In a word, has Henry Fielding drawn his picture with impartiality, or are we to allow for any bias due to the bent of his mind, to the sort of life he had led, or to that excessive employment of contrast which perhaps no imaginative writer, however great, has been able wholly to avoid?

One who promises to be an avid reader, and upon whose eyes the wide and noble prospect of English literature has just begun to dawn, said lately in my hearing that he did not want to know anything about the lives or characters of authors, for such knowledge would tend to destroy the illusion created by their works. There is something to be said for this view-if we are satisfied to rest in an illusion. But if we would see further into the matter, if we would be assured how far the illusion is just, we cannot afford to remain ignorant of the circumstances and temperament of its creator. No man or writer can be wholly impersonal. Shakespeare gets very near it; he, of all writers, seems most aloof from any bias due to disposition or surroundings; his detachment is Olympian. Yet even in his works the voice of intimate personal experience is occasionally heard. Were it otherwise, we should hardly think him human. But such aloofness as his is extremely rare. We do not find it, for instance, in Burns or Shelley, in Thackeray or Sterne. And hence it is that two or more writers will survey the features of their age, and will portray them very variously. They look at them through different glasses. Three eighteenth-century novelists, Fielding, Sterne, and Goldsmith-a realist, a sentimentalist, and an idealist, if a rough classification may be hazarded-have recorded their impressions of their times, which impressions, as every one is aware, are various and individual. Fielding was a more exact observer than the other two, and their superior in talent; but even in his case

it does not do to overlook (if I may borrow an astronomical phrase) the personal equation.

Let us recall for a moment the circumstances of his early manhood. Macaulay, in a famous and justly admired passage, has drawn a brilliant picture of the denizens of Grub Street in the first half of the eighteenth century, when Samuel Johnson joined their ranks; how they were "sometimes blazing in gold-laced hats and waistcoats; sometimes lying in bed because their coats had gone to pieces, or wearing paper cravats because their linen was in pawn; sometimes drinking champagne and tokay with Betty Careless; sometimes standing at the window of an eating-house in Porridge Island, to snuff up the scent of what they could not afford to taste," with much more to the same effect, which is too well known to need repetition. This was the company in which Fielding found himself thrown at the age of twenty. Practically without resources except those afforded by a good education, good health, and abundant animal spirits, he had, as he said afterwards, to choose between turning hackney writer or hackney coachman." The choice was soon made. He determined to follow in the footsteps of Dryden, and to challenge fortune as a writer for the stage. He met with a fair measure of success at once, and managed to rub along in this fashion for a dozen years. His plays served their purpose, and he was probably quite aware that they had, for the most part, only an ephemeral value. He saw a great deal of the seamy side of life, so much of it, indeed, that he inclined to take a poor opinion of humanity. He rubbed shoulders with those noisy comrades described by Lord Macaulay, perhaps with Savage, for in

Essay on Crocker's Edition of "Boswell's Life of Johnson."

Letter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to the Countess of Bute, June 23rd, 1754.

stance, whose act of bloodshed in an unlucky broil may have suggested the similar misfortune which befell Tom Jones. But we need not suppose he had no better society, though Boswell says he never kept any polite company in his life. His friendship with Lyttleton, for instance, which began at Eton lasted till the end, and his family connections must socially have stood him in some stead. In the main, however, we may suppose that the majority of his intimates-and he was the most sociable of men-were occupied with much the same pursuits as himself. Their moral standard, even after making allowances for Macaulay's rhetoric, was not a high one, and Fielding nowhere pretends to have been any better than his fellows. It is hardly too much to suppose that the confession to Minos of the narrator of A Journey from this World to the Next is Fielding's own. The narrator admits that he had been far from strait-laced in his youth, "but had never done an injury to any man living, nor avoided an opportunity of doing good." There is also an explicit statement in Amelia which puts the matter beyond a doubt.

7

It is generally agreed that we may look for autobiographical touches in the persons of Tom Jones, Captain Booth, Horatio, and Mr. Wilson. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Fielding's second cousin, bluntly identifies him with Booth. "I wonder," she adds, referring to Jones and Booth, "he does not perceive them to be sorry scoundrels." * To this description of these gentlemen I must return a little later. As to the identification, it, is to be accepted with the reserve that while in the general outline of character Booth may stand for a likeness of Henry Fielding, it is unfair and unnecessary to suppose that

Horatio

in any particular actions of his hero he has registered or pilloried his own. In Fielding's picture of Horatio there is, it seems to me, a touch which it is very important to remark. "had wit and humor, with an inclination to satire which he indulged rather too much." This is an exact description of one aspect of our author's genius. The wit and humor will be acknowledged at once by any one who has made acquaintance with Parson Adams or with Partridge, figures in the very front rank of humorous portrayal. The inclination to satire is only less apparent than the wit and humor. It is explicitly the driving-power of Jonathan Wild and Joseph Andrews, implicitly of Tom Jones and Amelia. And Horatio indulged it rather too much. That is statement of considerable moment.

