GENERAL INTRODUCTION.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
BOOK I.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
CHAPTER XVIII.
BOOK II.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XIV.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
CHAPTER XVII.
BOOK III.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
BOOK IV.
CHAPTER I.
CHAPTER II.
CHAPTER III.
CHAPTER IV.
CHAPTER V.
CHAPTER VI.
CHAPTER VII.
CHAPTER VIII.
CHAPTER IX.
CHAPTER X.
CHAPTER XI.
CHAPTER XII.
CHAPTER XIII.
CHAPTER XV.
CHAPTER XVI.
GENERAL INTRODUCTION.
There
are few amusements more dangerous for an author than the indulgence
in ironic descriptions of his own work. If the irony is
depreciatory,
posterity is but too likely to say, "Many a true word is spoken
in jest;" if it is encomiastic, the same ruthless and ungrateful
critic is but too likely to take it as an involuntary confession of
folly and vanity. But when Fielding, in one of his serio-comic
introductions to Tom
Jones, described it
as "this prodigious work," he all unintentionally (for he
was the least pretentious of men) anticipated the verdict which
posterity almost at once, and with ever-increasing suffrage of the
best judges as time went on, was about to pass not merely upon this
particular book, but upon his whole genius and his whole production
as a novelist. His work in other kinds is of a very different order
of excellence. It is sufficiently interesting at times in itself;
and
always more than sufficiently interesting as his; for which
reasons,
as well as for the further one that it is comparatively little
known,
a considerable selection from it is offered to the reader in the
last
two volumes of this edition. Until the present occasion (which made
it necessary that I should acquaint myself with it) I own that my
own
knowledge of these miscellaneous writings was by no means thorough.
It is now pretty complete; but the idea which I previously had of
them at first and second hand, though a little improved, has not
very
materially altered. Though in all this hack-work Fielding
displayed,
partially and at intervals, the same qualities which he displayed
eminently and constantly in the four great books here given, he was
not, as the French idiom expresses it,
dans son assiette,
in his own natural and impregnable disposition and situation of
character and ability, when he was occupied on it. The novel was
for
him that assiette;
and all his novels are here.Although
Henry Fielding lived in quite modern times, although by family and
connections he was of a higher rank than most men of letters, and
although his genius was at once recognised by his contemporaries so
soon as it displayed itself in its proper sphere, his biography
until
very recently was by no means full; and the most recent researches,
including those of Mr Austin Dobson—a critic unsurpassed for
combination of literary faculty and knowledge of the eighteenth
century—have not altogether sufficed to fill up the gaps. His
family, said to have descended from a member of the great house of
Hapsburg who came to England in the reign of Henry II.,
distinguished
itself in the Wars of the Roses, and in the seventeenth century was
advanced to the peerages of Denbigh in England and (later) of
Desmond
in Ireland. The novelist was the grandson of John Fielding, Canon
of
Salisbury, the fifth son of the first Earl of Desmond of this
creation. The canon's third son, Edmond, entered the army, served
under Marlborough, and married Sarah Gold or Gould, daughter of a
judge of the King's Bench. Their eldest son was Henry, who was born
on April 22, 1707, and had an uncertain number of brothers and
sisters of the whole blood. After his first wife's death, General
Fielding (for he attained that rank) married again. The most
remarkable offspring of the first marriage, next to Henry, was his
sister Sarah, also a novelist, who wrote David Simple; of the
second,
John, afterwards Sir John Fielding, who, though blind, succeeded
his
half-brother as a Bow Street magistrate, and in that office
combined
an equally honourable record with a longer tenure.Fielding
was born at Sharpham Park in Somersetshire, the seat of his
maternal
grandfather; but most of his early youth was spent at East Stour in
Dorsetshire, to which his father removed after the judge's death.
He
is said to have received his first education under a parson of the
neighbourhood named Oliver, in whom a very uncomplimentary
tradition
sees the original of Parson Trulliber. He was then certainly sent
to
Eton, where he did not waste his time as regards learning, and made
several valuable friends. But the dates of his entering and leaving
school are alike unknown; and his subsequent sojourn at Leyden for
two years—though there is no reason to doubt it—depends even less
upon any positive documentary evidence. This famous University
still
had a great repute as a training school in law, for which
profession
he was intended; but the reason why he did not receive the even
then
far more usual completion of a public school education by a sojourn
at Oxford or Cambridge may be suspected to be different. It may
even
have had something to do with a curious escapade of his about which
not very much is known—an attempt to carry off a pretty heiress of
Lyme, named Sarah Andrew.Even
at Leyden, however, General Fielding seems to have been unable or
unwilling to pay his son's expenses, which must have been far less
there than at an English University; and Henry's return to London
in
1728-29 is said to have been due to sheer impecuniosity. When he
returned to England, his father was good enough to make him an
allowance of L200 nominal, which appears to have been equivalent to
L0 actual. And as practically nothing is known of him for the next
six or seven years, except the fact of his having worked
industriously enough at a large number of not very good plays of
the
lighter kind, with a few poems and miscellanies, it is reasonably
enough supposed that he lived by his pen. The only product of this
period which has kept (or indeed which ever received) competent
applause is Tom
Thumb, or the Tragedy of Tragedies,
a following of course of the
Rehearsal, but full
of humour and spirit. The most successful of his other dramatic
works
were the Mock Doctor
and the Miser,
adaptations of Moliere's famous pieces. His undoubted connection
with
the stage, and the fact of the contemporary existence of a certain
Timothy Fielding, helped suggestions of less dignified occupations
as
actor, booth-keeper, and so forth; but these have long been
discredited and indeed disproved.In
or about 1735, when Fielding was twenty-eight, we find him in a
new,
a more brilliant and agreeable, but even a more transient phase. He
had married (we do not know when or where) Miss Charlotte Cradock,
one of three sisters who lived at Salisbury (it is to be observed
that Fielding's entire connections, both in life and letters, are
with the Western Counties and London), who were certainly of
competent means, and for whose alleged illegitimacy there is no
evidence but an unsupported fling of that old maid of genius,
Richardson. The descriptions both of Sophia and of Amelia are said
to
have been taken from this lady; her good looks and her amiability
are
as well established as anything of the kind can be in the absence
of
photographs and affidavits; and it is certain that her husband was
passionately attached to her, during their too short married life.
