history, or, as M. Taine fancies, a tract) in which Fielding seems to
lose his unvarying coolness of judgment; and the explanation is obvious.
The one fault to which he is, so to speak, unjust, is hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy, indeed, cannot well be painted too black, but it should not
be made impossible. When Fielding has to deal with such a character, he
for once loses his self-command, and, like inferior writers, begins to
be angry with his creatures. Instead of analysing and explaining, he
simply reviles and leaves us in presence of a moral anomaly. Blifil is
not more wicked than Iago, but we seem to understand the psychical
chemistry by which an Iago is compounded; whereas Blifil can only be
regarded as a devil (if the word be not too dignified) who does not
really belong to this world at all. The error, though characteristic of
a man whose great intellectual merit is his firm grasp of realities, and
whose favourite virtue is his downright sincerity, is not the less a
blemish. Hatred of pedantry too easily leads to hatred of culture, and
hatred of hypocrisy to distrust of the more exalted virtues. Fielding
cannot be just to motives lying rather outside his ordinary sphere of
thought. He can mock heartily and pleasantly enough at the affectation
of philosophy, as in the case where Parson Adams, urging poor Joseph
Andrews, by considerations drawn from the Bible and from Seneca, to be
ready to resign his Fanny 'peaceably, quietly, and contentedly,'
suddenly hears of the supposed loss of his own little child, and is
called upon to act instead of preaching. But his satire upon all
characters and creeds which embody the more exalted strains of feeling
is apt to be indiscriminate. A High Churchman, according to him, is a
Pharisee who prefers orthodoxy to virtue; a Methodist a mere
mountebank, who counterfeits spiritual raptures to impose upon dupes; a
Freethinker is a man who weaves a mask of fine phrases, under which to
cover his aversion to the restraints of religion. Fielding's religion
consists chiefly of a solid homespun morality, and he is more suspicious
of an excessive than of a defective zeal. Similarly he is a hearty Whig,
but no revolutionist. He has as hearty a contempt for the cant about
liberty[13] as Dr. Johnson himself, and has very stringent remedies to
propose for regulating the mob. The bailiff in 'Amelia,' who, whilst he
brutally maltreats the unlucky prisoners for debt, swaggers about the
British Constitution, and swears that he is 'all for liberty,' recalls
the boatman who ridiculed French slavery to Voltaire, and was carried
off next day by a pressgang. Fielding, indeed, is no fanatical adherent
of our blessed Constitution, which, as he says, has been pronounced by
some of our wisest men to be too perfect to be altered in any
particular, and which a number of the said wisest men have been mending
ever since. He hates cant on all sides impartially, though, as a sound
Whig, he specially hates Papists and Jacobites as the most offensive of
all Pharisees, marked for detestation by their taste for frogs and
French wine in preference to punch and roast beef. He is a patriotic
Briton, whose patriotism takes the genuine shape of a hearty growl at
English abuses, with a tacit assumption that things are worse elsewhere.
The reflection of this quality of solid good sense, absolutely scorning
any ailment except that of solid facts, is the so-called realism of
Fielding's novels. He is, indeed, as hearty a realist as Hogarth, whose
congenial art he is never tired of praising with all the cordiality of
his nature, and to whom he refers his readers for portraits of several
characters in 'Tom Jones.' His scenery is as realistic as a photograph.
Tavern kitchens, spunging-house parlours, the back-slums of London
streets, are drawn from the realities with unflinching vigour. We see
the stains of beer-pots and smell the fumes of stale tobacco as
distinctly as in Hogarth's engravings. He shrinks neither from the
coarse nor the absolutely disgusting. It is enough to recall the female
boxing or scratching matches which are so frequent in his pages. On one
such occasion his language seems to imply that he had watched such
battles in the spirit of a connoisseur in our own day watching less
inexpressibly disgusting prize-fights. Certainly we could wish that, if
such scenes were to be depicted, there might have been a clearer proof
that the artist had a nose and eyes capable of feeling offence.
But the nickname 'realist' slides easily into another sense. The realist
is sometimes supposed to be more shallow as well as more prosaic than
the idealist; to be content with the outside where the idealist pierces
to the heart. He gives the bare fact, where his rival gives the idea
symbolised by the fact, and therefore rendering it attractive to the
higher intellect. Fielding's view of his own art is instructive in this
as in other matters. Poetic invention, he says, is generally taken to be
a creative faculty; and if so, it is the peculiar property of the
romance-writers, who frankly take leave of the actual and possible.
