Henry Fielding: a Memoir / Including Newly Discovered Letters and Records with Illustrations from Contemporary Prints

by G. M. Godden

With the retirement of Walpole, Fielding's vigorous figure vanishes from active political service. No more caustic Greek epics, translated from the original "by Homer," no more boisterous interludes with three-bottle Prime Ministers appearing in the part of principal boy, come from his pen. But scarcely is the ink dry on the page of his last known political pamphlet, when Fielding reappears, in this Spring of 1742, not as the ephemeral politician, but as the triumphant discoverer of a new continent for English literature; as the leader of a revolution in imaginative writing which has outlived the Ministries and parties, the reforms, the broils, and warfares of two centuries. For, to-day, the fierce old contests of Whig and Tory, the far-off horrors of eighteenth-century gibbets, jails, and streets, the succession of this and that Minister, the French Wars and Pragmatic Sanctions of 1740 are all dead as Queen Anne. But the novel based on character, on human life, in a word on 'the vast authentic Book of Nature' is a living power; and it was by the publication, in February 1742, of The Adventures of Mr Joseph Andrews and his Friend Mr Abraham Adams, that Fielding reveals himself as the father of the English novel. Henceforth we can almost forget the hard-hitting political Champion; we may quite forget the facile 'hackney writer' of popular farces, and the impetuous studies of the would-be barrister. With the appearance of these two small volumes Henry Fielding reaches the full stature of his genius as the first, and perhaps the greatest, of English novelists.

It is difficult, at the present day, to realise the greatness of his achievement. Fielding found, posturing as heroines of romance, the Clelias, Cleopatras, Astraeas; he left the living women, Fanny Andrews, Sophia Western, Amelia Booth. "Amelia," writes his great follower Thackeray, "... the most charming character in English fiction,--Fiction! Why fiction? Why not history? I know Amelia just as well as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu." Again, Fielding found a world of polite letters, turning a stiff back on all "low" naturalness of life. He taught that world (as his friend Lillo had already essayed to do in his tragedy of a London Merchant) that the life of a humble footman, of a poor parson in a torn cassock, of the poverty-hunted wife of an impoverished army-captain, of a country lad without known parentage, interest or fortune, may make finer reading than all the Court romances ever written; and, moreover, that "the highest life is much the dullest, and affords very little humour or entertainment." And, having rediscovered this world of natural and simple human nature, his genius proceeded to the creation of nothing less than an entirely new form of English literary expression, the medium of the novel.

The preface to Joseph Andrews shows that Fielding was perfectly conscious of the greatness of his adventure. Such a species of writing, he says, "I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language." We can but wonder at, and admire, the superb energy and confidence which could thus embark on the conscious production of this new thing, amid want, pain, and distress. And wonder and admiration increase tenfold on the further discovery that this fresh creation in literature, fashioned in circumstances so depressing, is overflowing with an exuberance of healthy life and enjoyment. Having entered on his fair inheritance of this new world of human nature, Fielding pourtrays it from the standpoint of his own maxim, that life "everywhere furnishes an accurate observer with the ridiculous." So, into this, his newly-cut channel for imaginative expression (to use Mr Gosse's happy phrase) he poured the strength of a genius naturally inclined to that "exquisite mirth and laughter," which as he declared in his preface to these volumes, "are probably more wholesome physic for the mind and conduce better to purge away spleen, melancholy, and ill affections than is generally imagined." No book ever more thoroughly carried out this wholesome doctrine. The laughter in Joseph Andrews is as whole-hearted, if not as noisy, the practical jokes are as broad, as those of a healthy school-boy; and the pages ring with a spirit and gusto recalling Lady Mary's phrase concerning her cousin "that no man enjoyed life more than he did." To quote again from Mr Gosse: "A good deal in this book may offend the fine, and not merely the superfine. But the vitality and elastic vigour of the whole carry us over every difficulty... and we pause at the close of the novel to reflect on the amazing freshness of the talent which could thus make a set of West country scenes, in that despised thing, a novel, blaze with light like a comedy of Shakespeare."