His method, however, of showing his affection smacked in some ways
too much of the foibles which he has attributed to Captain Booth,
and
of those which we must suspect Mr Thomas Jones would also have
exhibited, if he had not been adopted as Mr Allworthy's heir, and
had
not had Mr Western's fortune to share and look forward to. It is
true
that grave breaches have been made by recent criticism in the very
picturesque and circumstantial story told on the subject by Murphy,
the first of Fielding's biographers. This legend was that Fielding,
having succeeded by the death of his mother to a small estate at
East
Stour, worth about L200 a year, and having received L1500 in ready
money as his wife's fortune, got through the whole in three years
by
keeping open house, with a large retinue in "costly yellow
liveries," and so forth. In details, this story has been simply
riddled. His mother had died long before; he was certainly not away
from London three years, or anything like it; and so forth. At the
same time, the best and soberest judges agree that there is an
intrinsic probability, a consensus (if a vague one) of tradition,
and
a chain of almost unmistakably personal references in the novels,
which plead for a certain amount of truth, at the bottom of a much
embellished legend. At any rate, if Fielding established himself in
the country, it was not long before he returned to town; for early
in
1736 we find him back again, and not merely a playwright, but
lessee
of the "Little Theatre" in the Haymarket. The plays which
he produced here—satirico-political pieces, such as
Pasquin and the
Historical Register—were
popular enough, but offended the Government; and in 1737 a new bill
regulating theatrical performances, and instituting the Lord
Chamberlain's control, was passed. This measure put an end directly
to the "Great Mogul's Company," as Fielding had called his
troop, and indirectly to its manager's career as a playwright. He
did
indeed write a few pieces in future years, but they were of the
smallest importance.After
this check he turned at last to a serious profession, entered
himself
of the Middle Temple in November of the same year, and was called
three years later; but during these years, and indeed for some time
afterwards, our information about him is still of the vaguest
character. Nobody doubts that he had a large share in the
Champion, an
essay-periodical on the usual eighteenth-century model, which began
to appear in 1739, and which is still occasionally consulted for
the
work that is certainly or probably his. He went the Western
Circuit,
and attended the Wiltshire Sessions, after he was called, giving up
his contributions to periodicals soon after that event. But he soon
returned to literature proper, or rather made his
debut in it, with
the immortal book now republished. The
History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and his Friend Mr
Abraham Adams,
appeared in February 1742, and its author received from Andrew
Millar, the publisher, the sum of L183, 11s. Even greater works
have
fetched much smaller sums; but it will be admitted that
Joseph Andrews was
not dear.The
advantage, however, of presenting a survey of an author's life
uninterrupted by criticism is so clear, that what has to be said
about Joseph
may be conveniently postponed for the moment. Immediately after its
publication the author fell back upon miscellaneous writing, and in
the next year (1743) collected and issued three volumes of
Miscellanies. In
the two first volumes the only thing of much interest is the
unfinished and unequal, but in part powerful,
Journey from this World to the Next,
an attempt of a kind which Fontenelle and others, following Lucian,
had made very popular with the time. But the third volume of
the
Miscellanies
deserved a less modest and gregarious appearance, for it contained,
and is wholly occupied by, the wonderful and terrible satire
of
Jonathan Wild, the
greatest piece of pure irony in English out of Swift. Soon after
the
publication of the book, a great calamity came on Fielding. His
wife
had been very ill when he wrote the preface; soon afterwards she
was
dead. They had taken the chance, had made the choice, that the more
prudent and less wise student-hero and heroine of Mr
Browning's
Youth and Art had
shunned; they had no doubt "sighed deep, laughed free, Starved,
feasted, despaired," and we need not question, that they had
also "been happy."Except
this sad event and its rather incongruous sequel, Fielding's
marriage
to his wife's maid Mary Daniel—a marriage, however, which did not
take place till full four years later, and which by all accounts
supplied him with a faithful and excellent companion and nurse, and
his children with a kind stepmother—little or nothing is again
known of this elusive man of genius between the publication of
the
Miscellanies in
1743, and that of
Tom Jones in 1749.
The second marriage itself in November 1747; an interview which
Joseph Warton had with him rather more than a year earlier (one of
the very few direct interviews we have); the publication of two
anti-Jacobite newspapers (Fielding was always a strong Whig and
Hanoverian), called the
True Patriot and
the Jacobite's
Journal in 1745 and
the following years; some indistinct traditions about residences at
Twickenham and elsewhere, and some, more precise but not much more
authenticated, respecting patronage by the Duke of Bedford, Mr
Lyttelton, Mr Allen, and others, pretty well sum up the
whole.Tom
Jones was published
in February (a favourite month with Fielding or his publisher
Millar)
1749; and as it brought him the, for those days, very considerable
sum of L600 to which Millar added another hundred later, the
novelist
must have been, for a time at any rate, relieved from his chronic
penury. But he had already, by Lyttelton's interest, secured his
first and last piece of preferment, being made Justice of the Peace
for Westminster, an office on which he entered with characteristic
vigour. He was qualified for it not merely by a solid knowledge of
the law, and by great natural abilities, but by his thorough
kindness
of heart; and, perhaps, it may also be added, by his long years of
queer experience on (as Mr Carlyle would have said) the "burning
marl" of the London Bohemia. Very shortly afterwards he was
chosen Chairman of Quarter Sessions, and established himself in Bow
Street. The Bow Street magistrate of that time occupied a most
singular position, and was more like a French Prefect of Police or
even a Minister of Public Safety than a mere justice. Yet he was
ill
paid. Fielding says that the emoluments, which before his accession
had but been L500 a year of "dirty" money, were by his own
action but L300 of clean; and the work, if properly performed, was
very severe.That
he performed it properly all competent evidence shows, a foolish,
inconclusive, and I fear it must be said emphatically snobbish
story
of Walpole's notwithstanding. In particular, he broke up a gang of
cut-throat thieves, which had been the terror of London. But his
tenure of the post was short enough, and scarcely extended to five
years. His health had long been broken, and he was now constantly
attacked by gout, so that he had frequently to retreat on Bath from
Bow Street, or his suburban cottage of Fordhook, Ealing. But he did
not relax his literary work. His pen was active with pamphlets
concerning his office;
Amelia, his last
novel, appeared towards the close of 1751; and next year saw the
beginning of a new paper, the
Covent Garden Journal,
which appeared twice a week, ran for the greater part of the year,
and died in November. Its great author did not see that month twice
again. In the spring of 1753 he grew worse; and after a year's
struggle with ill health, hard work, and hard weather, lesser
measures being pronounced useless, was persuaded to try the
"Portugal
Voyage," of which he has left so charming a record in the
Journey to Lisbon.