Fielding disavows all claim to this faculty; he writes histories, not
romances. But, in his sense, poetic invention means, not creation, but
'discovery;' that is, 'a quick, sagacious penetration into the true
essence of all objects of our contemplation.' Perhaps we may say that it
is chiefly a question of method whether a writer should portray men or
angels--the beings, that is, of everyday life--or beings placed under a
totally different set of circumstances. The more vital question is
whether, by one method or the other, he shows us a man's heart or only
his clothes; whether he appeals to our intellects or imaginations, or
amuses us by images which do not sink below the eye. In scientific
writings a man may give us the true law of a phenomenon, whether he
exemplifies it in extreme or average cases, in the orbit of a comet or
the fall of an apple. The romance-writer should show us what real men
would be in dreamland, the writer of 'histories' what they are on the
knifeboard of an omnibus. True insight may be shown in either case, or
may be absent in either, according as the artist deals with the deepest
organic laws or the more external accidents. The 'Ancient Mariner' is an
embodiment of certain simple emotional phases and moral laws amidst the
phantasmagoric incidents of a dream, and De Foe does not interpret them
better because he confines himself to the most prosaic incidents. When
romance becomes really arbitrary, and is parted from all basis of
observation, it loses its true interest and deserves Fielding's
condemnation. Fielding conscientiously aims at discharging the highest
function. He describes, as he says in 'Joseph Andrews,' 'not men, but
manners; not an individual, but a species.' His lawyer, he tells us, has
been alive for the last four thousand years, and will probably survive
four thousand more. Mrs. Tow-wouse lives wherever turbulent temper,
avarice, and insensibility are united; and her sneaking husband wherever
a good inclination has glimmered forth, eclipsed by poverty of spirit
and understanding. But the type which shows best the force and the
limits of Fielding's genius is Parson Adams. He belongs to a
distinguished family, whose members have been portrayed by the greatest
historians. He is a collateral descendant of Don Quixote, for whose
creation Fielding felt a reverence exceeded only by his reverence for
Shakespeare.[14] The resemblance is, of course, distant, and consists
chiefly in this, that the parson, like the knight, lives in an ideal
world, and is constantly shocked by harsh collision with facts. He
believes in his sermons instead of his sword, and his imagination is
tenanted by virtuous squires and model parsons instead of Arcadian
shepherds, or knight-errants and fair ladies. His imagination is not
exalted beyond the limits of sanity, but only colours the prosaic
realities in accordance with the impulses of a tranquil benevolence. If
the theme be fundamentally similar, it is treated with a far less daring
hand.
Adams is much more closely related to Sir Roger de Coverley, the Vicar
of Wakefield, or Uncle Toby. Each of these lovable beings invites us at
once to sympathise with and to smile at the unaffected simplicity which,
seeing no evil, becomes half ludicrous and half pathetic in this corrupt
world. Adams stands out from his brethren by his intense reality. If he
smells too distinctly of beer and tobacco, we believe in him more firmly
than in the less full-blooded creations of Sterne and Goldsmith. Parson
Adams, indeed, has a startling vigour of organisation. Not merely the
hero of a modern ritualist novel, but Amyas Leigh or Guy Livingstone
himself, might have been amazed at his athletic prowess. He stalks ahead
of the stage-coach (favoured doubtless by the bad roads of the period)
as though he had accepted the modern principle about fearing God and
walking a thousand miles in a thousand hours. His mutton fist and the
crabtree cudgel which swings so freely round his clerical head would
have daunted the contemporary gladiators, Slack and Broughton. He shows
his Christian humility not merely by familiarity with his poorest
parishioners, but in sitting up whole nights in tavern kitchens,
drinking unlimited beer, smoking inextinguishable pipes, and revelling
in a ceaseless flow of gossip. We smile at the good man's intense
delight in a love-story, at the simplicity which makes him see a good
Samaritan in Parson Trulliber, at the absence of mind which makes him
pitch his Æschylus into the fire, or walk a dozen miles in profound
oblivion of the animal which should have been between his knees; but his
contemporaries were provoked to a horse-laugh, and when we remark the
tremendous practical jokes which his innocence suggests to them, we
admit that he requires his whole athletic vigour to bring so tender a
heart safely through so rough a world.
