Pattie ature itso pie METI Ce EayT oan aha “wor MRT med ri per aaa gate! a ae ce EL H Eevee Pa waren wre oF esa wage ng PLFA SR PTR ITT ETH rrr art, My ape Ln SPR ret ym ran Ie, FS A hp pag ear hi ir et Fel Seal ryare orate ei Seles ee +. Sarna ieee Acokerntnte elie) nei Wobetetes 151° 5 A ALINE yp ow Per ah\ bhgente thts RES: SOA iA TALL rt etch aia Fee Spied y j i a ePeete : arr ote a eed Pot sone ts =m no tpianateteect Se >) et Semrebaced zpos tires’ | paomeaiieiee aid ~ oe booted ere ee ~_— yoy ij ih /) (ae ae wee lt ad eetietietediieeth Lon te tae ee ee a QI "i ‘s - ie ee es : deed tenddidanet ee :bey * hépden punter +) Ok ny ates ee sash ctierearp eters —S tJ se" Srtrety ery eer eer Re an et — ; 3 > A 3} i En He be} 7 x ry oer ears raga at races rr aa eS) ; Ts oie eis ES 2 On ha sisal eens spersash-yeeee SRE ERere — Vests. eT er) ta ae Tae —— rcs srs Sebi er eh be Sa > petra ela om henner en ara Bipniriae wieimn A, S . 2) eaeFielding the Novelist — pare rer ty oT) - ot TS See hah et ete Pere er ws eee a ee eine —_— b i i i i if cht tH Ht; H i a t 33) : a cf er ee eee een a ey. eo!— : a i : . i , 5 r 7 : *. ro aan ee Per tear ener ie Oe ee ee OSE eee eee —- = es ial ood he rt Pe etete sie, es Seem ee Ler ou oy eens oe Se nent oe On anna ae aes mene ew wtety es eerieKIEL DIS the Novelist AD ot UD IN HISRORICAL CRITICISM BY Frederic T: Blanchard PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT LOS ANGELES LONDON es inirtdi * ae OXBO RD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1927 CEPR EQ I AE BR CBE CBE EE BBE IP A) SE GEESE HIG EY pee MERSIN ERI FENN ERIN MRL IDY HRCI MEIN FORD FR RD 9 AD pe OBs ie an te 9 he ow sep Weep ere eter AAEM A ngne aes Se Serres soo bed Reine oache a ir ere SF ited 2 . th. <5 reed ira pei agers a , ~~ ee Wont mrdl me ws wth Sas rr TL ee TAPE . cate Te Sr om Speer ges The cite A aa ter awtlmretintin ees en Se ate ee ne ee ee ne PER et me Suan of ee tt Oe NEP os re es rh eee om eer ~~ ee ee eae 7 mn Snot Na ti seewsb ata ooene ts * 7 ni - . o 7 ; ry 1 o ; ei a ay : + ti ee | eis i ati Ba $3 eet: By uel eal 24: H ‘oye en enna Copyright, 1920, by Yale University Press ore vt . Se tS intro pee} Printed in the United States of America First publisbed, March, 1920 Second printing, November, 1927 . &? ee ee OTE a raene | : : } H i i ' / ) F: ri ; ; i ; ? 1 4 } —— SS ae eno eter eePr ger ei Ss liaebenietaihetinaieedhenm ethene Ps roe eee Te _ iat Petre a ee eee es Saha sr 9s To My Wife += ce! } if Pie 4 5 i} i : RAF TESTE SS ONE TET SR a etoer eeeret - + «= ficse Cott hd " Bray WN eo tte Pete oe pe aon eda, SEL ee fr het a 44 ear awe ot ee noertn wint 4. ea ter ae be R renee etc eniesewe See bao an, eee ee ee hag —— ee ee i ; RE } : vigtehetee ee amt eeChapter ele III. V. VI. Valle: WAMU IX. alr: XII. XAT. XTIV:. XV. XVI. XVII. XVIII. Contents List oF ILLUSTRATIONS PREFACE JosEPH ANDREWS Tom Jones: THE RippLe oF Its VOGUE AMELIA “DAmMNn’D” A JouRNAL OF THE VoYAGE TO LIsBON FIELDING’s CONTEMPORARIES BeForE Murpuy’s Essay Murpuy’s “LIFE” oF FIELDING THe TuRNING OF THE JIDE SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION THe Enp OF THE CENTURY BEFORE ‘“SWAVERLEY” From “WAVERLEY” TO THE DEATH OF ScoTT Tue Vicrorian AGE: Part I Tue Victorian AcE: Parr Il Tue Vicrorian AcE: Part III Tue New Era: Part I Tue New Era: Part II FIELDING—PasT AND PRESENT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX 104 126 140 301 408 446 477 517 550 581 623 ed an e = = “% i. 5 ee Poe teesies eters apenas ah Petes tee eae Te rs Fe gates oy ete ie ee 2 EAA piaeeinh pebieietntems-ciceahaeat et bet tet) en or oes er ee eet e Ai =p aR, Whe ion ibe aeent chy tags Meee 294%, ike " ee Jo peqene—vcabasncbemattseerbeanentigharsstest st =) Sia ere: oer rare Pee ee ees ee ae rr Ova oeemet Peake bee my eee 4 ry for - . PI . - Pr err ATT FO Pel bilities re i ni bese Fh rome ant nt a ~+e eer et eet me - Sy oa re ry ep errata cee betes te ee ees ee ene eet ne Pe eee ey eee et re ree “J rete b “4 a0 are caine ee Selllustrations THe ETERNAL ContTRAST Frontispiece From a drawing by A. Johannot for Defauconpret’s trans- lation of Tom Jones, Paris, 1836. In the Library of the University of California, Southern Branch. Facing page Parson ADAMS AND FANNY BEFORE THE JUSTICE Drawing by Rowlandson for an edition of Joseph Andrews published by J. Murray, London, 1792. From a copy tn the Library of the University of California, Southern Branch, FacsIMILE OF TITLE-PAGE To Am Examen of Tom Jones From a copy in The Frederick S. Dickson Collection of Fielding’s Works in the Library of Yale University. FACSIMILE OF TITLE-PAGE To Av ee on the New Sie of Writing From a copy in The Frederick S. Dickson Collection of Fielding’s Works in the Library of Yale University. Mayor BaTH SURPRISED Drawing by Corbould (London, a for a Cooke votes edition of Amelia. From a copy in The Frederick S. Dick- son Collection of Fielding’s Works in the Library of Yale University. FIELDING AND THE LANDLADY AT RYDE Drawing by Rooker for an edition of Fielding’s Works, London, 1784. From a copy in The Frederick S, Dickson Collection of Fielding’s Works in the Library of Yale Unt- versity. FAcsIMILE oF TITLE-PAGE To The Life and Adventures of a Cat From the unique copy in The Henry E. Huntington Li- brary and Art Gallery. Henry FIELDING 3 Engraving by James Basire after a sketch by Hogarth. From a copy of Murphy’s edition of Fielding’s Works (London, 1762) in the Library of Yale University. 6 40 58 88 124 148 156 rm ero) mn ee pepe ah tba ten + me te ee Fi ent) pee ies rs ear eet ete ony er ae ee ae : ia : peereeee Pere wees ferent) beer er TsPes Se ee hate ee ee he ee os - 5 ears on ne ae pte aD x Tur Door FLEW OPEN AND IN CAM PARTRIDGE SHOWS THE MuFF To JON j n of Tom Jones pub- ovelist’s Magazine, Vol. IJ], London, 178r. lerich Dickson Collection of Drawing by Gr Jones, L 1don, Dickson Collect lished in The N f rom a copy in Fielding’s Work > Parson Apams FI j CulbiVs 1t107 oT Tos ph ick S. Dickson brary of Y ale U Tue BaTtTrLe Ro Drawing by C Jones, London, 1 Dickson Colle DD), avelot for La I ’ From a tion of Firelding’s Yale Unive 7: ity . T he Fredert incs His AéscHYL Drawing by Corbould Cc \ ) ILLUST RATIONS far Drawing by Stothard for the edttt ES t YAL IN THE CHURCH YARD p Re ruikshank for Fale llesecionceta Yale University. SOUIRE WESTERN Drawing by M le Comte de la Library of the THE STATUE Cop Drawing by Bo by La Place), London, 1801. From ick §. Dickson AND SOPHIA , , oréau Jor the tra Bédovyére, Parts, yr MES TO LIF! 1 ) ia > d scoe’s edition of Tom tion of Tom Jones by ~— ae ~ ; the 1822. From a copy 1n the i i University of California, Southern Branch. rel for an edition of Tom Jones (translated Collection of Fielding’s brary of Yale University. AMELIA AND HER CHILDREN a copy in The Freder- ; Works in the L1- Drawing by Corbould (London, 1799) for a Cooke pocket- edition of Amelia. From a copy in The Frederick S. Dick- son Collection of Fielding’s Works in the Library of Yale University. Tom Restores Sopuia’s PocKET-Book Drawing by Stothard for the edition of Tom Jones pub- lished in The Novelist’s Magazine, Vol. III, London, 1781. / From a copy in The Frederick S. Dickson Collection of Fielding’s Works in the Library of Yale University. Nw N Oo 264 Ww J IO $04 448 560P re face I have always had a strong and irresistible curiosity to discover what opinions were entertained on the first appearance of works which afterwards acquired the greatest celebrity, and have generally found that this celebrity has been of gradual and slow growth. WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR* HIS is a study of Henry Fielding’s fame as a novel- ist and of the impress which his original genius has made upon the minds and hearts of English readers. As the years pass, the author of Tom Jones becomes an in- creasingly important figure in the history of British fiction; for it was he, more than any other, who either worked out or suggested the patterns which have been followed ever since his day. But though the statement has become a commonplace that his influence upon the novel has been immense, a detailed examination of dicta concerning his art and accomplishment has not up to this time appeared. In those chapters in his life of the novelist which deal with defamers and apologists, Pro- fessor Cross has removed for good and all, let us hope, the shadows which have obscured Fielding the Man; moreover, he has incorporated in his work a fuller treatment of the au- thor’s critics than had hitherto been attempted. But it was not within the scope of his design, as he says in his preface, to treat at length of the “opinions which have been passed upon Fielding’s novels.” Such is the purpose of the following in- vestigation. Busying itself with what has been said, from year to year, of the novelist’s work, it reveals kinships and antipa- thies which throw a light not merely upon Fielding’s genius * Charles James Fox (edited by Stephen Wheeler), London, 1907, p. 143. tal ee A 4 pebhetebiaent tee ee wrt ~ i Aguhes misieeeue my att dre cereeenwewtordenl panent - a aerate ee 0 ; A i nt f ‘ S : . Tri ceo =i br mo | al va ass 13, oa { uf} rt +! ‘ bas) : at Pek) bh J a ns aaa wet east ere es re te bs eT a nee re Sea aLilie law pea ees oe% xl PREFACE and achievement but upon the development of the genre of realism which he founded and of which he may be r -zarded as perhaps the most distinguished representative in his own country. ee eee ee enon tee eed A word or two may not be out of place here concerning the pe eee method which has been attempted in this study. Anyone who eee ato oF wa) examines a considerable number of critical utterances soon dis- covers that much which passes under the name of historical criticism is insufficiently documented—is, too often, nothing more than a collection of illustrative material. But in tracing the course of opinion it is not enough to assemble, without fur- ther inspection, the purple passages of the most eminent writers of a period; for literary dicta are notably dependent upon the circumstances under which they are uttered. First of all, When was the pronouncement made? Since critics follow like the proverbial sheep, chronology is of prime importance. Was the assertion made carelessly, or was it thoughtfully pondered? Was it deflected by personal malice, by ethical or religious predilections, by partisanship for a competitor in the art, by lack of experience, by undue submissiveness to the lords of criticism, by mere whim or perversity? Did the critic say one thing in his youth and another in his maturity? Did he read the books or did he take his judgments ready-made? Thus is the skein of criticism woefully perplexed. But in the case of important dicta, such questions as these, hopeless as they are of a perfect solution, must be as far as possible taken into account. It may be predicted, indeed, that the historical criticism of the future will be more careful in its inquisition into matters of this nature than it has been in the past. So great, as a rule, has been the deference to authority, that the attendant circum- stances which have influenced the truth of a famous assertion by some acknowledged great judge should be earnestly con- sidered in estimating a man’s true worth. _ = = eat ett Le een ts Se rr soho! tories Moreover, pains should be taken not to five a wrong im- * a pail spate cote anaes aeee o> te ae f>) i ‘tae. oii ee & ron ie e.% ez > i = te Para ta oe) tet atara t4PREFACE X11 pression by wrenching a criticism from its context, by ignor- ing other and perhaps contradictory opinions of the same au- thor, or by neglecting the comparative worth of the dictum by disregarding what the writer of it has said concerning the work of a rival in the same department. Finally, new points of view, afforded by the vogue of a new genre, must suc- cessively be reckoned with. Such considerations as these, how- ever imperfect may be the result, I have had constantly in mind during the years in which I have been engaged upon this research, the object of which has been to trace, period by pe- riod, the estimation in which Fielding has been held as a nov- elist since the appearance of Joseph Andrews, and to point out the main influences—social, literary, individual—which have played a part in the assessment of his genius and achievement. It is hoped that an account of the many utterances regard- ing this great man may aid in exposing as well as in recording some of the vagaries of criticism, and in selecting and empha- sizing those qualities of his mind and art which in the light of past experience appear to be most characteristic. From this in- vestigation it will be seen that notwithstanding an exceptional amount and variety of opposition and misapprehension, Field- ing’s importance in English literary history, as shown by the number and zeal of his admirers as well as by the concessions of his most eminent detractors, is far greater than has been hitherto recorded. To mention by name the friends to whom I have been in- debted for advice or suggestions, as well as the libraries and private collections which have been ransacked for materials for this book, would be, of course, impossible. But it is even more impossible for me to remain entirely silent. To the h- brarians of Yale, Harvard, California, the British Museum, and the Huntington Library, my thanks are due for many spe- cial favors. To Mr. Frederick S. Dickson, who by the gift of his Fielding Collection to Yale University made scholarly Pe vr oF en a. ae TA gee a; a re awe “ r ~ Tire * aie: Lr it a i At Serene? praet ae bert rr: a eee aia. tae t1 vr het arated en aabeenedeniet | pO tr~) She eePE eo ge eer patito teeta! TR ee gay ow pe re eee Cresta A “ i Fai Wy pei 4 a! A re ett oH Pet et Bi: +8 4) ay The pe Y 4 rt ape ee a re bhp nay ot eee Sta eer eae LSS Pe ne DT |Tee etay) ‘Fels )?- oo Skeet 2 pas ay ae ar Fes, SDT se spibcinees)-soomhderdipneerirtie ne re rs . om vate or Ainten a rare. or ie ee bie Foes 4527 Paes i} es - i Wot} Pea tee HF t nenempewt hniweene re reeee nl oor, AT eR ashe a hep ree er rae ; + -* , on trTe tt ath ha Le be it. XIV PREFACE study of the novelist possible in this country, | am beholden for an exceptional kindness: w hen this work was nearly com- pleted he generously allowed me to check my bibliography with his. To Professor Chauncey B. Tinker of Yale Univer- sity I desire to express my thanks for helpful references. To Professor Charles Mills Gayley of the University of Cali- fornia, who has read the manuscript, | acknowledge with pleasure, as former student and sometime colleague, a particu- lar obligation. To Professor Wilbur Lucius Cross, Dean of the Graduate School at Yale, under whom I first became in- terested in the Eighteenth Century, I owe a debt of gratitude for guidance, shrewd counsel, and personal friendship extend- ing over many years. But my greatest debt is to my wife, who has worked beside me, in library stacks as well as in the study, from the beginning, and whose actual labor, keen criticism, and loving inspiration could be adequately described only by the pen of Henry Fielding himself. FREDERIC I HOMAS BLANCHARD. Los A ngeles, Califo r 1124, , , pn her = N OU 27710 €1 lr, LO2S- $ - ea, . ae aS l Se by COSA VUES TSR SIE Pee oe re FP iu - aba) Pore tel Sete ree te Peo te be oe re OF E: tee cet Ae PAP OR ParFielding the Novelist CHAPTER I “Foseph Andrews: The Reception of Fielding’s First Novel 1742-1749 ARELY is it given a man to see the follies and vices of his own age through the eyes of succeeding genera- tions. Nor is the ability to do this always of much material advantage to the possessor, its reward being too often simply malevolence and injurious treatment. Such in brief was the fate of the novelist Henry Fielding, whose genius—ain its trend and altitude largely obscured to his contemporaries— has only within the last few decades been adequately shown in its fuller significance. There can be little doubt that by most critics of the past thirty years Fielding has been accorded higher rank as.a novelist than Richardson; even those who have defended the author of Clarissa most valiantly have been compelled to admit that the odds have been against them. Yet in Fielding’s own day the exact opposite was the case. Richard- son, the prose phenomenon of the age, was mentioned—for profundity—in the same breath with Shakespeare; while at the very end of the century the pathetic power in Sir Charles Grandison was thought by so able a scholar as Joseph Warton to compare favorably with that of Lear. In view of this ex- traordinary bouleversement of opinion, we must keep in mind, to understand the attitude of contemporaries toward Fielding, their attitude toward Richardson as well. When Joseph Andrews came out, during the month of February, 1742, Richardson’s Pamela, first published in No- vember, 1740, was still a nine-days’ wonder. Four editions had appeared in swift succession—November, February, March, ee etahepenesegl” = ren rr ere a LL pape ee eee ae SPS rer tare Palm a ee Pease eer. : Fy r pf { ae ia a Fad rf } | wie pe ry — as eS 1 te neha bel Deeb res a — ays Set ene r O er Pinbenat es etait ened Rye ee eet iy ae ae eet> Ps eee OS ee tetra Sah eer eer ane s pene ot Y oeerate , 7 7 i i 7a —— a Bea Hi i ee soe i ie ie | ; i a B= etre ‘ ‘i a 2 FIELDING THE NOVELIST and May; even before the second edition The Gentleman’s Magazine declared that it was “judged in Town as great a Sign of Want of Curiosity not to have read Pamela, as not to have seen the French and Italian Dancers.” Fine ladies at a public assembly, according to Mrs. Barbauld, held up the vol- umes to one another to show that they were in possession of this popular novel; and Dr. Slocock, the Chaplain of St. Saviour’s in Southwark, earnestly recommended the book to his congregation from the pulpit. Richardson himself, as Austin Dobson has pointed out, subsequently appended a note to one of the MSS. now at South Kensington which read as follows: “The Publication of the History of Pamela gave Birth to no less than 16 Pieces, as Remarks, Imitations, Retailings of the Story, Pyracies, etc. etc.”* An exhibition of Pamela in Wax Work, tickets “Sixpence each” (according to The Daily Ad- vertiser, April 23, 1745), made its appearance not far from Richardson’s own door. The furor over Pamela in the year 1741 is evidenced not merely by the praise but also by the opposition which the story evoked. According to one of the notable pamphlets against the book, called Pamela Censured, which, like the more famous Shamela, appeared after the third edition, “‘both the Pu/pit and the Press” had ‘‘joined” in extolling Pamela as “the most per- fect Piece of the Kind” ever published. Yet the heroine of Richardson’s novel in the opinion of the ironical author of the pamphlet “‘instead of being artless and innocent” sets out at first with as much knowledge “‘of the Arts of the Town” as if she had been “‘born and bred” in Covent Garden “‘all her Life Time.” To him Marivaux’s Le Paysan Parvenu recently trans- lated into English was somewhat “‘more modest” as to “title,” and was “‘as much calculated for the Encouragement of Vir- tue.” He addresses by name “‘the Rev. Dr. Slocock, Chaplain of St. Saviour’s,” and severely takes him to task for his action 1 The Gentleman’s Magazine, X1, 56 (January, 1741). * Dobson, A., Samuel Richardson, London, 1902, p. 47.RECEPTION OF JOSEPH ANDREWS 3 in recommending such a book as Pamela “from the most solemn Place.’’* Compared with Shamela,* however, Pamela Censured is of little historical interest. It was Shamela which made Richard- son wince; and, as he believed it to be the work of Henry Fielding, he referred to it with especial bitterness after his rival had become famous. The question has long been debated as to whether Fielding really did write Shamela, but the chances are he did. In view of considerable positive evidence, Mr. J. Paul de Castro’ has attributed it to him, and Professor Cross, discussing the matter at length in his recent biography,” has placed it in the list of Fielding’s works. Whoever wrote it, most critics nowadays regard the pamphlet as a deserved exposé of the morbidity of Richardson’s first novel. The main point with which we are now concerned is that Pamela Censured and Shamela were both called forth by the great vogue of the book which they ridiculed, and that Joseph Andrews is another evidence of that popularity. Richardson, then, by the success of Pamela had become a shining light in the literary sky. On the other hand, when Joseph Andrews appeared Fielding was by no means unknown. His labors as a dramatist had brought him before the public for over a decade; even those who had paid little attention in general to his dramas had laughed over the Noodle and Doodle of his Tom Thumb or had taken sides for or against him in the political plays, Pasquin and The Historical Register. More- over, the onslaughts of the “sharp family of the Vinegars,” in Fielding’s newspaper, The Champion, to which he had con- tributed until June, 1741, had been looked forward to every week by both foe and friend. Furthermore, Jonathan Swift,’ 3 Pamela Censured, London, 1741, Dedication, p. 7. 4 An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, London, 1741. 5 Notes and Queries, 12 S., 1, 24-26 (January 8, 1916). 6 Cross, W. L., The History of Henry Fielding, New Haven, 1918, I, 304-313. See also Digeon, A., Les Romans de Fielding, Paris, 1923, Pp- 63-69. 7 Swift, J., On Poetry: A Rapsody, Dublin, 2.d. [1733]. For an account of this matter, see Cross, I, 87-88. oe a t tat ia om - ae - ee ee shee ee Lm Fria Pm rere te + Ain reas FS rr reer Pee Sa Serer ia teee) prea ee Mt thd > tag (pa he ben eee bee—eaaront tptatyeie = d - ane ees Papeeen a A ten = = peerage Sea anaes ad eet snes ae % ; i : * rf i ie at ee, ra > e } eer ee a a aoe a re aawhermeycnsaryoeemenrnetettaasnen ings oer STs eee eer Pepe Tes ee aeinds fee eee ee eT ey eTee ee Nene Sea ce bg ee Eat ee ete te a hat tee ee Se a a es ea A , te) it We jae tt le 5 i? FE 1] 2 a i : Ce a P oe 4 FIELDING THE NOVELIST one of the commanding literary figures of the age, had taken a fling at him in his Rapsody (though afterwards, perceiving more clearly the ironical intent of Fielding’s bathos, he made his line read the “Laureate” [i.e., Cibber] instead of “Field- ing”); and Cibber himself, in return for Fielding’s well- deserved ridicule, had in his celebrated Apology (1740) ma- ligned him as a “broken Wit” and a corrupt party writer. At the time of the appearance of Joseph Andrews Fielding was unquestionably well known in dramatic and journalistic circles; but it is clear that his reputation was such as to militate a priori against a true appreciation of his splendid new achieve- ment in the department of fiction. His enemies, particularly his political enemies, had already pursued him with an acri- mony even in those hard-hitting days exceptional. Because of this constant abuse it is probable that not merely those who were against him but also those who inclined toward him found it difficult to realize that the author of The Covent- Garden Tragedy and The Grub-Street Opera was initiating in Joseph Andrews a new and very significant genre of litera- ture. To them Fielding was a writer of farces, burlesques, and political satires—to his friends, a wit; to his enemies, a buffoon or worse. A needy young barrister struggling for a foothold; a witty and rather successful dramatist whose career as a satiri- cal playwright had been cut short by an act of parliament (1737); a slashing political journalist, who had been bespat- tered by his opponents—such was Henry Fielding when, in February, 1742, there appeared, to use Richardson’s words, the “lewd and ungenerous engraftment” upon the much-vaunted Pamela, still the book of the hour. The most striking fact about the immediate reception of Joseph Andrews is the paucity of reference to it by those from whom comment might have been expected. Almost the only notable criticism made in the year 1742 which Fielding’s biog- raphers have been able to unearth is the very famous one by the poet Gray, then a young man of twenty-six; and almost the only notable enthusiast who has been brought forward is Gray’s friend, young Richard West. There are other critics and criti- SEES 5a Cee Saat ae eS te are OPP See Tee Lita eee Te aL a TO CEPR ESATO LETS Pee e ee eee Sar ia tere eae Pee ee Olea ta Oe eee ee eS tee SPR SOLTST PTS L OY LES WERE S CLEC A SES cee ea Se Stair le We tere PPT et ad aS ? . ec OF 17 p we eee i SP ti ee ee 6RECEPTION OF JOSEPH ANDREWS 5 cisms, as will presently be shown, and Joseph Andrews was, then and later, widely read; but this fact of the fewness of allusions to the novel by literary persons must be regarded as a significant one, particularly when we take into account the tri- umph at home and abroad of Richardson’s Pamela. Gray’s pronouncement, hackneyed as it is to us now, is sufhi- ciently typical and should be given in full. At the earnest so- licitation of Richard West, he bestowed a reading upon Joseph Andrews and made the following reply (April, 1742): “I have myself, upon your recommendation, been reading Joséph Andrews. The incidents are ill laid and without invention; but the characters have a great deal of nature, which always pleases even in her lowest shapes. Parson Adams is perfectly well; so is Mrs. Slipslop, and the story of Wilson; and throughout he shews himself well read in Stage-Coaches, Country Squires, Inns, and Inns of Court. His reflections upon high people and low people, and misses and masters, are very good. However the exaltedness of some minds (or rather as I shrewdly suspect their insipidity and want of feeling or observation) may make them insensible to these light things, (I mean such as charac- terize and paint nature) yet surely they are as weighty and much more useful than your_grave discourses upon the mind, the passions, and what not.” Still, in spite of his defense of such “light things” as realistic novels, it was not to Joseph Andrews that Gray would turn for his highest enjoyment in the matter of fiction. “As the paradisaical pleasures of the Mahometans,” he goes on to say, “consist in playing upon the flute and lying with the Houris, be mine to read eternal new romances of Marivaux and Crebillon.”® It is not strange, as we shall see later, that Gray, who thus exalts the French senti- mentalists, was much pleased with Dr. Johnson’s disparage- ment of T’om Jones as superficial. Richard West, who had rec- ommended Joseph Andrews to Gray, was somewhat surprised at his friend’s preference. “‘I rejoice,” he replied, that “you 8 The Poems of Mr. Gray, edited by W. Mason, York, 1775, pp. 138-139. a mpl, rr ee ore Ve Ske eS Sanuet-phtheretshenahaethabhebhaniontoah tine edt to pas, al ieee rerrerrry por het re etek) Sh behest oe J rey ey a\« a" PPD Se ee eee ent rene ath te i a oie ous Seed i; me re Bi re eee err _ pwerreererrrt tere feneneneerer st Penner rs aed ee eee oe eee ot eee) pene ere rs aad yen * ry TIFT 7 ee Tibet reese es ere erree ee — S paweene eeu e eae Br verted 3 eee Ser Oe - Ca eae Selle l- “whivweiere ee ee » 6) i Ca a yy . ie i ' ere e ac 6 FIELDING THE NOVELIST found amusement in Joseph Andrews. But then I think your conceptions of Paradise a little upon the Bergerac [1.e., the extravagant | ote Though there have been modern critics to whom Gray’s assessment of Joseph Andrews has seemed perfectly adequate, they themselves would be the first to admit that this has not been the usual modern view. Professor Saintsbury has fre- quently alluded to Gray’s dictum, sometimes endeavoring to palliate or explain it, at other times castigating its author for ‘amazingly patronis- c his apathy, but always dissenting from so ing a verdict,” which, in his opinion, was “doubtless flavored by youth and literary superfineness.”” A generation ago Austin Dobson declared “that any reader who should nowadays [1883] contrast the sickly and sordid intrigue of the Paysan Parvenu with the healthy animalism of Joseph Andrews would greatly prefer the latter”;*® and more than once since that time he has spoken of Gray’s criticism as unsympathetic. One can imagine with what surprise Gray himself would read the admiring references to Parson Adams by Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt; or, to come down to our own day, the statement of Sir Edmund Gosse that the “bustle and intrigue” of “the purest comedy” set Fielding’s first novel ablaze “‘with light” like a play of Shakespeare. And yet, compared with Shenstone, Gray was positively en- thusiastic. Shenstone’s letter to Richard Graves (dated “1743” but probably** written in 1742) may be allowed to speak for itself. “Indeed, as to the little parody you send, it would fix your reputation with men of sense as much as (greatly more than) the whole tedious character of Parson Adams. I read it [Joseph Andrews| half a year ago; . . . but made Mr. Shuckburgh take it again, imagining it altogether a very mean performance.—lI liked a tenth part pretty well; but, as Dryden says of Horace (unjustly), he shews his teeth without laugh- ® The Poems of Mr. Gray, edited by W. Mason, p. 144. 10 Dobson’s Fielding, London, 1883, p. 87. 11 Wells, J. E., “The Dating of Shenstone’s Letters,” in Anglia, xxill, N.F., p. 442. e3t4: Bi eiai?tI}, Sif / /, hy, iy Wf My lf Wf Vif) UELEAMY Yif) Yih 1) Yi 6/1 Cp |//////// iy) YW a al RSG MT i a ba I We Ss Wal RAY, Hy Wy Aa es Me NW ay PAY ey ji Wy Yi i, %, SST > > Jowlandson Invéct Bee Libijhed as Che Act directs by 7 Sibbua 1792, JUSTICE THE BEFORE AND FANNY Andre: ADAMS PARSON k II, Chapter XI) ) 00 vs. F ) ¢ ( Joset hi ie ir Pots Sin oa baes el ee ep eee eee eee ey eer pene z * ees pow nat peer gale amber ant met omsaree ee ee eed edited Ie a ental ara oe eet I , . - o : o . “ . ) Se ee ree Ne ee ee On eee —" eee oe ee ee ert ol eh eaten oe ET ONES tent hibre lear tetteremeea in — at pete i meneeee. et ee ae ee Seen roars Ces ad —RECEPTION OF JOSEPH ANDREWS 7 ing: the greater part is umnatural and unhumorous. It has some advocates; but, I observe, those not such as I ever esteemed tasters. Finally, what makes you endeavour to like it?”’