He left Fordhook on June 26, 1754, reached Lisbon in August, and,
dying there on the 8th of October, was buried in the cemetery of
the
Estrella.Of
not many writers perhaps does a clearer notion, as far as their
personality goes, exist in the general mind that interests itself
at
all in literature than of Fielding. Yet more than once a warning
has
been sounded, especially by his best and most recent biographer, to
the effect that this idea is founded upon very little warranty of
scripture. The truth is, that as the foregoing record—which, brief
as it is, is a sufficiently faithful summary—will have shown, we
know very little about Fielding. We have hardly any letters of his,
and so lack the best by far and the most revealing of all
character-portraits; we have but one important autobiographic
fragment, and though that is of the highest interest and value, it
was written far in the valley of the shadow of death, it is not in
the least retrospective, and it affords but dim and inferential
light
on his younger, healthier, and happier days and ways. He came,
moreover, just short of one set of men of letters, of whom we have
a
great deal of personal knowledge, and just beyond another. He was
neither of those about Addison, nor of those about Johnson. No
intimate friend of his has left us anything elaborate about him. On
the other hand, we have a far from inconsiderable body of
documentary
evidence, of a kind often by no means trustworthy. The best part of
it is contained in the letters of his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley
Montagu, and the reminiscences or family traditions of her
grand-daughter, Lady Louisa Stuart. But Lady Mary, vivacious and
agreeable as she is, had with all her talent a very considerable
knack of writing for effect, of drawing strong contrasts and the
like; and it is not quite certain that she saw very much of
Fielding
in the last and most interesting third of his life. Another
witness,
Horace Walpole, to less knowledge and equally dubious accuracy,
added
decided ill-will, which may have been due partly to the shrinking
of
a dilettante and a fop from a burly Bohemian; but I fear is also
consequent upon the fact that Horace could not afford to despise
Fielding's birth, and knew him to be vastly his own superior in
genius. We hear something of him again from Richardson; and
Richardson hated him with the hatred of dissimilar genius, of
inferior social position, and, lastly, of the cat for the dog who
touzles and worries her. Johnson partly inherited or shared
Richardson's aversion, partly was blinded to Fielding's genius by
his
aggressive Whiggery. I fear, too, that he was incapable of
appreciating it for reasons other than political. It is certain
that
Johnson, sane and robust as he was, was never quite at ease before
genius of the gigantic kind, either in dead or living. Whether he
did
not like to have to look up too much, or was actually unable to do
so, it is certain that Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, and Fielding,
those four Atlantes of English verse and prose, all affected him
with
lukewarm admiration, or with positive dislike, for which it is vain
to attempt to assign any uniform secondary cause, political or
other.
It may be permitted to hint another reason. All Johnson's most
sharp-sighted critics have noticed, though most have discreetly
refrained from insisting on, his "thorn-in-the-flesh," the
combination in him of very strong physical passions with the
deepest
sense of the moral and religious duty of abstinence. It is perhaps
impossible to imagine anything more distasteful to a man so
buffeted,
than the extreme indulgence with which Fielding regards, and the
easy
freedom, not to say gusto, with which he depicts, those who succumb
to similar temptation. Only by supposing the workings of some
subtle
influence of this kind is it possible to explain, even in so
capricious a humour as Johnson's, the famous and absurd application
of the term "barren rascal" to a writer who, dying almost
young, after having for many years lived a life of pleasure, and
then
for four or five one of laborious official duty, has left work
anything but small in actual bulk, and fertile with the most
luxuriant growth of intellectual originality.Partly
on the obiter dicta
of persons like these, partly on the still more tempting and still
more treacherous ground of indications drawn from his works, a
Fielding of fantasy has been constructed, which in Thackeray's
admirable sketch attains real life and immortality as a creature of
art, but which possesses rather dubious claims as a historical
character. It is astonishing how this Fielding of fantasy sinks and
shrivels when we begin to apply the horrid tests of criticism to
his
component parts. The
eidolon, with inked
ruffles and a towel round his head, sits in the Temple and dashes
off
articles for the
Covent Garden Journal;
then comes Criticism, hellish maid, and reminds us that when
the
Covent Garden Journal
appeared, Fielding's wild oats, if ever sown at all, had been sown
long ago; that he was a busy magistrate and householder in Bow
Street; and that, if he had towels round his head, it was probably
less because he had exceeded in liquor than because his Grace of
Newcastle had given him a headache by wanting elaborate plans and
schemes prepared at an hour's notice. Lady Mary, apparently with
some
envy, tells us that he could "feel rapture with his cook-maid."