The would-be satirist looks round upon the society which he knows, and sees it full of imperfections. These, in the interests of virtue, he makes it his business to expose. His task is not a pleasant one, any more than the seavenger's, but insensibly he grows to like it. His gaze is fixed so constantly upon the blemishes and blots of humanity that he is in danger of becoming unable to see anything else. He indulges his inclination to satire rather too much.

This propensity Fielding did not altogether escape. The social conditions amid which he lived while connected with the theatre are reflected and intensified in his plays, and their operation is not limited to the purlieus of Covent Garden, but extended, not always fairly, to other strata of society. He has eyes, at this period of his career, for imperfections only. Virtue, enshrined in her remote fane, is for the time forgotten. Satire, unchecked by her frown, runs into exaggeration and The very

Letter to the Countess of Bute, above quoted.

944

him. The journal named after that delectable alley falls foul of the license of some of his early plays, and avers that they "met with the universal detestation of the town." A case of Satan rebuking sin, perhaps, but that does not make sin any whiter. "The great" and "the polite," however, accept the dedications of his comedies-Sir Robert Walpole himself, Lord Chesterfield, and a brace of dukes. One, Love in Several Masques, he inscribes to Lady Mary; it is comparatively inoffensive, but the bare fact that she saw it played twice reminds us of the change that has since then taken place in the standard of propriety. Meanwhile the dramatist lives from hand to mouth, but being young and strong, finds his lot quite tolerable. In a copy of verses addressed to Walpole he petitions for any sort of post under Government, and laments the presence of duns and the absence of dinner; but seems only half in earnest. No doubt the lines were penned in one of his impecunious seasons. Again we are reminded of Macaulay. "They knew luxury; they knew beggary; but they never knew comfort." Most true, and-thus far-most applicable. But Fielding differed in one respect, and that the most important, from his fellow-scribblers. "These men," the indictment proceeds, "were irreclaimable." And that emphatically he was not. He extricated himself, before it was too late, from the quagmire which engulfed so many. His great works were all, as yet, unwritten; but if we find in them at times an unnecessary bitterness, a low estimate of human motives too widely diffused, and a degree of coarseness which might have been avoided; if the stage is so crowded with unworthy characters that we are tempted to recall the disproportionate bread and sack in Falstaff's tavern bill -we may refer these blemishes to those early days when a disposition naturally prone to cynicism found in

the men and women around it so little to admire and so much to despise. What wonder if a young man, thrown into such a vortex at a most impressionable age, was in some degree infeeted with the sordid views and loose opinions of those among whom he moved? The infection, in his case, never wholly disappeared; but if I am right in thinking that the holding of these views and opinions detracts something from the value of Fielding's picture of contemporary character, that does not unmake the picture as a whole; it only means that a great artist has fallen short of perfection. The fare provided, as the first chapter of Tom Jones assures us, is no other than Human Nature; but Thackeray himself admits, with decent reluctance, that the cloth might have been cleaner." "Seeing life" is one thing; "to see life steadily and see it whole" is another. Fielding has, it seems to me, just missed the latter qualification, which Matthew Arnold claimed for Sophocles, and which we may claim for Shakespeare; but he has seen certain aspects of life, and makes his readers see them, as clearly as any other writer of fiction since the world began. And about the condition of the cloth I have only one thing more to say, and that is, that the host himself was quite unaware of it. We may attribute this fact to an obliquity in his own vision, or to the temper of his age, or to a combination of both. But fact it is. It did not strike him that his novels might not suitably be put in everybody's hands. On the contrary, he looks forward to the time when "some tender maid, whose grandmother is yet unborn" should be numbered amongst their readers."

That imaginary damsel would, at any rate, meet with two characters of her

10 Lectures on the English Humorists.

11" Tom Jones," Book XIII., ch. i. This is the passage in which he tells us who it was that sat as model for Sophia.

own sex from whom she could get no harm; I refer to Sophia Western and Amelia Booth. The creator of these heroines has certainly pushed contrast to the furthest limit, but for so amiable a reason that he is readily forgiven. They are both portraits of his wife. Sophia and Amelia represent Miss Charlotte Cradock before and after she became Mrs. Henry Fielding. Their noble qualities are heightened by the conspicuous defects of those with whom they come in contact. In Tom Jones there is besides the heroine one other female character who is endurable; in Amelia there is hardly that. Is there not something almost artless in this method of enhancing praise? Artless or not, it is in the highest degree effective. From such women as Miss Bridget Allworthy, Mrs. Waters, Lady Bellaston, and Mrs. Ellison (the list could easily be doubled) the reader, disgusted and sometimes sickened, turns with intense relief to the society of Sophia and Amelia. In them he knows that he will find nothing to shock his moral sense or to offend his taste, though it may for a moment surprise him that Amelia should base her idea of Heaven upon Vauxhall Gardens.12 Sophia Western is a perfect picture of the English gentlewoman. She is highspirited, yet kind and courteous to all; faultless in temper and in breeding; has a perfect appreciation of what is due to others and of what is due to herself. To a tender heart she adds a cultivated mind, and the beauty of her person is an index of the soul that lodges there. To her the words of Steele might well apply, that "to love her is a liberal education." (I am afraid this is almost dithyrambic, but I am one of those in whom Fielding's prophecy 13 is amply fulfilled, for I am greatly in love with his heroine.) What male reader is there whose blood does not boil at the

