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

by G. M. Godden

"Ah! thou foolish follower of the ragged Nine
You'd better stuck to honest Abram Adams, by half;
He, in spite of critics can make your Readers laugh."

The next publication of these lean years was the Miscellanies, a collection of mingled prose, verse, and drama, of which the only connecting link seems to be the urgent need of money which forced so heterogenous a medley from so great an artist. These long delayed volumes appeared, probably, in April, and were, says Fielding, composed with a frequent "Degree of Heartache." They include the lover's verses of his early youth; philosophical, satiric, and didactic essays; a reprint of the political effusion dedicated to Dodington; a few plays; the fragment entitled A Journey from this World to the Next; and the splendid ironic outburst on villany, Jonathan Wild.

The Preface, largely occupied as it is with those private circumstances which forced the hasty production of the Wedding Day, has other matter of even greater interest for the biographer. Thus Fielding's sensitive care of his reputation in essential matters appears in the fiery denial here given to allegations of publishing anonymous scandals: "I never was, nor will be the Author of anonymous Scandal on the private History or Family of any Person whatever. Indeed there is no Man who speaks or thinks with more detestation of the modern custom of Libelling. I look on the practice of stabbing a Man's Character in the Dark, to be as base and as barbarous as that of stabbing him with a Poignard in the same manner; nor have I ever been once in my Life guilty of it." Here too, he marks his abhorrence of that 'detestable Vice' hypocrisy, which vice he was, before long, to expose utterly in the person of Blifil in Tom Jones. His happy social temperament is betrayed in the characteristic definition of good breeding as consisting in "contributing with our utmost Power to the Satisfaction and Happiness of all about us." And in these pages we have Fielding's philosophy of goodness and greatness, delivered in words that already display an unrivalled perfection of style. Speaking of his third volume, that poignant indictment of devilry the Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great, it is thus that Fielding exposes the iniquity of villains in "great" places:--"But without considering Newgate as no other than Human Nature with its mask off, which some very shameless Writers have done, a Thought which no Price should purchase me to entertain, I think we may be excused for suspecting, that the splendid Palaces of the Great, are often no other than Newgate with the Mask on. Nor do I know anything which can raise an honest Man's Indignation higher than that the same Morals should be in one Place attended with all imaginable Misery and Infamy and in the other with the highest Luxory and Honour. Let any impartial Man in his Senses be asked, for which of these two Places a Composition of Cruelty, Lust, Avarice, Rapine, Insolence, Hypocrisy, Fraud and Treachery, was best fitted, surely his Answer must be certain and immediate; and yet I am afraid all these Ingredients glossed over with Wealth and a Title, have been treated with the highest Respect and Veneration in the one, while one or two of them have been condemned to the Gallows in the other."

Here is the converse of that insight which could discern goodness under a ragged cassock, or in a swearing postilion. And, having discerned the true nature of such Great Men, Fielding proceeds to point out that "However the Glare of Riches and Awe of Title may terrify the Vulgar; nay however Hypocrisy may deceive the more Discerning, there is still a Judge in every Man's Breast, which none can cheat or corrupt, tho' perhaps it is the only uncorrupt thing about him"; that nothing is so preposterous as that men should laboriously seek to be villains; and that this Judge, inflexible and honest "however polluted the Bench on which he sits," always bestows on the spurious Great the penalty of fear, an evil which "never can in any manner molest the Happiness" of the "Enjoyments of Innocence and Virtue."

The subsequent philosophic dissertation on the qualities of goodness and greatness is interesting for such passages as the definition of a good man as one possessing "Benevolence, Honour, Honesty, and Charity"; and the fine declaration that of the passion of Love "goodness hath always appeared to me the only true and proper Object." And the very springs of action underlying half at least of each of the three great novels, and almost every page of Jonathan Wild, are revealed in the final declaration of the writer's intention to expose in these pages vice stripped of its false colours; to show it "in its native Deformity." As the native and stripped deformity of vice is perhaps not often fully apprehended and certainly is very seldom exposed in our own age, Fielding, by the very sincerity and fire of his morality, doubtless loses many a modern reader.

