EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEGINNINGS: FIELDING
It is interesting to ask if Henry Fielding, barrister,
journalist, tinker of plays and man-about-town, would ever have
turned novelist, had it not been for Richardson, his
predecessor. So slight, so seemingly accidental, are the
incidents which make or mar careers and change the course of
literary history. Certain it is that the immediate cause of
Fielding's first story was the effect upon him of the fortunes
of the virtuous Pamela. A satirist and humorist where Richardson
was a somewhat solemn sentimentalist, Fielding was quick to see
the weakness, and--more important,--the opportunity for
caricature, in such a tale, whose folk harangued about morality
and whose avowed motive was a kind of hard-surfaced, carefully
calculated honor, for sale to the highest bidder. It was easy to
recognize that Pamela was not only good but goody-goody. So
Fielding, being thirty-five years of age and of uncertain
income--he had before he was thirty squandered his mother's
estate,--turned himself, two years after "Pamela" had appeared,
to a new field and concocted the story known to the world of
letters as: "The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend
Abraham Adams."
This Joseph purports to be the brother of Pamela (though the
denouement reveals him as more gently born) and is as virtuous
in his character of serving-man as the sister herself; indeed,
he outvirtues her. Fielding waggishly exhibits him in the full
exercise of a highly-starched decorum rebuffing the amatory
attempts of sundry ladies whose assault upon the citadel of his
honor is analogous to that of Mr. B.,--who naturally becomes
Squire Booby in Fielding's hands--upon the long suffering
Pamela. Thus, Lady Booby, in whose employ Joseph is footman,
after an invitation to him to kiss her which has been gently but
firmly refused, bursts out with: "Can a boy, a stripling, have
the confidence to talk of his virtue?"
"Madam," says Joseph, "that boy is the brother of Pamela and
would be ashamed that the chastity of his family, which is
preserved in her, should be stained in him."
The chance for fun is palpable here. But something unexpected
happened: what was begun as burlesque, almost horse-play, began
to pass from the key of shallow, lively satire, broadening and
deepening into a finer tone of truth. In a few chapters, by the
time the writer had got such an inimitable personage as Parson
Adams before the reader, it was seen that the book was to be
more than a jeu d'esprit: rather, the work of a master of
characterization. In short, Joseph Andrews started out
ostensibly to poke good-natured ridicule at sentimental Mr.
Richardson: it ended by furnishing contemporary London and all
subsequent readers with a notable example of the novel of
mingled character and incident, entertaining alike for its
lively episodes and its broadly genial delineation of types of
the time. And so he soon had the town laughing with him at his
broad comedy.
In every respect Fielding made a sharp contrast with Richardson.
He was gentle-born, distinguished and fashionable in his
connections: the son of younger sons, impecunious, generous, of
strong often unregulated passions,--what the world calls a good
fellow, a man's man--albeit his affairs with the fair sex were
numerous. He knew high society when he choose to depict it: his
education compared with Richardson's was liberal and he based
his style of fiction upon models which the past supplied,
whereas Richardson had no models, blazed his own trail.
Fielding's literary ancestry looks back to "Gil Blas" and "Don
Quixote," and in English to "Robinson Crusoe." In other words,
his type, however much he departs from it, is the picturesque
story of adventure. He announced, in fact, on his title-page
that he wrote "in imitation of the manner of Cervantes."
Again, his was a genius for comedy, where Richardson, as we have
seen, was a psychologist. The cleansing effect of wholesome
laughter and an outdoor gust of hale west wind is offered by
him, and with it go the rude, coarse things to be found in
Nature who is nevertheless in her influence so salutary, so
necessary, in truth, to our intellectual and moral health. Here
then was a sort of fiction at many removes from the slow,
analytic studies of Richardson: buoyant, objective, giving far
more play to action and incident, uniting in most agreeable
proportions the twin interests of character and event. The very
title of this first book is significant. We are invited to be
present at a delineation of two men,--but these men are
displayed in a series of adventures. Unquestionably, the
psychology is simpler, cruder, more elementary than that of
Richardson. Dr. Johnson, who much preferred the author of
"Pamela" to the author of "Tom Jones" and said so in the
hammer-and-tongs style for which he is famous, declared to Bozzy
that "there is all the difference in the world between characters
of nature and characters of manners: and there is the difference
between the characters of Fielding and those of Richardson.
