Facts.
He is before all things else a writer to be studied. He wrote for the world at large and to the end that he might be read eternally. His matter, his manner, the terms of his philosophy, the quality of his ideals, the nature of his achievement, proclaim him universal. Like Scott, like Cervantes, like Shakespeare, he claims not merely our acquaintance but an intimate and abiding familiarity. He has no special public, and to be
only on nodding terms with him is to be practically dead to his attraction and unworthy his society. He worked not for the boys and girls of an age but for the men and women of all time; and both as artist and as thinker he commands unending attention and lifelong friendship. He is a great inventor, an unrivalled craftsman, a perfect master of his material. His achievement is the result of a life-time of varied experience, of searching and sustained observation, of unwearying intellectual endeavour. The sound and lusty types he created have an intellectual flavour peculiar to themselves. His novels teem with ripe wisdom and generous conclusions and beneficent examples. As Mr. Stephen tells you, ‘he has the undeniable merit of representing certain aspects of contemporary society with a force and accuracy not even rivalled by any other writer’; and it is a fact that not to have studied him ‘is to be without a knowledge of the most important documents of contemporary history.’ More: to contrast those fair, large parchments in which he has stated his results with those tattered and filthy papers which the latter-day literary rag-picker exists but to grope out from kennel and sewer is to know the difference between the artist in health and the artist possessed by an idiosyncrasy as by a devil.
The Worst of It.
But the present is an age of sentiment: its ideals and ambitions are mainly emotional; what it chiefly loves is romance or the affectation of romance, passion, self-conscious solemnity, and a certain straining after picturesque effects. In Fielding’s time there was doubtless a good deal of sentimentalism, for his generation delighted not only in Western and Trunnion and Mrs. Slipslop but in Pamela and Clarissa and the pathetic Le Fevre. But for all that it was—at all events in so far as it was interesting to Fielding and in so far as Fielding has pictured it—a generation that knew nothing of romance but was keenly interested in common sense, and took a vast deal of honest pleasure in humour and wit and a rather truculent and full-blooded type of satire. It is plain that such possibilities of sympathy and understanding as exist between a past of this sort and such a present as our own must of necessity be few and small. Their importance, too, is greatly diminished when you reflect on the nature and tendency of certain essential elements in Fielding’s art and mind. The most vigorous and the most individual of these is probably his irony; the next is that abundant vein of purely intellectual comedy by whose presence his work is exalted to a place not greatly inferior to that of the Misantrope and the Ecole des Femmes. These rare and shining qualities are distinguishing features in the best and
soundest part of Fielding. Of irony he is probably the greatest English master; of pure comedy—the intellectual manipulation and transmutation into art of what is spiritually ridiculous in manners and society—he is both in narrative and in dialogue the greatest between Shakespeare and Mr. George Meredith. And with both our sympathy is imperfect. We have learned to be sentimental and self-sufficient with Rousseau, to be romantic and chivalrous with Scott, to be emotional with Dickens, to take ourselves seriously with Balzac and George Eliot; there are touches of feeling in our laughter, even though the feeling be but spite; we have acquired a habit of politeness—a tradition of universal consideration and respect; and our theory of satire is rounded by the pleasing generalities of Mr. Du Maurier on the one hand and the malevolent respectability of Mr. W. S. Gilbert on the other. It is an age of easy writing and still easier reading: our authors produce for us much in the manner of the silkworm—only their term of life is longer; we accept their results in something of the spirit of them that are interested, and not commercially, in the processes of silkworms. And M. Guy de Maupassant can write but hath a devil, and we take him not because of his writing but because of his devil; and Blank and Dash and So-and-So and the rest could no more than so many sheep develop a single symptom of possession among
them, and we take them because a devil and they are incompatibles. And art is short and time is long; and we care nothing for art and almost as much for time; and there is little if any to choose between Mudie’s latest ‘catch’ and last year’s ‘sensation’ at Burlington House. And to one of us it is ‘poor Fielding’; and to another Fielding is merely gross, immoral, and dull; and to most the story of that last journey to Lisbon is unknown, and Thackeray’s dream of Fielding—a novelist’s presentment of a purely fictitious character—is the Fielding who designed and built and finished for eternity. Which is to be pitied? The artist of Amelia and Jonathan Wild, the creator of the Westerns and Parson Adams and Colonel Bath? or we the whippersnappers of sentiment—the critics who can neither read nor understand?
the end
Printed by T. and A. Constable, Printers to Her Majesty,
at the Edinburgh University Press.