** Some impress on Shenstone’s memory was made by Parson Adams, however, as we learn from the correspondence of his friend, Lady Luxborough; after she had read the first four volumes of Tom Jones she wrote the poet, “I think as you do, that no one character yet is near so striking as Adams’s in the author’s 18 But, though Shenstone apologized to other composition. Lady Luxborough for his delay in returning Tom Jones, he never seems to have been an enthusiast for Fielding; as we shall see later, Richardson was more to his taste. When— a quarter-century afterwards—Shenstone’s friend, Richard Graves, published a novel of his own, The Spiritual Quixote (1772), he went out of his way in his preface™* to pay a com- pliment to Richardson; of Fielding, despite the fact that he had known more or less about the novelist in the old days at Ralph Allen’s, there is in the preface nothing at all, though during the course of the story he refers to the thrust (in Tom Jones) at the Methodist landlady. To return to the year 1743, young Graves, it is to be noted, was at that time sufficiently well disposed toward Joseph Andrews to evoke a remonstrance from his friend Shenstone, who, while disparaging the book, commended Pamela (despite his playful letter written to Jago “in the Manner” of that novel)*® for “some nice natural strokes.” Joseph Andrews, it may be imagined, was not quite elegant enough to please either the fastidious Thomas Gray or the fini- cal master of the Leasowes. And though both poets, still in their twenties, were rather exacting young gentlemen, their 12 The Works . . . of William Shenstone, second ed., London, 1769, III, 70-71. 18 Letters Written by . . . Lady Luxborough to William Shenstone, London, 1775, p. 88, Letter XXVI (March 23, 1748-1749). 14 It is only fair to say that Graves puts his preface in the mouth of “4 clergyman.” 15 The Works... of . . . William Shenstone, second ed., III, 4-6. °7 reer ee Hea ree arte ca rere pane eee ores ete beset! ~ auf tee Phoy Maye r SRR Ne me eect ee ee aden oY rae ers ee ER SL ae bn ee O05 a Od * we = ed as nit a ee aes aT) poser = stn pan vn Pet pes ted eS eta a Tre | 3) : Ti hal aa Be E at rr Ht ry Pay HI ete at Pea ¢ ; eer reer sys oom bash WS spt eA rst a pre —— 9 eH 5 rer ee TT = oeegene aoe mapese for Senta eat S ry ie on‘Tate te: De angsees we tacninhhQvcossk uae tuiabesennta abit ~ Oe ed * Vete OSD peta Sie tree aed a oe tang —- e2 re alll pateresneeendcamen opera + ’ le eee Tae ae Re Be ola er St : — i ee a ie . f a a # as aemanetiorepeted ee re a is 8 FIELDING THE NOVELIST lukewarmness may be regarded as an attitude by no means at that ttme uncommon. When we turn to the correspondence of other literary persons of the day we find a notable lack of ref- erence to Fielding’s new venture in the way of fiction. Lady Mary did not read Joseph Andrews until after Tom Jones; and though this fact may perhaps be accounted for by the diffi- culty with which persons on the continent received books from England during the war, an extraordinary success on the part of her cousin would hardly have escaped comment in her let- ters. No reference to Joseph Andrews is to be found in her published correspondence until after the appearance of Tom Jones; then—from a recent perusal of both novels—she said, “T think Joseph Andrews better than his Foundling.” Appar- ently she afterwards changed her mind; for, according to her granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, she wrote in her copy of Tom Jones the words, “Ne plus ultra.”*® As a matter of fact, Lady Mary herself attributes her liking for Joseph Andrews mainly to the circumstance that she once had just such a maid- servant as Fanny in her own household. ‘Then there is Horace Walpole, who—enemy as he was— could not forbear referring (in 1749) to the popularity of LT'om Jones. Though he disparaged Richardson he admitted, sarcastically, in an early letter, the triumph enjoyed by P aL aa BS oa | ‘ ee a cc a amela. can send you no news, he wrote, “the late singu- lar novel is the universal and only theme—Pamela is like snow, she covers every thing with her whiteness.””** We look in vain, however, in the published correspondence of Walpole for any reference to Joseph Andrews in the letters written by him be- fore the appearance of Tom Jones. Lord Chesterfield, who had spoken against the Licensing Act (though he scored Pasguin, perhaps ironically, for in- decency), discussed Pamela at length with Crébillon fils, and, later, despite certain strictures, allowed Richardson “reat knowledge and skill both in painting and in interesting the ee of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, London, n.d. [1861], 17 Letters of Anna Seward, Edinburgh, 1811, V, 431. ae bu be Oo Pe BS Oo PE PETES he be Eee ee bee PeEPATEIIL ILS Sere eat Tee ele ata ta tote) Sete SEL a Laes el ee Ce Tater Oe ie OF AL at Ss PeteRECEPTION OF JOSEPH ANDREWS 9 heart.”*8 Yet of Joseph Andrews there is in his published correspondence never a word. Nor have we anything from Pope. On November 17, 1742, Richardson referred (in a letter to Warburton) to the praise which had been bestowed upon Pamela by “the first Genius of the Age””*® [z.e., Pope]; and Warburton in his re- ply (December 28, 1742) speaks of discussing Pamela with Pope, who “agreed, that one excellent subject of Pamela’s let- ters in high life, would have been to have passed her judg- ment, on first stepping into it, on everything she saw there.” What, we may ask, prevented “‘the first Genius of the Age” from writing of Joseph Andrews? That Pope in spite of by- gone ill feeling was friendly toward Fielding at the time of the publication of that novel has more than once been re- marked upon. The New Dunciad, as Professor Cross has shown,” which appeared in March, 1742 (Joseph Andrews was published in February), contained a high compliment for Fielding’s dramatic satires. And though Pope may have been at first deceived by two scurrilous pamphlets directed at him which purported to have been written by “Hercules Vine- gar,”?° he spoke pleasantly enough, after the Muscellamies ap- peared (in 1743), of Fielding’s reference in 4 Journey from this World to the Next to Ralph Allen’s “handsome building _ by the Bath.” “Fielding,” he says in a letter to Allen, “has paid you a pretty Complement upon your House.”*” As Pope turned the leaves of the three volumes of Miscellanies he must have discovered also more than one “pretty Complement” to himself. Yet despite the amicable relations which presum- 18 Chesterfield’s letter to David Mallet, November 5, 1753. 19 Dobson’s Samuel Richardson, p. 58. 20 Cross’s Fielding, I, 366-368. 21 Letters from Pope to Ralph Allen, British Museum, Egerton MSS.., 1947. According to “George Paston”’ this is an allusion to the story of Wilson, Book III of Joseph Andrews (Mr. Pope his Life and Times, New York, 1909, II, 675, 675 note); but, as Mr. Dobson has shown (At Prior Park, New York, 1.d., p. 21), it should be referred to Field- ing’s Journey from this World to the Next. rear eo 7) aves ee eee en rene ee oe - ST ee eae a ert I Pe ee en ee AS es Me ee ee ee eee tear ee eens oes. t Pete mah sft itt 7 ty By ek! oh) iz ‘s' “t es pe Y + 3% ¢ r+ rao er s Pdietaid elie nd tite eo aoe tk theer hel re + Per eer ry) ee nee errs eo ae S aS a othe « “< tel an! pa ereey vee er errr reyes a aneeee ee eee ere ee pede tae ae - a es _ aera Se eee ee eee pe Ne sah i i (ts 73 Yh te ; i ry Py Fr 2? Fi ae IO FIELDING THE NOVELIST ably existed at this time between poet and novelist, no refer- ence by Pope to Fielding’s Joseph Andrews has come down to us in the published correspondence. Swift, according to Mrs. Pilkington, had a high opinion of Fielding’s “wit,” notwithstanding his previous jibe at him as a writer of verse; but we are not surprised at finding no refer- ence in his works to Joseph Andrews, since by November, 1742, he had become hopelessly insane. It is strange, however, that there is, apparently, no mention of the novel in the correspond- ence of Aaron Hill. Praise abounds, of course; and in one of his letters to Richardson, fulsome praise—of Pamela Hill expresses his indignation on the appearance of Shamela; but Joseph Andrews seems to have been entirely ignored. Stranger still, no letter by Richardson himself on the subject of Fielding’s first novel written before the success of Tom Jones Richardson was loud in his dispraise. But if there be any refer- , has yet been discovered. 4 fter that success, we shall see, ence to Joseph Andrews in the unpublished letters at South 9 Kensington, the industry of Dr. Poetzsche,”* who assembled the Fielding passages in his Richardson’s Belesenheit, has failed to unearth it. The malevolence which everyone knows about belongs to the period after the triumph of Tom Jones—a vol- ume of abuse which further unearthing could hardly equal. While Fielding was winning (in 1749) popular applause by Lom Jones, Richardson, looking back over his rival’s career, assured Lady Bradshaigh that “Before his Joseph Andrews the poor man wrote without being read, except when his Pasquins,—&c. roused party attention and the legislature at the same time;’** and in another equally spiteful letter to her ladyship (January 9, 1749-1750) he remarked: “As to the list of Fielding’s performances, I have seen at least twenty of them; for none of which, before Joseph Andrews (except for such as were of a party turn), he gained either credit or read- *2 Erich Poetzsche, Samuel Richardsons Belesen/ veit, Kiel, 1907. 23 " ano c The Greet: nce of Samuel Richardson, Landon! 1804, IV, 286. ‘TREO TI FR PeCeTA STE SL Ole le Pat eee eee Par ata A USS Ete ee a ees ft Le tates SAP a Pa eee or ES CSCS OLe OF le PE LEST SPL eres Bea Fa tate So le ae SASS ZA LGLR ESS LE aT Vee ee ie Ce Pa eee eT ae ee eee eT Pa ee > «RECEPTION OF JOSEPH ANDREWS Il ers.””* These references on the part of a jealous rival imply that Joseph Andrews did enjoy a certain measure of success; in 1742, however, and, indeed, up to the time of the appear- ance of Tom Jones, Fielding’s popularity as a novelist was ob- viously not formidable enough to call forth the exceptional malignancy which we are soon to consider. A careful examination of the periodicals of the day reveals no evidence of an overwhelming immediate triumph on the part of Joseph Andrews. Take, for example, the two main re- views of the period, The Gentleman’s Magazine and The London Magazine. ‘The Gentleman’s, which two years before allowed an excellent puff to Pamela,” contains no reference to Fielding’s novel in 1742 except the bare mention of the title in the Register of Books. And though it may be objected that Johnson (the implacable detractor of Fielding during nearly a lifetime) was then employed by the editor Cave, it may be answered that as the anonymous writer of the “Parliamentary Debates” he had not as yet attained to any great degree of emi- nence. Furthermore, Johnson declared thirty years later that he had never read Joseph Andrews.”® It is unlikely that the thrifty Cave would crush out even an allusion in the Poet’s Corner to a book that was really the darling of the town; to Tom Jones, when Johnson’s influence was unquestionably very great, occasional references crept in, despite the fact that it was not reviewed. Even if the omission of an account of Joseph Andrews in the Gentleman’s can be laid to Johnson’s opposition, how shall we explain a similar neglect on the part of both The London Magazine and The Works of the Learned? Mention of the first and second editions was duly made in the London, but no review ever appeared in that peri- odical; while The Works of the Learned, which devoted (in December, 1740) six pages to Pamela, utterly disdained an ac- count of Joseph Andrews. 24 The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, IV, 312. 25 The Gentleman’s Magazine, X1, 56 (January, 1741). 26 Boswell’s Life of Johnson, edited by G. B. Hill, Oxford, 1887, II, 174 (April 6, 1772). bate de wry oo “ Me tatereensevabedeistshsineen-o-tescnenrs He ‘He tf if i a) Pt a a Peo Le; B Pe AI tae Pie ea) re af 38 }~] % eee teers oe LS sos 2a Heap tegeye ee eh eee ra = ARR at a es Se eee Ate enn wn teers ee karma Tee Serer tess er " — craven ie ge SeeTiras bonaiwin—ad ai, ane . a nee ree cme wah ene tire oer iw penne ad fe Brae eee eS ! i q te I i Bo . it £\: ct ‘+ i ; re (Fay * ot : ul iW , APT e ele tata sease xe Fete: ¢i¢i? eyeseus att eee avoe se aes Sth 1438 Oe Ass eee ats tee oa oh a eae ee ne Te Le Sete iL ae Ly Sta eat ade ede bee ee he eae a a ee ee ee 12 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Still, though the success of Joseph Andrews fell far short of the triumph of Pamela, Fielding’s novel was, during the interval between its appearance (1742) and the publication of Tom Jones (1749) unquestionably a well-known book. This is shown, if by nothing else, by the testimony of the editions; recent investigations by Mr. J. Paul de Castro have completed our information regarding the actual number of copies printed.*” A summary of this matter has been given by Pro- fessor Cross: ““Three London editions of ‘Joseph Andrews,’ six thousand and five hundred copies altogether, in the course of thirteen months, with a French translation, twice printed, soon following, would indicate a body of readers numbering about half that enjoyed by ‘Pamela.’ of which there were six English editions the first year. “Iwo more authorized editions of ‘Joseph Andrews’ were yet to appear in English during Field- ing’s lifetime—one in November, 1748, though dated 1749, and the other in 1751. There were also two Dublin editions, the first of which came out in 1742, the second in 1747.” Besides the evidence of the editions there are scattered allu- sions, though not so many as one would expect. We may note, for example, the personal interest with which Sir Dudley Ryder (who afterwards became Chief-Justice Ryder) at- tempted, as he wrote his lady, “to rescue Jos. Andrews and Parson Adams out of the hands of pirates.” He has been un- successful so far, he says (October 23, 1742), but believes that “another broadside next week will do the business.”””” Hogarth’s reference, also, should be remembered. In 1743, perhaps as a return compliment for being mentioned in his friend’s first novel, the celebrated painter recommends (in his Characters and Caricaturas, Plate 1) to all those persons who 27 Mr. de Castro gives excerpts from Strahan’s ledger in Notes and Queries, November, 1917, Twelfth Series, III, 465; see also his article in Bibliographical Society Transactions, Second Series, I, 258 (The Library, Fourth Series, 1), March, 1921. 28 Cross’s Fielding, I, 357. 29 John Lord Campbell’s Lives of the Chief Justices, London, 1849, II, 260. “SS Sa A ae ey SES TOPS LS Pe Ley ei yee F errr Seth SAS eta Te TELS bel Sita eae. PEdR eRe wt hee Rae Ss PA eB el el betasRECEPTION OF JOSEPH ANDREWS Ne desire “a farther explanation of the Difference betwixt Char- acter and Caricatura” a perusal of “ye Preface to Joh Andrews.”’*° ‘Then there is the evidence furnished by the prologue to Fielding’s drama The Wedding Day (1743), for the success of which Arthur Murphy declared, long afterwards, that “the author of Joseph Andrews” had “raised the highest expecta- tion.”’** In this prologue, ““Writ and Spoken by Mr. Macklin,” Fielding is humorously told that he had better have stuck to “honest Abram Adams,” who, “in spight of Critics, can make” his “Readers laugh,” than to have gone on with play-writing. As he penned this badinage, Macklin, it would seem, was counting on an audience to whom Parson Adams was a famil- lar figure. Fielding himself evidently felt that Joseph Andrews had not been unsuccessful, for in the Miscellanies (1743), which followed in the wake of his novel, he professes to have “‘com- municated” the “Manuscript” of the Journey from this World to the Next to “my Friend Parson Abraham Adams, who after a long and careful Perusal, returned it me with his Opinion, that there was more in it than at first appeared.” Still other ‘“communications” from the author’s old friend are to be found in The True Patriot; for example, in the issues of December 17, 1745, and January 28, 1746. According to the testimony of Warton, Fielding in 1746 set a higher value upon Joseph Andrews than upon any of his previous works. “Russell and I,”’ writes young -Joseph Warton (who had just “spent two evenings with Fielding”) October 29, 1746, “sat up with the Poet [Fielding] till one or two in the morning, and were inexpressibly diverted. I find he values, as he justly may, his Joseph Andrews above all his writings.”*° 80 Treland, J., 4 Supplement to Hogarth Illustrated, London, 1798, p. 342; for a reproduction of the plate, see George Paston, Social Cart- cature in the Eighteenth Century, London, 1906, p. 2. 81 Arthur Murphy’s Life of David Garrick, London, 1801, I, 49. 82 Introduction to the Journey from this World to the Next. 83 Wooll, J., Biographical Memoirs of the late . . . Joseph Warton, London, 1806, p. 215 (letter VI). or wy ope 45 ate epee ete wee? G-aa! ae ihe ee eee ee or nnen ye ony a @ * E ji f 2 He boy hh 9 ey pn ee bat ” “4 pecbietaph seen ee eee cl ahahaha ee re ye (Pimento Fo be rived ev Pert # renters Sor Pre eet ee ae ener ee rt ae erred ee" ee Te Tots pt ineths tt ane rey y reat Penny rer tT we oo + ease er ee a ne pete Pe eee ' éLptacleihicepeietne ea an BO Sete ae canbeee 7 dlisted ne ‘* a ps antenna Da ss * rt 5 enn sera > : t , fT 14 FIELDING THE NOVELIST During the same year, young William Mason had Fielding in mind in his poem entitled The Birth of Fashion. Half a century later, looking back on his youthful production, the aged poet writes, “I suspect that the young Author [i.e., Mason himself] now, and before in this epistle, took his idea of fe- male shape Sad beauty from Fielding’s Description of Fanny in his Adventures of Joseph Andrews; an idea, w hich, com- pared with what it is now, was in that author as absurd, as in himself.’** The line in Mason’s poem, however, refers specifi- cally not to Joseph Andrews but to the “‘round-ear’d cap and boddice” fashionable in the ’Forties. Allusions in prose to Fielding’s first novel are extremely difficult to find; but allu- sions in verse by the well-known poets of the day are almost nonexistent. The poems and collected works of Gray and of Edward Young yield us nothing; nor do we find any refer- ences in the works of Thomson. It should be remembered, per- haps, that the very successful Tom Thumb, in which, a dozen years before, Fielding had scored the dramatic absurdities of both Young and Thomson, was still a favorite. The lash of so powerful a satirist could not soon be forgotten. Between Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) very few references to Fielding’s first novel made their ap- Gentleman’s and pearance in the two chief magazi! the London—though some of eee were commendatory. The Gentleman's Magazine, for instance, permitted in its columns several allusions to the book: January, 1743; October, 1745; and May, 1746. The first is an excerpt from The Craftsman, January 1, 1743, in which “The Author of The History of Joseph Andrews” is quoted regarding an “Explanation of the Ridiculous.”** The original passage in The Craftsman reads as follows: “I honour the Author of that facetious Work the History of Joseph Andrews, for what he saith in his Preface by way of explanation of af Ridiculous. . . . Nor do I know any one piece of Criticism better worth the study (if they 84 The Works of William Mason, London, 1911, I, 153 note. Mason says the poem was “written in 1746.” 5 7 Ps 88 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XIII, 25 (January, 1743).mee . * = tal S PUR, moe Bethe een ae oe a eet recteperett ercernpctreteramracesstatett RECEPTION OF JOSEPH ANDREWS 15 study at all) of those Critics and Orators who endeavour to divert their Audience and Readers with pleasant Images of Pe a the Public Calamities and arch Caracatures of those Persons to — 9936 ey whom they are thought to be owing.”*” The second reference in The Gentleman’s Magazine (October, 1745) is in the form of a note to one of the poems of the month. “The au- OT TN OT ee ey re er ay | eretcats athe ee abeencnaieien Laconia thor of the History of Joseph Andrews,” runs this humorous comment, “had certainly seen this performance, when he wrote that celebrated poem in praise of the Rev. Mr Abraham Adams.”** The third reference, May, 1746, purports to be a poe letter from Parson Adams himself: “Jf you ever read the en- pereeers tertaining history of Joseph Andrews, You cannot but have some notion of the Rev. Mr Abraham Adams, and his little son Dick.” Then follows little Dick’s Latin translation “of a favourite song of . . . Mr Andrews”; that is, “The Song” of Chloe and Strephon,*® which occurs in the Twelfth Chap- ter of Book Two of Joseph Andrews. Of interest in passing is a peculiar statement which is to be found in Scanderbeg (1747). While listing English dramatic authors (with “some Account of their Lives”) up to “the Year 1747,” the compiler says that Fielding “is supposed to be the Author of The Adventures of Joseph Andrews, etc. a divert- ing Romance, wrote in Imitation of Cervantes.”*? The doubt here expressed may be in part accounted for by the fact that Joseph Andrews made its original appearance anonymously ; even on the title-page of the second edition (August, 1742) the author’s name was not in evidence. But in 1743, probably because of the piratical attempt on this novel, Fielding had his publisher, Andrew Millar, advertise the third edition as “By Henry Fielding,”*® and, for the first time, insert the name of the author in the title-page. In 1743, moreover, Macklin’s ref- ere 2 P| ia oi re | i if | bi Pak a4) cB F eg 5 rat on . 3 "78 bot aay t af hi tf 1h > am in ’ a) Fi 7 H Seer are ore ich aha eibenh een teeeneenen tte 86 The Craftsman, No. 862, January 1, 1743. 37 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XV, 550 (October, 1745). 88 Tbid.. XVI, 268 (May, 1746). 89 Scanderbeg, London, 1747, P- 234: 40 The St. James’s Evening Post, March 10-15, 1743 (No. 5175). See also Nos. 5176-5181, etc. mot te a ome ete aks ete ths pete’ eer peypremrrer ST e reat apne Se eee eT er rp aes D eens aeyseir ge g asa ; 16 FIELDING THE NOVELIST erence to Parson Adams in the oe to The Wedding Day must have been well known. And in 1744 Fielding again in- formed the public in the title-page of a third edunon of The Historical Register, that he was the “AUTHOR of the History of Joseph Andrews.” therefore, as to who wrote Joseph Andrews; and that there There should have been no question, could be in 1747 any doubt, real or assumed, concerning the authorship of the book may be regarded as evidence that Field- ing had achieved no such splendid triumph as had come to Richardson through Pamela. On the other hand, the allusions in The Gentleman’s Magazine which have been noted above are sufficient testimony to the fact that in the years 1743, 1745, and 1746 Joseph Andrews was still in the public eye. In 1748, moreover, before the advent of Tom Jones, a fourth edition of the novel made its appearance. Undoubtedly the very encouraging sale of Joseph Andrews materially aided Fielding in disposing of his three volumes of Miscellanies (published by subscription) in 1742; the list of subscribers to the latter work is indicative of a rather wide- spread interest in the author. Headed by the Prince of Wales, who took fifteen sets, the haut monde came forward hand- somely. Among ie the noble families of Argyle, Bed- ford, Chesterfield, Devonshire, Denbigh, Marlborough, New- castle, bt ere Richmond, Strafford, Shaftesbury, and Westmoreland were represented—even Sir Robert Walpole, we are surprised to find, putting his name down for ten sets. Then there were the political leaders—Pitt, Lyttelton, Dod- ington, and Hanbury Williams; clergymen, including Bishop Hoadly of Winchester; a number of physicians, among whom was Dr. Edward Wilmot, who waited upon his Majesty him- self; the famous Admiral Vernon; theatrical people, among whom were Charles Fleetwood, manager of Drury Lane Theatre, Kitty Clive, and Garrick; finally a host of lawyers, not only of Fielding’s own Middle Temple, but of Gray’s 41 The Historical Register . . . To which is added Eurydice Hiss’d, third ed., London, 1744. Se kana en aE ea a a . raat ee MA pane eS ee 7 ‘ : 7. 4 q jae a he Ly i ry tae ‘ee & VISITAS aS ESCs ata le LOU ELT Piero O85 ea ea te ete ie SPLAT 2 Orel BLUSE LUC beck eee PP lee) eee eat asseee, ae ee ee ph dicedibeeen es es ox RECEPTION OF JOSEPH ANDREWS 17 all in all an im- Inn. Lincoln’s Inn, and the Inner Temple ) ) I posing array of names! Presumably Joseph Andrews, the suc- — 5 aie ns A hep eheye. — Sapnuiehineeetieiaan seaeeition at cess of which had increased their interest in the book for Spm pare, which they listed themselves as subscribers, must have been - ee rvs 5 spuityahine Pa Pelee ier t cee eet ee arereay well known to them, either from hearsay or from actual pe- rusal. But however that may be, nothing notable has come down to us regarding Fielding’s first novel from the persons ve here listed. Dodington is said by Cumberland® to have enjoyed eer reading Jonathan Wild to some noble ladies who “made part’”’ of the “domestic society” at Eastbury, but no mention of Joseph Andrews appears in his famous diary. Lyttelton, of whom more will be said in the next chapter, seems to have left jj q 4 é ya % : } + ff e p if - bh us nothing; ** neither has Pitt nor Hanbury Williams. Nor do we find anything in the voluminous correspondence of Gar- rick.** In view of the fact that so many persons of note subscribed for Fielding’s Miscellanies it is remarkable that no celebrated dictum from any of them concerning Joseph Andrews has been recorded in literary history. We may infer that to the majority in its own day, at least before the publication of Tom Jones, Fielding’s first novel seemed at best little more than an extremely clever parody and burlesque which contained the diverting character of Parson Adams. But a very clear-sighted woman who was already gaining public notice for her literary attainments saw more deeply; this was the “learned” Miss Elizabeth Carter. Oddly enough the correspondent who ad- vised her to read the book was that future Richardsonian who became the “celebrated” Miss Talbot. “I want very much to know,” writes Miss Talbot (June 1, 1742), “whether you have yet condescended to read ‘Joseph Andrews,’ as I am well er oe an are ee Pa rt ee Sere a tara ns 42 Cumberland, R., Memoirs, London, 1807, I, 192. 43 Though Fielding himself tells us in the preface to Tom Jones that his patron expressly desired him to go on with a greater work than he had hitherto been engaged upon; that is, greater than Joseph Andrews or Jonathan Wild. 44 There is, of course, the prologue to The Fathers, written by Gar- rick a generation later. Pera r yer nr et te et ppeeen erent nt ber ienen te ee ae ee ee a be ayer pee er ere pepe te)cesresr es getate 18 FIELDING THE NOVELIST assured the character of Mr. Adams is drawn from one in real life: if the book strikes you as it did me, you will certainly come up to town next winter, that you and I may join in con- triving some means of getting acquainted with him.’’** Ob- viously the character of Parson Adams was impressing itself even upon those whose attitude toward Fielding was one of condescension. Miss Carter, it seems, had heard so ill an account of Joseph Andrews that she had not thought of procuring the book. “It was your recommendation,” she tells Miss Talbot, ‘‘which first tempted me to enquire after it.”*° When at length the novel was in her hands she read it with the keenest enjoyment. In her reply, January 1, 1743, she thanked her friend for the “perfectly agreeable entertainment” the book had given her, and proceeded to write the most cordial appreciation of its merits which contemporary letters and memoirs afford.{ “Jo- >) seph Andrews,” declares Mjss Carter, c ‘contains such a sur- prising variety of nature, wit, morality, and good sense, as is scarcely to be met with in any one composition, and there is such a spirit of benevolence runs through the whole, as I think renders it peculiarly charming. The author has touched some particular instances of inhumanity which can only be hit in this kind of writing, and I do not remember to have seen ob- served any where else; these certainly cannot be represented in too detestable a light, as they are so severely felt by persons they affect, and looked upon in too careless a manner by the rest of the world.’’* To her credit be it spoken, Miss Carter was, from the first, in her correspondence, an unwearied defender of Fielding. The vivid scenes of Joseph Andrews etched themselves indel- ibly upon her mind; while reading of Eumzus, for instance, in the Memoirs of Ulysses she thought of that modern Eu- mzus, Parson Trulliber, and called attention to the parallel 49 A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Cath- erine Talbot, London, 1809, I, 16. ee las. 1,19, 23. eC Thid., I, 23. Pe ee eee US OP ST Ae NT Oe PERE AL ee Tee Cee ee eee Ce alee re: ‘ a . bo Pe EO POL adh othe Ce FAR Leese sia et ital gs a iFatav ars TPE EES Pete PEL R La TSe to S23/3%)" 3sRECEPTION OF JOSEPH ANDREWS 19 in her letter to Miss Talbot (September 5, 1746). When Tom Jones appeared (1749), and Miss Talbot herself, then a full- fledged Richardsonian, fell foul of that young gentleman, Miss Carter was sorry to find her friend so “outrageous” in her denunciation. And when, in 1752, the “‘fine folks” were unanimous in calling Amelia “sad stuff,” she longed to “en- gage” her friends in behalf of that maltreated book. Any lover of Fielding who reads Miss Carter’s excellent defense of his novels in her private correspondence must regret that when she was inclined to panegyric she preferred to eulogize Rich- ardson rather than his rival. But of this more will be said later. For our present purposes the most interesting fact about Miss Carter’s letter to Miss Talbot is not that she appreciated and praised Joseph Andrews, but that current misinterpretation and abuse of the book were so general and so violent that she delayed a perusal of it, and that when she finally did read it she was moved to a defense. “‘It must surely be a marvellous wrongheadedness and perplexity of understanding,” she ex- claims, ‘‘ that can make any one consider this complete satire as a very immoral thing, and of the most dangerous tendency, and yet I have met with some people who treat it in the most outrageous manner.” This passage was written in January, 1743. Who were the “Heople” that treated Joseph Andrews so outrageously? Were they the Richardsonians, to whom any reflection upon Pamela appeared in the light of sacrilege? Or were they political op- ponents of Fielding and therefore outrageous about anything he chanced to write? One cannot tell. But it is clear enough that oeoee path as a novelist was from the first a thorny one. Richardson’s journey up the hill of fame was compara- tively untroubled: a jibing pamphlet, now and then, was di- rected at his books; but the man himself escaped, for he never engaged in any dramatic, journalistic, or political controver- sies; and in his role as moralist he never disturbed the conven- tional ideas of his formal and self-complacent age.