Characters of manners are very entertaining; but they are to be
understood by a more superficial observer than characters of
nature, where a man must dive into the recesses of the human
heart."
And although we may share Boswell's feeling that Johnson
estimated the compositions of Richardson too highly and that he
had an unreasonable prejudice against Fielding--since he was a
man of magnificent biases--yet we may grant that the critic-god
made a sound distinction here, that Fielding's method is
inevitably more external and shallow than that of an analyst
proper like Richardson; no doubt to the great joy of many weary
folk who go to novels for the rest and refreshment they give,
rather than for their thought-evoking value.
The contrast between these novelists is maintained, too, in the
matter of style: Fielding walks with the easy undress of a
gentleman: Richardson sits somewhat stiff and pragmatical,
carefully arrayed in full-bottomed wig, and knee breeches,
delivering a lecture from his garden chair. Fielding is a master
of that colloquial manner afterwards handled with such success
by Thackeray: a manner "good alike for grave or gay," and making
this early fiction-maker enjoyable. Quite apart from our relish
of his vivid portrayals of life, we like his wayside chatting.
For another difference: there is no moral motto or announcement:
the lesson takes care of itself. What unity there is of
construction, is found in the fact that certain characters, more
or less related, are seen to walk centrally through the
narrative: there is little or no plot development in the modern
sense and the method (the method of the type) is frankly
episodic.
In view of what the Novel was to become in the nineteenth
century, Richardson's way was more modern, and did more to set a
seal upon fiction than Fielding's: the Novel to-day is first of
all psychologic and serious. And the assertion is safe that all
the later development derives from these two kinds written by
the two greatest of the eighteenth century pioneers, Richardson
and Fielding: on the one hand, character study as a motive, on
the other the portrayal of personality surrounded by the
external factors of life. The wise combination of the two, gives
us that tangle of motive, act and circumstance which makes up
human existence.
With regard to the morals of the story, a word may here be said,
having all Fielding's fiction in mind. Of the suggestive
prurience of much modern novelism, whether French or French-derived,
he, Fielding, is quite free: he deals with the sensual
relations with a frank acknowledgment of their physical basis.
The truth is, the eighteenth century, whether in England or
elsewhere, was on a lower plane in this respect than our own
time. Fielding, therefore, while he does no affront to essential
decency, does offend our taste, our refinement, in dealing with
this aspect of life. We have in a true sense become more
civilized since 1750: the ape and tiger of Tennyson's poem have
receded somewhat in human nature during the last century and a
half. The plea that since Fielding was a realist depicting
society as it was in his day, his license is legitimate, whereas
Richardson was giving a sort of sentimentalized stained-glass
picture of it not as it was but, in his opinion, should be,--is
a specious one; it is well that in literature, faithful
reflector of the ideals of the race, the beast should be allowed
to die (as Mr. Howells, himself a staunch realist, has said),
simply because it is slowly dying in life itself. Fielding's
novels in unexpurgated form are not for household reading to-day:
the fact may not be a reflection upon him, but it is surely
one to congratulate ourselves upon, since it testifies to social
evolution. However, for those whose experience of life is
sufficiently broad and tolerant, these novels hold no harm:
there is a tonic quality to them.--Even bowdlerization is not to
be despised with such an author, when it makes him suitable for
the hands of those who otherwise might receive injury from the
contact. The critic-sneer at such an idea forgets that good art
comes out of sound morality as well as out of sound esthetics.
It is pleasant to hear a critic of such standing as Brunetiere
in his "L'Art et Morale" speak with spiritual clarity upon this
subject, so often turned aside with the shrug of impatient
scorn.