"Which many has," as Mr Ridley remarks, from Xanthias
Phoceus downwards; but when we remember the historic fact that he
married this maid (not a "cook-maid" at all), and that
though he always speaks of her with warm affection and hearty
respect, such "raptures" as we have of his clearly refer to
a very different woman, who was both a lady and a beautiful one, we
begin a little to shake our heads. Horace Walpole at second-hand
draws us a Fielding, pigging with low companions in a house kept
like
a hedge tavern; Fielding himself, within a year or two, shows us
more
than half-undesignedly in the
Voyage to Lisbon
that he was very careful about the appointments and decency of his
table, that he stood rather upon ceremony in regard to his own
treatment of his family, and the treatment of them and himself by
others, and that he was altogether a person orderly, correct, and
even a little finikin. Nor is there the slightest reasonable reason
to regard this as a piece of hypocrisy, a vice as alien from the
Fielding of fancy as from the Fielding of fact, and one the
particular manifestation of which, in this particular place, would
have been equally unlikely and unintelligible.It
may be asked whether I propose to substitute for the traditional
Fielding a quite different person, of regular habits and methodical
economy. Certainly not. The traditional estimate of great men is
rarely wrong altogether, but it constantly has a habit of
exaggerating and dramatising their characteristics. For some things
in Fielding's career we have positive evidence of document, and
evidence hardly less certain of probability. Although I believe the
best judges are now of opinion that his impecuniosity has been
overcharged, he certainly had experiences which did not often fall
to
the lot of even a cadet of good family in the eighteenth century.
There can be no reasonable doubt that he was a man who had a
leaning
towards pretty girls and bottles of good wine; and I should suppose
that if the girl were kind and fairly winsome, he would not have
insisted that she should possess Helen's beauty, that if the bottle
of good wine were not forthcoming, he would have been very tolerant
of a mug of good ale. He may very possibly have drunk more than he
should, and lost more than he could conveniently pay. It may be put
down as morally ascertained that towards all these weaknesses of
humanity, and others like unto them, he held an attitude which was
less that of the unassailable philosopher than that of the
sympathiser, indulgent and excusing. In regard more especially to
what are commonly called moral delinquencies, this attitude was so
decided as to shock some people even in those days, and many in
these. Just when the first sheets of this edition were passing
through the press, a violent attack was made in a newspaper
correspondence on the morality of
Tom Jones by
certain notorious advocates of Purity, as some say, of Pruriency
and
Prudery combined, according to less complimentary estimates. Even
midway between the two periods we find the admirable Miss Ferrier,
a
sister of Fielding's own craft, who sometimes had touches of nature
and satire not far inferior to his own, expressing by the mouth of
one of her characters with whom she seems partly to agree, the
sentiment that his works are "vanishing like noxious
exhalations." Towards any misdoing by persons of the one sex
towards persons of the other, when it involved brutality or
treachery, Fielding was pitiless; but when treachery and brutality
were not concerned, he was, to say the least, facile. So, too, he
probably knew by experience—he certainly knew by native shrewdness
and acquired observation—that to look too much on the wine when it
is red, or on the cards when they are parti-coloured, is ruinous to
health and fortune; but he thought not over badly of any man who
did
these things. Still it is possible to admit this in him, and to
stop
short of that idea of a careless and reckless
viveur which has so
often been put forward. In particular, Lady Mary's view of his
childlike enjoyment of the moment has been, I think, much
exaggerated
by posterity, and was probably not a little mistaken by the lady
herself. There are two moods in which the motto is
Carpe diem, one a
mood of simply childish hurry, the other one where behind the
enjoyment of the moment lurks, and in which the enjoyment of the
moment is not a little heightened by, that vast ironic
consciousness
of the before and after, which I at least see everywhere in the
background of Fielding's work.The
man, however, of whom we know so little, concerns us much less than
the author of the works, of which it only rests with ourselves to
know everything. I have above classed Fielding as one of the four
Atlantes of English verse and prose, and I doubt not that both the
phrase and the application of it to him will meet with question and
demur. I have only to interject, as the critic so often has to
interject, a request to the court to take what I say in the sense
in
which I say it. I do not mean that Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, and
Fielding are in all or even in most respects on a level. I do not
mean that the three last are in all respects of the greatest names
in
English literature. I only mean that, in a certain quality, which
for
want of a better word I have chosen to call Atlantean, they stand
alone. Each of them, for the metaphor is applicable either way,
carries a whole world on his shoulders, or looks down on a whole
world from his natural altitude. The worlds are different, but they
are worlds; and though the attitude of the giants is different
also,
it agrees in all of them on the points of competence and strength.
Take whomsoever else we may among our men of letters, and we shall
find this characteristic to be in comparison wanting. These four
carry their world, and are not carried by it; and if it, in the
language so dear to Fielding himself, were to crash and shatter,
the
inquiry, "Que
vous reste-t-il?"