\ How 48 4 Series of Letters, I, 23-24. eer" rere iyre Loe eres eee ee ete Ws. “ore ree Wintta4 , « m, ayenOiop~ Sie ee era nets Co aati 3 one aed oro SR Parr mer Sees ai ree ot pt i « + <4)-) vr os Tr ne on = 4nd, ry ee + herr rary a hteonan les seehacmsyotren ee: : if rf L f ‘ rate rh by PLY 2 raat i z at to ! ek - ” O49 ah Kyo eee tht thee Ee - SEA 3q het) mec toe een a hdibeet Peee eee fae tana <> = rece eC CE : ~ . ereahaeneraheiarunnee: keateeetbn as ro eateneent hee eee rr Sot wr Wet taer tebe en reeewton worded - ‘ar ‘ reer es ad 20 FIELDING THE NOVELIST different from the very beginning was the life of Fielding— Fielding the Dramatic Censor of the Social and Political Evils of his time, the Destroyer of Rant and Bombast and Sickly Sentimentality in play and novel, the Hercules Vinegar who did battle with the legions of Grub Street! A good share of contemporary misinterpretation and abuse of Joseph Andrews can be attributed to the efforts of Fielding’s personal, dra- matic, journalistic, and political enemies, who used every con- ceivable means to diminish not merely his fame as an author but his reputation as a man as well. The injurious treatment which had been accorded Fielding by his libelous antagonists provoked him in the preface to the Miscellanies (1743) to cry out against the scandalous pam- phlets and other productions which had been fathered upon him. “I look on the practice of stabbing a Man’s Character in the Dark.” he writes, “‘to be as base and as barbarous as that of stabbing him with a Poignard in the same manner.” This pro- test was. however, of no avail. And as the attacks upon him continued he took occasion in the preface which he furnished to the second edition of his sister’s David Simple (1744) to denounce his “good Friends the Critics” who had endeavored to fasten upon him “half the Scurrility, Bawdy, Treason and Blasphemy, which these few last Years have produced.” ‘Three years later, in her Familiar Letters, Fielding’s sister Sarah her- self exclaimed against the indignities which were continually being heaped upon her brother. Apropos of several letters of his contributed to her volume she writes: “The following five letters were given me by the Author of the Preface. I should have thought this Hint unnecessary, had not much Nonsense and Scurrility been unjustly imputed to him by the Good- Judgment or Good-nature of the Age. They can know but little of his Writings, who want to have them pointed out; but they know much less of him, who impute any such base 3349 and scandalous Productions to his Pen. By the following year, things had come to such a pass that in one of the numbers 49 7 Familiar Letters, London, 1747, II, 294. TEETSET ITT ARTE ZG EAE 074 Fos Ob Cae tee sea ale ies es ital eee tesa tate Cae Sees Pe ses el ere hol beet aay ds apa tare t oboe Te SC ee elt oe 12a eens esRECEPTION OF JOSEPH ANDREWS 21 of his Jacobite’s Journal Fielding remonstrated even more vig- orously. His enemies, he asserts, have “‘attempted to blacken” his character “with every kind of Reproach,” pursuing “me into private Life, even to my boyish Years; where they have given me almost every Vice in Human Nature. Again they have followed me with uncommon Inveteracy into a Profes- sion in which they have very roundly asserted that I have neither Business nor Knowledge: And lastly, as an Author they have affected to treat me with more Contempt than Mr. Pope, who hath great Merit and no less Pride in the Character of a Writer hath thought proper to bestow on the lowest Scrib- bler of his Time.”’ In short, “‘before my paper [2.e., The Jacobites Journal| hath reached the 20th number a heavier load of Scandal hath been cast upon me than I believe ever fell to the Share of a Single Man.”®” The story of these attacks upon Fielding, which were mainly instigated by political opposition, has been told more than once; it is unnecessary to recapitulate the items here. As Lawrence declared, long ago (1855): “Party feeling at this time ran high, and private character was savagely calumniated by some of the creatures who contributed to the newspapers. Fielding appears to have been attacked with a peculiar malig- nity. His assailants exhausted the vocabulary of scurrility, and indulged in the most wanton personalities.” “The follies and irregularities of his life were absurdly magnified. He was taunted with his poverty; accused of corrupt motives; and as- sailed with personal insults of the grossest character _ his enemies, instead of engaging in a fair controversy with him, collected together all the scandalous tales that had ever been circulated about him, and lampooned him without mercy.””* Inasmuch as nothing that Fielding had ever written was free from the shafts of his sleepless antagonists, Joseph An- drews came in for its share of abuse at the hands of the jour- 50 Godden, Miss G. M., Henry Fielding, London, 1910, pp. 168-169. 51 Lawrence, F., The Life of Henry Fielding, London, 1855, pp. 225-226. 5 oe re oye Dey ee a eee enaee ot oe * twp hct ras >t caetnenesnoreemeeasialgtacst - ene * abs er fi; i Ht ey ies 5m | ef f F wi one a9 peeve eae aoe * : em han ee eta ae me eee mere ae es eibenemere ei Tee an eer iS ae es osa eeeee ere Fete suse tate SS 22 FIELDING THE NOVELIST nalists and pamphleteers. Sometimes, as in the case of a pam- phlet called The Patriot Analized (1748), the attack took the form of an ironical compliment. “Don’t you think,” asks the writer, that “the Pen that writ Pasquin, Joseph Andrews, and the Champion, could have answered the Apology [z.e., the spurious pamphlet entitled Winnington’s A pology|, if he had had the Will?” More commonly, however, Fielding’s assail- ants preferred the bludgeon to the rapier. Here is a sample from the periodical press. In Old England, March 5, 1748, “Porcupine Pelagius” makes Fielding give the following ac- count of his career: “Hunted after Fortune, and lived on Kept-Mistresses for a while; scored deep at the Taverns, borrow’d Money of my Landlords and their Drawers; abused my Benefactors in the Administration of public Affairs, of religious Dispen- sations, of Justice, and of the Stage ; hackney’d for Booksellers and News-Papers; lampoon’d the Virtuous, wrote the Adven- tures of Footmen, and the Lives of Thief-Catchers; crampt the Stage, debased the Press, and brought it into Jeopardy; bilk’d every Lodging for ‘Ten Years together, and every Ale- house and Chandler’s Shop in every Neighbourhood; De- frauded and revil’d all my Acquaintance, and being quite out of Cash, Credit and Character, as well as out of Charity with all Mankind, haunted by Duns | [and] Bumbailiffs, hollow’d, hooted at and chased from every Side and by every Voice... ihis tirade, too good to pass by, was reported at some length in The Gentleman’s Magazine.’* By the “Adventures of Footmen” and the “Lives of Thief-Catchers,’ Porcupine Pelagius meant, of course, Joseph Andrews and Jonathan Wild. Even Parson Adams did not escape; by means of this “dry unnatural character” Fielding “‘ridicul’d,” it was said, “all the inferior clergy.” More vituperation of this sort may be gathered not only 62 Old England, March 5, 1748, pp. 1-2. °8 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XVIII, 129 (March, 1748). ~ — a sa mene ee te pee ee ee poser ier tad tot See, eo eee etn SO . Sutietq te io" 5 ae raed tap i tary oe ‘ ; a ’ a a = aRECEPTION OF JOSEPH ANDREWS 23 from Old England but from The London Evening Post, both periodicals harping upon the “lowness” of Joseph Andrews, the Low Humour, like his own, he [ Fielding] once exprest, In Footman, Country Wench, and Country Priest.>4 But enough has been given for the present purpose. The con- stant representation of Fielding as a foe to virtue, a scoffer at the clergy, and a dissolute painter of low life undoubtedly served to debase him in the estimation not merely of his ene- mies but of many persons not otherwise ill-disposed. At a time when realism in fiction was apt to be regarded as “low,” the continued abuse of the novelist in the newspapers, reverberated in The Gentleman’s Magazine and The London Magazine, was unquestionably influential in obscuring to Fielding’s con- temporaries the great achievement and promise that we now recognize in Joseph Andrews and in Jonathan Wild. “There is no evidence,” writes Miss Godden, that Fielding’s “‘auda- cious innovation, his splendid adventure in literature, Joseph Andrews, really revealed the existence of a new genius in their midst to the Whigs and Tories of those factious days, to the gay frequenters of the play-house, to the barristers at West- minster Hall and on the Western Circuit. In 1748 Fielding must have been, to his many audiences, a witty and well-born man of letters who, at forty-one, had as yet achieved no tow- ering success; a facile dramatist; and a master of slashing political invective, growing perplexingly impartial, alike in his praise and his condemnation. While, as regards outward cir- cumstances, the struggling barrister, baffled in his professional hopes by persistent attacks of gout, was now so far enlisted, to use his own fine image, under the black banner of poverty, that even the small post and hard duties of a Bow Street mag- istrate were worth his acceptance.””” To conclude this chapter, it may be said in general that Joseph Andrews had considerably enhanced Fielding’s reputa- tion as a writer; and, in particular, that the character of Par- 54 The London Evening-Post, No. 3236 (July 28-July 30, 1748). 55 Miss Godden’s Fielding, pp. 174-17 Ww Se oan ne ee foton Ee ee ee frre ta pe ttre ee cmrenwene seat a! eae ciedieen Se rrr eae rye a a eee yi ee eer} ‘hikiavietet rasa Pe etek “ — ane = ‘s, 4 Tt we r &. Fs : i - Bs ak ue Cee = — a? pareve - Po NE ee ones 4 ere eye terre rr tr ea ne yea ere ey ON Doren ee en eatLT eeTat arte Peete Ped eat ita 24 FIELDING THE NOVELIST son Adams had securely niched itself in the popular mind. As has been seen, Fielding’s first novel must have enjoyed from the beginning a good measure of popularity. The number and size of the editions, the almost immediate translation into French, the piratical attempt upon it and the solicitude for the rescue of Parson Adams expressed by such a man as Sir Dudley Ryder—these facts are indisputable evidence of public favor. On the other hand, biographers have always found it difficult to produce very many eulogistic references to the novel by those who were admittedly competent in literature. It need not be repeated that a critic like Gray, who hurried away from the perusal of Joseph Andrews to enjoy the paradise of Mari- vaux and Crébillon, can hardly be claimed (despite the efforts of several writers to do so) as a notable admirer of Fielding’s. Furthermore, though Shenstone specifically tells us that some “few” people like the book, none of these were such as he ever esteemed “‘tasters.”’ It is true that neither Shenstone nor Gray was really fitted by nature to enjoy Joseph Andrews; but, if we may believe Miss Carter, misinterpretation of the novel passed beyond the mere apathy of a pair of somewhat fastidi- ous poets to such downright and perverse abuse that she felt called upon to exclaim against it. Significantly enough, the form in which Miss Carter’s own tribute appears is that of a defense against current misunderstanding and vituperation. In the seven years between Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones the bitter attacks of many enemies—political, journalistic, and personal—were, no doubt, injurious to Fielding’s fame. On this account his outspoken castigation of the evils of his time was, apparently, either little noted or, indeed, strangely per- verted. Again, the luster of his innovation in the way of real- ism was perceptibly obscured by the new vogue of sentimental fiction and by the fact that Joseph Andrews was a confessed parody upon a book which, purporting to exhibit ‘Virtue Re- warded,” had received the plaudits of the clergy themselves. Fae etal tater tee ean te . : ae Le ese " “4 Truth to say, Joseph Andrews was something of a hybrid, and the parody part undoubtedly caused many a reader to over- TUTROIIS TeRECEPTION OF JOSEPH ANDREWS 25 look the serious purpose of the whole and to pronounce the novel merely “diverting.” Here is the opinion of the Chevalier Ramsay, in a letter dated September 1, 1742: “I have read the first book of “The History of Joseph Andrews,’ but don’t believe I shall be able to finish the first volume. Dull burlesque is still more insup- portable than dull morality. Perhaps my not understanding the language of low life in an English style is the reason of my disgust ; but I am afraid your Britannic wit is at as low an ebb as the French.”*® This letter is significant of the taste of the time on both sides of the water. To many others beside the author of the Travels of Cyrus, Fielding’s underlying ironic purpose was either unperceived or ignored by those whose chief delight was in the elegant. The silence of literary persons of the age can hardly be mis- interpreted. Pope, Walpole, Young, Chesterfield, Aaron Hill, Warburton—all of whom testify to the triumph of Pamela— yield us little or nothing regarding Joseph Andrews. As will be noted in succeeding chapters, there came a time when the book was frequently regarded as the equal or the superior of Tom Jones. But in the period before the appearance of Field- ing’s great Epic of Human Nature historians of Fielding’s life and fame have always found it difficult in the case of Joseph Andrews to discover (notwithstanding the large number of copies sold) anything like the chorus of praise by eminent lit- erary persons that was bestowed upon the novel which it de- servedly parodied. 56 Tite and Correspondence of David Hume, by John Hill Burton, Edinburgh, 1846, I, 12 note. pet <7 a ee ee e« . ~ ne 9) ~ 40 ee rt ape eeijanks See ead oftehn, ip 7 etn Pe arene ve 5 eer eres Sere are Se eet at St eee ; ey - ni weer Witt Hose ah in! oe m Pet ied bed Se te ee eed ee ek enna’ eS nee = ae aire tenants hentai eec ers nny Pr =| ae. ba ves ee) pose ein} - ee Sas nha. ree biary9 we ne pentose SO letra Wm ee My oe 7 rece . & Mase ae ee 'CHAPTER II Tom “fones: The Riddle of Its Vogue 1749-1751 I T has occasioned some surprise that_T’om Jones, Fielding's second and supreme achievement in the way of pure _fic- of Joseph An- drews, appear in its completed state until February, 1749, tion, did not, in spite of the flattering sa et , C seven years after the advent of Parson Adams. But during the early part of this period, while Fielding was addressing him- self manfully to the practice of law, the reputation of being a writer of fiction seemed to him for the time being a danger- ous one. Testimony to this effect we have from his own pen: in the preface which he contributed to the second edition of his sister’s David Simple (1744) he felt it necessary to state that he was not the author of that novel (which had appeared anonymously ) not only on his sister’s account but on his own. He was afraid, he said, that to continue to be known as a fiction-writer would “injure, him in his “Profession” as a lawyer. Nor was his fear unwarranted when we consider the added scurrility and abuse that Joseph Andrews—in which his enemies pretended to find an attack upon the legal profession —had drawn down upon him. When, therefore, in 1744, Fielding declared that he had neither the “Leisure” nor the “‘Tnclination”’ to write such a work of fiction, we have no rea- son to question his sincerity. Not more than two years later, however, according to his most recent biographer, Fielding was working at his magnum opus, Tom Jones, upon the com- position of which, as he afterwards asserted, he had spent some “thousands of hours.”* Just why’ Fielding turned again to 1 «The novel, I take it, was begun as early as the summer of 1746,” during the interval of leisure “between the discontinuance of ‘The True Patriot’ in June, 1746, and the establishment of ‘The Jacobite’s Journal’ in December, 1747.” Cross’s Fielding, II, 100. * As M. Digeon suggests, Fielding may have been spurred on by the ee ae irate hy = ee Nabe Sichabe te T-'—ekphy tein? rest ans Weer at ee 3 ‘t ae . H * g : t r a _ Ca pe os ee . TOLCALTS VIG S ta {hb teed Sata Tass giv te le eat Fee Te rat are te TUE TEST Ce Serle ee Tee TS Ce ee at ek ests Cee SE POS ASS ates Pera ete Orbe fe Leto Le Pie OE OLAS ae ee es oTHE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 27 fiction-writing we do not know; but in the “‘Dedication” of his novel to Lyttelton he states that, several years before, his patron had urged him to attempt an extended work of that comic-epic variety the rules for which he had laid down in the initial chapters of Joseph Andrews. “To you, Sir,” he writes, “it is owing that this history was ever begun. It was by your desire that I first thought of such a composition. So many years have since past, that you may have, perhaps, forgotten this circumstance: but your desires are to me in the nature of commands; and the impression of them is never to be erased from my memory.” And then Fielding goes on to say that without. Lyttelton’s “‘assistance,” and, he implies, that of «< Ralph Allen also, this “history,” wherein he had “endeavoured to laugh mankind out of their favourite follies and vices,” would never have been “completed.” Joseph Andrews, as has been said, appeared anonymously, without, so far as we know, the patronage of any of Field- ing’s influential friends. Very different was the début of T’omm Jones. Not only was it furnished with a splendid dedication to Lyttelton, which, as the author confesses, had “run into a preface,” but it was approved and heralded by his patron long before its actual appearance. Fielding himself is witness to this fact: “You have commended the book so warmly,” he declares, that you should not “be ashamed of reading your name before the dedication.” Apropos of Lyttelton’s commendations a story has long been current to the effect that before Tom Jones was published the manuscript was read aloud to a number of dis- tinguished persons who were being entertained at Radway Grange in Warwickshire. ‘‘ ‘Lord Chatham and Lord Lyttel- ton,” wrote (in 1907) the Rev. George Miller (great- grandson of Sanderson Miller, the architect), “ “came to Rad- way to visit my ancestor, when Lord Chatham planted three trees to commemorate the visit, and a stone urn was placed be- tween them. Fielding was also of the party and read “Tom knowledge that Richardson was at work on Clarissa-—Les Romans de Fielding, Paris, 1923, p. 164. But we cannot—with M. Digeon—regard Tom Jones as an answer to Clarissa. eT bP BD 2G Ahayes meopninye. ‘ng athe 1 re Be ape a embetter te ben pene tr iB An r #\ me a Pa Sh biter een tte eet heeetan ha eee ¥ or — eer prerenees ch ; 7 Pe al re Hh Te “a rf is real es 9 Rte os ea ea a! 5 rm Po oa eso a FY ane errno ees Se oa ha nd ay end ae ne Se es ArsL/PLRL SSPE STIS Se eee ‘emer 28 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Jones” in manuscript after dinner for the opinion of his hear- ers before publishing it.’ ue Thus runs this charming story. It is somewhat surprising that in the published work of neither Lyttelton nor of the elder Pitt do we find apparently any reference to Fielding’s great novel. But it is clear that Lyttelton and Pitt as well were so enthusiastic about J'om Jones that they used their best en- deavors among their acquaintances to arouse an interest in it and thereby insure its success. So strenuous were their efforts in Fielding’s behalf that several months after the appearance of the book both Lyttelton and Pitt on account of their zeal came in for a terrible tongue-lashing in the scurrilous columns of Old England, the principal organ of their political oppo- nents. Professor Cross* has called attention to the following paragraphs addressed to Lyttelton in the issue of May 27, 1749: “Not only the Dedication [of Tom Jones|, but common Fame is full of the warm Commendations you have given of the afore-mentioned Romance. You have run up and down the Town. and made Visits, and wrote Letters merely for that Purpose. You puffed it up so successfully about Court, and among Placemen and Pensioners, that, having catched it from you, they thought it incumbent upon them to echo it about the Coffee houses; insomuch, that all the Women laboured under the Burthen of Expectation, till it was midwived into the World by your all-auspicious Hand, and proclaimed by them to be the goodest Book that was ever read. “While it was yet in Embrio, or rather, after it was licked up into Wit and Humour, and dished finely up in Lavender, your Zanies puffed and blew it up so into Fame, among his old Masters the Booksellers, that they begun to lament their Want of Discernment touching the Value of the precious Jewel, which, like the Cock in the Fable, they had despised and cast away on the very Dunghill they found it in. But, by the Care 8 Godden, Miss G. M., Henry Fielding, p. 179; and George Harris’s Life of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, London, 1847, Il, 456-457. 4 Cross’s Fielding, Il, 114-115. FULT IH VT ee ae er oe eae OeTHE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 29 of yourself and Brother Deserter, Two of the best and worthi- est who are strongly and zealously his Friends, (yclept the Poet and the Orator! ) he has been so improved and polished, as to exhibit finer Lustres than ever blazed from the great Diamond, which founded the Family of one of his said IT'wo best and worthiest Friends. Lo! the Effects of the Public Treasury and Pay-Office!”” By “the Orator” was meant, of course, William Pitt, Paymaster-General of the Forces, whose grandfather sold the famous “great Diamond” to Louis XV. After this fashion were the efforts of Lyttelton and his “Brother Deserter,’ William Pitt, held up to ridicule by their political enemies. What principally concerns us is the assiduity in Fielding’s behalf which Old England charges against Lyttelton. It has always been known from Fielding’s own statement in the ‘‘Dedication” that his patron recommended Tom Jones to friends before the novel actually appeared; but none of Fielding’s biographers has, I think, made use of the following interesting letters which are found in The Orrery Papers. From them we learn on the excellent authority of the Rev. Thomas Birch, the eminent historian and biographer, that Lyttelton was commending Tom Jones to his acquaint- ances as early as January, 1748, five months before the assign- ment of the novel to Millar (June 11, 1748) and over a year before it was placed on sale. We also learn on the best au- thority—for Birch, though dull, was a trustworthy reporter— something that has before been merely conjecture—namely, what features of the novel Lyttelton regarded as most admir- able. In the first of these letters, dated “January 19, 1747- 1748,” Birch, who was supplying the Earl of Orrery with literary news, informs his noble correspondent that “Mr. Fielding is printing three volumes of Adventures under the title of The Foundling. Mr. Littleton, who has read the manuscript, commends the performance to me as an excellent one, and abounding with strong and lively painting of charac- ters, and a very copious and happy invention in the conduct of ) ore — n aie ee eT Be De hel + r a i 5. :. 5 ee i oy at psf "e 4 ty) ry ar Hf n Paty i ras ah . i rh act pi + eh) eat oh at at re "i ene P= bepet PE Se weber tetas eninge speeeeteenipnee © — eone panne am hesteey nega ee wae! et aaa ay erat rin gent areas ~ rom wae ret ee aan a 4 fee pone faTOTe le heh Cate be ie VE. 30 FIELDING THE NOVELIST the story.”° Here we have that specific commendation of the plot and characterization of Jom Jones 5 which one looks for in vain in the published works of Fielding’s patron. The sec- ond letter from Birch to the Earl of Orrery is d: ited Septem- ber 30, 1748. “Mr. Richardson’s Sequel to Clarissa is in the press,” he writes, “‘and will be compleated about the middle of November; and Mr. Fielding’s novel c: illed the Foundlin will be published about the same time. His Bookseller had so 02 great expectations from it that cave him £600 for the Copy; and Mr Littleton, who has read part of it in manu- script, speaks of it in terms of hi sh approbation.”® Presumably Birch had again been talking with Lyttelton, who was more enthusiastic about J'om Jones ne ever. The third letter, dated December 20, pias: runs as follows: “Mr. Fielding’s novel, called the Foundling, in 6 Volumes, was expected be- fore ae time, but will not be published before the middle, or perhaps end, of next month. Humour is the chief characteristic of it, though I am told by my friends, who have seen it, that it is not destitute of the instructive and pathetic.”’ From this letter we have additional confirmation of the fact already known, that, in one form or another, some of the volumes of Tom Jones were privately circulated before the actual appear- ance of the entire work. By the middle of December, Birch, who kept in touch with many of the notable persons of his day, was already hearing about the merits of the novel from others beside Lyttelton. One of those who were privileged to read Fiel ding’s book in part before all six volumes were pub lished was Lady Hert- ford, afterwards Duchess of Somerset. “I have been very well entertained lately,” she wrote Lord Bolingbroke’s sister, Lady Luxborough, November 20, Bee “with the two first Vol- umes of the Foundling, written by Mr. FIELDING, but not to be published till the 229 of January; if the same Spirit runs through the whole Work, I think it will be much preferable 5 The Orrery Papers, London, 1903, II, 14. Eilbtas. Ls tas. 7 Tbid., Il, 49. Sash meee he ieeees relad nisl Se ene pa 3 st Sone ~ a id tei ne aie Te 6 et - - | a ft | re i er ns i AS gyTHE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 31 to JOSEPH ANDREWS.”® Professor Cross has surmised that the volumes which Lady Hertford read were advance copies; and Birch’s statement about the opinions of his “friends,” who “have seen” the novel, supports the conjecture. Thanks to the influence of Lyttelton and his acquaintances, therefore, excellent preparations were thus made for the suc- cessful appearance of T'om Jones. “I remember I heard so much in T’om Jones’s praise,” declared Lady Luxborough afterwards, “‘that when I read him, I hated him.”® Moreover, interest in the forthcoming novel was the keener because of the circumstance that in the summer of 1748*° Fielding had been awarded the important office of Justice of the Peace for Westminster. This appointment, of course, served to increase the virulence of Fielding’s enemies, whose abuse now grew more violent than ever before. Old England, which had kept up a flow of Billingsgate during 1748*’—attacking the novel- ist as a Turncoat, an Obscene Writer, a Press-Informer, a Hireling of “Paymaster” Lyttelton, and what not—took es- pecial delight throughout 1749 and thereafter in representing the Bow Street magistrate as an utterly corrupt “Trading Jus- tice.” The following doggerel from the issue of January 7 /? 1749, will serve for a sample: Now in the ancient shop at Bow (He advertises it for show) He signs the missive Warrant The midnight Wh-—re and Thief to catch He sends the Constable and Watch Expert upon the errand. 8 Thomas Hull’s Select Letters between the late Duchess of Somerset, Lady Luxborough, and Others, London, 1778, I, 85. ® Lady Luxborough’s Letters to Shenstone 369 (Letter CIII, December 21, 1753). 10Ihen<‘fiaty 1s) dated July 30; 1 ceived his “commission”; and by December he was performing his duties London, 1775, Pp. ) 748; on October 25 Fielding re- as a magistrate. 11 See, for example, the following dates: April 23, July 9, and August 27. ; a —— a es ot orate aaa arene Aste eapes eee Py ree eee aver re nwa APmt igen reece enena rere ieee we ot arte rere ee ea ers aad En ae ~~ rr’ - Par See ho ee leepiteeeteeiete tated etek taken tel ¥ Cg ee el otras s oy reg ar he a tbe ft) f pF | ea, aT eM FF at it ee _oe ee Want etemeneemitedarveten sta esrer ezeeiedes cr te Votes s (AEs STE LE PRR a em ra bated sn ded al te one ee MP ae Reams pr eee RE aL eT at Sn Dorctadeee ead ae eae anger tr Aiekblb saya Mgs...gk pupweOonioceeoen owiol pe ws ; a Na A ea en 71 He yoo ra as Erotves + tite FIELDING THE NOVELIST From hence he comfortably draws Subsistence out of every cause For dinner and a bottle. God shield old Argus from his shop Lest he should fairly truss him up y 4 At Clerkenwell or Tottle. Who would be righted of his wrong To woB Street let him come along His Worship there is willing To cut and shuffle forth the laws With nostrils snuff’d and Bacco jaws And take your solid shilling. Long before Tom Jones was published, “Old Argus” had got wind of what Fielding was doing and had begun his attack. As early as September 5, 1748, we find a ““communication”’ to the editor of Old England which reads: “You have detected his [Fielding’s] Ignorance in Grammar, his false English and his Meanness of Language. You have also shown his unacquaintance with Law tho’ he boasts so loud of his knowledge that way and of his being brought to bed soon of a Law-Book which is to be published at the same time with six volumes of his novels spick and span new fronted with special dedications. An odd sort of Author this, a kind of Jack of all Trades and would-be Humorist, a Farce maker, a Journal Scribbler and Mock Lawyer, a Novel Framer.” Meanwhile, Joseph Andrews and Jonathan Wild were not forgotten. On November 12, 1748, Old England endeavored to turn the legal profession against their fellow member by charging that in Joseph Andrews Fielding had abused in par- the Gentlemen of our Inns of Court,’ whom he the very Affectation of Affectation.””*” “But what could you expect,” asks the journalist, “from a per- ticular ‘‘ “brands with being son who set out so meanly with Merry-Andrew Tricks and Pickleherring wit, and ever noted for vulgarisms and homeli- 12 Joseph Andrews, Book III, chapter iii. PAVE FE PE Pa COT STS PEN Ee eee Tae Tea ete ye eae SPP sT a Eek Ot. rf -THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 33 ness of Expressions in every scene of life? Who even in his own boasted way of Humour is at best low, imperfect and dwindling into wretched Buffoonery and Farce. . . . The outcast of the Playhouse, the Refuse of the Booksellers, the Jest of Authors and the Contempt of every ingenious reader.” A fortnight later (November 26, 1748), on the occasion of the discontinuance of The Jacobite’s Journal, not only Joseph Andrews but Jonathan Wild as well was befouled in that oft- quoted doggerel epitaph which runs: j Beneath this stone Lies Trotplaid John His length of chin and nose His crazy brain Unhum’ rous vein In verse and eke in prose. Some plays he wrote Sans wit or plot Adventures of inferiors?