The episodic character of the story was to be the manner of
Fielding in all his fiction. There are detached bits of
narrative, stories within stories--witness that dealing with the
high comedy figures of Leonora and Bellamine--and the novelist
does not bother his head if only he can get his main characters
in motion,--on the road, in a tavern or kitchen brawl, astride a
horse for a cross-country dash after the hounds. Charles
Dickens, whose models were of the eighteenth century, made
similar use of the episode in his early work, as readers of
"Pickwick" may see for themselves.
The first novel was received with acclaim and stirred up a
pretty literary quarrel, for Richardson and his admiring clique
would have been more than human had they not taken umbrage at so
obvious a satire. Recriminations were hot and many.
Mr. Andrew Lang should give us in a dialogue between dead
authors, a meeting in Hades between the two; it would be worth
any climatic risk to be present and hear what was said; Lady
Mary, who may once more be put on the witness-stand, tells how,
being in residence in Italy, and a box of light literature from
England having arrived at ten o'clock of the night, she could
not but open it and "falling upon Fielding's works, was fool
enough to sit up all night reading. I think "Joseph Andrews"
better than his Foundling"--the reference being, of course, to
"Tom Jones"; a judgment not jumping with that of posterity,
which has declared the other to be his masterpiece; yet not an
opinion to be despised, coming from one of the keenest
intellects of the time. Lady Mary, whose cousin Fielding was,
had a clear eye alike for his literary merits and personal
foibles and faults, but heartily liked him and acted as his
literary mentor in his earlier days; his maiden play was
dedicated to her and her interest in him was more than passing.
The Bohemian barrister and literary hack who had made a love-match
half a dozen years before and now had a wife and several
children to care for, must have been vastly encouraged by the
favorable reception of his first essay into fiction; at last, he
had found the kind of literature congenial to his talents and
likely to secure suitable renown: his metier as an artist of
letters was discovered, as we might now choose to express it; he
would hardly have taken himself so seriously. It was natural
that he should publish the next year a three volume collection
of his miscellany, which contained his second novel, "Mr.
Jonathan Wild The Great," distinctly the least liked of his four
stories, because of its bitter irony, its almost savage tone,
the gloom which surrounds the theme, a powerful, full-length
portrayal of a famous thief-taker of the period, from his birth
to his bad end on a Newgate gallows. Mr. Wild is a sort of
foreglimpse of the Sherlock Holmes-Raffles of our own day.
Fielding's wife died this year and it may be that sorrow for her
fatal illness was the subjective cause of the tone of this
gruesomely attractive piece of fiction; but there is some reason
for believing it to be an earlier work than "Joseph Andrews"; it
belongs to a more primitive type of story-making, because of its
sensational features: its dependence for interest upon the seamy
side of aspects of life exhibited like magic lantern slides with
little connection, but spectacular effects. The satire of the
book is directed at that immoral confusion between greatness and
goodness, the rascally Jonathan being pictured in grave mock-heroics
as in every way worthy--and the sardonic force at times
almost suggests the pen of Dean Swift.
But such work was but a prelude to what was to follow. When the
world thinks of Henry Fielding it thinks of "Tom Jones," it is
almost as if he had written naught else. "The History of Tom
Jones, A Foundling" appeared six years after "Jonathan Wild,"
the intermediate time (aside from the novel itself) being
consumed in editing journals and officiating as a Justice of
the Peace: the last a role it is a little difficult, in the
theater phrase, to see him in. He was two and forty when the
book was published: but as he had been at work upon it for a
long while (he speaks of the thousands of hours he had been
toiling over it), it may be ascribed to that period of a man's
growth when he is passing intellectually from youth to early
maturity; everything considered, perhaps the best productive
period. His health had already begun to break: and he was by no
means free of the harassments of debt. Although successful in
his former attempt at fiction, novel writing was but an aside
with him, after all; he had not during the previous six years
given regular time and attention to literary composition, as a
modern story-maker would have done under the stimulus of like
encouragement. The eighteenth century audience, it must be borne
in mind, was not large enough nor sufficiently eager for an
attractive new form of literature, to justify a man of many
trades like Fielding in devoting his days steadily to the
writing of fiction. There is to the last an effect of the gifted
amateur about him; Taine tells the anecdote of his refusal to
trouble himself to change a scene in one of his plays, which
Garrick begged him to do: "Let them find it out," he said,
referring to the audience. And when the scene was hissed, he
said to the disconsolate player: "I did not: give them credit
for it: they have found it out, have they?" In other words, he
was knowing to his own poor art, content if only it escaped the
public eye. This is some removes from the agonizing over a
phrase of a Flaubert.