It is in the third volume of the Miscellanies, a volume completely occupied by Jonathan Wild, that Fielding first fully reveals himself as public moralist. And in this Rogue's progress to the gallows he displays so concentrated a zeal, that nothing short of his genius and his humour could have saved these pages from the dullness of the professional reformer. For the little volume consists of a relentless exposure of the deformity and folly of vice. Here the foul souls of Wild and his associates, stripped of all the glamour of picturesque crime, stand displayed in their essential qualities, with the result that even the pestilential air of thieves' slums, of 'night cellars,' and of Newgate purlieus, an air which hangs so heavy over every page, falls back into insignificance before the loathsomeness of the central figure. A few years later, in the preface to Tom Jones, Fielding formally asserted his belief that the beauty of goodness needed but to be seen 'to attract the admiration of mankind'; in Jonathan Wild he appears to be already at work on the converse doctrine, that if the deformity of vice be but stripped naked, abhorrence must ensue. Such a naked criminal is Wild; and in the contemplation of his vices, as in the case of the arch hypocrite Blifil, in Tom Jones, and of the shameless sensualist "My Lord," in Amelia, Fielding's characteristic compassion for the faults of hard pressed humanity is, for the time, scorched up in the fierceness of his anger and scorn at deliberate cruelty, avarice and lust. Under the spell of Fielding's power of painting the devil in his native blackness, we feel that for such as Wild hanging is too handsome a fate. It is easy for his Newgate chaplain to assert that "nothing is so sinful as sin"; it takes a great genius and a great moralist to convince us, as in this picture, that nothing is so deformed or so contemptible. The dark places of Jonathan Wild receive some light in the character of the good jeweller, in the tender scenes between that honest ruined tradesman and his wife and children, and in the devoted affection of his apprentice. But the true illumination of the book, and its personal value for the biographer, lie in the white heat of anger, the "sustained and sleepless irony" to adopt Mr Austin Dobson's happy phrase, with which Fielding, with a force unwavering from the first page to the last, here assails his subject. An underlying attack on the Ministerial iniquity of "Great Men" in high places seems to be often suggested; if this be a true inference, it does but give us further proof of Fielding's energies as a political, no less than as a moral, reformer. Certainly, through all the squalid scenes of the book, the contention is insisted on that criminals of Wild's tyrannical stamp may as easily be found in courts, and at the head of armies, as among the poor leaders of Newgate gangs. To the wise moralist it is the same rogue, whether picking a pocket or swindling his country.

And not to forget the wit in the moral reformer, we may leave Mr Jonathan Wild listening to one of the reasons given by the Newgate chaplain for his Reverence's preference for punch over wine: "Let me tell you, Mr Wild there is nothing so deceitful as the spirits given us by wine. If you must drink let us have a bowl of punch; a liquor I the rather prefer as it is nowhere spoken against in Scripture."

After Jonathan Wild the most interesting fragment of the Miscellanies is the Journey from this World to the Next. In this essay Fielding reveals his philosophy, his sternness, his affections, and his humour, as a man might do in intimate conversation. His warm humanity breathes in the conception that "the only Business" of those who had won admission to Elysium 'that happy Place,' was to "contribute to the Happiness of each other"; and again in the stern declaration of Heaven's doorkeeper, the Judge Minos, that "no Man enters that Gate without Charity." And indeed the whole chapter devoted to the judgments administered by Minos on the spirits that come, confident or trembling, before him, and are either admitted to Heaven, sent back to earth, or despatched to the "little Back Gate" opening immediately into the bottomless pit, is full of personal revelation. We feel the glee with which Fielding consigns the "little sneaking soul" of a miser to diabolically ingenious torments; the satisfaction with which he watches Minos apply a kick to the retreating figure of a duke, possessed of nothing but "a very solemn Air and great Dignity"; and the pleasure it gave him to observe the rejection accorded to "a grave Lady," the Judge declaring that "there was not a single Prude in Elysium." Again, nothing could be more true to Fielding's nature than the account of the poet who is admitted, not for the moral value he himself places on his Dramatic Works (which he endeavours to read aloud to Minos), but because "he had once lent the whole profits of a Benefit Night to a Friend, and by that Means had saved him and his Family from Destruction"; unless it were the account of the poverty driven wretch, hanged for a robbery of eighteen-pence, who yet could plead that he had supported an aged Parent with his labour, that he had been a very tender Husband, and a Kind Father, and that he had ruined himself for being Bail for a Friend. "At these words," adds the historian, "the gate opened, and Minos bid him enter, giving him a slap on the Back as he passed by him."

When the author's own turn came, he very little expects, he tells us, "to pass this fiery Trial. I confess'd I had indulged myself very freely with Wine and Women in my Youth, but had never done an Injury to any Man living, nor avoided an opportunity of doing good; but I pretended to very little Virtue more than general Philanthropy and Private Friendship." Here Minos cut the speaker short, bidding him enter the gate, and not indulge himself trumpeting forth his virtues. Whether or no we may here read the reflections of Fielding's maturity, looking honestly back over his own forty years and forward with humble fear into the future, we may certainly see reflected in both confession and judgment much of the doctrine and the practice of his life.

After the failure, early in 1743, of the Wedding Day, and the subsequent publication of the Miscellanies, Fielding seems to have thrown his energies for twelve months into an exclusive pursuit of the law. This appears from his statement, made a year later, in May 1744, that he could not possibly be the author of his sister's novel David Simple, which had been attributed to him, because he had applied himself to his profession "with so arduous and intent a diligence that I have had no leisure, if I had inclination, to compose anything of this kind." Clearly, in the period that covers the publication of Joseph Andrews an historical pamphlet, parts of a farce and of Plutus, and of the Miscellanies, Fielding found both leisure and inclination for writing; so this sudden immersion in law must relate to the twelve months or so intervening between these works and the publication of his statement. Murphy corroborates this bout of hard legal effort. After the Wedding Day says that biographer "the law from this time had its hot and cold fits with him." The cold fits were fits of gout; and inconveniences felt by Fielding from these interruptions were, adds Murphy "the more severe upon him, as voluntary and wilful neglect could not be charged upon him. The repeated shocks of illness disabled him from being as assiduous an attendant at the bar, as his own inclination and patience of the most laborious application, would otherwise have made him."