* Which with his Lives** Of Rogues and Thieves ‘The remaining seven lines, which rake the jakes of nastiness, theless, both in The Gentleman’s Magazine and in The Lon- don Magazine, the two chief periodicals of the day; and this are now unprintable. They were diligently reproduced, never- unsavory lampoon—which everybody read—turned the laugh not only on Fielding and his unfortunate periodical but also upon two excellent works of fiction. During the course of the attack on Fielding as a “Trading J.st.ce” in the Old England of January 7, 1749 (from which a quotation has already been given) the vigilant ‘““Argus”’ again fell foul of Jonathan Wild and again warned his readers of what they might expect in To: Jones. “A spice of Humour run up” into buffoonery ‘“‘interspersed” through Fielding’s 13 The allusions are to T/e Adventures of Joseph Andrews and The Life of Jonathan Wild. ae od a 3 oe uiieiatatieiehaeaaitee > es Fe Ce ary eee am rr PTET EY <7ta@ pata gba baie beets tort Fe ee ene nanensr en tet 2) po wer par raeaerrs Boys st poem, “ee . pe beet ee tt pee a aterm ee beet ele Co, a ae er pare ee Petr ehetenlt ttt PTOI ir Bayne 455 te eee eae pena ee ee nn cami \ pedal namie eenge r ere + 7 ae as | F . a) i % att is i a z a 4 A ; rh “13; zi i fi ’ 4: “7 i ear Teer, nen eee er eee eee ret ~* Se teed ete ae ts rT ee 4 reer iy a eee TT ie Capek pe Ove mer pv ry rere aie Myatetes pe FIELDING THE NOVELIST has ‘‘denoted him well qualified to fill up W.rr.nts. Nor was a knack of Old Baily Biography accounted in the least to fall short of it especially if the Author . . . hada nning out a nov el on a Foundling story to six 34 >) “7 orks good hand at sp! volumes.” Abuse of Fielding’s nov els, as well as of their au- 1 of everything connected with him, ran riot in the col umns of his enemies. It could hardly fail of having an injuri- ous effect upon his reputation as a novelist, not only among thor anc those who were antagonistic or indifferent, but also among those who were in general sufficiently well dis sposed. Constant iteration of the charge that Joseph Andrews and Jonathan Wild were mere “Buffoonery” and “Old Baily Biogr aphy” must have kept many of his contemporaries from rating those admirable fictions at their true value; and the contemptuous references to the forthcoming Tom Jones were unquestion- ably prejudicial to an unbiased estimate—presumably this work also would consist of “low” scenes, “discouraging to Virtue and detrimental to Religion.” IT In spite of Fielding’s antagonists, however, there can be no doubt of the immediate literary excitement caused by Tom Jones when, after so many delays, it finally appeared (in Feb- ruary, 1749). Within the interval of two years which elapsed between its publication and that of Amelia (1751) the popu- larity of Fielding’s masterpiece is attested by unimpeachable -vidence, not the least important of which 1s furnished by his many and bitter enemies. A book may be popular, of course without being justly assessed or generally commended by the majority of those who are considered competent in literature; but no one can question the fact that Tom Jones had a “‘vast run” in England, nor, despite Richardson’s statement to the contrary, that its popularity during the period of two years Seer tateadr pelepeeatnen a eke eet et which we are now investigating continued to increase. It is true that the abuse which had previously been visited upon Fielding by his political antagonists was kept up with unabated Seeeetod resins ped bed eee . s mt si - rated eeteanarahdaamemas tela nee 7" Gidea fel hehe tetee. ere oe =~ palate SS heniehe Pe bepet ete ri reer eet Se eres anne THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 35 vigor after the publication of Tom Jones, and that it broke ° en forth with especial violence and scurrility after the publication Td ene ee en is Take he pe of Amelia. Moreover, following the appearance of Tom ane io =? Jones their onslaughts were supplemented by the untiring ef- forts of the jealous Richardson and his numerous adherents. But a marked difference is to be observed between the attacks upon Tom Jones and those which were aimed at Joseph An- drews or Amelia; Fielding’s enemies, who only turned up their noses at Joseph Andrews and who ridiculed Amelia as a failure, were_practically unanimous in_ admitting the vogue_of Tom Jones. As we trace the fortunes of this novel in the years immedi- ately following its publication, we are amazed at the amount, the variety, and the persistency of antagonism directed at its author. None of the great English novelists has ever been so savagely and so continuously manhandled—Fielding’s success #) may.) 044 , fi LFF aap ryeyer de pa pope itr et bs was a bitter draught for his truculent assailants. There can be no question about the immediate popular interest in his book: on February 28, 1749, Millar declared in his advertisement that it was “‘impossible to gets Sets bound fast enough to an- swer the Demand”; his patrons might “have them sew’d in Blue Papers and Boards.’’** Whether or not this statement (as in the case of Amelia) was a bookseller’s trick, the demand for Tom Jones was unquestionably great; before the end of the year 1749 there were as many as four London editions and one Dublin edition of the novel.” What report was made respectively by the two chief maga- zines of the age—The Gentleman’s Magazine and The Lon- don Magazine—concerning? the new production? The differ- ence is striking. In February, the month in which Tom Jones appeared, The London Magazine gave Fielding the place of honor by devoting to his novel,its four opening pages; while the February number of The Gentleman's Magazine, which contains a “Plan and Specimens” (and the “Epilogue” as are D ry ee eee eee eee eens i i eee ooh ea ea ‘- aoa i go ae $; : cea + ere ee teats ~ eS ee ee ner ed earn! “) hone 14 The General Advertiser, February 28, 1749. 15 Cross, II, 121-123; III, 316-317. ee er eo = ea inl * wre pga eran ee Sr Se re re a ee es eal eee eeEte Poor vt Oe ett pate tala esterase eet eedarune nes seeenaree! tad ~% ne om aE a = wh —erhe - aed - pnese tainithhata bette eee ae ea * 7 : wirtatele - ms ae er nN ee ’ / | f } i i — We Le be OP AE UE ALOT OF LSE aL 36 FIELDING THE NOVELIST well) of Johnson’s play /rene, carefully avoids—except for the mere title in the “Register” of new publications—all men- tion of Fielding’s book. Since the materials of The Gentle- nan’s Magazine were (according to a subsequent editor, John Nichols)?° as early as 1747 “frequently, if not constantly” superintended by Johnson (who was always pro-Richardson and anti-Fielding), the omission need not surprise us. The coldness of The Gentleman’s Magazine was counter- balanced, however, by the heartiness of the London, which did ‘ts best to launch T'om Jones appropriately. The suggestion has been made by Professor Cross that the review in question may have been prepared beforehand from an advance copy, and perhaps even arranged for by Pitt or by Lyttelton himself. This may well have been the case, for The London Magazine, owned by Thomas Astley, supported the party in power, and would therefore be friendly to the novelist; moreover, Tom Jones was not actually published until the last of February, the month in which the article appeared.*’ Whatever may have been the motive that inspired it and whoever wrote it, the ac- count in The London Magazine must have been most gratify- ing to Fielding; the “‘polite part of the Town,” and, for that matter, of the entire Kingdom could not escape hearing about a novel which was already giving the readers of the London “creat amusement, and, we hope Instruction.” ‘short abstract,” The main part of the review is devoted to a which is to “‘serve as an incitement” to those who “have not yet had the pleasure” of reading the book; and preceding and following the abstract are commendatory paragraphs of char- acterization. This “‘novel, or prose epick composition,” writes the critic, with his eye on Fielding’s preface, is (“calculated to recommend religion and virtue, to shew the bad consequences of indiscretion, and to set several kinds of vice in their most deformed and shocking light.” Like “all such good composi- tions,” it “consists of a principal history, and a great many 16 Nichols’s ‘““Prefatory Introduction” to the “General Index” of The Gentleman’s Magazine, London, 1821, III, xlii. A ‘Cross, II, 129-130. EPL TE LS MED See SERVE OM PE SE MDE OS Te POPOL eaters Lea Pe eee eae ae TESS SEE L OES ge CV Ee Sa eats Sere Ce Peat tre lee e-4 Oo eee Tee le |THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 37 episodes or incidents; all which arise naturally from the sub- ject, and contribute towards carrying on the chief plot or de- sign. Through the whole, the reader’s attention is always kept awake by some new surprizing accident, and his curiosity upon the stretch, to discover the effects of that accident, so that it is difficult to leave off before having read the whole.” In conclusion the writer says: “Thus ends this pretty novel, with a most just distribution of rewards and punishments, according to the merits of all the persons that had any considerable share in it.’ Not a word of adverse criticism is to be found in this review; its author’s only regret is that he has had to omit “many of the surprizing incidents” of the narrative, and that he cannot give “any of them in their beautiful dress.” While The London Magazine extended this cordial wel- come, the Gentleman’s maintained a frigid silence. But Fielding’s engaging novel was not to be put down; as the months went by, even surly Mr. Urban was compelled to ac- knowledge its existence. The involuntary recognition which is uncovered by a close examination of succeeding numbers of The Gentleman’s Magazine is excellent proof of the headway the book continued to make in the years 1749-1750. (The first notice which Mr. Urban deigned to take of TJ'om Jones appeared (March, 749) in the form of a footnote to an Extract from the Rev. Edward Cobden’s sermon on “‘A Persuasive to Chastity.” For a picture of the misery attendant upon vice the editor refers his readers to the “‘most lively and striking picture” furnished by Smollett’s Miss Williams in Roderick Random; and then adds: “‘Some strokes of this kind appear also in Tom Jones, and in Mrs. Philips’s Apology. . However, the loose images in these pieces perhaps incite to vice more strongly than the contrast figures alarm us into virtue.”*® One can imagine the smile of Mr. Urban’s editor as he put Fielding’s great work in the same category as the Apology of the notorious Mrs. Phillips! 18 The London Magazine, XVIII, 51-55 (February, 1749). 19 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XIX, 126 (March, 1749). ahors | &. rr reer) jana, at ree. Rein et ee ae * oer e Schiabtehedithadtathaihaniehie ioe Met re ~~ — ake ain - ees rey Spt y pepe eqen®ye4 AIR ese eer Me hk epee ee o-Ps iat 7 a ey rs | oe 3 bm Ct ¢ he Ar i ras ety — ‘ Bh a yt pe 3°34Ce es Se ee ee ee i ene wae esi . ree rh Nene o tod wt iateethdes dental ieee pmeedbivipeone rebebnind : i f ik. ieee ae "Ae reales eet a 38 FIELDING THE NOVELIST After this slap at the novelist, April, May, June, and July went by, and not a word about T'om Jones was permitted to efter the columns of The Gentleman’s Magazine. Meanwhile, Fielding’s book was becoming the talk of the town. Rave as he might in the columns of Old England against that motley “History of Bastardism, Fornication, and Adultery”; and pre- dict as he might that readers would turn from their “airy Banquet” of “Whip-Sillabub,” Old Argus the Hundred-Eyed was forced to admit that “the Public” had “greedily catched at it? and that it was already a “celebrated Production.”*® Finally, when (in August) The Gentleman's Magazine broke its long silence, it was to print an excerpt from the Old England of August 5, in which, during the course of an ex- tended tirade on Fielding as a Press-Informer, a Trading Justice, and even a Highwayman, the inveterate ‘‘Aretine” characterized Fielding’s hero as “that renowned bastard Tom Jones? As was to be expected, this attack on Fielding was given by Mr. Urban a generous amount of space; but even greater space was devoted to “A Critical Account of Clarissa Translated from the French,” which, overflowing the June number, occupied four more eulogistic pages in August— praise that the editor transcribes with great pleasure and hopes “our readers will share this pleasure with us.” Regarding Tom Jones, on the other hand, the editor himself maintains his usual taciturnity; but/somehow or other there appeared in the issue a tribute in verse addressed to Henry Fielding by a ” “On reading his inimitable certain ‘“Tho.[mas| Cawthorn, History of Tom Jones.” Indifferent though the lines are, they voice a genuine appreciation of Fielding’s realism: Long, thro’ the mimic scenes of motley life, Neglected Nature lost th’ unequal strife; When Genius spoke: Let Fielding take the pen! Life dropt her mask, and all manki lere-men.** 20 Old England, May 27, 1749. 21 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XIX, 366-367. 22 Thid., XIX, 245 (June, 1749). 28 Thid., XIX, 371 (August, 1749). CS UPRE OY DEAT DERE RE Cae Cet ee ee heheh bad Ee?THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 39 How this stowaway compliment managed to creep into the Poet’s Corner, nobody knows; possibly Mr. Urban was misled as to the identity of the author.) There was a Cawthorn— James, not ‘Thomas—the master of the Grammar School at ‘Tunbridge, who did enough in the poetic way to be included, a generation later, by Dr. Johnson among his Poets. One may imagine the perturbation of that good dominie when the news got around that he was the author of this tribute to Tom Jones. In October, Mr. Urban took pains to inform the public that the verses in question “were not written”~* by James the Schoolmaster. The laugh was now turned against Fielding himself, whose Grub Street enemies were not slow in making capital of the episode.”° On careful scrutiny, the September number of the Gentle- man’s reveals another reference in verse to Tom Jones. In a poem entitled ““The Patriot,” quoted from The Westminster Journal of August 19, the statement is made that Ev’n Allen might survive without romance. Lest his readers should miss the force of this compliment to the worthy Ralph Allen, the editor supplied the following note, “Supposed to be shadowed in the character of Allworthy, by the author of Tom Jones.””® then, Tom Jones had become so much talked of that an editor could not afford to crush out every reference to it. Thus, in the December number, a communication about altering the In less than a twelvemonth, Book of Common Prayer—a subject over which there was a heated discussion in 1749-1750—takes the shape of a debate in which, by the way, the ~ ‘ between Allworthy and Western,” Squire’s language retains its original flavor! Finally, in the emblematic frontispiece to the completed volume (1749), to 24 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XIX, 464. 25 4m Examen of the History of Tom Jones, London, 1750, p. 118 note. Though the title-page reads “1750,” the book was listed in De- cember, 1749 (Lond. Mag., p. 580; Gent. Mag., p. 576). 26 The Gentleman's Magazine, XIX, 422 (September, 1749). 27 Ibid., XIX, 547-550. bed ~- a OE Pte PE aes eS pr ere re ae Sette Poti eepeeeren ys rte mena eienneam Soha teetiet ed 4 Sh FRA me 9 Anema ee ger aaah eeheee a - ee. reer Sota pte —Re eee eee tae a 40 FIELDING THE NOVELIST use the words of Austin Dobson, who first called attention to the matter, Fielding’s novel “appears under Clarissa sharing with that work a possibly unintended proximity to a sprig of laurel stuck in a bottle of Nantes amongst a pile of the books of the year. By the winter of 1749-1750 the appellations ‘“Tom Jones” and “Sophia” had acquired something of that popularity which, in a subsequent age, was responsible for “Pickwick” cigars and other Pickwickian commodities. Lady Bradshaigh, Richard- son’s beloved “Incognita,” had heard so much of Fielding’s book that she was “‘fatigued”’ with the very name. She has lately “fallen into the company of several young ladies’’ who have “each a Tom Jones in some part of the world, for so they call their favourites”; and, in like manner, “the gentlemen have their Sophias.” A friend of hers told her he must show her “his Sophia, the sweetest creature in the world, and imme- diately produced a Dutch mastiff puppy.» The vogue of Tom Jones was now conceded by some of Fielding’s bitterest antagonists; in fact, so “much Notice’’ had “been taken of this Performance as an inimitable one,” that a certain “‘Orbilius” was impelled to prepare a counterblast over a hundred pages in length, the celebrated Examen of Tom Jones,’ one of the most singular productions imaginable. Among the various hostile “examens” of the day—and the genre was then popular—no other can excel in minuteness this lengthy broadside. Seriatim and in extensoj Orbilius points out the innumerable “faults” of Fielding’s “chaotic History,” which he declares is both immoral and irreligious; chapter by chapter, page by page, he damns—with the particularity of a medieval anathema—the incidents, the characters, the descrip- tions, the observations, and the style. Apropos of the number 28 Dobson’s Fielding, London, 1883, p. 136. 29 The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, IV, 280-281. This letter, undated, precedes another letter of hers of December 16, 1749. 80 4n Examen of the History of Tom Jones . . . Proper to be bound with the Foundling, London, 1750. r , co ee Pe Pee S|VAVA AYN EXAMEN Or THE HISTORY Orr Tom Jones, a Foundling. Parturiunt Montes: nafcetur ridiculus — Hor, The Produ& of his Toil and Sweating, A BastTarp of is own Begetting. Swirt. In TWO LETTERS to a Frienp. Pi per to, be bound with the Foundling. ET Ol IN 7D ORIN: Printed for W. Owen, near Temple-Bars M,DCC,L, — H bit ow. PB _ “2 > & te cae . erehepemenea,: rs een Coe ere es rer Ste eee Seer chiebtebatiediath niente aod . eras ad Site ee-sna>s mamenn=neaenane — aa rata tiehinie Lt ee eee baa rt tek bineentet ate eiieeamen neti’ rt ener es . - atte pe Pear oe ba ears > weet a pe t| in ; e t es ry Co ~_ come mores et ane heh PO, sa pne me et ee cra a ee bee as ree erent oe ae tt eres te Saat aM rebaar A aseyA . ce Soe vee aes at a SS ee ee Se es en ee Se eee a" ' a nN : ‘ n : 4 5 ee MPR ET tye ee nee Lr ary tA a) SSS ee eaTHE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 41 of inns which are described in TJ'om Jones, he includes the “following Epigram”’: Herodotus avd Thou, O Fielding! claim (Tho? Critics snarl) an equal Share of Fame. The NINE support his wondrous Mass of Glory: Thou equallst him in INNS—f not in STORY. Accusing Fielding of plagiarism, he cites the parallel between Partridge and Smollett’s Strap, who he supposes have “been lathered in the same basin.” The plot he characterizes as a tis- sue of “Inconsistency and Improbability”; Sophia is “‘trash”’; Jones is a “stinking Hero’’; and the novel as a whole is “‘our filthy Author’s” “fetid Foundling.” “Were not the prevailing Character of this Age Lewdness, Mr. F. would never have found readers enough in high life to take off his numerous Editions.” /Who could have gone to all this trouble?( No one knows for certain the name of Fielding’s assailant; but the individual best equipped for the task must have been someone connected with the abusive Old England, The author, as Pro- fessor Cross has observed, “‘repeated, sometimes quoting them, the blunders that ‘Aretine’ had discovered in “I’om Jones,’ advertised his ‘Examen’ in ‘Old England’ along with the satires of “Porcupinus Pelagius,’ and surely had the hundred eyes of ‘Argus Centoculi.’ ”** In the Old England of Decem- ber 9 the Examen was offered to the public as an exposé of “the bad morals, unnatural descriptions, inconsistencies, im- probabilities, impertinent shew of learning, and false preten- sions of wit, of that droll performance [ T'om Jones]. And, close upon the heels of this notice (December 16), “Argus Centoculi” pressed on with the editorial statement: “Tis whispered about, that [Fielding] is under a most sen- sible Mortification from an Examen into his Foundling, which has lately been published . . . unravelling all his acters, proving—them—weak, immoral, wicked, trifling and out of Nature.”~But the most significant-passage is the following, which furnishes an interesting corroboration—in low life— 81 Cross’s Fielding, II, 153-154. pen oreeete es ~~: wins Saree +R pe Se rere Vi ra Ser a ied es bein rr 9 eng op eb eietieeb teens pa Bt ert et yi beyes Fer aerirs =) yer “ ‘ — pe ty hens pny ee bei Dingri Agayai Bini whose : : Te Saneh pitebateetaadinthsiaieniaterk eine 5 ms yAoynae a eres ee err ~ eerie a egte rn oe oT — Ae reo wat Pa & 7 F oF if | rt <‘* aay ee | et ‘ “ ta +f 4 i a4 as ‘ed raat « a aye a Shy Sead ey a ee es Peet toe Ore tee eet ee ben - ne Spee pre eeeen) sreeee tr hret ronal) ae emia esPer Sesser Peres eS secrets EST SLC LSS FATS Lh Ti ta oe LC 42 FIELDING THE NOVELIST of Lady Brad: lshaigh’s testimony oe ee the vogue of Field- ing’s book. The Examen, predicts Old Argus, will render this popular novel so Seat aneb sle that the girls of easy virtue “will hardly for the future be so very fond of calling their Pen- sioners by the name of Tom Jones, nor the Fribbles their Har- lots t dy that of So phia.’ Argus of the Hund red Eyes was, however, a better detec- ees Tk a eel arias ay ee Se 3332 tive than he was a prophet—if we may believe the author of the “Considerable Additions” to the “Second E dition” of the celebrated Apology for the Life of Mr. Bampfylde-Moore Carew. In an address to the reader, dated “February 10, 1750,” Mr. Thomas Jones 1s characterized as “‘that most re- nowned and shining Character of the Age,” whose “History” is in “every Hand, from the beardless Youth up to the Hoary Hairs of Age.” Not that the “historiographer,” as he called himself, was one of Fielding’s eulogists—far from it; for though in his “‘Additions” to the Apology he was obviously trading upon that writer’s fame, he made them, at the same time, the vehicle of abuse. After a hostile preface addressed “To the Worshipful Henry Fielding,” in which he parodied the dedication of Tom Jones, ridiculed its author’s “strange Metamorphosis” into a justice of the peace, accused him of borrowing witticisms from the Cambridge Jest Book, and made game of the manner in which he had “‘so delicately ragoo’d, hash’d, and fore’d Human Nature,” the historiogra- pher proceeded—by making alterations in the body of the Stole work out at length an impudent “parallel” between Fielding’s hero and Carew, King of the Vagabonds; and, as a final stroke of insolence, appended to the whole a scurrilous 9 . . . 82 By the well-disposed Monthly Review the abusive Examen was not allowed to go unchallenged. Admitting that the “anonymous” pam- phleteer, whose chief “talent” is “scurrility,” has pointed out “some real faults in the Foundling,” he insists that these imperfections in a cc nn ecraateen yates se work “chiefly calculated for entertainment,” wherein “so many beauties are continually flowing,” are “beneath the notice” of anyone; and de- clares that the contemptuous would-be critic “has nothing of the gentle- man about him.”—The Monthly Review, II, 93 (December, 1749). Saesetr eter taleieresteen tee pn Rr MY meyeyne? Ste araTHE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 4.3 resumé entitled “The full and true History of Tom Jones, a Foundling; without Pattering.” In edition after edition—for Lhe Apology, which really was interesting, continued to be exceptionally popular—the objectionable matter relating to Fielding was, in whole or in part, purveyed to a multitude of readers; indeed, so profitable was this feature of the book in the eyes of its publishers that it was nog entirely discarded for over a quarter of a century after the novelist’s death.** Need- less to say, the reputation of Tom Jones was not improved by this protracted and undesired association with so notorious a scoundrel. But for the light it throws upon the early vogue of Fielding’s novel, the ‘Second Edition” of the Apology is a document of considerable importance. Whether regarded as a counterblast against Fielding or as a device by which to trade upon his fame as a novelist—and it was undoubtedly both— the inclusion of so much matter concerning Tom Jones is ex- cellent evidence of the popularity which, by February, 1750, that work had attained even in the opinion of a hostile “histori- ographer.” For a full year The Gentleman’s Magazine had kept out of its columns any actual review of Fielding’s novel. Mean- while, T’om Jones had become so much a topic of the day that at last, after the appearance of the French translation (by M. de la Place), interest triumphed over inclination, and the editors thought best to include a short account and critique of the book in their March number. This review took the form of an unsigned “Uiterary Article from Paris,’** which pur- ported to have been written by a Frenchman. In view of their long recalcitrancy, it is no less surprising than significant that the editors, whose only comment on Tom Jones at the time of its publication had been that “the loose images” in such a book “perhaps incite to vice more strongly than the contrast figures alarm us into virtue,” should allow the following praise of so vicious a production: 83 Of the numerous editions, many of which are in the Dickson Col- lection at Yale, it is unnecessary to speak in detail. 84 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XX, 117-118 (March, 1750). - ee rte : re oamtte ett ee pe are eed Wi ob -teer a eee ene eenas iste: ~ . Sol STANT hit etree opr ee ort oe a pa 7 we ™ ee ee ie espe a ee Ure rere ee re errr Tee eee -, ere err ina ann ~~ re at “\* oT Se eran ae ene ene ae rr urs ae pry ae 9 F prea" er ear. | " pean yrere rs Perens rrr th ow # myn) ys rapenaas alae m4 fe rT oo = q iH Ph al ya ey te Hf tf ef a a4 | FI t Lief - Hi it te oe ee — - ee ee nea yeyinabvepinyp veer e SeeOPIS ereics cea bitte TESTS CASE SS LSS IEPA TOT SS it ead td £054) Gh 04 ch £4 Chi te Ee SR ESS Ee 44 FIELDING THE NOVELIST “The public has not for a long time been entertain’d with a piece where the principal persons are more engaging or more interesting, the episodes better connected with the principal ac- tion, the characters more equally sustained, the incidents more artfully prepared, or more naturally arising one out of an- other. Miss Western is a truly admirable character; Tom Jones, as much a libertine as he is, engages all sensible hearts his by his candor, generosity, humanity, his gratitude to his bene- a factors, his tender compassion, and readiness to assist the dis- tressed. The name of Alworthy, which in English signifies supereminently good, could never be more justly bestow’d than on the respectable uncle of Jones. ‘The character of Blifil, in opposition to that of the Foundling, presents us with an-admir- able contrast, and is dress’d up-with-singular art. The author has employ’d no less skill about his other characters, in assign- ing to every one his station and business, so that, among so great a number, they all, except one, appear necessary to the action.” Along with this commendation went a number of strictures. Fielding was scored for “imitating the manner of Cervantes, Scarron, and le Sage, in the titles of his chapters”; and his translator, who (to use his own words) by suppressing “all sorts of digressions, dissertations,’ and “moral touches” had reduced the size of the original production from six volumes to four, was advised “‘to make some more retrenchments” when he came “to give a second edition of his translation.” But the main charges against Tom Jones concerned the *‘loose manners” of the “‘heroe” and the “resolute boldness with which Miss Western abandons her father’s house.” It was in- timated, indeed, that “‘the love of liberty in the English” ren- “senerally more disposed” than the French_“to dered them forgive the disobedience of a daughter”; but Fielding’s state- mént in his preface to the effect that the “strictest regard to relixion and virtue” had been observed in his novel could only be justified by a special definition of terms:—‘‘We must here suppose that, by virtue, M. Fielding would not have us under- stand aj rigorous observation of all the precepts in the christian ’ Welwlyscyaslinws ser ee = ES “ ~ ae ace . - m ® ~ ; sal ait ee tase diet e ne Deserta Sol ar ostee te-So Sees eee tare od . os wat + Pate eersese Se pester airs eben ane Cee SoriaTHE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 45 system of morality, but only the practice of the principal offices of justice and humanity.” Of La Place’s unfortunate rendering of Fielding’s great novel no extended account is necessary here. Translation it is not—as everyone knows—but rather an indifferent abridge- ment, in which by casting out “‘toute espéce de Digressions, de Dissertations, ou de Traité de Morale, the translator utterly despoiled and denatured the splendid comédie humaine which, he professes, has charmed him to such a degree that it was im- possible for him to “résister_a_la_tentation” to put it into French, and the author of which he so greatly admires though he has never see him. This T’om Jones—deprived of the glory and even of the essential character of its original—was the one most commonly used in other countries besides France; for most foreign translators La Place’s French was an easier job to tackle than Fielding’s English. Despite all misfortunes, however, Tom Jones was much more popular in France than has often been supposed; and, though the enthusiasm for the book in that country fell short of the raptures which attended the advent of Clarissa, it was so considerable that the news of it was influential in increasing the reputation of its author at home.°** Oddly enough, Fate, which played so many ironical tricks on Fielding, put a temporary block in the path of La Place’s version. It was an unexpected pleasure for Old England to print, in its issue of April 7, 1750, the following translation of an item of news which had appeared in the French periodi- cal A-la-Main of March 16: An Arrét of the Council of State is issued for suppressing a cer- tain immoral Work, entitled The History of TOM JONES, trans- lated from the Exglish. This interesting paragraph did not escape the eye of Mr. Urban, who, while including (as we have seen) a review of 85 For La Place’s remarks, see the “Traduction d’une Lettre” (first written to Fielding in English) which serves as an introduction to Vol. I of the Histoire de Tom Jones, ou PEnfant Trouvé, London (“Chez Jean Nourse”), 1750. eee, eet, aoe rene rt Pras Papen Terr Pe el tee lt nt me a ae at tert er een ern ee ~ ey Se 6 NRT os es Py mm ov ra oA er rHee ee oe en eee ne eee. " oe SS Te t-te of te - en i tit ppentees erateariahen eto h) ea Le rn ear ne ie are r aso ahceaie aoe Oe ae ee a en yO Sena ts { | } Bea, a Tete. TL? eas. Fete) ‘Se De 4 Deters. 