Like the preceding story, "Tom Jones" has its center of plot in
a life history of the foundling who grows into a young manhood
that is full of high spirits and escapades: likable always, even
if, judged by the straight-laced standards of Richardson, one
may not approve. Jones loves Sophia Western, daughter of a
typical three-bottle, hunting squire: of course he prefers the
little cad Blifil, with his money and position, where poor Tom
has neither: equally of course Sophia (whom the reader heartily
likes, in spite of her name) prefers the handsome Jones with his
blooming complexion and many amatory adventures. And, since we
are in the simple-minded days of fiction when it was the
business of the sensible novelist to make us happy at the close,
the low-born lover, assisted by Squire Allworthy, who is a deus
ex machina a trifle too good for human nature's daily food, gets
his girl (in imitation of Joseph Andrews) and is shown to be
close kin to Allworthy--tra-la-la, tra-la-lee, it is all
charmingly simple and easy! The beginners of the English novel
had only a few little tricks in their box in the way of incident
and are for the most part innocent of plot in the Wilkie Collins
sense of the word. The opinion of Coleridge that the "Oedipus
Tyrannus," "The Alchemist" and "Tom Jones" are "the three most
perfect plots ever planned" is a curious comment upon his
conception of fiction, since few stories have been more plotless
than Fielding's best book. The fact is, biographical fiction
like this is to be judged by itself, it has its own laws of
technique.
The glory of "Tom Jones" is in its episodes, its crowded canvas,
the unfailing verve and variety of its action: in the fine open-air
atmosphere of the scenes, the sense of the stir of life they
convey: most of all, in an indescribable manliness or humanness
which bespeaks the true comic force--something of that same
comic view that one detects in Shakspere and Moliere and
Cervantes. It means an open-eyed acceptance of life, a
realization of its seriousness yet with the will to take it with
a smile: a large tolerancy which forbids the view conventional
or parochial or aristocratic--in brief, the view limited. There
is this in the book, along with much psychology so superficial
as to seem childish, and much interpretation that makes us feel
that the higher possibilities of men and women are not as yet
even dreamed of. In this novel, Fielding makes fuller use than
he had before of the essay link: the chapters introductory to
the successive books,--and in them, a born essayist, as your
master of style is pretty sure to be, he discourses in the
wisest and wittiest way on topics literary, philosophical or
social, having naught to do with the story in hand, it may be,
but highly welcome for its own sake. This manner of pausing by
the way for general talk about the world in terms of Me has been
used since by Thackeray, with delightful results: but has now
become old-fashioned, because we conceive it to be the
novelist's business to stick close to his story and not obtrude
his personality at all. Thackeray displeases a critic like Mr.
James by his postscript harangues about himself as Showman,
putting his puppets into the box and shutting up his booth:
fiction is too serious a matter to be treated so lightly by its
makers--to say nothing of the audience: it is more, much more
than mere fooling and show-business. But to go back to the
eighteenth century is to realize that the novel is being newly
shaped, that neither novelist nor novel-reader is yet awake to
the higher conception of the genre. So we wax lenient and are
glad enough to get these resting-places of chat and charm from
Fielding: it may not be war, but it is nevertheless magnificent.