If the ideal hero is always to live in fancy-land and talk in blank
verse, Adams has clearly no right to the title; nor, indeed, has Don
Quixote. But the masculine portraiture of the coarse realities is not
only indicative of intellectual vigour, but artistically appropriate.
The contrast between the world and its simple-minded inhabitant is the
more forcible in proportion to the firmness and solidity of Fielding's
touch. Uncle Toby proves that Sterne had preserved enough tenderness to
make an exquisite plaything of his emotions. The Vicar of Wakefield
proves that Goldsmith had preserved a childlike innocence of
imagination, and could retire from duns and publishers to an idyllic
world of his own. Joseph Andrews proves that Fielding was neither a
child nor a sentimentalist, but that he had learnt to face facts as they
are, and set a true value on the best elements of human life. In the
midst of vanity and vexation of spirit he could find some comfort in
pure and strong domestic affection. He can indulge his feelings without
introducing the false note of sentimentalism, or condescending to tone
his pictures with rose-colour. He wants no illusions. The exemplary Dr.
Harrison in 'Amelia' held no action unworthy of him which could protect
an innocent person or 'bring a rogue to the gallows.' Good Parson Adams
could lay his cudgel on the back of a villain with hearty goodwill. He
believes too easily in human goodness, but there is not a maudlin fibre
in his whole body. He would not be the man to cry over a dead donkey
whilst children are in want of bread. He would be slower than the
excellent Dr. Primrose to believe in the reformation of a villain by
fine phrases, and if he fell into such a weakness, his biographer would
not, like Goldsmith, be inclined to sanction the error. A villain is
induced to reform, indeed, by the sight of Amelia's excellence, but
Fielding is careful to tell us that the change was illusory, and that
the villain ended on a gallows. We are made sensible that if Adams had
his fancies they were foibles, and therefore sources of misfortune. We
are to admire the childlike character, but not to share its illusions.
The world is not made of moonshine. Hypocrisy, cruelty, avarice, and
lust have to be stamped out by hard blows, not cured by delicate
infusion of graceful sentimentalisms.
So far Fielding's portrait of an ideal character is all the better for
his masculine grasp of fact. It must, however, be admitted that he fails
a little on the other side of the contrast. He believes in a good heart,
but scarcely in very lofty motive. He tells us in 'Tom Jones'[15] that
he has painted no perfect character, because he never happened to meet
one. His stories, like 'Vanity Fair,' may be described as novels without
a hero. It is not merely that his characters are imperfect, but that
they are deficient in the finer ingredients which go to make up the
nearest approximations of our imperfect natures to heroism. Colonel
Newcome was not perhaps so good a man as Parson Adams, but he had a
certain delicacy of sentiment which led him, as we may remember, to be
rather hard upon Tom Jones, and which Fielding (as may be gathered from
Bath in 'Amelia') would have been inclined to ridicule. Parson Adams is
simple enough to become a laughing-stock to the brutal, but he never
consciously rebels against the dictates of the plainest common-sense.
His theology comes from Tillotson and Hoadly; he has no eye for the
romantic side of his creed, and would be apt to condemn a mystic as
simply a fool. His loftiest aspiration is not to reform the world or any
part of it, but to get a modest bit of preferment (he actually receives
it, we are happy to think, in 'Amelia'), enough to pay for his tobacco
and his children's schooling. Fielding's dislike to the romantic makes
him rather blind to the elevated. He will not only start from the
actual, but does not conceive the possibility of an infusion of loftier
principles. The existing standard of sound sense prescribes an
impassable limit to his imagination. Parson Adams is an admirable
incarnation of certain excellent and honest impulses. He sets forth the
wisdom of the heart and the beauty of the simple instincts of an
affectionate nature. But we are forced to admit that he is not the
highest type conceivable, and might, for example, learn something from
his less robust colleague Dr. Primrose.
This remark suggests the common criticism, expounded with his usual
brilliancy by M. Taine. Fielding, he tells us, loves nature, but he does
not love it 'like the great impartial artists, Shakespeare and Goethe.'
He moralises incessantly--which is wrong. Moreover, his morality appears
to be very questionable. It consists in preferring instinct to reason.
The hero is the man who is born generous as a dog is born affectionate.