So original in creation, so humane, so full of a brave delight in life, was the power that, mastering every gloomy obstacle of circumstance, broke into the stilted literary world of 1742; and Murphy's Irish rhetoric is not too warm when he talks of this sunrise of Fielding's greatness "when his genius broke forth at once, with an effulgence superior to all the rays of light it had before emitted, like the sun in his morning glory."

Any detailed comment on the literary qualities of the genius which thus disclosed itself would exceed the limits of this memoir; and indeed such comment is, now, a thrice-told tale. To Sir Walter Scott, Fielding is the "father of the English novel"; to Byron, "the prose Homer of human nature." The magnificent tribute of Gibbon still remains a towering monument, whatever experts may tell us concerning the Hapsburg genealogy. "Our immortal Fielding," he wrote, "was of the younger branch of the Earls of Denbigh, who drew their origin from the Counts of Hapsburg. The successors of Charles V. may disdain their brethren of England; but the romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of Austria." Smollett affirmed that his predecessor painted the characters, and ridiculed the follies, of life with equal strength, humour and propriety. The supreme autocrat of the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson himself, though always somewhat hostile to Fielding, read Amelia through without stopping, and pronounced her to be 'the most pleasing heroine of all the romances.' "What a poet is here," cries Thackeray, "watching, meditating, brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind him: what generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly." Finally we may turn neither to novelist nor historian, but to the metaphysical philosopher, "How charming! How wholesome is Fielding!" says Coleridge, "to take him up after Richardson is like emerging from a sick-room, heated by stoves, into an open lawn on a breezy day in May." Such are some estimates of the quality of Fielding's genius, given by men not incompetent to appraise him. To analyse that genius is, as has been said, beyond the scope of these pages. But Fielding's first novel is not only a revelation of genius. It frankly reveals much of the man behind the pen; and in its pages, and in those of the still greater novels yet to come, we may learn more of the true Fielding than from all the fatuities and surmises of his early biographers.

Thus in Joseph Andrews for the first time we come really close to the splendid and healthy energy, the detachment, the relentless scorn, the warmth of feeling, that characterised Henry Fielding under all circumstances and at all times of his life. This book, as we have seen, was written under every outward disadvantage, and yet its pages ring with vigour and laughter. Here is the same militant energy that had nerved Fielding to fight the domination of a corrupt (and generally corrupting) Minister for eight lean years; and which in later life flung itself into a chivalrous conflict with current social crime and misery. Here is a detachment hardly less than that which fills the pages of the last Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon with a courage, a gaiety, a serenity that no suffering and hardship, and not even the near approach of death itself, could disturb. Here, again, Fielding consciously avows a moral purpose in his art; the merciless scorn of his insight in depicting a vicious man or woman is actuated, he expressly declares, by a motive other than that of 'art for art's sake.' And as this motive is scarce perceptible in the lifelike reality of the figures whom we see breathing in actual flesh and blood in his pages, and yet is of the first importance for understanding the character of their creator, the great novelist's confession of this portion of his literary faith may be quoted in full. The passage occurs in the preface to Book iii. of Joseph Andrews. Fielding is afraid, he explains, that his figures may be taken for particular portraits, whereas it is the type and not the individual that concerns him. "I declare here," he solemnly affirms, "once for all, I describe not Men, but Manners; not an Individual, but a Species." And he proceeds to make example of the lawyer in the stage coach as not indeed confined "to one Profession, one Religion, or one Country; but when the first mean selfish Creature appeared on the human Stage, who made Self the Centre of the whole Creation; would give himself no Pain, incur no Damage, advance no Money to assist, or preserve his Fellow-Creatures; then was our Lawyer born; and while such a Person as I have described, exists on Earth, so long shall he remain upon it." Not therefore "to mimick some little obscure Fellow" does this lawyer appear on Fielding's pages, but "for much more general and noble Purposes; not to expose one pitiful Wretch, to the small and contemptible Circle of his Acquaintance; but to hold the Glass to thousands in their Closets that they may contemplate their Deformity, and endeavour to reduce it."