Fielding in this fiction is remarkable for his keen observation
of every-day life and character, the average existence in town
and country of mankind high and low: he is a truthful reporter,
the verisimilitude of the picture is part of its attraction. It
is not too much to say that, pictorially, he is the first great
English realist of the Novel. For broad comedy presentation he
is unsurpassed: as well as for satiric gravity of comment and
illustration. It may be questioned, however, whether when he
strives to depict the deeper phases of human relations he is so
much at home or anything like so happy. There is no more
critical test of a novelist than his handling of the love
passion. Fielding essays in "Tom Jones" to show the love between
two very likable flesh-and-blood young folk: the many mishaps of
the twain being but an embroidery upon the accepted fact that
the course of true love never did run smooth. There is a certain
scene which gives us an interview between Jones and Sophia,
following on a stormy one between father and daughter, during
which the Squire has struck his child to the ground and left her
there with blood and tears streaming down her face. Her
disobedience in not accepting the addresses of the unspeakable
Blifil is the cause of the somewhat drastic parental treatment.
Jones has assured the Squire that he can make Sophia see the
error of her ways and has thus secured a moment with her. He
finds her just risen from the ground, in the sorry plight
already described. Then follows this dialogue:
'O, my Sophia, what means this dreadful sight?'
She looked softly at him for a moment before she spoke, and
then said:
'Mr. Jones, for Heaven's sake, how came you here? Leave me,
I beseech you, this moment.'
'Do not,' says he, 'impose so harsh a command upon me. My
heart bleeds faster than those lips. O Sophia, how easily
could I drain my veins to preserve one drop of that dear
blood.'
'I have too many obligations to you already,' answered she,
'for sure you meant them such.'
Here she looked at him tenderly almost a minute, and then
bursting into an agony, cried:
'Oh, Mr. Jones, why did you save my life? My death would
have been happier for us both.'
'Happy for us both!' cried he. 'Could racks or wheels kill
me so painfully as Sophia's--I cannot bear the dreadful
sound. Do I live but for her?'
Both his voice and look were full of irrepressible
tenderness when he spoke these words; and at the same time
he laid gently hold on her hand, which she did not withdraw
from him; to say the truth, she hardly knew what she did or
suffered. A few moments now passed in silence between these
lovers, while his eyes were eagerly fixed on Sophia, and
hers declining toward the ground; at last she recovered
strength enough to desire him again to leave her, for that
her certain ruin would be the consequence of their being
found together; adding:
'Oh, Mr. Jones, you know not, you know not what hath passed
this cruel afternoon.'
'I know all, my Sophia,' answered he; 'your cruel father
hath told me all, and he himself hath sent me hither to
you.'
'My father sent you to me!' replied she: 'sure you dream!'
'Would to Heaven,' cried he, 'it was but a dream. Oh!
Sophia, your father hath sent me to you, to be an advocate
for my odious rival, to solicit you in his favor. I took
any means to get access to you. O, speak to me, Sophia!
Comfort my bleeding heart. Sure no one ever loved, ever
doted, like me. Do not unkindly withhold this dear, this
soft, this gentle hand--one moment perhaps tears you
forever from me. Nothing less than this cruel occasion
could, I believe, have ever conquered the respect and love
with which you have inspired me.'
She stood a moment silent, and covered with confusion;
then, lifting up her eyes gently towards him, she cried:
'What would Mr. Jones have me say?'
We would seem to have here a writer not quite in his native
element. He intends to interest us in a serious situation.