persecutions to which Sophia is subjected, to force her to accept the odious Blifil as a husband? Who but would cheerfully assault her brutal father, at the risk of bodily harm or legal penalty, when he flings his daughter from him with such violence upon the polished floor that the blood flows from her mouth? Oh, Sophia, Sophia, thou art almost too ready to forgive; it is indeed thine only fault, as it is Amelia's also; too ready to overlook the Squire's cruelty; too ready to forgive the infidelities of Mr. Jones-who is, to say the truth, not fit to tie thy shoestring!

Sophia's attitude to her father (to resume a less impassioned strain) marks, as much as any other circumstance, the period of the story. In Fielding's day daughters did not criticise their parents. Sophia never wavers in her love and reverence, in spite of all that Western does, and says, and is. She does not even ask herself, it appears, whether he might not employ his time more profitably than in getting drunk every afternoon. She will not marry a man whom she hates, but short of that she will obey her father in all things; will submit to his abuse and his punishments, without a murmur or an inward question. Such a situation is no longer possible. Nowadays a daughter might conceivably love such a father, but could not revere him. She might try to reclaim him-a course which Sophia would have deemed undutiful; or she might leave him for good; or she might stay, and by acquiescence in his proceedings herself, perhaps, deteriorate. But in the eighteenth century the paths of men and women, which in the twentieth converge and intermingle at so many points, were rigidly distinct. Drunkenness did not beseem a lady, but it was so common, in a gentleman of the old school, as scarcely to arouse her censure or surprise. Hence Sophia regarded

this habit in her father, with its attendant failings, as part of the natural order. She was as content with him as he with her. A better spirit was already abroad among the younger men. Tom Jones is usually temperate in his pctations; so is Nightingale, so is Booth. They do not wilfully appear before ladies under the influence of drink.

Such, then, was Sophia Western. And if her advent is so welcome a relief to readers of Tom Jones, how much more welcome must that of her original have been to Henry Fielding, weary of the dissolute society among which he moved! He had known and admired Miss Charlotte Cradock, a country girl from Wiltshire, some years before he married her. His marriage was the turning-point in his career. All his great work is subsequent to it. Joseph Andrews and Jonathan Wild appeared in his wife's lifetime, Tom Jones and Amelia after he had lost her. The classical quotations prefixed to Amelia (the last of his novels) are retrospective in their bearing, and surely sum up his own experience:-"Happy and thrice happy they who are united by unbroken bonds"; "A man can get nothing better than a good wife, and nothing worse than a bad one." A closing reflection in Tom Jones is of the same purport. "Thus, reader, we have at length brought our history to a conclusion; in which, to our great pleasure, though contrary perhaps to thy expectation, Mr. Jones appears to be the happiest of all human kind; for what happiness this world affords equal to the possession of such a woman as Sophia, I sincerely own I have never yet discovered." For eight years this happiness was Fielding's. There are touching references to his wife in the preface to the Miscellanies, published shortly before her death. He speaks there of "the dangerous illness of one from whom 1 draw all the solid comfort of my life." Later on he writes: "The extreme dan

ger of life into which a Person very dear to me was reduced rendered me incapable of executing my task." And once more: "I was last winter laid up with the gout, with a favorite child dying in one bed, and my wife in a condition very little better on another, attended with other circumstances which served as very proper decorations for such a scene." But her loss could not rob him of his happiest memories; and he looked forward to reunion in another life. "This is a hope," he writes, "which no reasoning shall ever argue me out of, nor can any man show me its absolute impossibility till he can demonstrate that it is not in the power of the Almighty to bestow it on me." That in this life he did not forget her, there is ample evidence in the pages of Tom Jones and of Amelia.

99 14

It is pleasanter to dwell on what is good and admirable than on the reverse of those qualities, but that must not blind us to the fact that the less worthy characters in the novels are drawn to admiration, and that many of them are more often a source of wholesome laughter than of repulsion. So it is, to name but two examples, with Squire Western and with Mrs. Slipslop. Lady Booby's waiting-gentlewoman, who maltreats the King's English so delightfully. "Do you intend to result my passion?" she asks the unhappy Joseph Andrews. "Is it not enough, ungrateful as you are, to make no return to all the favors I have done you, but you must treat me with ironing? Barbarous monster! How have I deserved that my passion should be resulted and treated with ironing?" "Madame," answers Joseph, "I don't understand your hard words." 15 And no wonder. Think, too, of the amount of diversion forthcoming when we are on the road with Parson Adams and Joseph, or with Jones and Partridge. There is no man

14A Remedy for Affliction."

15" Joseph Andrews," Book I., ch. 6.