could be answered by each, "Moi!"The
appearance which Fielding makes is no doubt the most modest of the
four. He has not Shakespeare's absolute universality, and in fact
not
merely the poet's tongue, but the poet's thought seems to have been
denied him. His sphere is not the ideal like Milton's. His irony,
splendid as it is, falls a little short of that diabolical
magnificence which exalts Swift to the point whence, in his own
way,
he surveys all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory or
vainglory
of them. All Fielding's critics have noted the manner, in a certain
sense modest, in another ostentatious, in which he seems to confine
himself to the presentation of things English. They might have
added
to the presentation of things English—as they appear in London, and
on the Western Circuit, and on the Bath Road.But
this apparent parochialism has never deceived good judges. It did
not
deceive Lady Mary, who had seen the men and manners of very many
climes; it did not deceive Gibbon, who was not especially prone to
overvalue things English, and who could look down from twenty
centuries on things ephemeral. It deceives, indeed, I am told, some
excellent persons at the present day, who think Fielding's
microcosm
a "toylike world," and imagine that Russian Nihilists and
French Naturalists have gone beyond it. It will deceive no one who
has lived for some competent space of time a life during which he
has
tried to regard his fellow-creatures and himself, as nearly as a
mortal may, sub
specie aeternitatis.As
this is in the main an introduction to a complete reprint of
Fielding's four great novels, the justification in detail of the
estimate just made or hinted of the novelist's genius will be best
and most fitly made by a brief successive discussion of the four as
they are here presented, with some subsequent remarks on the
Miscellanies here
selected. And, indeed, it is not fanciful to perceive in each book
a
somewhat different presentment of the author's genius; though in no
one of the four is any one of his masterly qualities absent. There
is
tenderness even in
Jonathan Wild;
there are touches in
Joseph Andrews of
that irony of the Preacher, the last echo of which is heard amid
the
kindly resignation of the
Journey to Lisbon,
in the sentence, "Whereas envy of all things most exposes us to
danger from others, so contempt of all things best secures us from
them." But on the whole it is safe to say that
Joseph Andrews best
presents Fielding's mischievous and playful wit;
Jonathan Wild his
half-Lucianic half-Swiftian irony;
Tom Jones his
unerring knowledge of human nature, and his constructive
faculty;
Amelia his
tenderness, his
mitis sapientia,
his observation of the details of life. And first of the
first.The
History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr
Abraham
Adams was, as has
been said above, published in February 1742. A facsimile of the
agreement between author and publisher will be given in the second
volume of this series; and it is not uninteresting to observe that
the witness, William Young, is none other than the asserted
original
of the immortal Mr Adams himself. He might, on Balzac's plea in a
tolerably well-known anecdote, have demanded half of the L183, 11s.
Of the other origins of the book we have a pretty full account,
partly documentary. That it is "writ in the manner of
Cervantes," and is intended as a kind of comic epic, is the
author's own statement—no doubt as near the actual truth as is
consistent with comic-epic theory. That there are resemblances to
Scarron, to Le Sage, and to other practitioners of the Picaresque
novel is certain; and it was inevitable that there should be. Of
directer and more immediate models or starting-points one is
undoubted; the other, though less generally admitted, not much less
indubitable to my mind. The parody of Richardson's
Pamela, which was
little more than a year earlier (Nov. 1740), is avowed, open,
flagrant; nor do I think that the author was so soon carried away
by
the greater and larger tide of his own invention as some critics
seem
to hold. He is always more or less returning to the ironic charge;
and the multiplicity of the assailants of Joseph's virtue only
disguises the resemblance to the long-drawn dangers of Pamela from
a
single ravisher. But Fielding was also well acquainted with
Marivaux's Paysan
Parvenu, and the
resemblances between that book and
Joseph Andrews are
much stronger than Fielding's admirers have always been willing to
admit. This recalcitrance has, I think, been mainly due to the
erroneous conception of Marivaux as, if not a mere fribble, yet a
Dresden-Shepherdess kind of writer, good at "preciousness"
and patch-and-powder manners, but nothing more.There
was, in fact, a very strong satiric and ironic touch in the author
of
Marianne, and I do
not think that I was too rash when some years ago I ventured to
speak
of him as "playing Fielding to his own Richardson" in the
Paysan Parvenu.Origins,
however, and indebtedness and the like, are, when great work is
concerned, questions for the study and the lecture-room, for the
literary historian and the professional critic, rather than for the
reader, however intelligent and alert, who wishes to enjoy a
masterpiece, and is content simply to enjoy it. It does not really
matter how close to anything else something which possesses
independent goodness is; the very utmost technical originality, the
most spotless purity from the faintest taint of suggestion, will
not
suffice to confer merit on what does not otherwise possess it.
Whether, as I rather think, Fielding pursued the plan he had
formed
ab incepto, or
whether he cavalierly neglected it, or whether the current of his
own
genius carried him off his legs and landed him, half against his
will, on the shore of originality, are questions for the Schools,
and, as I venture to think, not for the higher forms in them. We
have
Joseph Andrews as
it is; and we may be abundantly thankful for it. The contents of
it,
as of all Fielding's work in this kind, include certain things for
which the moderns are scantly grateful. Of late years, and not of
late years only, there has grown up a singular and perhaps an
ignorant impatience of digressions, of episodes, of tales within a
tale. The example of this which has been most maltreated is the
"Man
of the Hill" episode in
Tom Jones; but the
stories of the "Unfortunate Jilt" and of Mr Wilson in our
present subject, do not appear to me to be much less obnoxious to
the
censure; and Amelia
contains more than one or two things of the same kind. Me they do
not
greatly disturb; and I see many defences for them besides the
obvious, and at a pinch sufficient one, that divagations of this
kind
existed in all Fielding's Spanish and French models, that the
public
of the day expected them, and so forth. This defence is enough, but
it is easy to amplify and reintrench it. It is not by any means the
fact that the Picaresque novel of adventure is the only or the
chief
form of fiction which prescribes or admits these episodic
excursions.