4 ao te ig leoe te eters esas on erie 4.6 FIELDING THE NOVELIST the French version, vented his spleen against Fielding by in- sinuating in a footnote that the words “Chez Jean Nourse’”’ on La Place’s title-page were a bookseller’s trick, and by calling the attention of his readers to the fact that “Since the writing of this article, the edition has been suppressed.”’ “This does not end the story of jubilation on the part of Mr. Urban and Argus Centoculi; but it is now time to speak of Samuel Richardson, whose delight was even greater than theirs. Re- joicing over his rival’s misfortune, he wrote to J. B. Defreval in Paris (January 21, 1750, O.S.), “Tom Jones is a dissolute book. Its run is over, even with us. Is it true, that France had virtue enough to refuse a license for such a profligate per- formance?’’*® Presumably the ‘‘arrét” was operative only a short time; at any rate, Defreval seems to have known nothing of the matter. His reply is as follows: “I am sorry to say it, but you do my countrymen more honour than they truly de- serve, in surmising that they had virtue enough to refuse a license to Tom Jones; I think it a profligate performance upon your pronouncing it such, for I have not read the piece, though much extolled; but it has had a vast run here this good while, and considering how things go on, I don’t believe there is now a book dissolute enough to be refused admittance among Usha That Tom Jones enjoyed “‘a vast run” in France during the year 1750 is amply substantiated by the testimony of other literary persons besides Defreval; the arrét, of which he had not heard, was, nevertheless, a matter of record. Why should the French refuse a license to T'om Jones? Were they really shocked by the immorality of the hero and the runaway pro- pensities of the heroine? Who knows? But the following ex- planation which is given by so competent an authority as the Marquis d’Argenson, though hitherto disregarded by Fielding’s biographers, deserves serious consideration. D’Argenson, who - ce 7 . found ‘‘rien que de vertueux dans ce petit roman anglais,” - 5 6 The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, V, 275. 87 Thid., V, 276-277 (April 17, 1751).THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 47 gives the following account (March 28, 1750): “Rollin, imprimeur de Tom-Jones a été condamné 4 l’amende et le livre supprimé par arrét du conseil, . . . mais Vouvrier a manqué d’attention a M. Maboul, maitre des requétes chargé par M. le chancelier du district de la librairie, et Maboul est bien un autre ouvrier.”** In other words, the French Tom Jones bore the brunt of a private quarrel. The vogue of the book when it finally appeared cannot be doubted: “After ‘Gul- liver’ and ‘Pamela,’ ”’ exclaims the Marquis d’Argenson, “‘here comes “Iom Jones,’ and they are mad for him.’’*® One of the notable critics that hastened to read La Place’s version was the celebrated /ittérateur Grimm, who had been greatly impressed by the success which Tom Jones was enjoy- ing in London. In the spring of 1750, some “‘douze ou quinze mois” after the appearance of the first English edition, Grimm testifies to the fact that “Cet ouvrage, de M. Fielding, y [z.e., in London] eut le succés le plus prodigieux.”*° The English “original” he has not yet seen; but of La Place’s translation he writes as follows: “Quoique le traducteur ait resserré |’ou- vrage, il se trouve encore trop long. Les caractéres y sont assez bien peints et assez variés, mais la multitude des personnages cause une espéce de confusion. L’intérét qu’on doit prendre aux deux héros du roman est affaibli par celui qu’on veut que je prenne a des personnages subalternes. Une autre chose mal en- tendue encore, ce sont les infidélités que Jones fait a sa maitresse.”’ Then comes the real objection to the book—Field- ing’s lack of elegance. “‘Les détails bas de l’ouvrage peuvent plaire aux Anglais,” writes Grimm, “mais ils déplaisent sou- verainement a nos dames. J’ignore si loriginal, que je n’ai point vu, est bien écrit, mais la traduction est assez souvent gothique. 38 Journal . . . du Marquis D’Argenson, Paris, 1864, VI, 182. 89 Jusserand, J.. The English Novel in the Time of Shakespeare, London and New York, 1890, Introduction, p. 24; quoted from Meé- motres et Journal inédit du Marquis d’Argenson, Paris, 1857, 5 vols., vol. V, “Remarques en lisant,” No. 1832. 40 Correspondance Littéraire, Paris, 1877, 1, 410. ots et ey Ti eed 4 “it 7 ey “4 rd ‘t M ru a Pr ee ey ek | =3° ver ‘y a si a Pa ee / |ee eee eee a , es Bs mane ES Se. — om 2s - Se ene ree hel Tel eiere themed ee ee Se a ee i ali ke i a eect rind # ed fF Co CUE UI US 3E wD Went tae ee ae Fes TEER ET. —fet>i sisting ; - ro a Breet s es *titecsT 48 FIELDING THE NOVELIST On ne peut guére faire bien et faire vite.” As time went on, Grimm, we shall see, thought more and more highly of Field- ing and often praised him; but his greater enthusiasm was reserved for Richardson,*t whom he ranked with Homer, Sophocles, and Raphael,** and whose Clarissa was “‘peut-étre l’ouvrage le plus surprenant qui soit jamais sorti des mains d’hommes.’”*® Perhaps the most famous person whose attention was at- tracted by the vogue of Tom Jones was Prince Charles Ed- ward, the Pretender, then in France, against whose expeditions Fielding had directed his banter in The Jacobite’s Journal. On May 18, 1750, the Prince requested Mlle. Ferrand to send him from Paris Joseph Andrews in both French and English and Tom Jones in French.** “In Tom Jones,” writes Andrew Lang, “he may have been amused by the adventures of Sophia when mistaken for Jenny Cameron, and by the festive and futile Jacobitism of|Squire Western, Even so good a Whig as Fielding would have been pleased, had he known that his books were assuaging the melancholy seclusion of ‘the Young Pre- tender.’ ”’*® The arrét of La Place’s translation of Tom Jones was, in- deed, temporary and of no intrinsic importance; but in the hands of Fielding’s many enemies in England it became a somewhat effective weapon. The Gentleman's Magazine did not expatiate upon the matter in its own name, but it was 41 Correspondance Littératre, III, 161; IV, 24-25; V, 23. #2 Hill, G. B., Writers and Readers, New York and London, 1892, p. 86. esiQorr. Ist. I. ra. #4 Andrew Lang, Pickle the Spy, London, 1897, pp. 96-97. #5 Lang’s Prince Charles Edward, London, etc., 1900, p. 240. Field- ing would have been interested to know that another book of his was read by the Empress Catherine II of Russia. “If I ever write a comedy,” she declared, “I shall certainly not take the Mariage de Figaro as a model, for, after Jonathan Wild, I have never found myself in such bad company.”—K. Waliszewski, The Romance of an Empress, New York, 1905, p. 337.. A re ee Tey. — ee a ao I Pal biebhet ot ee ache nh a THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 49 pleased in its April (1750) number to call attention to Old Englana’s attack of the seventh of that month. The passage runs as follows: “Here the writer [in Old England] . . brings in T’om Jones, . . . observing that the French have * shewn wisdom by suppressing that book, which to our shame was greedily swallowed here, (though wrote against).”*° Once s pra . per me ra . Ps A LM, PORE Hm er ry eae atees eh tenebemnatei ed Ube nel er aiet aieretets "i more Fielding’s enemies were compelled to admit that Tom Jones had been “greedily swallowed” by his countrymen. eee tet Oh Be me te eerie woe ey a In turning current events to account in blackening a man’s reputation, however, modern journalism itself must bow before the following master stroke of ingenuity on the part of Old any England; namely, the endeavor to class Tom Jones among aoe. ar vere ne a Pe Aes ewan ie ai hekersenralet pints those obscene books which, according to Thomas Sherlock, Bishop of London, were in part responsible for the famous earthquake shocks in England during the year 1750. In a Letter to the Clergy and Inhabitants of the city the Bishop had exclaimed,, “Have not histories or romances of the vilest prostitutes been published, intended merely to display the most execrable scenes of lewdness!”*’ What books were in the Bish- op’s mind we cannot positively say. Judging from the adver- at Av] y tS i Se i Ai if S33, hy 5 tisements then current in the periodicals, there had been for rz, | some time in London an especially severe epidemic of obscene ar + St eee one bean oth Be we m, pamphlets; and among the longer fictions which were particu- larly popular was Defoe’s Roxana; or, the Fortunate Mistress. Whatever Sherlock may have thought of Tom Jones, it is not clear that he specifically referred to the book. But Fielding’s enemies took advantage of the opportunity offered and de- nounced the novel as one of the many libidinous productions which, in the opinion of the Bishop of London, were a con- tributory cause of the recent seismic manifestations of Divine displeasure toward ‘‘a sinful people.”’ Along with the account of the stay of Fielding’s book in France, Old England, in its issue of April 7, 1750, made a citation from the Bishop’s Let- ter regarding “‘lewd books,” and expressed a hope that the coord er a ee eae ne pot bl eel ney me anlage y tetpenetsemee hs ene ee eee an ehen 46 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XX, 177. 47 Tbid., XX, 124 (March, 1750), from an “Abstract” of the Letter. n ees — ———— pn ares Seninhemrchinhas saris “Ok Badbhnn sity =u ch a4 a nhaseikah 4 aarensy ae ne en be tat oy en ee eee a een OtEste ie foes ee | eaee5 50 FIELDING THE NOVELIST English, following the example of the French, woulc hus might the Kingdom ee ere es 1 suppress Tom Jones by an act of Parliament. I be relieved of the terror of future earthquakes. This attack on Fielding was duly reported in [he Gentle- man’s Magazine for April, 1750; ‘8 but the undoubted popu- larity of Tom Jones could not be utterly neglected. In the same number the score was given for “TOM JONES; A Dance,” which under a slightly different caption had appeared several months before in The London Magazine.) Even Fielding’s inveterate enemy, William Kenrick, was obliged to admit the vogue of Tom Jones. In a pamphlet called The eee Scandalizade, which appeared*® in April, 1750, he abuses Fielding’s hero as “Puff’d Trotplaid’s iniquitous Son of a Whore” and denounces Lyttelton, who was responsible for the “puffing” Tom Jones and St. P——/! can a Writer so nice In his Objects of Virtue, commend to us Vice! Tis Nature, forsooth! and must bear a great Price.°* Yet in the attack on Cibber, which follows, Fielding’s success 1S implied in the lines: But I see thour’t inclining to old Parent Earth, Thy Fame, in Appeal, to Posterity yielding, 2 Thy Bronze to thy Son, and thy Lawrel to F—d—-zg.°* In the May number of The Gentleman’s Magazine another bit of testimony to the fame of Tom Jones found its way into a footnote to one of the “Poetical Essays.” In a ‘‘Dialogue” between ‘“Mitio and Demea,” ostensibly on the subject ‘of 48 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XX, 177. 49 Tbid., XX, 179 (April, 1750); and The London Magazine, Janu- ary, 1750, p. 41. 50 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XX, 192 (April, 1750). 51 From The Scandalizade, as reprinted in Remarkable Satires, Lon- don, 1760, p. 104. The reference is to Lyttelton’s defense of St. Paul. 62 Tbid., pp. 120-121. Ran ede = _ ae pe tae = sek FE EE do, : n a ~~ - nen enenn enon paren) tobe « nS a ‘aie iodine sedi = 7 ? ee - ccipeerer oe eee eee er eer Ts he Pecks wine: nt te pach ees Sct ete fe 7THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 51 “Panegyric” but really upon affairs in Ireland, Demea ironi- cally cuts short Mitio’s praise of his hero by saying: Haste to France; There learn to dress an hero in romance . Make honest Joes a minister of state, Doubtless, that Phantom will reform the great. To this passage the author supplies the following note: “4 ill-natured Sarcasm, from peevish Demea: for none, but an ignorant and pretending Sign dawber, would presume to make alterations in a most celebrated and complete original.””°* The allusion is, of course, to La Place’s villainous rifacimento of Tom Jones. The June issue of The Gentleman’s Magazine furnishes inadvertently more evidence of the stir which Fielding’s novel continue to create. A certain critic who signs himself “T. P.,” falling foul of Warburton’s edition of Shakespeare, eg pee . , that the greatest treasure of critical oS = learning [Warburton’s edition] that ever was offer’d to the world is, at present, thrown by as rubbish; will it be any great wonder to a man, that considers how the world is run a mad- ding after that fool parson Adams, and that rake Tom Jones?” “But the time will shortly come,” adds the ironical “T. P.,” “when these trifles shall vanish in smoak, and the best edition of Shakespeare shall shine forth in all its glory.”™* Thus during the winter of 1749 and far along into the Spring and summer of 1750, hardly an issue of The Gentle- man’s Magazine (unfriendly as it was) appeared that did not contain some slight reflection of the popularity of Tom Jones. And, as might be expected, Joseph Andrews enjoyed with its successor the sunshine of greater public notice than ever before. True, it was not always commended. A writer in The Student for January 20, 1750, had heard Parson Adams so “highly condemn’d” (“‘because, it seems, he knew not the world”) and had found so “many” divines of “the same opinion” that he 53 The Gentleman's Magazine, XX, 229 (May, 1750). BE DAd SOX 262: _—— ee “ Penk mane th ret oer Tee rte gms ak a eet eat Man. iM hee geet een ens beeen aereep lindas oowtt ee ee ee ner ee aan an mene eet ee ea P Chae Tae zy vain a ie : a Oe m ret hotter to = = rt pee: Soke eth > ha #3 > ati aE er tf , Hf ht 8 Hi af My eT ee ar ar yin peaks ee ee BL AOR Wren apt eemewk mot arnne ne ae Oe ot ph eytengenta® nde eo geepeten. SAS eerie atan ene areata ae bee rs ere mt -" iM Sid ot eee - Seeiehet et hc eeieas ed nghgeg- gy e - = ee eee Was oe ee ne, 4% oT Leary paren nena sodEP ETT USL Vee ae se Fo LP ee ETI ARTEL LEC ee Tt tt a Fe PA SOT eter. TUG le a ae ae eee £8 es oP oe eee Shel ed te] P96 Ph O45 4) ok 4 TE Soh te Eh PET a ea a ae bi ASS eas BREE CE CSED CS is ae oe FS ee TE Td Ss a 2 OS SS ES 54 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Knowing that a reference to the popular I’om Jones was sure to catch the eye of the public, Hill (before the famous quar- rel) took occasion to be very complimentary to Fielding. “It does not appear,” he declares in his “Tntroduction” to Mr. Loveill, that “every writer” of novels “can be the father of a foundling.””” By claiming a literary kinship with Tom Jones the un- known author of Charlotte Summers had attracted consider- able attention. Some persons, who should have known better, even fathered the production on Fielding (Grimm,” for in- stance), and allusions to the book were very common. Here was another chance for Hill. Still friendly toward Fielding, he declared, in his pamphlet entitled 4 Parallel between Lady Frail and Peregrine Pickle,” that there was no more “THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 57 “but one objection,” which is, “that the name of Mr. De Marivaux stands foremost of the two.’ Marivaux’s characters, to his mind, “are neither so original, so ludicrous, so well dis- tinguished, nor so happily contrasted” as Fielding’s; and, “as the characters of a novel principally determine its merit,” he, Coventry, ‘“‘must be allowed to esteem” his “countryman the greater author.” “Few books,” he says in conclusion, “have been written with a spirit equal to Joseph Andrews, and no story that I know of, was ever invented with more happiness, or conducted with more art and management than that of Tom Jones.” It is unfortunate that this enlightened assessment of Field- ing’s genius, owing to the nature and anonymity of the vehicle by which it was conveyed to the public, was almost entirely lacking in authority. According to Mr. Gosse, the discovery of its authorship “made Coventry a nine-days hero,”’? and no doubt this was true among the writer’s friends; but the world in general seems to have known little of the matter, for the book was commonly regarded as anonymous far down the century. Among the fiction-manufacturers, however, “little Pompey’s” remarks on Fielding were eagerly read and noted. In The Adventures of Captain Greenland (1752), the title of which has survived on account of certain illustrations by the youthful Thackeray, we find, for example, the following passage: ““The ingenious Author of a great Work, call’d Pom- pey the Little, hath been pleased to style that worthy and learned Gentleman above mention’d the King of Biographers. For which good Deed, I will also, confer upon him, the Title of Archbishop of Romance; for, being the first Person, who, by divine Providence, hath happily placed this Imperial Crown upon his Majesty’s [ Fielding’s] Head.” Of no value in itself, Captain Greenland is one of the many conscious imitations of Fielding’s novels, though the features imitated are, as usual, merely such external ones as the prolegomenous chapter (e.g., IT, iv, ch. i, “Imitation of a modern Preface;” III, vii, ch. i, 71 Gosse, E., Gossip in a Library, p. 204. aoe Ne — «ony ere ahah emenek per ar Pere ee rE ote a sot Seberang rere - paar eT ee ae a pietone ” arer PB ee eT enerents tess Ee te PEM ons. rm Poe Pek 0 Coe ih F499 =, a, aig bopay sae , Sen erent oe eee nee a rn a a ; Ts rw or or — ee eee te ed oe er eee ee ee ee ee a et te ee ee eee Ot Sanne nee enna ma per ert ~ ae as wie ee pth th rte AAR ae Hoe gaeleee elas tor ts} Perse el esas Leta laa te £4b eben te tees eee te iti Pee eS) HATS TITS: 58 FIELDING THE NOVELIST “Prefatory Despondings”); the digression (e.g., III, 300); and the passage of mock-heroics (passim). Again, inasmuch as “in most modern Histories of this cast, those Heroes who have sprung from the meanest Parentage, have been the best received by the Public; as Madam Pamela, Mr. David Simple, Mr. Joseph Andrews, Mr. Roderick Random, [and] Thomas Jones, Esq;” the author of Captain Gre nland has made his principal character a ““Farmer’s Son” (I, 6-7 be Before the end of the year 1751 so much attention had been directed to Fielding’s excellences by the unsuccessful efforts of his imitators (particularly by the author of Charlotte Sum- mers) that someone was impelled to compose an Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Mr. Fielding. (After speaking of the “‘many Histories of this kind that lately have been publish’d, which undoubtedly owe their Rise to the ex- traordinary Success of Mr. Fielding’s Pieces,” the writer of the Essay singles out Charlotte Summers for special atten- tion (because the author of this novel “goes so far as to call himself” Fielding’s “poetical Issue”), and characterizes it as a “servile” and unsuccessful imitation, which, with other “‘weak, sickly” productions like Joe Thompson and Peregrine Pickle deserves to be destroyed ‘Sin Embrio.’’! Whatever strictures ? he may make, he promises to perform his task in a “more Gentleman-like Manner than our Author has yet been us’d by any of his Critics,” particularly by “the Examiner of Tom - Jones, and the Author of Bampfylde Moore Carew.” ‘The author—no blackguard this time, no ruffanly Orbilius or Beggar King manner of a gentleman. Furthermore, he actually saw the o was as good as his word and wrote in the situation: he realized that in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, 12 The Adventures of Capt. Greenland, London, 1752, III, 299; IV, 142-143. Listed in Monthly Review, VI, 311 (April, 1752). This novel has been attributed to W. Goodall. For Thackeray’s illustrations, see Thackerayana, London, 1898, new edition, pp. 78-81. 73 An Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Mr. FIELD- ING, London, 1751. Listed in The London Magazine, March, 1751, p. 144. Possibly written by Coventry; see Cross’s Fielding, III, 346. abet epee ees ened a wee ’ ; j | aa a , ‘ es ry : 4 ‘ | ae i Te | {s ih * < ee J ts Pt 4 ei #), | aNposes A YY New SPEcIEs of WritTING FLO UN DE, D BY Mit Ee Ei DIN. G- With a Word or Two upon the MoperRN SrarTe of Criticism. Qui,quid fit pulchrum, quid turpe, quid utile, quidnon, Pleniits ac melius Chryfippo et Crantore dicit. Cur ita crediderim, nifi quid te detinet, audi. Hor. iO) NG OD ONE Printed for W. OWEN, near Temple-Bar. MDCCLI. = rE orien — nolan! ort enn Peter cet ias Se oe ee eee Py (ae aeirsbiepeteteoest eer erent ee P ay ee eee Nee aren RTE Har a SS es seepenen os ae A P\-y*« ne PETS r +e 2 - ¢ of, ye ¢ “~ 2 S, : . Sipe rnee ee been ee ee ae pears Se eS Fre ee oer *hehen ee pr en Settee wre wlenl sled ee iE i 5 ee Saran omen He ee a rere pehasecaet: Scie es Sean nr are hehe a Pane Cas eas ite ae ae eh ee teste c-THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 59 Fielding had indeed founded a “New Species of Writing” which should show life as it is; and that as yet even the most successful of his followers belonged to a lower order. Accord- ing to a slighting reference by Mr. Urban, the Essay con- sists of “some trite remarks on novel-writing,” and is “in general an encomium on Mr. Fielding” and his works.?* Un- inspired the little pamphlet certainly is, and its performance fell below its promise; but in 1751 its matter was far from “trite,” epitomizing as it did the “Laws” which Fielding, the innovator, had laid down for those who should follow him in “this new kind of Biography.” Of these laws the “first and grand” one is, that “thro” the whole, Humour must diffuse Ricgdpngajesapeies tr Lmetaimto striatus aise ese pasha teh lenebehtbedehea Licckect ae? Unt ets rae twain Le Si. Seén0 Stee k beet a itself’; otherwise, “however regular” the design may be, “‘the whole Performance must be dead and languid.” Next to be considered is the “Choice of Characters,” whose every word must be “entirely consonant to the Notion the Author would have his Reader to entertain of them”; who “must be exactly copied from Nature”; and who should be “‘as agreeably varied as Parson Adams and Madam Slipslop.” As to the matter of form, Fielding has ‘‘ordain’d, that these Histories should be divided into Books, and these subdivided into Chapters; and also that the first Chapter of every Book” should “consist of any Thing the Author chose to entertain his Readers with.” The plot or “Story” should be “probable,”’ and the ‘“Charac- ters” should be taken from “‘common Life”; while “the Stile should be easy and familiar, but at the same Time sprightly and entertaining . sometimes heightened to the Mock- heroic, to ridicule the Bombast, which obtain’d so much in the Romances.”” No “Writer has so strictly kept up to” the holding of suspense as has the creator of Tom Jones, the choice of “admirable ‘Titles to Chapters” conducing especially to this i ey y ee : Dl pe * re] : excellence. Finally, the aim of a novelist should be to paint emp e at Te an exact “Picture” of “Life,” to lay bare, as Fielding has done, “all-the—lttle-movements by-witch-Humean—Natureis— actuated.” 74 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XXI, 143 (March, 1751). ~~ re eee ee ee. " eer arr ery bee meyer et. ier Teer nr bere —--- - AIST RE RE DS 3 Re eee coaaeen. ta ee esSap ee ee eee 7 o ee es ee gear ph Pon meetin ence aad a as wb cay So tee rene) nn ae ™ Sad yvev'e i’ —ebebese Pa Ne eee Tr “ eee , i if i? p = q izes CE TTT TL aa esi ee ee aT te SE) $49 3 oe TST Se 60 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Considering next the “few Mistakes’ of which Fielding has been guilty, the writer first takes up Joseph Andrews and, on account of the dialogues between Joseph and his temptress, finds it impossible to give the book a clean bill on the ‘‘score”’ of “Delicacy.” “Lewdness,” he says, “Is too mean a Branch of Humour” for “a Man of Mr. Fielding’s Sense.” A second objection is, that “tho’ the Narration is conducted with great Spirit, and there are innumerable Strokes of Wit and Nature throughout,” the “Story on which it is founded is not suffi- ciently interesting”; and that while the “Characters” are “equally natural and interesting with those of Tom Jones,” the ‘“‘Parts they are allotted engage much less of our Atten- tion.” The critic then turns his attention to T'om Jones, a “Performance which on the whole perhaps is the most lively Book ever publish’d,” and rejects the “Man of the Aull? asa “Narration which neither interests or entertains the Reader, and is of no service” to the plot. But whatever “other few Blemishes” there are in these two novels may be compared to “Freckles,” which are the ‘more remarkable in those of Fair Complexions.” Despite all strictures, the main drift of the Essay is to the effect that Fielding has discovered a new continent on the globe of fiction—the land of Realism—and that this discovery is a supreme achievement. Nothing came of the little pamphlet, so far as we know, for it was quite lacking in authority and was not distinguished in style; nevertheless, it is an interesting document, not only because it records the impress which Field- ing made upon the novelists who immediately followed him and traded upon his fame, but because it calls attention to the difference in stature between even the most prominent of those adventurers and the Great Explorer himself—‘“The English Cervantes’ —the principles of whose art it sincerely endeavors to expound. IV The story of the vogue of Tom Jones, which we have been following in periodicals and pamphlets and in the minor fictionTHE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 61 of the day, may also be read in another series of documents— the correspondence of Fielding’s celebrated rival and active though covert enemy, Samuel Richardson. There can be no doubt that the author of Pamela had from the first been wounded sans reméde by the parody on his book in Joseph An- drews; yet, if we may judge from his letters, it was not until Lom Jones became alarmingly popular that he expatiated upon the matter to his friends. That Fielding had been at work on the novel, Richardson well knew; Fielding’s sister Sarah, who had become one of his fondest admirers—his “daughters” as he called them—was a constant visitor at North End; so, too, was Jane Collier, who collaborated with Sarah in The Cry. By these two “daughters” Richardson was doubtless kept in touch with Fielding’s progress."* Just before Tom Jones ap- peared, Richardson wrote Edward Young (and also Aaron Hill) that Mr. Lyttelton, Mr. Fielding, and others had rec- ommended a happy ending for Clarissa. He did not follow their advice; but the tone of the references implies that at the time of these letters Richardson, instead of being violently opposed to Fielding, was somewhat flattered by his rival’s inter- est. In the summer of 1749, however, when Tom Jones be- came so much talked of, he commenced to mobilize his forces against this wicked intruder. One of his first acts as a commander was to put down a gentle but determined mutiny. ‘Dear Sir,” runs his letter to Aaron Hill (July 12, 1749), “have you read Tom Jones? I have found neither Leisure nor Inclination, yet, to read that Piece, and the less inclination as several good judges of my acquaintance condemn it and the general taste together. I could wish to know the Sentiments of your ladies upon it. If favourable they would induce me to open the six volumes.” 7 See Margaret Collier’s letter to Richardson written before the publication of Tom Jones, in which, apropos of the method which Mrs. Teachum (a character in Sarah Fielding’s Governess) employed in pun- ishing her scholars, there is a reference to the “Thwackums.”—Richard- son’s Correspondence, II, 63 (October 4, 1748). “6 Brewster, D., Aaron Hill, New York, 1913, p. 270. CRIT bilbum rere eS ry : arene 7 a Ens rei Lurie Gaaan a - 7 on ete fore < Simiaia . ae = Pt hohe St ee ee Gr Cy ey ons * a ee ee ee Seapine eT ert Et sar rm we on oF aT RY hater aeghs — ae aw eae we os Ps Stk biireent oa fh ‘if ert) 4 a mT eR oI +3 St a er ad Y a vier grea yr eae Pera er heer neem pan tn en haem ev eneqe meee nate tes Seven poe b eres a4 calleras = te ee be pve fue pee eer ee debt " ne mwvata tet 9) Sele SET SL | TETSLS LOL GS OA OL tare aes Cea sae ae seas Ch ties oP Se see PR SSISSTCES ESP SEL See Te Ese vel ts ee ses 62 FIELDING THE NOVELIST “They will certainly have sauciness enough to do it,” replied Hill, “being of late grown borrowing Customers to an Itin- erary Bookseller’s Shop, that rumbles, once a week, thro’ Plaistow in a wheelbarrow, with Chaff enough, of Con- science! and sometimes a weightier ae The “ladies” in question were Hill’s young daughters, Astraea and Minerva, who had visited Richardson in 1741 and who had waxed ale most as enthusiastic as their father over the author of Pamela. If an adverse opinion of Tom Jones could be secured from anyone, surely it would be from the daughters of the devoted Aaron Hill! A week later came their answer—which Rich- ardson perused with genuine amazement. ‘hey had read, they declared, ‘“‘the whole six volumes; and found much (masqu’d) merit, in ’em all; a double merit, both of Head, and Heart.” They think the author wears his “Lightness, as a grave Head sometimes wears a Feather: which tho’ He and Fashion may consider as an ornament, Reflection will condemn, as a Dis- guise, and covering.” They then proceed to console Richardson by exposing the Folly ‘ of making light of grave matters, and continue their examination. They take an “honest pleasure” in commending the plot of Tom Jones: “All the change windings of the Author’s Fancy carry on a course of regular Design; and end in an extremely moving Close, where Lines [ Lives? ] that seem’d to wander and run different ways, meet, All, in an instructive Centre.’ In fact, the ““whole Piece con- ~ sists of an inventive Race of Disappointments and Recoveries.” They commend the underlying meral of the book: “Its Events reward sincerity, and punish and expose | Hypocrisy ; 3 shew, Pity and Benevolence in amiable le Lights, and Av. arice > and Brutality in very despicable ones. In every Part it has Humanity for its Entention.”