Sophia is on the whole natural and winning, although one may
stop to imagine what kind of an agony is that which allows of so
mathematical a division of time as is implied in the statement
that she looked at her lover--tenderly, too, forsooth!--"almost
a minute." The mood of mathematics and the mood of emotion, each
excellent in itself, do not go together in life as they do in
eighteenth century fiction. But in the general impression she
makes, Sophia, let us concede, is sweet and realizable. But
Jones, whom we have long before this scene come to know and be
fond of--Jones is here a prig, a bore, a dummy. Sir Charles
Grandison in all his woodenness is not arrayed like one of
these. Consider the situation further: Sophia is in grief; she
has blood and tears on her face--what would any lover,--nay, any
respectable young man do in the premises? Surely, stanch her
wounds, dry her eyes, comfort her with a homely necessary
handkerchief. But not so Jones: he is not a real man but a
melodramatic lay-figure, playing to the gallery as he spouts
speeches about the purely metaphoric bleeding of his heart,
oblivious of the disfigurement of his sweetheart's visage from
real blood. He insults her by addressing her in the third
person, mouths sentiments about his "odious rival" (a phrase
with a superb Bowery smack to it!) and in general so disports
himself as to make an effect upon the reader of complete
unreality. This was no real scene to Fielding himself: why then
should it be true: it has neither the accent nor the motion of
life. The novelist is being "literary," is not warm to his work
at all. When we turn from this attempt to the best love scenes
in modern hands, the difference is world-wide. And this
unreality--which violates the splendid credibility of the hero
in dozens of other scenes in the book,--is all the worse coming
from a writer who expressly announces his intention to destroy
the prevalent conventional hero of fiction and set up something
better in his place. Whereas Tom in the quoted scene is nothing
if not conventional and drawn in the stock tradition of mawkish
heroics. The plain truth is that with Fielding love is an
appetite rather than a sentiment and he is only completely at
ease when painting its rollicking, coarse and passional aspects.
In its unanalytic method and loose construction this Novel,
compared with Richardson, is a throw-back to a more primitive
pattern, as we saw was the case with Fielding's first fiction.
But in another important characteristic of the modern Novel it
surpasses anything that had earlier appeared: I refer to the way
it puts before the reader a great variety of human beings, so
that a sense of teeming existence is given, a genuine imitation
of the spatial complexity of life, if not of its depths. It is
this effect, afterwards conveyed in fuller measure by Balzac, by
Dickens, by Victor Hugo and by Tolstoy, that gives us the
feeling that we are in the presence of a master of men, whatever
his limitations of period or personality.
How delightful are the subsidiary characters in the book! One
such is Partridge, the unsophisticated schoolmaster who, when he
attends the theater with Tom and hears Garrick play "Hamlet,"
thinks but poorly of the player because he only does what
anybody would do under the circumstances! All-worthy and Blifil
one may object to, each in his kind, for being conventionally
good and bad, but in numerous male characters in less important
roles there is compensation: the gypsy episode, for example, is
full of raciness and relish. And what a gallery of women we get
in the story: Mrs. Honour the maid, and Miss Western (who in
some sort suggests Mrs. Nickleby), Mrs. Miller, Lady Bellaston,
Mrs. Waters and other light-of-loves and dames of folly, whose
dubious doings are carried off with such high good humor that we
are inclined to overlook their misdeeds. There is a Chaucerian
freshness about it all: at times comes the wish that such talent
were used in a better cause. A suitable sub-title for the story,
would be: Or Life in The Tavern, so large a share do Inns have
in its unfolding. Fielding would have yielded hearty assent to
Dr. Johnson's dictum that a good inn stood for man's highest
felicity here below: he relished the wayside comforts of cup and
bed and company which they afford.
"Tom Jones" quickly crossed the seas, was admired in foreign
lands. I possess a manuscript letter of Heine's dated from Mainz
in 1830, requesting a friend to send him this novel: the German
poet represents, in the request, the literary class which has
always lauded Fielding's finest effort, while the wayfaring man
who picks it up, also finds it to his liking. Thus it secures
and is safe in a double audience. Yet we must return to the
thought that such a work is strictly less significant in the
evolution of the modern Novel, because of its form, its
reversion to type, than the model established by a man like
Richardson, who is so much more restricted in gift.
