H.—I thought he only gave professions and classes, players, footmen, sharpers, courtesans, but not the individual, as Fielding often does, though we should strip Western of his scarlet hunting-dress and jockey phrases. There is Square, Blifil, Black George, Mrs. Fitzpatrick, Parson Adams; and a still greater cluster of them in the one that is least read, the noble peer, the lodging-house-keeper, Mrs. Bennet, and Colonel Bath.
N.—You mean Amelia. I have not read that, but will get it. I allow in part what you say; but in the best there is something too local and belonging to the time. But what I chiefly object to in Fielding is his conceit, his consciousness of what he is doing, his everlasting recommendation and puffing of his own wit and sagacity. His introductory chapters make me sick.
H.—Why, perhaps, Fielding is to be excused as a disappointed man. All his success was late in life, for he died in 1754; and Joseph Andrews (the first work of his that was popular) was published in 1748. All the rest of his life he had been drudging for the booksellers, or bringing out unsuccessful comedies. He probably anticipated the same result in his novels, and wished to bespeak the favour of the reader by putting himself too much forward. His prefaces are like Ben Jonson’s prologues, and from the same cause, mortified vanity; though it seems odd to say so at present, after the run his writings have had; but he could not foresee that, and only lived a short time to witness it.
N.—I can bear any thing but that conscious look—it is to me like the lump of soot in the broth, that spoils the whole mess. Fielding was one of the swaggerers.
H.—But he had much to boast of.
N.—He certainly was not idle in his time. Idleness would have ruined a greater man.
H.—Then you do not agree to a maxim I have sometimes thought might be laid down, that no one is idle who can do any thing.
N.—No, certainly.
H.—I conceive it may be illustrated from Wilson, who was charged with idleness, and who, after painting a little, used to say, as soon as any friend dropped in, ‘Now let us go somewhere,’—meaning to the alehouse. All that Wilson could do, he did, and that finely too, with a few well-disposed masses and strokes of the pencil; but he could not finish, or he would have staid within all the morning to work up his pictures to the perfection of Claude’s. He thought it better to go to the alehouse than to spoil what he had already done. I have in my own mind made this excuse for —, that he could only make a first sketch, and was obliged to lose the greatest part of his time in waiting for windfalls of heads and studies. I have sat to him twice, and each time I offered to come again, and he said he would let me know, but I heard no more of it. The sketch went as it was—of course in a very unfinished state.
N.—But he might have remedied this by diligence and practice.