—They admit that there are in the novel “bold shocking Pictures; and (I fear) [says the fair Astraea] not unresembling ones, in high Life, and in low. And (to conclude this too adventurous Guess-work, from a Pair of forward F eitredeeeentaetamee Baggages) [T'om Jones| woud, every where, (we think), ‘7 Brewster, D., Aaron Hill, p. 270 (letter of July 20, 1749); and Dobson’s Fielding, } New York, 1883, pp. 130-131. A re renal “as Weinre-ela sn poeswt Neipranp ensobandl = en ee ae ir tae oe i : y a 4 z cs ie Le re <> Ue Es Se ae eeTHE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 63 deserve to please,—if stript of what the Author thought him- self most sure to please by. And thus, Sir, we have told you our sincere opinion of Tom Jones... . Nour most profest Ad- mirers and most humble Servants, ASTRAEA and MI- INUEFROVAS FETE Te ezte Surely this was more than Richardson had bargained for; such heretical opinions from this “pair of forward Baggages” would never do. The week was eae over before he sent them a pious poe on their presumption. Of this reply Austin Dobson says:"® “His requesting two young women to read and criticise a book which he has heard strongly condemned as im- moral—his own obvious familiarity with what he has not read but does not scruple to censure—his transparently jealous an- ticipation of its author’s ability—all this forms a picture characteristic alike of the man and the time.” Richardson’s letter, which Dobson so admirably describes, is as follows: "1 must confess, that I have been prejudiced by the Opinion of Several judicious Friends against the truly coarse-titled Tom Jones; and so have been discouraged from reading it—I was told, that it was a rambling Collection of Waking Dreams, in which Probability was not observed: And that it had a very bad Tendency. And I had Reason to think that the Author in- tended for his Second Vi His first, to fill his Pocket, by ac- BR acge ie thc reizniog Tame i Writing it, to whiten LE _a vicious Character, and to make Morality bend to his Prac- tices. What Reason had he to make his Tom illegitimate, in an Age where Keeping is become a Fashion? Why did he make him a common—What shall I call it? And a Kept Fellow, the Lowest of all Fellows, yet in Love with a Young Creature: who was traping |[trapesing] after him, a haere from her Father’s House? Why did he draw his Heroine so fond, so foolish, and so insipid? —Indeed he has one Excuse— He knows not how to draw a delicate Woman—He has not been accustomed to such Company,—And is too prescribing, 78 Brewster, D., Aaron Hill, pp. 270-271; and Dobson’s Fielding, New York, 1883, p. 131. 78 Dobson’s Fielding, p. 132. we on) ae ho 42 epvetmhaaed pea eae ans ae Se Saanee orate. ee ora Lt ’ - ras eee ete ee x ee Agr ook inthe -" eho ee Sl ee Sri is ee pepe est aeereen. erent tee ee Tar rar Tr _ re i 4 7 rid H ta at) rial a =@ 4 art! Ft ey aa A Fi “af; I i a ins Pr yrs Patents ete a eas PST Ee rT re Cor sash 4, es yA gh gs yeeny® eres S a arr yr are re ee as Oo Ne nen Las ee Reman ee ge poe erm Rh ES be regs ne a res Sher sree (panos re ae ms rere eed rare . Ce ed a Ry reer chaib le ie F538 : 64 FIELDING THE NOVELIST too impetuous, too immoral, I will venture to say, to take any other Byass than that a perverse and crooked Nature has given him: or Evil Habits, at least, have confirm’d in him. Do Men expect Grapes of ‘Thorns, o r Figs of Thistle ? But, perhaps, I think the worse of the Piece because |] nce ‘the Writer, and dislike his Principles both Public and Private, tho’ I wish well to the Man, and Love Four worthy Sisters of his, with whom I am well acquainted. And indeed should admire him, did he make the Use of his Talents which I wish him to make, For the Vein of Humour, and Ridicule, which he is Master of, might, if properly turned, do great Service to y” Cause of Virtue. But no more of the Gentleman’s Work, after I have said, That the favourable Things, you say of the Piece, will tempt me, if I can find Leisure, to give it a Perusal.””* Com- ment on this letter would be superfluous! Only cordially welcomed the first two volumes of Clarissa in his”’ Jacobites Journal, and later, in his Covent-Garden Journal, he again® referred pleasantly to the author. The:reason that a year before the epistle was written, Fielding had Richardson attacked Fielding was not that his rival’s comport- ment was really unbearable to him; for, in the first place, there is nothing to show that in 1749 the private life of Field- ing was questionable, and surely his public life as an efficient magistrate deserved the highest praise. Even if the author were leading a vicious existence, he could hardly have outdone Old Cibber, who—because of his flattery—Richardson warmly ex- tolled. It was not Fielding’s morality but his popularity which a his rival’s delicate sensibilities. A week later (August 11, 1749) Aaron Hill himself (who, in the old mo had been friendly to Fielding the dramatist) replied in his characteristic manner, describing to him how 80 a . a ; . . / Quoted in Dobson’s Fielding, pp. 132-133 (London ed., pp. 139- 140). 81 ae The Jacobite’s Journal, No. V. Quoted in Dobson’s Fielding, p. 107. [3 (ghey 7 Covent-Garden Journal, No. 10 (February 4, 1752). Jensen’s edi- tion, I, 193. ; Mieco PS en " a an "i oe vets i J “NTHE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 65 Astraea and Minerva had taken the scolding. ‘Unfortunate Lom Jones!” he exclaims, “how sadly has he mortify’d Two sawcy Correspondents of your making! ‘They are with me now: and bid me tell you, You have spoil’d ’em Both, for Criticks.”” And after observing that his fair daughters “cry?d” for being thought to have praised a book that had an “Evj/ Lendency, in any Part or Purpose of it,” Hill pere says they hold fast to their first opinion and desire Richardson not to believe the “‘over-rigid Judgment of those Friends, who cou’d not find a Thread of Moral Meaning in Tom Jones,” until he has time to read the book himself; “tis there, pert Sluts, they will be bold enough to rest the Matter,—Mean while, they love and honour you and your opinions.” With rebellion in his camp of fair ones, Richardson thought It time to strike a crushing blow; in his reply, he expresses sor- row for giving pain to the “‘dear Ladies,” and (to quote Austin Dobson )** minutely justifies “his foregone conclusions from the expressions they had used. He refers to Fielding again as ‘a very indelicate, a very impetuous, an unylelding-spirited Man’; and he also trusts to be able to ‘bestow a Reading’ on Lom Jones; but by a letter from Lady Bradshaigh . dated December, 1749, it seems that even at that date he had not, or pretended he had not, yet done so.” Richardson had barely silenced Astraea and Minerva when he received a letter (long since famous) from his great ad- mirer, Lady Bradshaigh, which confirmed all his worst fears. That the young people in her ladyship’s circle were applying the names “Tom Jones” and “Sophia” to their favorites, and even, in one instance, to a pet dog,*° was indisputable evidence —lt put rancors in the vessel of Richardson’s peace. “So long as the world will receive,” he answered,*® “Mr. Fielding will write. Have you ever seen a list of his performances? Nothing but a shorter life than I wish him, can hinder him from writ- ®3 Dobson’s Fielding, New York, 1883, p. 133 (London ed., p. 140). 84 [bid., p. 133 (London ed., p. 141). 8 See p. 40. 86 The Correspondence, IV, 285-286. A eS Ane : | a NS 29 Or esye en Feber rbase A Hey wens a er ee he. eP empmintehes tent. an een iiey et adel erry 7 ra as ebabebactatae eh pe a ee Pe oo oars iweneee em ’ eee Ee eS Enid eer ree. ake EIR Ohm cn ePeSE er Ac ete zee see eadasweeeawheeesnanrel eer i iy a : cn at Hy Sie ih a - ria vf) Pet H eH ii "oy let ee ee ors ruse ee eee Ah tbeeried Deed nt tae tees ln eee ee aalndeypeseensermnahi gaits amen rey ey a aa " Se ee eePeet ete tet e ac eesercre ei SEE 2535 5) 66 FIELDING THE NOVELIST ing himself out of date.” “Then plumps the cat out of the bag: “The Pamela, which he abused in_ his Shamela,” declares Richardson, * ‘aught him how to write to please, tho’ his man- ners are so different. Before his Joseph Andrews (hints and names taken from that story, with a lewd and ungenerous en- graftment) the poor man wrote without being read. . . . But to have done, for the present, with this cachionehle aurlon There are other comments in the same vein; but they must give place to the following answer. In this letter (December 16, 1749) Lady Bradshaigh tries to make amends. She obligingly assures en in practically his own words, that the ‘“‘character of Sophia is so very trifling and insipid”®’ that she has “never heard a dispute about it”; and though the “girls are certainly fond of Tom Jones,” and “do not scruple declaring it” she never lets a “faulty word or action pass without a visible disapprobation.” Indeed, she has had “‘many a round battle” with them “concerning ‘Tom Jones”; and despite the fact that Richardson seems to think ‘soft” and “gentle,” she really designed the “con- ‘ her blame demnation [of Tom Jones] strongly” from her “heart.” Be- fore completing her lengthy epistle she again speaks of the novel; her conscience still troubles her, and fhe begs “pardon” for ever having mentioned the book. “I do assure you, Sir, Mr. Fielding’s private character [learned from Richardson him- self] makes him to me appear disagreeable.” But in spite of her asserted disapproval not only of Tom Jones but of its au- thor, Lady Bradshaigh persists in thinking “there are many good things” i in Fiel ding’s novel. Less impetuous than Astraea and Minerva Hill, the ‘“‘beloved incognita,” notwithstanding her deference, was subdued but not convinced. Richardson probably surmised as much; for his reply was mostly made up of an account of his unavailing attempts to see her in the park, where he dined as he walked “‘on a sea-biscuit,”’ which he had put in his pocket, his “‘family at home, all the time,” and wholly unsuspecting. Of the author of Tom Jones, he merely says (if the passage may be cited again), “‘As to the list of 87 Fi Qo 2 a pc a “2 The Correspondence, 1V, 295, 296, 309, 310. Spd ene = bi i : Sete le + ere «THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 67 Fielding’s performances, I have seen at least twenty of them; for none of which, before Joseph Andrews (except for such as were of a party turn), he gained either credit or readers.’?®* Then, one day in the spring, running across the allusion in Charlotte Summers which we gave a moment ago, Richardson, ignoring the greater praise of Fielding, appropriated—in his letter to Lady Bradshaigh—all the glory to himself. But her ladyship was not so easily taken in. ‘“SWhen I saw you: last,” she wrote (March 27, 1750), “I forgot to tell you I had read Charlotte Summers; but did not find any thing relating to you, like what you told me. I doubt I do not well remember what he [the author of the novel] says; but I think it is, that we are taught the art of /aughing and crying, from your melancholy disposition, and Mr. Fielding’s gay one; and I think passes a compliment upon each, though perhaps he might design to sneer.” Then, lest she had gone too far, her ladyship hastened to say: “There are very different kinds of laughter: you make me laugh with pleasure; but I often laugh, and am angry at the same time with the facetious Mr. Fielding.”*® Lady Brad- shaigh was not the only one who was angry with herself for laughing. Since the formal world of that day thought it more dignified to weep, Fielding was too often taken at his word and considered a mere humorist. You may make me laugh, said the pompous Mid-Eighteenth Century, but I shall have my re- venge: I will call you a buffoon. To return to Richardson, whatever chagrin Lady Bradshaigh’s rebuff may have caused him it did not prevent his preserving her letter; the day was sure to come, he believed, when, the correspondence being given to the world, time would bring in his revenges. Far more satisfactory than Lady Bradshaigh’s letter was a communication received during the previous summer (July 10, 1749), from Solomon Lowe (the author of a Critical Spelling Book), who was a great admirer of Clarissa. “I find by Cave’s Magazine,” he wrote, that the “‘fame of it [z.e., Clarissa] is 88 Correspondence, IV, 312 (January 9, 1749-1750). 89 Ibid., VI, 7-8. _ three a — Or a a yi ta etl wh nhel thane, mee See ee ee Ate tot nd ne a si reper ised nt eres ee te Sel 1, i ; er en eee tare ee er ee ee ee ee ee ees ar ee Pores “ Laren, a oopi eiegeecade aa ke 2s tek O) ptens t nnaan by 7” ot et pert aed a ee a a te 68 FIELDING THE NOVELIST vot into Holland, and I do not doubt but all Europe will ring BE it: when a Cracker, that was some thous? hours a-compos- ing, will no longer be heard, or talkt of.” Richardson’s pro- cedure was characteristic; before filing the document away with a view to its inclusion in his published correspondence, he wrote on the back of the manuscript: “Cracker, T. Jones.” As the months went by, Richardson and his friends, dis- mayed to find that Fielding’s novel was no ephemeral fire- cracker, were busy with complaints and denials, though in spite of themselves they sometimes admitted that the book pos- sessed certain excellences. ““[The more I read “Tom Jones, the more I detest him,” and “‘admire”’ “Clarissa,” wrote Catherine Talbot (May 22, 1749), “Yet there are in it things that must touch and please every good heart, and probe to the quick many a bad one, and humour that it is impossible not to laugh at.’’** A year later the situation, from Richardson’s point of view, had grown worse rather than better. In the autumn of 1750 (September 25), sympathetic Mrs. Donnellan took pains to assure the printer that “those who are fit to write delicately,” are, like him delicate in body. ““ITom Jones could get drunk, and do all sorts of bad things, in the height of his joy for his uncle’s recovery.” “I dare say,” she adds, “‘Fielding is a robust, strong man.”*” Consolation also came from another—and lower—quarter; in other words, from that strange literary adventuress whom Richardson befriended, Laetitia Pilkington. In an ebullient “Proem” (see her Memoirs) she issued the following manifesto: Stand apart now, ye Roderick Randoms, Foundlings, bastard Sons of Wit, Hence, ye Profane, be far away, All ye that bow to Idol Lusts, and Altars raise, Or to false Heroes give fantastick Praise. *° Forster Collection, Vol. XV: see Dobson’s Fielding, New York, p. 134; and Cross’s Fielding, II, 150. 81 4 Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Cath- erine Talbot, I, 312. ®2 Richardson’s Correspondence, IV, 30 (September 25, 1750).THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 69 Yet in the course of her curious hotchpotch she has a pleasant word for her benefactor’s rival. Swift told her, she says, that he had never “laugh’d above twice in his Life; once at some Trick a Mountebank’s Merry-Andrew play’d; the other time at the Circumstance of Tom Thumb’s killing the Ghost.”®* Swift died three years after the publication of Joseph Andrews; since by 1742 (as has been pointed out) he was hopelessly insane, we need not wonder, as some biog- raphers have done, that the great Ironist underestimated Field- ing. Of the novelist’s wit—Swift was thinking of the author of Tom Thumb—the fair Laetitia “can assure Mr. Fielding, the Dean had a high Opinion . . . which must be a Pleasure to him, as no Man was ever better qualified to judge, possessing it so eminently himself.” The necessitous Mrs. Pilkington, indebted to Richardson as she was, could not in spite of her slap at Fielding in her “Proem” quite afford to let the matter rest there. Another counterblast, from very high authority indeed, was issued in the spring of 1750 by Richardson’s friend, Samuel Johnson, who, not yet the arbiter of polite learning, was in- creasing his fame by the publication of The Rambler rom the presence in The Gentleman’s Magazine of obscure but repeated testimony to the popularity of T'om Jones it may be inferred that, influential as he was, Johnson was unable to give complete expression to his opinions in that magazine. The Rambler, on the other hand, was his own. Considering the vogue of Tom Jones we are not surprised to find the num- ber for March 31, 1750, devoted to the dangers arising from the “familiar histories” at that time so popular. Especially did he inveigh against those wicked heroes who are given so many good qualities that “we lose the abhorrence of their faults.f There seems to be no good reason for rejecting Chalmers’s statement that this Rambler was “occasioned by the popularity 93 Laetitia Pilkington’s Memoirs, London, 1754, III, 13, 155-156. It was, of course, the ghost of Tom Thumb that was killed—by Lord Grizzle. a Syme Be a er in See Habe Ur Ar tt marae rcpt a Par eed Wee sue Heyale _— rhabch a epee Dieser tye t peered 2 WEN ov ose ae See eee St Ad) es are re Reader Ol Pes sale er Oe dl ee ee . i ie" I 5 a : Rid seek i ru ees ee re rarer pera ar Oe ee eet ee a es i a rere - ~ a eee a ad bee) ee Tite ete ee oo en: m4 ae a ‘ah pp Ce beeen Lonel Ae ST Na nee Te | ead . ) "i 1 ae nee ae ee pee ats riihaaes eee ee Pweegeira ctethscpactets. i> — ene be, le A tn Ce ran er a o pe ee on . a ern oe me poe os ry ‘Pet etess 70 FIELDING THE NOVELIST of Roderick Random, and Tom Jones.”°’* What Johnson de- clared in his Rambler the following spring concerning Clarissa has been one of the most famous dicta in literary history— but of that we shall have something to say later on. V In spite of all defamers in high station or in low, there can be no question about the enthusiasm with which T'om Jones was received by the public—the evidence which has been gath- ered in the course of this chapter should be sufficient to establish this point; even those who were antagonistic to the novelist were compelled to admit the vogue of the novel. But it is equally true—and this is a surprising literary fact which needs to be emphasized—that Fielding had not yet succeeded in winning the plaudits of what was then considered the “polite world.” When we call the roll of persons of quality and of those distinguished in literature, we find astonishingly little in the way of unqualified enthusiasm. This matter will be taken up more fully when a summary is made of the attitude of Fielding’s contemporaries toward his work as a whole; but certain details are in order here. Lady Hertford, as we have said, predicted the earlier volumes—that T'om Jones would be better than Joseph Andrews; but her friend Lady Luxborough (Boling- broke’s sister ), with whom she corresponded, was less favorably impressed. Accordingly she wrote to Shenstone, March 22, 1749, before she had finished the book: “I might live at least five hundred years in this place [that is, Barrells] before one quarter of the incidents happened which are related in any one of the six volumes of Tom Jones. I have not read the two last; but I think as you do, that no one character yet is near so striking as Adams’s in the author’s other composition, and the plan seems far-fetched; but in the adventures that happen, I think he produces personages but too like those one meets with in the world; and even among those people to whom he gives after reading 94 The Works of Samuel Johnson, London, 1816, IV, 24.THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES Fat good characters, he shews them as in a concave glass, which discovers blemishes that would not have appeared to the com- moneye.. . . If Mr. Fielding and Mr. Hogarth could abate the vanity of the world by shewing its faults so plainly, they would do more than the greatest divines have yet been capable of: But human nature will still be the same, and would, I am afraid, furnish them, if they lived till the world ended, with such imperfect objects to represent.”®> In the Letters to Shen- stone, from which the passage above is taken, there are several other references to Fielding. On September 5, 1750 (Letter LIIl), she refers to “Parson Adams’s way of travelling on foot”; on April 16, 1750-51 (Letter L XIV), she tells the poet that his “apology for keeping Tom Jones is needless”; on » Ascension-Day,” 1751 (Letter LXIX), she declares Pompey the Little is Fielding’s; and in a previous letter (LXVII), May 27, 1751, she speaks of “Pompey” as “entertaining enough for such a trifle,” for “Fielding, you know, cannot write without humour.” Still it is obvious that her ladyship was never very enthusiastic about the novelist; and her assess- ment of Lom Jones may be taken as fairly typical of the atti- tude of the “polite world.” To accustom its taste to such a realistic presentation of life as Fielding’s, was, no doubt, some- what difficult; Richardson’s idealistic treatment gave ordi- narily less trouble. In one noble household, to be sure, Tom Jones received a readier welcome than Clarissa. The following story, which biographers of Richardson seem to have missed but which is too good to pass over, is to be found in the family letters of Fielding’s patron, the Duke of Richmond, who discovered in Clarissa a source of diversion. Fond of a jest and wishing to amuse his sprightly young daughter, Lady Kildare, then in Ireland, who was just recovering from an illness, he took ad- vantage of Richardson’s imperfect knowledge of polite society and endeavored to make him the butt of a practical joke. He 85 Lady Luxborough’s Letters to Shenstone, pp. 88-89 (Letter XXVI, March 23, “1748-49”). — ae adhe ie i a a hi a Fat) ai rie Hi rp 4 ++ nome a pebtetntienett nathan ead a i HY wat rae mei +t Ol HS Cer | ch F i a a ate + -}-a —_ Per hal Ne ree je py ee ene ah - . ea co ems eran TEE IPSS eS Ss th 43 5: 72 FIELDING THE NOVELIST assumed the character of John Cheale, Norroy King at Arms, with whom he was very friendly, and administered the follow- ing reproof (February 9, 1747-49): MR. RICHARDSON, As a great admirer of yr last performance the History of Miss Clarissa Harlowe, I take y® liberty of troubling you w'h a short criticism, which, considering my employment, I think I have a right to lay before you, in Page 176 of y® first Volume is this egregious blunder in Heraldry . . . how can you. . . know so little of the English Peerage as to call this old Viscount’s daughter Lady Char- lotte Harlowe, a Viscount’s daughter is only Miss before marriage and then only Mrs. Harlowe, wc) J wonder your brother Booksellers of the genteel side of Temple Bar did not inform you of. There are other absurdities in y™ book but depend upon it that by this I have mentioned you have highly affronted all y© Dukes Mar- quises and Earls Daughters, in England Scotland, and Ireland.*° To this letter the Duke appended the signature: “Jo Cheale Norroy King at Arms.” Needless to say, the Duke’s young daughter, Lady Kildare, awaited the outcome of this hoax with great eagerness. There was no doubt in her mind that the “Author of that most stupid Book ‘Clarissa’ ”’ would reply, and she was “‘vastly impatient to hear of Cheale’s surprise”®’ as well as of Richardson’s. It was a jubilant moment when she could write her father that “in the 3rd 4th 5th 6th and 7th Volumes” Lady Charlotte Harlowe had become plain “Mrs. Harlowe.”** Meanwhile, young Lady Kildare and the elder Lady Kildare, her husband’s mother, had been reading Tom Jones together with great enjoyment. In a letter to her mother, the Duchess of Richmond, June 26, 1749, she says: “Lady Kildare reads mighty well. Have you finished Tom Jones? She likes it vastly.”°® No doubt Fielding’s book was as well re- ceived by the Duke and Duchess of Richmond at home. 96 4 Duke and His Friends. The Life and Letters of the Second Duke of Richmond, by the Earl of March, London, 1911, II, 637. 87 Jbtd., Il, 638. 88 Thid., II, 666. eral oad, 11. 665.THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 73 The hoax which the Duke of Richmond perpetrated on the unsuspecting Richardson would have been enjoyed, had she known about it, by Fielding’s titled cousin, Lady Mary Wort- ley Montagu. Though she was “‘such an old foo] as to weep over Clarissa Harleme , like a milkmaid of sixteen over the ballad oe the Lady’s Fall,” she pronounced the novel “on the whole” ‘“‘most miserable one ” likely to “do more general mischief than the works of Lord Rochester.” “Even that model of affection, Clarissa,” she writes, “is so faulty in her behaviour as to deserve little compassion.”**° Much more to her taste were the works of Field ding. Here, in greater detail, is the letter previously quoted, which she sent from Lovere, Italy, October 1, N. S. [1749], to her daughter, the Countess of Bute, on the arrival of Joseph Andrews aid Tom Jones: “I have at length received the box, with the books enclosed, for which I give you many thanks, as they amused me very much. I gave a very ridiculous proof of it, fitter indeed for my granddaughter than myself. I returned from a party on horseback; and after having rode tw enty miles, part of it by pene it was ten at night when I found the box arrived. I could not deny myself the pleasure of opening it; and, fall- ing upon Fielding’s works, was fool enough to sit up all night reading. I think Joseph Andrews better than _ his Hound: ling. PxCaAe rime went on, Lady Mary had other things to say —not all of them comp olimentary—concerning her cousin and his books; and notwithstanding the “Ne plus ultra? of which Lady Stuart tells us, her first i impression was that Tom Jones was inferior to Joseph Andrews. Still, the passage given above contains more genuine enthusiasm for Fiel ding’s novels than was commonly recorded at that time by those who may be re- garded as competent in literature. Strange as it seems, perhaps the most vigorous defense of Tom ee (made during this period by a critic of abil ity ) which has found its way into the annals of literature, was 100 The Letters’. of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, edited by W. M. Thomas, London, n.d. [1861], II, 222. EW DAd len Sicar® 6: ee ere | —— eee a a TM pe tera ee eer ent od terete at ee ae ee See rane SEAT rataccigentectsese-tenshtees et ten eaabeineylace gocabencserases te: ee mete = - renee f . oe t> Pi ra 5 Hi ed) hat et ot tl ed i ‘y i Sw en =a ee enema ante np ase MON TRG eet “ ee “fom a Ce a I FP et eed - Sino poser ara frre eat bt Ne tt - ~ -_ ae nahheeunses bale es ;eretat Te a te IB BE 74. FIELDING THE NOVELIST written, four months after the appearance of the novel, by that professed Richardsonian—the ‘“‘learned” Miss Carter. It was, in fact, an answer to the attack on Fielding’s hero (just now quoted) made by her friend Miss Talbot. “‘I am sorry to find you so outrageous about poor Tom Jones,” runs her letter of June 20, 1749, “he is no doubt an imperfect, but not a de- testable character, with all that honesty, good-nature, and gen- erosity of temper. Though nobody can admire Clarissa more than I do; yet with all our partiality, I am afraid, it must be confessed, that Fielding’s book is the most natural representa- tion of what passes in the world, and of the bizarreries which arise from the mixture of good and bad, which makes up the composition of most folks. Richardson has no doubt a very good hand at painting excellence, but there is a strange awk- wardness and extravagance in his vicious characters. To be sure, poor man, he had read in a book, or heard some one say, there was such a thing in the world as wickedness, but being totally ignorant in what manner the said wickedness operates upon the human heart he has drawn such a monster [ Lovelace], as I hope never existed in mortal shape, for the honour of human nature.’’*°? Thus, for the second time, Miss Carter stoutly defended Fielding’s realism; but for all that, despite her criticism of Lovelace, she admitted her “par- tiality” for Richardson, whose great achievements she cele- brated, a decade later, in high-flown funereal verse. Fielding’s enemies among those literarily inclined were not confined to Grub Street or to the entourage of Samuel Rich- ardson. The attack of his follower Smollett (in the first edi- tion of Peregine Pickle, 1751) upon a “trading Westminster justice” who married “his own cook-wench” is too well known to demand further elaboration. Though the passage was afterwards removed it had already run the rounds.*** To this bit of scandal may be added the slurring remark of the supercilious young Richard Hurd—of whom more later— 102 4 Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Cath- erine Talbot, I, 315. 108 See page 87.THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 75 about the “‘worn-out rake”’ and buffoon who, forsooth, was the creator of Tom Jones.\Finally there was the slanderous story which Horace Walpole (nettled by Fielding’s success) wrote in a letter to George Montagu, May 18, 1749. While he pro- fessed to find Tom Jones “low” and “‘disgusting”—as we afterwards learn—he kept an eye on the novelist’s doings. And when he heard, as he wrote Montagu, that Millar had volun- tarily given the author an extra hundred pounds because of the great sale of his hook, he drew the celebrated picture of Fielding at Home-(“banqueting with a blind man, three Irishmen, and a whore, on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the cursedest dirtiest cloth! He never stirred nor asked them to sit. Rigby, who had seen him so often come to beg a guinea of Sir C. Williams, and Bath- urst, at whose father’s he had lived for victuals, understood that dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs, on which he civilized.”*°* All modern writers agree that by the appella- tions “blind man,” “whore,” and “‘three Irishmen,” the ami- able Walpole designated, respectively, Fielding’s brother, wife, and invited guests. During his long life—for he lived until the end of the century—Walpole continued to scatter his poison. To sum up—the “‘social contempt,” if we may use the phrase of one of Fielding’s biographers, which is to be noted in these anecdotes, “‘extended to his writings.” A more complete view of the attitude of contemporaries toward Fielding and the new genre of novel which he had inaugurated must be reserved for a later chapter; but before passing on to a discussion of Amelia several outstanding facts should be recorded. In the first place, the old question as to whether or not in the year or two after its publication T'omm Jones was really popular must be answered by a strong affirma- tive. In spite of the propaganda of his enemies, political and personal, Fielding’s vogue with the reading public between the appearance of Tom Jones (1749) and that of Amelia (1751) cannot be doubted. From then until the end of the 104 Tetters of Horace Walpole, Oxford, 1903, Toynbee edition, I, 383-384. ao ~~ en. eN - oe 2 hee heh eweeek + $m ten ee" Ar Ag aged mee ceerenbreietiena a rea nL be ee penne mL enn arene eer (W“s4 primed bt tp Setetcknt eee “e* ears 4 SORE =r bt bake ete elw ee hae eae ee ee) i » . Ee pe ee er ee eae pete Pee Se Te eh eb eben ree eee Stree Ay Seen Sane Teen e Tan Pb it eee el age eer a#mapawhesser Ch a eee re Oo! ae Met 2 onsen eee ee ttn tad Senet eal teen ae ¥ ies a evens wt mE oo Cetra Sere) i Ce oe +e i ie y Es 7 iF 3 | ‘? SHITE ESSERE Ch 85 76 FIELDING THE NOVELIST century the history of Fielding’s fame is the story of the rivalry between his works and those of Richardson. On the other hand, it is a remarkable fact that so little unalloyed praise on the part of eminent literary persons has been pre- served and handed down to posterity, especially praise that was recorded in any conspicuous place. Even in 1762 when Arthur Murphy wrote his essay on Fielding’s life and genius the only commendatory passage which he could find to quote was a genre of fiction in Warburton’s © footnote concerning the new edition of Pope (1751). “In this species of writing,” wrote Warburton, “Mr. De Marivaux in France, and Mr. FIELD- ING in England stand the foremost. And by enriching it with the best part of the Coznic art, may be said to have brought it to its perfection.””