Fielding's fourth and final story, "Amelia," was given to the
world two years later, and but three years before his premature
death at Lisbon at the age of forty-nine--worn out by irregular
living and the vicissitudes of a career which had been checkered
indeed. He did strenuous work as a Justice these last years and
carried on an efficacious campaign against criminals: but the
lights were dimming, the play was nearly over. The pure gust of
life which runs rampant and riotous in the pages of "Tom Jones"
is tempered in "Amelia" by a quieter, sadder tone and a more
philosophic vision. It is in this way a less characteristic
work, for it was of Fielding's nature to be instantly responsive
to good cheer and the creature comforts of life. When she got
the news of his death, Lady Mary wrote of him: "His happy
constitution (even when he had, with great pains, half
demolished it) made him forget everything when he was before a
venison pastry or over a flask of champagne; and I am persuaded
he has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth. His
natural spirits gave him rapture with his cook-maid and
cheerfulness in a garret." Here is a kit-kat showing the man
indeed: all his fiction may be read in the light of it. The main
interest in "Amelia" is found in its autobiographical flavor,
for the story, in describing the fortunes--or rather
misfortunes--of Captain Booth and his wife, drew, it is pretty
certain, upon Fielding's own traits and to some extent upon the
incidents of his earlier life. The scenes where the Captain sets
up for a country gentleman with his horses and hounds and
speedily runs through his patrimony, is a transcript of his own
experience: and Amelia herself is a sort of memorial to his
well-beloved first wife (he had married for a second his honest,
good-hearted kitchen-maid), who out of affection must have
endured so much in daily contact with such a character as that
of her charming husband. In the novel, Mrs. Booth always
forgives, even as the Captain ever goes wrong. There would be
something sad in such a clear-eyed comprehension of one's own
weakness, if we felt compelled to accept the theory that he was
here drawing his own likeness; which must not be pushed too far,
for the Captain is one thing Fielding never was--to wit, stupid.
There is in the book much realism of scene and incident; but its
lack of animal spirits has always militated against the
popularity of "Amelia"; in fact, it is accurate to say that
Fielding's contemporary public, and the reading world ever
since, has confined its interest in his work to "Joseph Andrews"
and "Tom Jones."
The pathos of his ending, dying in Portugal whither he had gone
on a vain quest for health, and his companionable qualities
whether as man or author, can but make him a more winsome figure
to us than proper little Mr. Richardson; and possibly this
feeling has affected the comparative estimates of the two
writers. One responds readily to the sentiment of Austin
Dobson's fine poem on Fielding:
"Beneath the green Estrella trees,
No artist merely, but a man
Wrought on our noblest island-plan,
Sleeps with the alien Portuguese."
And in the same way we are sympathetic with Thackeray in the
lecture on the English humorists: "Such a brave and gentle
heart, such an intrepid and courageous spirit, I love to
recognize in the manly, the English Harry Fielding." Imagine any
later critic calling Richardson "Sam!" It is inconceivable.
* * * * *
Such then were the two men who founded the English Novel, and
such their work. Unlike in many respects, both as personalities
and literary makers, they were, after all, alike in this: they
showed the feasibility of making the life of contemporary
society interesting in prose fiction. That was their great
common triumph and it remains the keynote of all the subsequent
development in fiction. They accomplished this, each in his own
way: Richardson by sensibility often degenerating into
sentimentality, and by analysis--the subjective method; Fielding
by satire and humor (often coarse, sometimes bitter) and the
wide envisagement of action and scene--the method objective.
Richardson exhibits a somewhat straitened propriety and a narrow
didactic tradesman's morality, with which we are now out of
sympathy. Fielding, on the contrary, with the abuse of his good
gift for tolerant painting of seamy human nature, gives way
often to an indulgence of the lower instincts of mankind which,
though faithfully reflecting his age, are none the less
unpleasant to modern taste. Both are men of genius, Fielding's
being the larger and more universal: nothing but genius could
have done such original things as were achieved by the two.
Nevertheless, set beside the great masters of fiction who were
to come, and who will be reviewed in these pages, they are seen
to have been excelled in art and at least equaled in gift and
power. So much we may properly claim for the marvelous growth
and ultimate degree of perfection attained by the best novel-makers
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It remains now
to show what part was played in the eighteenth century
development by certain other novelists, who, while not of the
supreme importance of these two leaders, yet each and all
contributed to the shaping of the new fiction and did their
share in leaving it at the century's end a perfected instrument,
to be handled by a finished artist like Jane Austen. We must
take some cognizance, in special, of writers like Smollett and
Sterne and Goldsmith--potent names, evoking some of the
pleasantest memories open to one who browses in the rich meadow
lands of English literature.