All the classical epics have them; many eastern and other stories
present them; they are common, if not invariable, in the abundant
mediaeval literature of prose and verse romance; they are not
unknown
by any means in the modern novel; and you will very rarely hear a
story told orally at the dinner-table or in the smoking-room
without
something of the kind. There must, therefore, be something in them
corresponding to an inseparable accident of that most unchanging of
all things, human nature. And I do not think the special form with
which we are here concerned by any means the worst that they have
taken. It has the grand and prominent virtue of being at once and
easily skippable. There is about Cervantes and Le Sage, about
Fielding and Smollett, none of the treachery of the modern
novelist,
who induces the conscientious reader to drag through pages,
chapters,
and sometimes volumes which have nothing to do with the action, for
fear he should miss something that has to do with it. These great
men
have a fearless frankness, and almost tell you in so many words
when
and what you may skip. Therefore, if the "Curious Impertinent,"
and the "Baneful Marriage," and the "Man of the Hill,"
and the "Lady of Quality," get in the way, when you desire
to "read for the story," you have nothing to do but turn
the page till finis
comes. The defence has already been made by an illustrious hand for
Fielding's inter-chapters and exordiums. It appears to me to be
almost more applicable to his insertions.And
so we need not trouble ourselves any more either about the
insertions
or about the exordiums. They both please me; the second class has
pleased persons much better worth pleasing than I can pretend to
be;
but the making or marring of the book lies elsewhere. I do not
think
that it lies in the construction, though Fielding's following of
the
ancients, both sincere and satiric, has imposed a false air of
regularity upon that. The Odyssey of Joseph, of Fanny, and of their
ghostly mentor and bodily guard is, in truth, a little haphazard,
and
might have been longer or shorter without any discreet man
approving
it the more or the less therefor. The real merits lie partly in the
abounding humour and satire of the artist's criticism, but even
more
in the marvellous vivacity and fertility of his creation. For the
very first time in English prose fiction every character is alive,
every incident is capable of having happened. There are lively
touches in the Elizabethan romances; but they are buried in
verbiage,
swathed in stage costume, choked and fettered by their authors'
want
of art. The quality of Bunyan's knowledge of men was not much
inferior to Shakespeare's, or at least to Fielding's; but the range
and the results of it were cramped by his single theological
purpose,
and his unvaried allegoric or typical form. Why Defoe did not
discover the New World of Fiction, I at least have never been able
to
put into any brief critical formula that satisfies me, and I have
never seen it put by any one else. He had not only seen it afar
off,
he had made landings and descents on it; he had carried off and
exhibited in triumph natives such as Robinson Crusoe, as Man
Friday,
as Moll Flanders, as William the Quaker; but he had conquered,
subdued, and settled no province therein. I like
Pamela; I like it
better than some persons who admire Richardson on the whole more
than
I do, seem to like it. But, as in all its author's work, the
handling
seems to me academic—the working out on paper of an ingeniously
conceived problem rather than the observation or evolution of
actual
or possible life. I should not greatly fear to push the comparison
even into foreign countries; but it is well to observe limits. Let
us
be content with holding that in England at least, without prejudice
to anything further, Fielding was the first to display the
qualities
of the perfect novelist as distinguished from the romancer.What
are those qualities, as shown in
Joseph Andrews? The
faculty of arranging a probable and interesting course of action is
one, of course, and Fielding showed it here. But I do not think
that
it is at any time the greatest one; and nobody denies that he made
great advances in this direction later. The faculty of lively
dialogue is another; and that he has not often been refused; but
much
the same may be said of it. The interspersing of appropriate
description is another; but here also we shall not find him exactly
a
paragon. It is in character—the chief
differentia of the
novel as distinguished not merely from its elder sister the
romance,
and its cousin the drama, but still more from every other kind of
literature—that Fielding stands even here pre-eminent. No one that
I can think of, except his greatest successor in the present
century,
has the same unfailing gift of breathing life into every character
he
creates or borrows; and even Thackeray draws, if I may use the
phrase, his characters more in the flat and less in the round than
Fielding. Whether in Blifil he once failed, we must discuss
hereafter; he has failed nowhere in
Joseph Andrews.
Some of his sketches may require the caution that they are
eighteenth-century men and women; some the warning that they are
obviously caricatured, or set in designed profile, or merely
sketched. But they are all alive. The finical estimate of Gray (it
is
a horrid joy to think how perfectly capable Fielding was of having
joined in that practical joke of the young gentlemen of Cambridge,
which made Gray change his college), while dismissing these light
things with patronage, had to admit that "parson Adams is
perfectly well, so is Mrs Slipslop." "They
were, Mr Gray,"
said some one once, "they were more perfectly well, and in a
higher kind, than anything you ever did; though you were a pretty
workman too."Yes,
parson Adams is perfectly well, and so is Mrs Slipslop. But so are
they all. Even the hero and heroine, tied and bound as they are by
the necessity under which their maker lay of preserving Joseph's
Joseph-hood, and of making Fanny the example of a franker and less
interested virtue than her sister-in-law that might have been, are
surprisingly human where most writers would have made them sticks.
And the rest require no allowance. Lady Booby, few as are the
strokes
given to her, is not much less alive than Lady Bellaston. Mr
Trulliber, monster and not at all delicate monster as he is, is
also
a man, and when he lays it down that no one even in his own house
shall drink when he "caaled vurst," one can but pay his
maker the tribute of that silent shudder of admiration which hails
the addition of one more everlasting entity to the world of thought
and fancy. And Mr Tow-wouse is real, and Mrs Tow-wouse is more real
still, and Betty is real; and the coachman, and Miss Grave-airs,
and
all the wonderful crew from first to last. The dresses they wear,
the
manners they exhibit, the laws they live under, the very foods and
drinks they live upon, are "past like the shadows on glasses"—to
the comfort and rejoicing of some, to the greater or less sorrow of
others. But they
are there—alive, full of blood, full of breath as we are, and, in
truth, I fear a little more so. For some purposes a century is a
gap
harder to cross and more estranging than a couple of millenniums.
But
in their case the gap is nothing; and it is not too much to say
that
as they have stood the harder test, they will stand the easier.
There
are very striking differences between Nausicaa and Mrs Slipslop;
there are differences not less striking between Mrs Slipslop and
Beatrice. But their likeness is a stranger and more wonderful thing
than any of their unlikenesses. It is that they are all women, that
they are all live citizenesses of the Land of Matters Unforgot, the
fashion whereof passeth not away, and the franchise whereof, once
acquired, assures immortality.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
As
it is possible the mere English reader may have a different idea of
romance from the author of these little volumes, and may consequently expect a kind of entertainment
not to
be found, nor which was even intended, in the following pages, it
may
not be improper to premise a few words concerning this kind of
writing, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in
our language.The
EPIC, as well as the DRAMA, is divided into tragedy and comedy.