*°® Very different was the case with Richard- son, who enjoyed the suffrage not only of those who revelled in the new vogue of the sentimental but of the more grave and reverend persons who regarded him as a profound moral- ist. Poetic tributes to his genius could be gathered with full hands; and, after 1751, everyone knew who it was that had taught the passions to move at the command of virtue. No such good fortune attended Fielding. As we go through the list of notables once again, we realize very keenly that the author and his New Species of Writing were compelled to struggle against heavy odds. Diligent and extended search through the ofera of his more eminent contemporaries reveals singularly little eulogy—and that little is rarely unmixed. Johnson and Young, as we shall see, were indefatigable in promoting the interests of Richardson; Shenstone and Gray found their pleasure in Richardson rather than in Fielding; the “learned” Miss Car- ter, despite her defense of Tom Jones, confessed her “par- tiality” for Clarissa; and the celebrated Lord Chesterfield, Fielding’s friend, though he declared that Richardson was not at home in “high life,” allowed him that praise as a novelist which he denied his rival. Not only had Fielding been dragged through the horse-pond of Grub Street scurrility, but he had 108 The Works of Alexander Pope, London, 1751, IV, 169.THE VOGUE OF TOM JONES 77 been savagely vilified by those higher up in the scale of society and letters—by the sneering Hurd, the envious Richardson, the brutal Smollett, and the scandal-mongering Walpole. Such was the condition of affairs in 1751, just before the publication of Amelia; what brought about this condition will be discussed in a later chapter. Before considering the reception of Fielding’s third novel, however, we must put out of our minds for the moment the comparative coldness of the eminent and the critical and give ear to the voice of the great reading public which had greeted Tom Jones with such enthusiasm. To show that Fielding’s fame in the periodicals had, in the year 1751, increased rather than diminished, the following three notices may fitly end this chapter. By The Monthly Review, Fielding’s Enquiry concerning Robbers received in January this cordial welcome: ““The public hath been hitherto not a little obliged to Mr. Fielding for the entertainment his gayer performances have afforded it; but now this gentleman hath a different claim to our thanks, for services of a more substantial nature. If he has been heretofore admired for his wit and humour, he now merits equal applause as a good magistrate, a useful and active member, and a true friend to his country. As few writers have shown so just and extensive a knowledge of mankind in general, so none ever had better opportunities for being perfectly acquainted with that class which is the main subject of this performance: a class of all others most necessary and useful to all, yet the most neglected and de- spised; we mean the labouring part of the people.”*°® In April, The Magazine of Magazines was equally cordial: ‘““Whoso- ever is acquainted with his [Fielding’s] writings must con- fess, that there is no body so . . . capable of representing virtue in its own amiable dress, or vice in its native deformity, that has such a thorough insight into the causes and effects of things, is such a master of character, and so able to draw the 106 The Monthly Review, IV, 229. Beginning too late to review Tom Jones, this friendly magazine, which often commended Fielding, praised, in July, 1749 (1, 239), his Charge to the Grand Jury. —_— are ek x etre at eee ee eae Soro , ra Cae — Se re. Mo taht edgeten ese ane He -* eI ae oat ee D 5 B i F Fi ; | a ae “¢! Bf f Pe it teig [Peet epee stelle he lel eae te £Sh-O) os oe ce te ie fa Se te oe eee gS, pert THISTLE ISTE SEES TE TE TOTS 78 FIELDING THE NOVELIST picture of an author, and a reader of every kind.”**” Finally, The Ladies Magazine of April 20-May 4, 1751, printed the following verses “On the incomparable History of ‘Tom Jones”: Hail! happy Fielding, who with glorious ease, Cans’t Nature paint, and paint her still to please. Each humorous incident is finely hit, With justness, symmetry of parts, and wit. Nature throughout the drama plays her part, Behind the curtain lurks assisting art.*°® The three passages just quoted from three different magazines all appeared during 1751. We are not surprised to learn that Andrew Millar paid Fielding a handsome sum*”* for the much smaller novel Amelia, which came from the press before the year was out. 107 The Magazine of Magazines, April, 1751. 108 The Ladies Magazine, Il, 202. 109 Wraxall, Memoirs, edition of 1836, I, 55-56. ee ne ee ioe ¢ - 45 ff ede ra 2 = sea didieh en enter e aet 5 Sai y- eee = _ ees tetas See osCHAPTER III Amelia “Damn d”’ 1751-1752 HEN Amelia was published (in December, 175th) Fielding was, according to Malone,” “‘in the high- est reputation” as a novelist; for everyone knows that the whole issue was reputed to have been exhausted on the day of its appearance-Even Dr. Johnson was so impressed by this fact that he once declared Amelia to be ‘‘perhaps the only book, which, being printed off betimes one morning, a new edition was called for before night.”* That the so-called sec- ond edition was in reality, as may be inferred from the Strahan entries, only a second impression, robs the famous anecdote of some of its glory; but the fact remains that five thousand copies were printed in December, and three thousand more shortly thereafter in January—a large sale indeed for those days. In December, the very month of publication, accounts of the book appeared in The Monthly Review and The Lon- don Magazine two periodicals friendly to Fielding—and from this fact, as Professor Cross has pointed out, it may be inferred that the editors in both instances were supplied by Millar with advance copies. Naturally enough, no review of the book, for the time being, found a place in The Gentle- man’s Magazine. The article in The Monthly Review—a most commendatory one—deserves the following summary: “The ingenious author,”® says the reviewer, is ‘already so * Preface dated December 12, 1751; title-page dated 1752. 2 The Life of Samuel Johnson, seventh ed., London, 1811, I, 223. Malone’s note to a letter from Johnson to J. Warton, March 8, 1753. 5 See Piozzi, Mrs. H. L., Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson, London, 1786, pp. 221-222. * See J. P. de Castro’s article in Notes and Queries, 12 S., III, 466; also The Bibliographical Society, Transactions, Second Series, I, 266- 267. ®° The Monthly Review, V, 510 ff., December, 1751. a wens = en PER) my my tee ee et ne ees my oe Se tne et pt acy Sar obey ot onc th nigra oro ad | BH i 4 cif eer ti ec a er w tupvet ats Ae B1, Oh spaya e@ingse dane See rt cee bare ne een ee Beye sty [28 bt et ho , a re | rr eo ees ee at en Sheela at and eeea ane a Eee eee * = zz At a Patties dite eet ee EL ™~ een Ye ae " 80 FIELDING THE NOVELIST well known for his talents in novel-writing, and espe- cially that original turn which he gives to all his works in that way, that it would be superfluous to say anything more of his literary character.” He commends as the “boldest stroke that has been yet attempted in this species of writing” the fact that “The author takes up his heroine at the very point at which all his predecessors have dropped their capital personage” and “has ventured to give the history of two persons already mar- ried.’ One ‘“‘who does not peruse this work, will hardly imagine how the relish of such conjugal endearments, as com- pose the basis of it, could be quickened enough to become pala- table to the reader. The author, however, has interwoven such natural situations, such scenes of trial, taken from nature, that the attention is for ever kept on the stretch, and one is led on by the attraction of a curiosity artfully provoked to pursue the heroine through all her adventures, and an impatience to know how the married pair will be extricated out of the suc- cessive plunges in which they are represented, and in which the writer often successfully presses vice into the service of virtue.” Contrasting Fielding with the French novel-writers, a6 who have turned “conjugal love into ridicule,” the reviewer continues, “be it said, to the honour of the English, and to this writer in particular, that he never thought so ill of the public, as to make his court to it at the expense of the sacred duties of morality.”” Whenever the-author is obliged to describe | his actors as departing “‘from the paths of virtue and prudence, he is sure to make examples of them, perhaps more salutary, than if he had made them too rigidly adhere to their duty. Their follies and vices are turned so as to become instructions in the issue of them, and which make a far more forcible im- pression than merely speculative maxims and dry sentences.” The chief purpose of the book is “to inculcate the superiority of virtuous conjugal love to all other joys; to prove that virtue chastens our pleasures, only to augment them; and to exem- plify, that the paths of vice, are always those of misery, and that virtue even in distress, is still a happier bargain to its vo- taries, than vice, attended with all the splendor of fortune.”AMELIA “DAMN’D” SI Very few strictures are made in this article. The writer does, indeed, suggest that the sordidness of the characters and situa- tions presented is somewhat “too long dwelt upon”; yet, un- like the generality of contemporary critics, he insists that it would be “an absurd affectation” in novels “of common life” to omit all such matter, “in compliance to a false delicacy, which calls everything Low, that does not relate to a high sphere of life.” Touching upon a question which has often been discussed since, he declares that Booth is, by his “‘own re- morse for the injury done to his amiable, virtuous wife,” so severely punished for “his one guilty step” that his weakness becomes “a moral warning.”’ Amelia is “the model of female perfection, formed to give the greatest and justest idea of domestic happiness. She fills every character, in every scene, in every situation, where the tender, agreeable wife, the prudent fond mother, and the constant friend can have leave to shine.” Atkinson has too undeserved a fate; but, on the whole, the book is entirely true to life—even “the stories of Miss Mat- thews, and Mrs Benner”? contributing “a due share towards unravelling the plot of the history.” Far less fortunate—in fact, most unfortunate—was the ac- count given by the reviewer for The London Magazine, who, though probably not antagonistic toward Fielding, was looking perhaps for another Tom Jones and therefore did not enjoy or understand this new venture in the way of a more sober real- ism and a more outspoken castigation of current abuses. At any rate, the article is little else than a résumé of the plot, with a few patronizing strictures subjoined. ““The story is amusing,” the writer admits, “the characters kept up, and [there are] many reflections which are useful, if the reader will but take notice of them, which in this unthinking age it is to be feared very few will.” He then searches for anachronisms, and finds, of course, a “glaring one,” which he proves with triumphant labor. He is very much worried about the wonderful restora- tion of Amelia’s nose, as was Dr. Johnson later. He is horri- fied to discover that Fielding in the second chapter of the eighth book has made light of English Liberty, and proceeds ~~ - Perrse oT TPR ty re . oa Papkpibpateteeems seeker een beaver reece Bers] ri iol, Seeaseg pe at arn veneeke ae Se © <+e0le “ Tt 4 pacer eer wr wes ee ree ; ¥ ay t a tS 4 or Af ee ft Pt re | iF en org ro ah ae a! a + rt a a Fe hy ear éf} ey pera eh *t = i s ; ri | : |Reese ei edad fee eae 7 ie Te Le bese 4s SPSS TLE. 82 FIELDING THE NOVELIST to give at some length a typical eighteenth-century harangue on the virtues of the English Constitution. Apparently ignor- ing the entire force of Fielding’s attack, he hopes the author in his next novel will direct his satire toward public corruption as well as private vice. In view of the fact that the chief sec- ondary purpose of Amelia was to reform certain legal abuses in England (see Book I, ch. 11, in which Fielding insists that a justice of the peace should have “some knowledge of the law”), the accusation that Fielding had neglected to denounce public corruption was preposterous. Incredible as it may appear, the most damaging discovery which the reviewer made was the seemingly innocent one regarding the nose of the heroine— but that is a story yet to be told.” As for The Gentleman’s Magazine, December, January, and February went by and that periodical maintained its cus- tomary silence; but in the latter month there appeared in the Journal Britannique a long account of Amelia, which, despite much grumbling, wound up with a fine flourish. The editor of this periodical, whom Gibbon eulogized and Johnson re- ferred to as a little “black dog,” was the rather well-known Dr. Maty. Richardsonian as he was, Maty acknowledged cer- tain commendable qualities in Amelia. “Je crois pouvoir dire,” he writes, “que quelques uns des incidents sont ou peu naturels ou mal amenés, que le dénouement n’est ni bien préparé ni suf- fisamment éclairci, qu’il n’y a point assez de noblesse & de con- sistence dans divers caractéres, que des digressions étrangeres & une érudition déplacée allongent inutilement le Roman, mais jaime a pardonner ces défauts 4 |’Auteur, dont la plume n’est moins chaste que spirituelle, & qui sait également dévoiler la Nature & annoblir ’humanité.’”* To make humanity nobler by drawing the veil from its faults was Fielding’s serious intention not only in Amelia but in his new periodical, The Covent-Garden Journal, the first 8 The London Magazine, XX, 531, 592, 596 (December, 1751). ‘Journal Britannique, VII, 123-146 (February, 1752). For an ex- cellent French appreciation of Amelia, see Clément, P., Cing années See littéraires, Letter 91 (London, January 1, 1752). dita ee SR roar hal eae ~ ane 2 ie oh p TG . 3 q ty 23 . :AMELIA “DAMN’D” 83 number of which is dated January 4, 1752. Even from his earliest days he had possessed the spirit of a reformer; and surely his was an age in which reforms were needed. Religion, law, politics, society, the press—all were unblushingly corrupt; and the condition of the lower classes, as Fielding had realized ever more keenly in his work as a magistrate, was a disgrace to any country that called itself civilized. Once again, therefore, he entered the field of journalism. The announcement of The Covent-Garden Journal, which appeared in the columns of The London Daily Advertiser as early as November 1, 1751, set all Grub Street agog; and after Amelia was published, on the eighteenth of the following month, novel and newspaper together were, until the latter came to its termination, the theme of much rancorous abuse. Only a few days after the publication of Amelia, Fielding’s ancient enemy Old England was rejoicing over “the almost lifeless Corpse” of this “poor, wretched, departing Novel,” advising its readers that ‘‘a true and faithful Account of her debauched Life, Amours,’’® etc., will be found in The Covent- Garden Journal, the advertisement of which, as has been re- marked, had already appeared. By Fielding’s new periodical, writes Old England, ‘“The Debauched, the Diseased, the Rot- ting and Rotten, may be instructed and amused, if not cured and reformed: Here will be seen the quaint Device; the old Badger preaching Continence to the young Wolf,—the Type of Impotence correcting Vice!” In the course of this attack, Fielding is made to say: “I once thought, and almost still think, TI’om Jones (which has all my Wit and Humour)? my great Masterpiece: But the SALE however not answering my Bookseller’s Expectation, 1 am now persuaded . to say the same of Amelia. . . .” A week later, Old England took an- other fling at Fielding’s ““Wit and Humour,”*® and then, silent 8 Old England, December 21, 1751. Amelia was published on Decem- ber 18. ® “J have employed all the wit and humour of which I am master in the following history.” See Dedication of Tom Jones. 10 Old England, December 28, 1751. See Jensen’s edition of The Covent-Garden Journal, New Haven, 1915, Il, 40. —_." det lie eee Ne % — oT oe” Cee aaa ew tt m OT era ee - ~ < Pe tub ehintteteren arte rr ar et i ele ee dave ed are *s Se abuts iat eet Cee eT eee bditep tenet eis eine et ? Pt D et ey: a ae ad Ty | a ee! i 7 ra! ere aaa - te ee eee Spee pe ete nrpeens gotten agen tee ee ee = 4 Pe hen i Ay cotaeriatane are aor ee bee a eee eee ree bere Tr qa aro ce Se abt tee at. nee eet tt ere cee ee weet = -Sipe wie geg ras 84 FIELDING THE NOVELIST for a short interval, stored up its venom against his appearance as Sir Alexander Drawcansir. From January 4, 1752, the date of the first issue, until the final number was published, November 25, 1752, Amelia and her creator were assailed with exceptional coarseness and vigor. Almost from the beginning, the “Paper War” between The Covent-Garden Journal and The Inspector, which Field- ing had commenced in Jest, was treacherously converted by Hill into a veritable hard-hitting battle, in the turmoil of which the novelist’s enemies found their opportunity. Amongst a crowd of unidentified scribblers we recognize the familiar figures not only of Hill himself but of Fielding’s old de- famers, Kenrick and Smollett, as well as that of a newcomer in the fray, Bonnell Thornton. The engagements between periodical and pamphlet, burlesque and lampoon, afforded the town a very interesting diversion—even now, as we glance down the pages of the forgotten broadsides, we come across passages here and there of genuine and uproarious fun; but since bitter personal antagonisms were involved, many a foul stroke was delivered by Fielding’s assailants, and their general conduct was indecent and scurrilous in the extreme. [he repu- tation of the pure and womanly Amelia, owing to the unfor- tunate slip about her nose, was reduced to that of a common strumpet. Only the outlines of the famous Hill-Fielding quarrel” can be given here—only those details which relate particularly to the treatment of Fielding’s novel; but the following account will no doubt be sufficient. We begin, accordingly, with the principal character of the opposition, Dr. John Hill. On a number of previous occasions, as has been seen, this facile and enterprising person had paid very high compliments to Fielding and had freely made use of his name and fame in puffs and prefaces to his own productions. But though in his Inspector of January 8, 1752, he did not as yet show his teeth, contenting unstated ~ eu = 11 fR es C ‘ , 7 x For an account of the ‘Paper War” see The Covent-Garden Journal, edited by G. E. Jensen; and Chapter xxv (“Battle of the Wits”) in Cross’s Fielding. - G Smeestataar ted anes net Spe ae a eae ewoeey Se > ? S%efiege te Ty as < aaAMELIA “DAMN’D” 85 himself merely with jibing references to a heroine who was able to “charm the World without the Help of a Nose,” he became in the next number, January 9, 1752, as Professor ae Old England was, of course, delighted. On January 11, following an inde- cent attack on Fielding by Hill (in The Inspector of January 10), this periodical gave vent to an abusive burlesque on the Jensen has pointed out, eae ously abusive. “superannuated Virago, now called Socdy Drawcansir,” whom it characterizes as “‘a bawdy Novelist” in his dotage.*® Fielding, however, accustomed to such treatment, maintained his equable temper; and—on the same day—inserted in the third number of his journal the following intelligence: “It is currently reported that a famous Surgeon, who absolutely cured one Mrs. Amelia Booth, of a violent Hurt in her Nose, insomuch, that she had scarce a scar left on it, intends to bring Actions against several ill meaning and slanderous People, who have reporte¢that the said Lady had no Nose, merely because the Author of her History, in a Hurry, forgot to inform his Readers of that Particular, and which, if those readers had had any Nose themselves, except that which is mentioned in the Motto of this Paper, they would have smelt it out.”** The “Motto,” by the way, was an apt quotation from Martial: “Ez Puert Nasum Rhinocerotis habent””** This good-humored re- monstrance had, of course, no mollifying effect upon Field- ing’s assailants. The opportunity offered—nay, almost in- vited—by the novelist’s inadvertence concerning the nose of his heroine was too good to be easily relinquished by an eight- eenth-century calumniator. On January 15, Fielding’s old enemy, the King of the Beggars, came to the fore, parodying, in his advertisement to an edition of his Apology, the celebrated device which Millar had used to stimulate interest in A7melia.*® And, on the same 12 Jensen, I, 42. 13 Tbid., 1, 47-48. te otde ta AT 18 The Tondo Daily Advertiser, January 15; The General Adver tiser, January 1; and The Whitehall Evening Post, November 7-9. See Jensen, I, 53. . ‘J onl ary ee 5 = a hap enenehe” pen ET es “> rer ba Fite rn LS ery res “* iabtemeireiaeieete one gts rrr peer ae a 04 doe Se re ‘ th BR eme th ssn, Oe e elres a oer Sptenslges~jtemace a a rs EE re aL here is re reer aes fees weatonncee: a ta 1 -* a ze 4 -oae i. ans a ere es pen eer Sher nrebyeere ned teen Tert f ‘q Bt | oe} s rid 4 i Ds ih Hi ie FI i oer rr ora et ere 0 hin CPG ad, ee t aw ee rer babe o reas aye eS eenees Rar ne ea ee nr niTOeis eat x Sete TATE LELP IS SIE ae eed 86 FIELDING THE NOVELIST day, a really formidable antagonist lent his assistance to the forces of Grub Street; this was the envious Tobias Smollett, who, by the way, had been almost as much intrigued by the success of T'om Jones as Richardson himself. In the first edi- tion of Peregrine Pickle (1751), as we have noted, Smollett had attacked Lyttelton (who was of a lean habit of body) as “Gosling Scrag” and Fielding as “Mr. Spondy,” advising the latter that “‘when he is inclined to marry his own cook-wench, his gracious patron may condescend to give the bride away; and finally settle him in his old age, as a trading Westminster justice.” So far as we know, Fielding had never deigned a reply to this insult; but in the second number of his Covent- Garden Journal, January 7, 1752, he had referred to Rod- erick Random in a playful communique about a recent skir- mish which had taken place between the Forces under Sir Alexander Drawcansir and the Army of Grub Street. This bit of war news ran as follows: A little before our March . we sent a large Body of Forces, un- der the Command of General A. Millar, to take Possession of the most eminent Printing-Houses. The greater Part of these were gar- risoned by Detachments from the Regiment of Grub-Street, who all retired at the Approach of our Forces. A small Body, indeed, under the Command of one Peeragrin Puckle, made a slight Shew of Re- sistance; but his Hopes were soon found to be in Vaim; and, at the first Report of the Approach of a younger Brother of General Thomas Jones, his whole Body immediately disappeared, and totally overthrew some of their own Friends, who were marching to their Assistance, under the Command of one Rodorick ‘Random. This Rodorick, in a former Skirmish with the People called Critics, had owed some slight Success more to the Weakness of the Critics, than to any Merit of his own.'® The irascible Scot, who had been nursing his wrath to keep it warm, now fought shoulder to shoulder with the legions of Grub Street and discharged at Fielding a venomous twenty- 16 Y The Covent-Garden Journal, No. 2, January 7, 1752 (Jensen, I, 145). fi Hl i ; ey . : | - ‘ ri 6 ’ 0 , iy re . Ee! i . > 7 as , ar ee’ fi ry .'s ro er 8 Bt - if . ; f ; S fants : es ha | 7 By,AMELIA “DAMN’D” 87 eight page pamphlet entitled, 4 Faithful Narrative of the base and inhuman Arts . . . lately practised upon the Brain of Habbakkuk Hilding.”' Fielding is here represented as in a state of insanity brought about by a potion administered by ‘Gosling Scrag.” Scrag (z.e., Lyttelton), so runs the story, unsuccessful in his attempt to make Hilding take charge of the forces ¢ against their enemies, particularly against that “rascal Pere- grine Pickle, who hath brought us both to ridicule and shame,” had finally resorted to the application of drugs, as the result of which, Hilding, now mentally deranged, was prosecuting the present Newspaper War. To make a long story short, this scurrilous production accuses Fielding of stealing from Rod- erick Random the characters of Miss Williams and Strap for those of Miss Matthews and Partridge, makes game of Jones’s illegitimacy and Amelia’s noselessness, and subjects Fielding’s private character to journalistic manhandling. Habbakkuk Hil- ding, attributed to Smollett by The Gentleman’s Magazine, did more damage, no doubt, than most of the anonymous pamphlets of the Newspaper War; for his reputation as a novelist was now so well established that a word from him was eagerly read.) As might have been imagined, the sneer at Fielding in the popular Peregrine Pickle had not gone unno- ticed; Richard Graves, for instance, called Shenstone’s atten- tion to it, as we learn from a letter dated September 17, 1751. “You tell me,” wrote Shenstone, ‘“The Author of Peregrine Pickle says, if you will flatter Mr. Lyttelton well, he will at last make you a Middlesex Justice.’’** In the second edition of his novel, Smollett removed the offensive allusion, and— over a decade after Fielding’s death—inserted in his History of England a commendatory reference to his great rival—but 17 Advertised in the London Daily Advertiser for “This Day at Noon,” January 15, 1752. The Gentleman’s Magazine (January, 1752, p. 29) says this pamphlet is “supposed to be written by the author of Peregrine Pickle.” See the reprint of the pamphlet in the Works of Smollett, edited by W. E. Henley, Westminster, 1901, XII, 165-186. 18 The Works . . . of . . . William Shenstone, third ed., London, 17.73, LIT, 187. ™ ee — wet te Spadetnbclsaenh teat St Cieiet ied ra ee r+ Yy At ! ee) a ef 3 es hy if 5 ] ae a iy ees Pe a ree | a ii ae Fe Ps ed ee a 2 resi PCH ys a es ee Sri “ a tet scaled ieee! PA OF tas > » tae! s tater ene” ae ar a er ers, As. rer rer ueyeitat 4. 04. a reer! RR ae or rat bt den > Ce aoe oven teteresecestigin yoke crt es a A rer ryt Pree ee eet rates sR a oe eS a ld et pases a eee eel, i “ E Be i! ra) Bh t tf aay th pn wee regrpenindeleyeryoarne er se abun eet he Peed otek et etn ate ee ee ee err ae Sena 4 SOOPER ye eet ra . = Paina ee ares. bint ober rad i ere eaeeage ee »Pt tn <9 om, ae ee arse “teens om. ae ~ a et “ a ~ sie. se sick Oo ean Ms eG tr FIELDING THE NOVELIST O2 Influence of evil Tongues. A Lady who was possessed of all the Jomestick Virtues of Life; and so remarkable for her Meekness of Ui Disposition, as to have equalled the Fame of Patient Grissel. The i Expence of her Funeral was defrayed by his Excellency Sir A/exan- der, who was deeply affected with her Fate, and now begs that no Person will be so cruel and impious as to disturb her Ashes. To proceed further with a detailed account of the News- paper War is unnecessary. After a few more weeks, Fielding’s novel ceased to be one of the major objects of attack, and dur- ing the spring and summer, was, comparatively speaking, neg- lected except for occasional sallies. But late in the fall, when The Covent-Garden Journal was given up, and the customary mock-obituaries of that periodical ran the rounds of hostile paragraphers, 4 melia came in for a share of the old coarseness and truculency. In one instance, indeed, the book was purposely ignored. “The last Will and Testament” of Alexander Draw- cansir, which appeared in Thornton’s Spring-Garden Journal, December 7, contains the following items: My Manuscript of Joseph Andrews I leave to Parson Y——\, my Chaplain and Quotation-hunter. My Tom Jones I leave to the Foundling Hospital, as a Token of Gratitude and Respect. But of Amelia there was never a word. During the conflict Fielding had not been without friends, but the admirers of Amelia were few in number. Among these, however, was a certain ‘‘Criticulus,”’ whose contribution —perhaps because Johnson was less hostile this time, or more probably because the topic in its connection with the News- paper War was of general interest—found a place in the March number of The Gentleman’s Magazine, which, by the way, had never condescended to review Fielding’s novel. The worthy “‘Criticulus” devotes much of his brief space to the de- tection of anachronisms; but the rest of it he bestows on a vin- dication of the book. He thinks that Amelia has been too “‘se- verely handled by some modern critics” and trusts that whatAMELIA “DAMN’D” 93 Mr. Fielding Garden Journal was only said “‘in his warmth and indignation . gave out in the Court of Criticism of his Covent- of this injurious treatment.” In spite of their imperfections, he believes that “some of the characters” “‘are handled in so mas- terly a manner,” that “virtue and vice” meet with such “‘due rewards,” and that there are so many “noble reflections on the ” that “She must be follies and vices . . . of human nature, both a bad and ill-natur’d reader, who is not by it agreeably entertain’d, instructed, and improved.” Another anonymous writer, supposed to be—despite his denial—the physician and antiquary Dr. John Kennedy, at- tributing the failure of Amelia not to the fault of the author but to the depravity of the age itself, defends the book in an anti-Hill pamphlet entitled Some Remarks on the Life and Writings of Dr. J—— H——.. The following passage, called forth by Hill’s abuse of Fielding’s heroine, occurs in a letter which purports to have been written to a friend in the country: ““You ask me for the opinion of the town, and my own of Mr. Fielding’s ‘Amelia.’ I must own to you, they are very different, if we are to form a judgment of the opinion of the town by the sale of the work, which has not as yet gone thro’ a second edition. Were I to take it from the circle of my own acquaintance, I should mention ‘Amelia’ to you as a most finished performance.” “What you take notice of as to Amelia’s nose,” he continues, ““was an omission which has occasioned a vast deal of low wit, and been a standing joke here. I dare say it will be emended in any future edition.” In his opinion the accusation of lowness preferred against the novel is a sure indication of the lowness of the public taste; to himself and to “‘the judicious few” Fielding’s heroine is “in- estimable.’’”