Yet another characteristic of Fielding's personality appears in the conscious control exercised over all the humorous and satiric zest of Joseph Andrews. Here is no unseemly riot of ridicule. The ridiculous he declares in his philosophic preface is the subject-matter of his pages; but he will suffer no imputation of ridiculing vice or calamity. "Surely," he cries, "he hath a very ill-framed Mind, who can look on Ugliness, Infirmity, or Poverty, as ridiculous in themselves"; and he formally declares that such vices as appear in this work "are never set forth as the objects of Ridicule but Detestation." What then were the limits which Fielding imposed on himself in treating this, his declared subject matter of the ridiculous? Hypocrisy and vanity, he says, appearing in the form of affectation; "Great Vices are the proper Object of our Detestation, smaller Faults of our Pity: but Affectation appears to me the only true Source of the Ridiculous." Such is Fielding's sensitive claim for the decent limits of ridicule; and such the consciously avowed subject of his work. But the force of his genius, the depth of his insight, the warmth of his detestations and affections, soon carried him far beyond any mere study in the ridicule of vain and hypocritical affectation. The immortal figure of Parson Adams, striding through these pages, tells us infinitely much of the character of his creator, but nothing at all of the nature of affectation. The "rural innocence of a Joseph Andrews," to quote Miss Fielding's happy [phrase] [1] and of his charming Fanny, are as natural and fresh as Fielding's own Dorsetshire meadows, but instruct us not at all in vanity or hypocrisy.

To turn to the individual figures of Joseph Andrews; what do they tell us of the man who called them into being. First and foremost, it is Parson Adams who unquestionably dominates the book. However much the licentious grossness of Lady Booby, the shameless self-seeking of her waiting-woman, Mrs Slipslop, the swinish avarice of Parson Trulliber, the calculating cruelty of Mrs Tow-wouse, to name but some of the vices here exposed, blazon forth that 'enthusiasm for righteousness' which constantly moved Fielding to exhibit the devilish in human nature in all its 'native Deformity,' it is still Adams who remains the central figure of the great comic epic. Concerning the good parson, appreciation has stumbled for adequate words, from the tribute of Sir Walter Scott to that of Mr Austin Dobson. "The worthy parson's learning," wrote Sir Walter, "his simplicity, his evangelical purity of heart, and benevolence of disposition, are so admirably mingled with pedantry, absence of mind, and with the habit of athletic and gymnastic exercise, ... that he may be safely termed one of the richest productions of the Muse of Fiction." And to Mr Austin Dobson, this poor curate, compact as he is of the oddest contradictions, the most diverting eccentricities, is "assuredly a noble example of primitive goodness, and practical Christianity." We love Adams, as Fielding intended that we should, for his single-hearted goodness, his impulsiveness, his boundless generosity, his muscular courage; we are never allowed to forget the dignity of his office however ragged be the cassock that displays it; we admire his learning; we delight in his oddities. But above all he reflects honour on his creator by the inflexible integrity of his goodness. A hundred tricks are played on him by shallow knaves, and the result is but to convince us of the folly of knavery. His ill-clad and uncouth figure moves among the vicious and prosperous, and we perceive the ugliness of vice, and the poverty of wealth. With his nightcap drawn over his wig, a short grey coat half covering a torn cassock, the crabstick so formidable to ruffians in his hand, and his beloved AEschylus in his pocket, Adams smoking his pipe by the inn fire, or surrounded by his "children" as he called his parishioners vying "with each other in demonstrations of duty and love," fully justifies John Forster's comment on Fielding's manly habit of "discerning what was good and beautiful in the homeliest aspects of humanity." Before the true dignity of Abraham Adams, whether he be publicly rebuking the Squire and Pamela for laughing in church, or emerging unstained from adventures with hogs-wash and worse, the accident of his social position as a poor curate, contentedly drinking ale in the squire's kitchen, falls into its true insignificance.