HOMER, who was the father of this species of poetry, gave us a
pattern of both these, though that of the latter kind is entirely
lost; which Aristotle tells us, bore the same relation to comedy
which his Iliad bears to tragedy. And perhaps, that we have no more
instances of it among the writers of antiquity, is owing to the
loss
of this great pattern, which, had it survived, would have found its
imitators equally with the other poems of this great
original.And
farther, as this poetry may be tragic or comic, I will not scruple
to
say it may be likewise either in verse or prose: for though it
wants
one particular, which the critic enumerates in the constituent
parts
of an epic poem, namely metre; yet, when any kind of writing
contains
all its other parts, such as fable, action, characters, sentiments,
and diction, and is deficient in metre only, it seems, I think,
reasonable to refer it to the epic; at least, as no critic hath
thought proper to range it under any other head, or to assign it a
particular name to itself.Thus
the Telemachus of the archbishop of Cambray appears to me of the
epic
kind, as well as the Odyssey of Homer; indeed, it is much fairer
and
more reasonable to give it a name common with that species from
which
it differs only in a single instance, than to confound it with
those
which it resembles in no other. Such are those voluminous works,
commonly called Romances, namely, Clelia, Cleopatra, Astraea,
Cassandra, the Grand Cyrus, and innumerable others, which contain,
as
I apprehend, very little instruction or entertainment.Now,
a comic romance is a comic epic poem in prose; differing from
comedy,
as the serious epic from tragedy: its action being more extended
and
comprehensive; containing a much larger circle of incidents, and
introducing a greater variety of characters. It differs from the
serious romance in its fable and action, in this; that as in the
one
these are grave and solemn, so in the other they are light and
ridiculous: it differs in its characters by introducing persons of
inferior rank, and consequently, of inferior manners, whereas the
grave romance sets the highest before us: lastly, in its sentiments
and diction; by preserving the ludicrous instead of the sublime. In
the diction, I think, burlesque itself may be sometimes admitted;
of
which many instances will occur in this work, as in the description
of the battles, and some other places, not necessary to be pointed
out to the classical reader, for whose entertainment those parodies
or burlesque imitations are chiefly calculated.But
though we have sometimes admitted this in our diction, we have
carefully excluded it from our sentiments and characters; for there
it is never properly introduced, unless in writings of the
burlesque
kind, which this is not intended to be. Indeed, no two species of
writing can differ more widely than the comic and the burlesque;
for
as the latter is ever the exhibition of what is monstrous and
unnatural, and where our delight, if we examine it, arises from the
surprizing absurdity, as in appropriating the manners of the
highest
to the lowest, or e
converso; so in the
former we should ever confine ourselves strictly to nature, from
the
just imitation of which will flow all the pleasure we can this way
convey to a sensible reader. And perhaps there is one reason why a
comic writer should of all others be the least excused for
deviating
from nature, since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet
to
meet with the great and the admirable; but life everywhere
furnishes
an accurate observer with the ridiculous.I
have hinted this little concerning burlesque, because I have often
heard that name given to performances which have been truly of the
comic kind, from the author's having sometimes admitted it in his
diction only; which, as it is the dress of poetry, doth, like the
dress of men, establish characters (the one of the whole poem, and
the other of the whole man), in vulgar opinion, beyond any of their
greater excellences: but surely, a certain drollery in stile, where
characters and sentiments are perfectly natural, no more
constitutes
the burlesque, than an empty pomp and dignity of words, where
everything else is mean and low, can entitle any performance to the
appellation of the true sublime.And
I apprehend my Lord Shaftesbury's opinion of mere burlesque agrees
with mine, when he asserts, There is no such thing to be found in
the
writings of the ancients. But perhaps I have less abhorrence than
he
professes for it; and that, not because I have had some little
success on the stage this way, but rather as it contributes more to
exquisite mirth and laughter than any other; and these are probably
more wholesome physic for the mind, and conduce better to purge
away
spleen, melancholy, and ill affections, than is generally imagined.
Nay, I will appeal to common observation, whether the same
companies
are not found more full of good-humour and benevolence, after they
have been sweetened for two or three hours with entertainments of
this kind, than when soured by a tragedy or a grave lecture.But
to illustrate all this by another science, in which, perhaps, we
shall see the distinction more clearly and plainly, let us examine
the works of a comic history painter, with those performances which
the Italians call Caricatura, where we shall find the true
excellence
of the former to consist in the exactest copying of nature;
insomuch
that a judicious eye instantly rejects anything
outre, any liberty
which the painter hath taken with the features of that
alma mater; whereas
in the Caricatura we allow all licence—its aim is to exhibit
monsters, not men; and all distortions and exaggerations whatever
are
within its proper province.Now,
what Caricatura is in painting, Burlesque is in writing; and in the
same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other.
And
here I shall observe, that, as in the former the painter seems to
have the advantage; so it is in the latter infinitely on the side
of
the writer; for the Monstrous is much easier to paint than
describe,
and the Ridiculous to describe than paint.And
though perhaps this latter species doth not in either science so
strongly affect and agitate the muscles as the other; yet it will
be
owned, I believe, that a more rational and useful pleasure arises
to
us from it. He who should call the ingenious Hogarth a burlesque
painter, would, in my opinion, do him very little honour; for sure
it
is much easier, much less the subject of admiration, to paint a man
with a nose, or any other feature, of a preposterous size, or to
expose him in some absurd or monstrous attitude, than to express
the
affections of men on canvas. It hath been thought a vast
commendation
of a painter to say his figures seem to breathe; but surely it is a
much greater and nobler applause, that they appear to think.But
to return. The Ridiculous only, as I have before said, falls within
my province in the present work. Nor will some explanation of this
word be thought impertinent by the reader, if he considers how
wonderfully it hath been mistaken, even by writers who have
professed
it: for to what but such a mistake can we attribute the many
attempts
to ridicule the blackest villanies, and, what is yet worse, the
most
dreadful calamities? What could exceed the absurdity of an author,
who should write the comedy of Nero, with the merry incident of
ripping up his mother's belly? or what would give a greater shock
to
humanity than an attempt to expose the miseries of poverty and
distress to ridicule? And yet the reader will not want much
learning
to suggest such instances to himself.Besides,
it may seem remarkable, that Aristotle, who is so fond and free of
definitions, hath not thought proper to define the Ridiculous.