And this, says M. Taine, might be all very well were it not for a great
omission. Fielding has painted nature, but nature without refinement,
poetry and chivalry. He can only describe the impetuosity of the senses,
not the nervous exaltation and the poetic rapture. Man is with him 'a
good buffalo; and perhaps he is the hero required by a people which is
itself called John Bull.' In all which there is an undoubted vein of
truth. Fielding's want of refinement, for example, is one of those
undeniable facts which must be taken for granted. But, without seeking
to set right some other statements implied in M. Taine's judgment, it is
worth while to consider a little more fully the moral aspect of
Fielding's work. Much has been said upon this point by some who, with M.
Taine, take Fielding for a mere 'buffalo,' and by others who, like
Coleridge--a safer and more sympathetic critic--hold 'Tom Jones' to be,
on the whole, a sound exposition of healthy morality.
Fielding, on the 'buffalo' view, is supposed to be simply taking one
side in one of those perpetual controversies which has occupied many
generations and never approaches a settlement. He prefers nature to law,
instinct to reasoned action; he is on the side of Charles as against
Joseph Surface; he admires the publican, and condemns the Pharisee
without reserve; he loves the man who is nobody's enemy but his own, and
despises the prudent person whose charity ends at his own doorstep. Such
a doctrine--so absolutely stated--is rather a negation of all morality
than a lax morality. If it implies a love of generous instincts, it
denies that a man should have any regard for moral rules, which are
needed precisely in order to control our spontaneous instincts. Virtue
is amiable, but ceases to be meritorious. Nothing would be easier than
to quote passages in which Fielding expressly repudiates such a theory;
but, of course, a writer's morality must be judged by the conceptions
embodied in his work, not by the maxims scattered through it. Nor, for
the same reason, can we pay much attention to Fielding's express
assertion that he is writing in the interests of virtue; for Smollett,
and less scrupulous writers than Smollett, have found their account in
similar protestations. Yet anybody, I think, who will compare 'Joseph
Andrews' with that intentionally most moral work, 'Pamela,' will admit
that Fielding's morality goes deeper than this. Fielding at least makes
us love virtue, and is incapable of the solecism which Richardson
commits in substantially preaching that virtue means standing out for a
higher price. That Fielding's reckless heroes have a genuine sensibility
to the claims of virtue, appears still more unmistakably when we compare
them with the heartless fine gentlemen of the Congreve school and of his
own early plays, or put the faulty Captain Booth beside such an
unredeemed scamp as Peregrine Pickle.
It is clear, in short, that the aim of Fielding (whether he succeeds or
not) is the very reverse of that attributed to him by M. Taine. 'Tom
Jones' and 'Amelia' have, ostensibly at least, a most emphatic moral
attached to them; and not only attached to them, but borne in mind and
even too elaborately preached throughout. That moral is the one which
Fielding had learnt in the school of his own experience. It is the moral
that dissipation bears fruit in misery. The remorse, it is true, which
was generated in Fielding and in his heroes was not the remorse which
drives a man to a cloister, or which even seriously poisons his
happiness. The offences against morality are condoned too easily, and
the line between vice and virtue drawn in accordance with certain
distinctions which even Parson Adams could scarcely have approved. Vice,
he seems to say, is altogether objectionable only when complicated by
cruelty or hypocrisy. But if Fielding's moral sense is not very
delicate, it is vigorous. He hates most heartily what he sees to be
wrong, though his sight might easily be improved in delicacy of
discrimination. The truth is simply that Fielding accepted that moral
code which the better men of the world in his time really acknowledged,
as distinguished from that by which they affected to be bound. That so
wide a distinction should generally exist between these codes is a
matter for deep regret. That Fielding in his hatred for humbug should
have condemned purity as puritanical is clearly lamentable. The
confusion, however, was part of the man, and, as already noticed, shows
itself in one shape or other throughout his work. But it would be unjust
to condemn him upon that ground as antagonistic or indifferent to
reasonable morality. His morality is at the superior antipodes from the
cynicism of a Wycherley; and far superior to the prurient sentimentalism
of Sterne or the hot-pressed priggishness of Richardson, or even the
reckless Bohemianism of Smollett.
