joseph andrew
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.