Indeed, where he tells us it is proper to comedy, he hath remarked
that villany is not its object: but he hath not, as I remember,
positively asserted what is. Nor doth the Abbe Bellegarde, who hath
written a treatise on this subject, though he shows us many species
of it, once trace it to its fountain.The
only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is
affectation. But though it arises from one spring only, when we
consider the infinite streams into which this one branches, we
shall
presently cease to admire at the copious field it affords to an
observer. Now, affectation proceeds from one of these two causes,
vanity or hypocrisy: for as vanity puts us on affecting false
characters, in order to purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on
an
endeavour to avoid censure, by concealing our vices under an
appearance of their opposite virtues. And though these two causes
are
often confounded (for there is some difficulty in distinguishing
them), yet, as they proceed from very different motives, so they
are
as clearly distinct in their operations: for indeed, the
affectation
which arises from vanity is nearer to truth than the other, as it
hath not that violent repugnancy of nature to struggle with, which
that of the hypocrite hath. It may be likewise noted, that
affectation doth not imply an absolute negation of those qualities
which are affected; and, therefore, though, when it proceeds from
hypocrisy, it be nearly allied to deceit; yet when it comes from
vanity only, it partakes of the nature of ostentation: for
instance,
the affectation of liberality in a vain man differs visibly from
the
same affectation in the avaricious; for though the vain man is not
what he would appear, or hath not the virtue he affects, to the
degree he would be thought to have it; yet it sits less awkwardly
on
him than on the avaricious man, who is the very reverse of what he
would seem to be.From
the discovery of this affectation arises the Ridiculous, which
always
strikes the reader with surprize and pleasure; and that in a higher
and stronger degree when the affectation arises from hypocrisy,
than
when from vanity; for to discover any one to be the exact reverse
of
what he affects, is more surprizing, and consequently more
ridiculous, than to find him a little deficient in the quality he
desires the reputation of. I might observe that our Ben Jonson, who
of all men understood the Ridiculous the best, hath chiefly used
the
hypocritical affectation.Now,
from affectation only, the misfortunes and calamities of life, or
the
imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. Surely
he hath a very ill-framed mind who can look on ugliness, infirmity,
or poverty, as ridiculous in themselves: nor do I believe any man
living, who meets a dirty fellow riding through the streets in a
cart, is struck with an idea of the Ridiculous from it; but if he
should see the same figure descend from his coach and six, or bolt
from his chair with his hat under his arm, he would then begin to
laugh, and with justice. In the same manner, were we to enter a
poor
house and behold a wretched family shivering with cold and
languishing with hunger, it would not incline us to laughter (at
least we must have very diabolical natures if it would); but should
we discover there a grate, instead of coals, adorned with flowers,
empty plate or china dishes on the sideboard, or any other
affectation of riches and finery, either on their persons or in
their
furniture, we might then indeed be excused for ridiculing so
fantastical an appearance. Much less are natural imperfections the
object of derision; but when ugliness aims at the applause of
beauty,
or lameness endeavours to display agility, it is then that these
unfortunate circumstances, which at first moved our compassion,
tend
only to raise our mirth.The
poet carries this very far:—None
are for being what they are in fault,But
for not being what they would be thought.Where
if the metre would suffer the word Ridiculous to close the first
line, the thought would be rather more proper. Great vices are the
proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults, of our pity; but
affectation appears to me the only true source of the
Ridiculous.But
perhaps it may be objected to me, that I have against my own rules
introduced vices, and of a very black kind, into this work. To
which
I shall answer: first, that it is very difficult to pursue a series
of human actions, and keep clear from them. Secondly, that the
vices
to be found here are rather the accidental consequences of some
human
frailty or foible, than causes habitually existing in the mind.
Thirdly, that they are never set forth as the objects of ridicule,
but detestation. Fourthly, that they are never the principal figure
at that time on the scene: and, lastly, they never produce the
intended evil.Having
thus distinguished Joseph Andrews from the productions of romance
writers on the one hand and burlesque writers on the other, and
given
some few very short hints (for I intended no more) of this species
of
writing, which I have affirmed to be hitherto unattempted in our
language; I shall leave to my good-natured reader to apply my piece
to my observations, and will detain him no longer than with a word
concerning the characters in this work.And
here I solemnly protest I have no intention to vilify or asperse
any
one; for though everything is copied from the book of nature, and
scarce a character or action produced which I have not taken from
my
I own observations and experience; yet I have used the utmost care
to
obscure the persons by such different circumstances, degrees, and
colours, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any
degree
of certainty; and if it ever happens otherwise, it is only where
the
failure characterized is so minute, that it is a foible only which
the party himself may laugh at as well as any other.As
to the character of Adams, as it is the most glaring in the whole,
so
I conceive it is not to be found in any book now extant. It is
designed a character of perfect simplicity; and as the goodness of
his heart will recommend him to the good-natured, so I hope it will
excuse me to the gentlemen of his cloth; for whom, while they are
worthy of their sacred order, no man can possibly have a greater
respect. They will therefore excuse me, notwithstanding the low
adventures in which he is engaged, that I have made him a
clergyman;
since no other office could have given him so many opportunities of
displaying his worthy inclinations.