There is a deeper question, however, beneath this discussion. The
morality of those 'great impartial artists' of whom M. Taine speaks
differs from Fielding's in a more serious sense. The highest morality of
a great work of art depends upon the power with which the essential
beauty and ugliness of virtue and vice are exhibited by an impartial
observer. The morality, for example, of Goethe and Shakespeare appears
in the presentation of such characters as Iago and Mephistopheles. The
insight of true genius shows us by such examples what is the true
physiology of vice; what is the nature of the man who has lost all faith
in virtue and all sympathy with purity and nobility of character. The
artist of inferior rank tries to make us hate vice by showing that it
comes to a bad end precisely because he has an adequate perception of
its true nature. He can see that a drunkard generally gets into debt or
incurs an attack of _delirium tremens_, but he does not exhibit the
moral disintegration which is the underlying cause of the misfortune,
and which may be equally fatal, even if it happens to evade the penalty.
The distinction depends upon the power of the artist to fulfil
Fielding's requirement of penetrating to the essence of the objects of
his contemplation. It corresponds to the distinction in philosophy
between a merely prudential system of ethics--the system of the gallows
and the gaol--and the system which recognises the deeper issues
perceptible to a fine moral sense.
Now, in certain matters, Fielding's morality is of the merely prudential
kind. It resembles Hogarth's simple doctrine that the good apprentice
will be Lord Mayor and the bad apprentice get into Newgate. So shrewd an
observer was indeed well aware, and could say very forcibly,[16] that
virtue in this world might sometimes lead to poverty, contempt, and
imprisonment. He does not, like some novelists, assume the character of
a temporal Providence, and knock his evildoers on the head at the end of
the story. He shows very forcibly that the difficulties which beset poor
Jones and Booth are not to be fairly called accidents, but are the
difficulties to which bad conduct generally leads a man, and which are
all the harder when not counterbalanced by a clear conscience. He can
even describe with sympathy such a character as poor Atkinson in
'Amelia,' whose unselfish love brings him more blows than favours of
fortune. But it is true that he is a good deal more sensible to what are
called the prudential sanctions of virtue, at least of a certain
category of virtues, than to its essential beauty. So far the want of
refinement of which M. Taine speaks does, in fact, lower, and lower very
materially, his moral perception. A man of true delicacy could never
have dragged Tom Jones into his lowest degradation without showing more
forcibly his abhorrence of his loose conduct. This is, as Colonel
Newcome properly points out, the great and obvious blot upon the story,
which no critics have missed, and we cannot even follow the leniency of
Coleridge, who thinks that a single passage introduced to express
Fielding's real judgment would have remedied the mischief. It is too
obvious to be denied without sophistry that Tom, though he has many good
feelings, and can preach very edifying sermons to his less scrupulous
friend Nightingale, requires to be cast in a different mould. His whole
character should have been strung to a higher pitch to make us feel that
such degradation would not merely have required punishment to restore
his self-complacency, but have left a craving for some thorough moral
ablution.
Granting unreservedly all that may be urged upon this point, we may
still agree with the judgment pronounced by the most congenial critics.
Fielding's pages reek too strongly of tobacco; they are apt to turn
delicate stomachs; but the atmosphere is, on the whole, healthy and
bracing. No man can read them without prejudice and fail to recognise
the fact that he has been in contact with something much higher than a
'good buffalo.' He has learnt to know a man, not merely full of animal
vigour, not merely stored with various experience of men and manners,
but also in the main sound and unpoisoned by the mephitic vapours which
poisoned the atmosphere of his police-office. If the scorn of hypocrisy
is too fully emphasised, and the sensitiveness to ugly and revolting
objects too much deadened by a rough life, yet nobody could be more
heartily convinced of the beauty and value of those solid domestic
instincts on which human happiness must chiefly depend. Put Fielding
beside the modern would-be satirists who make society--especially French
society[17]--a mere sink of nastiness, or beside the more virtuous
persons whose favourite affectation is simplicity, and who labour most
spasmodically to be masculine, and his native vigour, his massive
common-sense, his wholesome views of men and manners, stand out in solid
relief. Certainly he was limited in perception, and not so elevated in
tone as might be desired; but he is a fitting representative of the
stalwart vigour and the intellectual shrewdness evident in the best men
of his time. The English domestic life of the period was certainly far
from blameless, and anything but refined; but if we have gained in some
ways, we are hardly entitled to look with unqualified disdain upon the
rough vigour of our beer-drinking, beef-eating ancestors.