* At the end of the year (December, 1752), the author of another anti-Hill broadside paid Fielding a rather unusual compliment. The following four lines, from The Inspector’s 22 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XXII, 102 (March, 1752). 23 Quoted by Cross, Fielding, II, 348. Regarding the authorship of the pamphlet, see Jensen, I, 70 note. ee eT a. masa eee: owe eran 1 ae _ - > a he tl tester eed a et eneweene telat ny 7 col ie Fi fer SF oa Ay $ a ry st f or 1 F en ae BA ea i Hs ee oe a : eT aes tee eae Seapreiatete net ery ad ed 2 imeem, an ea ang ee ten aS Le eer ers et ee eerie Sted ane ht fragt Sens rer et eee eee *t*i4~,4 tia “ Seteptsa te) pie euppaiatbeen tn Seer Lied a mlCeec ees ese re Pere ST eee r ee le Toe bees FP EPS Te . + a MP y iB Peet ie i ae eee ee eet Y te Ean ¢ | , : | if a 94 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Rhapsody on the Loss of his Wig, may be given for what they are worth: For fame let Fielding scratch his pensive head, Fame I [Hill] despise, I scribble but for bread; Let him his labours polish and retouch, He may write better, but not near so much! Thus the fact that Fielding actually did take pains with his work was not entirely unnoticed by his contemporaries. But we must now bid adieu to the land of anonymia and speak of a major figure among Hill’s antagonists, Christopher Smart. Even before the Newspaper War, this worthy but unfortu- nate man (whom Fielding befriended) was one of the novel- ist?s most devoted admirers. In his periodical The Midwife, Smart made more than one reference to characters in Tom Jones (e.g., to Squire Western, II, 101), and asserted that in respect to “wit” Fielding deserved a place with Lucian, Swift, Butler, and Erasmus. In a later number, while commending Murphy’s imitation of The Covent-Garden Journal in The ea s-Inn Journal, he declared “that ’tis a certain Test of true Humour to be delighted with the Writings of Mr. Field- ing” (III, 137); and in January, 1753, he inserted an excel- lent tribute to his friend in the preface to a satirical poem en- titled ““The Hilliad” (directed at their common enemy, Dr. John Hill). “Through all Mr. Fielding’s inimitable comic cc Romances,” wrote Smart, “‘we perceive no such thing as per- sonal malice, no priv ate character dragged into light.” He then praised Fielding’s realism (“every scene of life is . . . repre- sented in its natural colours”), and his work as a reformer (he ridicules “every species of folly or humour” with “the most exquisite touches”). In short, ““A genius es this is perhaps more useful to mankind, than any [othe r| class of writers; he serves to dispel all gloom from our minds, to work off our ill- humours by the gay sensations excited by a well directed pleas- antry, and in a vein of mirth he leads his readers into the knowledge of human nature; the most useful and pleasingAMELIA “DAMN’D” 95 science we can apply to.”** At the end of “The Hilliad” itself, Smart pictured Hill as remaining the “ARCH-DUNCE,” While with joint force o’er humour’s droll domain, Cervantes, Fielding, Lucian, Swift, shall reign.”° From the admirable eulogistic verses written years after the novelist’s death we learn that Smart had a genuine appreciation of Amelia; but even at that time, as we shall see, there were comparatively few who shared that pleasure with him. And during the squabbles of 1752 even those who used their pens in a common cause with Fielding were noticeably reticent about praising a novel which had been so bandied about in newspaper and pamphlet. As we take into account the incessant scurrility which was directed at the ill-starred heroine, Dr. Johnson’s assertion to the effect that the sale of Amelia (at first so gratifying to author and publisher) was spoiled by that “vile broken nose,” is seen to be, in the main, a statement of actual fact. In their attacks upon Tom Jones, Fielding’s de- famers, it should be observed, were practically unanimous in conceding that the novel had been “greedily swallowed” by the public—that, in fact, was the principal cause of their wrath; in their onslaughts upon “poor” Amelia, they were equally unanimous in declaring that the book had been a fail- ure—for had not the author admitted it himself? Fielding’s assailants, meanwhile, were not confined to Grub Street. Among the crowd of persons who had been eager to appear as witnesses against Azelia were Samuel Richardson and his female adorers. From one of these, Mrs. Delany, we have the following testimony, in a letter to Mrs. Dewes, dated January 18, 1752. “We are reading Mr. Fielding’s Amelia. Mrs. Don. and I don’t like it at all; D. D. [Dr. Delany] won’t listen to it. It has more a moral design than either ap- *4 “The Hilliad,” London, 1753, p. viii (bound with Poems on Several Occasions, London, 1752). In The Impertinent (August 13, 1752), Hill asserted that Smart wrote because he was “hungry”: Fielding, be- cause he had “wit”—that is, the wit of a buffoon. 2 STthe Hilliads2aps aa Trae ae * ewke “4 RI Oa Parte a hy rrr Livan, rT arr a 5 eka rr rry ee 1a ee Nh ahi Ps ay) ea i ree ea Fp a iz ‘ +L a i Ba yaa pee NL a aA bere eee eh hy Pe yt Se aa eon en vatihbaed haat Ne ete! 5 oe + seat Pe te pebiaken ete et wet eT ear) a oe o mbint eae eT Ne ne ene aeater aetevseiaet si 2seiii gf 96 FIELDING THE NOVELIST pears in Joseph Andrews or ‘Tom Jones, but has not so much it neither makes one laugh or cry, though there are lismal scenes described, but there is something want- humour; some very ( ing to make them touching. I shall be glad to have your opin- ion; some few people here like it. Our next important reading will be Betty Thoughtless; I wish Richardson would publish his good man, and put all these frivolous authors out of con- tenance.2° To call the author of Amelia a frivolous author is certainly refreshing! But if one were to believe the news- papers—and, for that matter, the author of Clarissa himself— was not Fielding a buffoon: Not long after this we have the opinion of another Richard- sonian, Miss ae (later Mrs. Chapone). In a letter to Miss Carter, February 11, she says, “Mr. —— tells me that you are a friend to Fielding’s Amelia. I love the woman, but for the book— it must have merit, since Miss Carter and some few good judges approve of it.’ In the course of an extended critique—for she stands somewhat in awe of her learned friend—we ens oe eee ing query: ““And is there not a ten- dency in; s [Fielding’s] works, to soften the deformity of vice, by weuine than in an amiable light, that are desti- tute of every virtue except good naturet”’*' On the same day, still another member of the group, Mrs. Donnellan, was writing to Richardson himself. “Will you leave us to au Booth and Betty ‘Thoughtless for our exam- ples?” she asks. ““As for poor Amelia, she is so great a fool we pity her, but cannot be humble enough to desire to imitate her. Now, perhaps, you have not read this stuff, but I desire you will, and then I think your conscience must make you pub- lish [Grandison].” The last sentence, which is sufficiently illuminating as eo the popular attitude in certain quarters toward Fielding, runs as follows: “‘Poor Fielding, I believe, designed to be good, but did not know how, and in the attempt lost his genius, low humour.”’”® 26 T}, The Autobiography of Mrs. Delany, London, 1861, III, 79. 27 Th» Wor The Works of Mrs. Chapone, London, 1807, I, 45, 46. 28 . o rT Correspondence of Richardson, IV, 55-56 (February 11, 1752). wpletwtyecya ela, — * " . saat arta aeieabean Lied te sl ! 4 he te «AMELIA “DAMN’D” 97 Richardson had kept a close watch, presumably through Fielding’s sister, upon what his rival was doing. Even before Amelia was published he had taken pains to inform Lady Bradshaigh that in Newgate Prison, ‘“‘removed from,” the “Inns and alehouses” of Fielding’s former books ‘will some of his next scenes [7.e., of Amelia], be laid”; adding the pious comment: “perhaps not unusefully; I hope not. But to have done, for the present, with this fashionable author.”?® When Amelia actually appeared and was subjected to the abuse of journalists and pamphleteers, Richardson was in high feather. The attacks on Fielding during the Newspaper War of 1752 he followed with the greatest avidity. At the time the letter from Mrs. Donnellan arrived he was gloating over his rival’s apologia; in fact he delayed a reply to her until he had dis- patched a note to his friend Edwards, who, he knew, would rejoice with him. In the following letter one can almost see Richardson drawing a long face and rubbing his hands. “Mr. Fielding,” he writes, “has met with the disapprobation you ‘foresaw he would meet with, of his Amelia. He is, in every paper he publishes under the title of the Common Garden, contributing to his overthrow. He has been overmatched in his own way by people whom he had despised, and whom he thought he had vogue enough, from the success his spurious brat Tom Jones so unaccountably met with, to write down; but who have turned his own artillery against him, and beat him out of the field, and made him even poorly in his Court of Criticism give up his Amelia, and promise to write no more on the like subjects.”’*° On the following day, February 22, 1752, in his reply** to Mrs. Donnellan, the little printer was even more exultant: “Will I leave you to Captain Booth? Capt. Booth, Madam, has done his own business. Mr. Fielding has over-written him- self, or rather under-written; and in his own journal seems 29 Correspondence of Richardson, IV, 286. $0 Tbid., III, 33, 34 (February 21, 1752). 81 Tbid., IV, 59-60. ~ Ste a. | . - Co bebheteheeet tart oe Lage etd eT 7 ie ee if af BY i: , i. rr eee eS ae aan a RE PT ter ey ea asp Sided ete deat cet ht eee aeeee Ti sea Tae Ol bl S00 vee aCe 25 rete sess 98 FIELDING THE NOVELIST ashamed of his last Be and has promised that the same Muse shall write no more for him. The piece, in short, is as dead as if it had been published forty years ago, as to sale.” Richard- son had read, indeed, “but the first volume,” when he “‘found the characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty”’ that he “imagined” he “could not be interested for any one of them.” Did Fielding realize that Richardson was traducing him? Did his sister Sally tell him? If she did, he must have had greater Magnanimi ity than even he is known to have possessed. In the tenth number of that very Covent-Garden J ournal*” which Richardson was maligning, i.e., about two weeks before the present letter, Fielding had gone out of his way to allude to the “ingenious Author of Clarissa.” But the “ingenious Author,” now in his glory, was deaf to all feelings save that of malicious exultation; in the remainder of his letter he thus proceeds to enlighten Mrs. Donnellan regarding Fielding the Man. “In his Tom Jones,” writes the logical Richardson, “his hero is made a natural child, because his own first wife was such.” As for the hero, Tom, he is “Fielding himself, hard- ened in some places, softened in others.” Lady ue llaston is “fan infamous woman of his former acquaintance.’ > His Sophia is “again his first wife”; Booth, “in his last piece, again him- self’; while “Amelia, even to her noselessness, is again his first wife”; and his “brawls, his jarrs, his gaols, his spunging- houses, are all drawn from what he has seen and known.” This amazing epistle concludes as follows: “‘As I said (witness also his hamper plot)”—apparently the matter had been elucidated before—“he has little or no invention: and admirably do you observe, that by several strokes in his Amelia he designed to be good, but knew not how, and lost his genius, low humour in the attempt.”’ No doubt the rough-and-tumble warfare on the part of scurrilous journalists and pamphleteers was a great factor in obscuring from the view of contemporaries the true alti- Ae ae. : tude of Fielding’s genius; but the malignant insinuations of 82 7 aie ; The Covent-Garden Journal, No. 10, February 4, 1752 (Jensen, I, 193). we er Se nr ET Se Sarees Neneh eee ee eee mE . 4 etetetele + sa 7 : ; 7 ee f. E fF ; (ker = re “”rTHE ETERNAL CONTRAST (Tom Jones, Book III, Chapter IX) oeniate a tee te es aaa hale “0 u0, iW ar enw-nemobebecrenesprnlagelyae . iota ee Sieh dene nn ae Tt) ‘ eee Lene eee eer ape dies ee heeled edn ee ee On Le er ha i | she htt Ooo atoheine ee ee as Street kee ee tere ne ee ere Sirs See ieee eae a ea eee ee Mrs. a enews etree oe SeeAMELIA “DAMND” 99 Richardson not only injured Fielding among certain persons of his own generation whose opinion was of value, but, after the Correspondence (in part) was published in 1804, were injurious to his later fame. Perhaps the most extraordinary of all the Richardson letters in Mrs. Barbauld’s volumes is the following one, addressed to Lady Bradshaigh, February 23, 1752, the day after the epistle to Mrs. Donnellan. Now that Amelia was apparently a fail- ure, Richardson made so bold as to strike at Fielding through the latter’s own sister. As Sally Fielding was his ardent adorer, it may be imagined that this was not the first time he had spoken to her about her brother’s depravity. “Poor Fielding!” exclaims the pious Richardson, “I could not help telling his sister, that I was equally surprised at and concerned for his continued lowness. Had your brother, said I, been born in a stable, or been a runner at a sponging-house, we should have thought him a genius, and wished he had had the advantage of a liberal education, and of being admitted into good company; but it is beyond my conception, that a man of family, and who had some learning, and who really is a writer, should descend so excessively low, in all his pieces. Who can care for any of his people? A person of honour asked me, the other day, what he could mean, by saying, in his Covent Garden Journal, that he had followed Homer and Virgil, in his Amelia. I answered, that he was justified in saying so, because he must mean Cot- ton’s Virgil Travestied; where the women are drabs, and the men scoundrels.”’**/As Sir Leslie Stephen justly remarks, “It is painful to read this kind of stuff.”’** In the opinion of Richardson and the Richardsonians in general—Mrs. Delany, Mrs. Donnellan, Miss Mulso, and others—A melia was ‘“‘wretchedly low and dirty.” But the most distinguished of his female admirers, Miss Elizabeth Carter, made a strong protest against the abuse which was heaped upon the ill-starred heroine. Greatly as she admired Richardson, the “learned” Miss Carter, as we have seen, had always exerted 33 Correspondence of Richardson, V1, 154-155. 84 The Works of Samuel Richardson, 1, xxiv (London, 1883). a eran ys | eed eee ee a 44 rere omy aye a er iB — ma vo) = et Comtpekikee tee eae Pe ort See ary ras alteneebeiebe ion Wen +m Hen Ot Aree RL PEP a ls, crt a oe re a a p ~~ a pes Oy St en ene ee eS er Te TT! pam a he et Od oe AH trenpes oe eet ane aon? eek pee eee ote os ¢ _ pe aN AT py - i H s ea La rei ri ety aes) eh ria} 73) eh rea vk were? a oe herein —— opty - ner — ~ 4 SENN enter’ thet. Peeteetdeint te bat tet bdntet lt ete SR ean ee laa etc ea hee eee cette ahetion heenee eee So eee et oi enter “= See ee een aes Stee Pee om Pyters ae Be Tet tele “= = % Bay 7.4 oe i es Yea ik} ie A ia ; 3 ee as : 100 FIELDING THE NOVELIST herself in defense of Fielding. “Tt must surely be a marvellous wrong-headedness and perplexity of understanding,” she had written of Joseph Andrews, “that can make any one consider a very immoral thing, and of the most dangerous tendency’; she was “sorry” that her friend Miss about poor ‘Tom Jones” ; and now this complete satire as Talbot was “‘so outrageous find her rendering assistance to the distressed Amelia. 1 March 14, 1752, Miss Talbot, writing to we In a letter datec Miss Carter from the deanery of St. Paul’s, gives the follow- ing interesting account of the perusal of the book by Martin Benson, then Bishop of Gloucester. “T have not read ‘Amelia’ yet,” she says, “but have seen it read and commented upon much to my edification by that good Bishop of Gloucester, who seldom misses spending two or three days of the week at this deanery. I have been particularly delighted with some of our afternoons, when we have sat unmolested by my dressing room fire-side, he reading ‘Amelia’ (and quarreling excessively at the two first volumes) my mother and I reading or working, or following our own devices as it might happen.”*° ‘This ac- count drew from Miss Carter the following spirited rejoinder “Tn favour of the Bishop of Gloucester’s cold, his reading Amelia in silence may be tolerated, but I am somewhat scan- dalized that since he did not read it to you, you did not read it yourself. Methinks I long to engage you on the side of this poor unfortunate book, which I am told the fine folks are unanimous in pronouncing to be very sad stuff. The Bishop of Gloucester’s excessive sad quarrel with the two first volumes I am determined to conclude proceeded from the effects of his cold.”” Then—recalling Miss Mulso’s diatribe—she concludes, “How to account for Miss Mulso’s unmerciful severity to Amelia is past my skill, as it does not appear but that she was in very good health when she read the book.”** After this, it is not surprising that in her reply Miss Talbot was less “outra- geous” about Amelia than she had been regarding Tom Jones. 85 4 Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Cath- erine Talbot, Il, 69. 88 Tbid., Il, 71-72 (March 30, 1751).AMELIA “DAMN’D” IO She writes: “At last we have begun Amelia, it is very enter- taining. I do love Dr. Harrison and the good Serjeant; and Mrs. James’s visit to Amelia has extremely diverted me. How many Mrs. James’s in that good-for-nothing London!” Still, befere she gets through, Miss Talbot cannot refrain from say- ing, “But Mr. Fielding’s heroines are always silly loving runa- way girls [Presumably a reminiscence from Richardson]. Amelia makes an excellent wife, but why did she marry Booth? Miss Talbot, it would seem, was fairly amenable; Miss 9937 Mulso, on the other hand, continued to be recalcitrant—as the following letter will show: “ ‘Rather frail than wicked!’ Dear Miss Carter! that is what I complain of, that Fielding contrives to gloss over gross and monstrous faults in such a manner that even his virtuous readers shall call them frailties. Had I not reason to accuse the author of ‘softening or hiding the deformity of vice,’ when infidelity, adultery, gam- ing, and extravagance . . are so gently reproved, even by Miss Carter? ‘His amour with Miss Mathews,’ you say, ‘how- ever blameable, was attended with some alleviating circum- stances: what these were I am unable to discover. In- deed . . . [should not have cared sixpence had the book ended with his being hanged.” In “‘most” of Fielding’s “characters,” writes Miss Mulso, “the vices predominate”; and he ‘“‘has a very low opinion of human nature,” which “‘his writings tend to enforce” on “his readers.” “Is it not the common plea of wicked men,” she concludes, “that they follow nature? whereas they have taken pains to debauch and corrupt their nature, and have by degrees reconciled it to crimes that simple, uncorrupted nature would start at.”** Miss Carter’s statement that the “fine folks” regarded Amelia as “very sad stuff” is borne out in the case of Lady Orrery, who pronounced the novel “tedious,” though she could not leave off reading it. Amelia, it seems, held her attention sufficiently to make her lose her sleep and afflict her with a 87 4 Series of Letters, Il, 75-76 (April 22, 1752). 88 The Works of Mrs. Chapone, 1, 48-52 (letter X, May 27 [1752]). eee Pidwile a ~ petewzeeserecebakat bes ahamareaensbete wr hee eee CPN mg + $b bet Tie hee Tz) ay Ay 3 ; gt .or pt cad ree ay te a | Ae den SF rea= Poi Sh 102 FIELDING THE NOVELIST . . ’ . 89 - “horrid head Ach.” “Indeed, I belive,” she writes* in a letter to Lord Orrery, January 6, ing so much of Amelia last ni have finished, but cannot say Rt has given me equal pleasure with Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews. it certainly is his own history, the Love part foolishly fond beneath the dignity of a man. Amelia vastly good, but a little silly. I think she is dead many years in reality. the Prison and Baliff Sceans very well. the Catastrophy of recovering their fortune unnatural. Amelia’s conduct in carrying her Children to my Lord foolish and indiscreet. Mrs. Atkison’s character neither uniform nor natural, the only good stroke in it making so learned a lady also a drunken Lady. Miss Mathews the most consistant char- acter in the book. however, his observations on the abuse of 1752 2. <1t was occasioned by read- ght till it was very late, which I laws, and his moral discourses are very well. but all together it is tedious.” Another of the “‘fine folks” was Fielding’s own cousin. When Lady Mary, still abroad, read Amelia, in 1755, she also went so far as to 1¢ ay Booth as Fielding himself; won- dered her cousin did not “‘perceive” that Tom Jones and ‘Mr. Booth were both “sorry scoundrels”; and declared that “AY these [sic] sort of books have the same fault, which I cannot easily pardon, being very mischievous.” ‘“They place a merit,” she continues, “in extravagant passions, and encourage young people to hope for impossible events, to draw them out of the misery they chose [sic] to plunge themselves into, expecting legacies from unknown relations, and generous benefactors to distressed virtue, as much out of nature as fairy treasures.”*° Lady Mary’s attitude toward Fielding will be discussed at length farther on. It is evident that she held Amelia in no very high esteem; and it is safe to say that Miss Carter was right when she complained of the low opinion which the “‘fine folks” entertained of the “‘poor unfortunate” book. Richard- son’s characterization of the novel as ‘“wretchedly low and 89 The Orrery Papers, Il, 285-286 (January 6, 1752). The letter is given with her ladyship’s own spelling, ete. 40 Letters and Works, London, n.d. [1861], II, 279-280. ee Se eer n Peas ee en ees ST eae recs y - ee ee ie ae i te t? He 4AMELIA “DAMN’D” 103 dirty” expressed not merely the view of his sentimental adher- ents but of a reading public in general that had not yet be- come accustomed to a frank and sober realism. As we have seen, the laugh had been turned against Fielding; and the reputation of his pure and womanly Amelia had been so com- pletely destroyed that even the mention of her name provoked a smile. Time has substantiated Johnson’s assertion that the sale of the book was injured by the “vile broken nose, never cured” of its heroine; the revised edition, which Fielding carefully prepared,” did not appear during his lifetime, in fact, not until Arthur Murphy issued the collected Works in 1762. When Fielding died, in 1754, it was not Amelia but Joseph Andrews that challenged honors with Tom Jones. As the roll of the “judicious” is called for the third time, the advocates of Amelia are found to be “few” indeed, far fewer than in the case of Tom Jones or even of Joseph An- drews. The book had gone down to defeat—not entirely, to be sure, because of Amelia’s “‘vile broken nose,” but because of the distaste of the public for the author’s studies in real life. Amelia was Fielding’s last novel; with the exception of the autobiographical Voyage to Lisbon he did nothing more in the way of narrative. Not only his disinclination but his arduous labors as a magistrate and his rapid decline in health during the last two years of his life prevented any further venture into the world of pure fiction. His reputation as a novelist, though considerably shaken by the public ridicule of Amelia, was undeniably very great; but he had not succeeded in de- throning Richardson, nor had he won that position as a writer which we accord him to-day. Not yet in the opinion of scholars (Joseph Warton, for example) did he deserve mention with Cervantes and Le Sage. *1 Cross’s Fielding, Il, 356. we sre byt ue ott tt mp tee bate ererres nis 4 Ab tp jenn SY ened ett heart ten oe bh tebe ee ~ ~ Te Ere Se eae = * sie am arr ely), 4 ood petnerdes rb ite has - 3 ~ 3} & 3h! ‘ rat + mune eT errr Per a Ne wiry Seah dete ae a eR re et iy ys ea i Sti nee i Oh hit AY ba Miok APL A Reo ok Eel bertTETSU TPL FST EEG LEL YS OL Papeete, Te Lele PTT SES CHAPTER IV A Fournal of the Voyage to Lisbon so5 6) o4 I URING the brief interim between the publication of Amelia (December, 1751) and Fielding’s death (October, 1754), contemporary pamphleteers, jour- nalists, and scribblers of prose narrative sought, as before, to attract the attention of the public by references to his works, by parodies of his style, and by imitations of the more obvious features of the genre of fiction he had created. After his ene- mies had celebrated the decease of his Covent-Garden Journal with mock obituaries, their activities were less noticeable; for, id not again enter the lists with newspaper or novel, since he d for assailing him were reduced in number. As the occasions result of his battle with the denizens of Grub Street consider- able ‘“‘mud,” to use the novelist’s own expression, clung to his reputation; but even the ridicule heaped upon Amelia did not rob him of his standing as the author of Tom Jones and of Joseph Andrews. He was the only rival Richardson had to fear, and allusions to him and his works possessed, as every hack-writer well knew, a market value. When G. A. Stevens, for example, inserted the following parody in his Dedication to Distress upon Distress; or, Tragedy in True Taste: ““Come ye Sons of sterling Humour, Luczan, Rablais {sic|, Cervantes, Teach me to 2? he could count on a smile of rec- ognition on the part of his readers. With the writers of fiction, of course, an imitation of the external characteristics of a Fielding novel went on as usual, though very often the indebtedness was unacknowledged. An instance in point is William Guthrie’s The Friends (1754), in which, though Fielding’s influence 1s obvious, the author im- 1 Dedication, pp. iv-v, May 1, 1752. REE Te ir aa. SR ete et pad : , PS ens eee tend eee ae et “Pos re sth dati bal te eee tt ee aeTHE VOYAGE TO LISBON 105 pudently declares that for “a History of the kind” here pre- sented—the “Fic in lower life’”—‘“‘no certain Rules”? have as yet “been laid down.’”” Guthrie, it will be remembered, was one of the principal contributors to Old England. More gen- erous in his acknowledgments is Shebbeare, who, in his first novel, The Marriage Act (1754), speaks of Fielding as an author “we adore” (I, 288). His admiration is most apparent; for he includes, in chapter xix, a “Dissertation” on the word “Good” (I, 111); introduces to us “a Clergyman, named Farley,” who was “an excellent Greek and Latin Scholar” (ch. xxx; I, 200); and bursts forth in such mock heroics as the following: “And now the Sun rose thro’ the Eastern Skies, darting his Beams along the ruddy Horizon, and drank the delicious Dewdrops of the fragrant Morn; when Farley waked by the Side of his lovely Nanny” (ch. xxxviii; I, 260- 2601). Among the periodicals most friendly to Fielding, was young Arthur Murphy’s Gray’s-Imn Journal (fashioned after the pattern of The Covent-Garden Journal), which began in the fall of 1751. In No. 16, February 3, 1752, Murphy declares that “Fielding will ever be a faithful Guide to the Adventurer in comic Romance.”* In No. 20, March 2, 1752, he brackets the names of Fielding and Hogarth.’ In No. 38, July 7, 1753, he writes, “It would be absurd in any Critic, to call the inimi- table Mr. Fielding an HUMOURIST, but he who would pronounce him to be a Man of Exquisite Humour, would, I believe, express something more pertinent to the Point.”® In No. 86, June 8, 1754, occurs this passage: “Whenever Field- ing shall arrive to his Estate in this Part of Parnassus [i.e., the “Regions of Humour and Ridicule”],” there is “a Borough * The Friends. A Sentimental History, London, 1754, Preface. S$ The Marriage Act. A Novel Containing a Series of Interesting Adventures, London, 1754 (Gentleman’s Magazine, XXIV, 486). * The Gray’s-Inn Journal (reprinted in two volumes), London, 1756, I, 107. bids 15 1311 © Tbid., I, 243. ete ee Cebabetd iene + ~~ Sires pera d 7 - 4 ere iteptemiekpeiation st mie yes BE te rar 7 ae Rik th ee “Yesrrt 7 ie i year Pea. «nr ter Ps 5 iT’ (Ses, eg 4 ek) Be Pets ot a4] ’ oat “ee aor Big ® jee, 5 es err? ae Laer re ea mon ne pe ee Meera nt Pt See SB he Ne rg ar Find ostne este An era >t , Fi aT), 7 ee et ee er peepee Eek eed ae” era ARON Ew eee yan ats + a te Hg o~ Le eee eee ee PP yt pn + TORO be TR ae UE SEIN PGI 7106 FIELDING THE NOVELIST ready to elect him.’ In Nos. 96 and 97, August 17 and 24, 1754, Murphy criticizes Fielding’s statement that the source of the ridiculous is affectation, saying that the ridiculous may be found “where there is no Affectation at the Bottom,”® and instancing certain situations in the life of Parson Adams. Thus Murphy, who was afterwards in his Essay to do Fielding the greatest possible disservice by exploiting himself at the expense of a friend, here finds it to his advantage to refer very often to the popular novelist. A generation later, however, when The Gray’s-Inn Journal was revised for inclusion in Murphy’s W orks (1786), it was no longer Fielding but Cervantes who would “ever be a faithful guide to the adventurer in comic romance.® The fact has not been generally observed, I be- lieve, that the servile biographer of Fielding, who, in his life of that gentleman, fawned upon such lords of life as Hurd and Warburton, conferred in his Gray’s-Inn Journal a higher honor upon Richardson than upon the author whose periodical he took for a model. In the course of an extensive and hand- some notice (two folio pages in length) concerning the theft of “Grandison,” Apollo himself, in a special communication, declares that “RICHARDSON?” is “‘our favourite Son to whom we have imparted a large Portion of our etherial Fire, and to whom we have opened the Secrets of the human Heart. While Apollo’s ‘favourite Son” engaged the attention and enjoyed the praise of a great number of those eminent in the higher walks of life, Fielding was obliged to fight a hard battle for every sprig of the laurel that was conferred upon him by his more important contemporaries. Very few indeed 9910 7 The Gray’s-Inn Journal, 2 vols., London, 1756, II, 215, 216. 8 Ibid., Il, 278, 284. References differ according to the editions. In the folio edition these passages are in No. 49 (August 31) and No. 50 (September 6).—The Gray’s-Inn Journal. By Charles Ranger, Esq; London, 1.d., pp. 292, 296. 9 The Works of Arthur Murphy, London, 1786, V, 129. (Number 16 of the two-volume reprint here becomes January 27, 1752). 10 The Gray’s-Inn Journal. By Charles Ranger, Esq; folio edition, London, 7.d., p. 17. Bs ae ue A ee Meee Te reeTHE VOYAGE TO LISBON 107 are the tributes of this character; but the following passages, written by three writers long since in oblivion, though well enough known in their own day, deserve mention at this point: Allan Ramsay, the painter; William Whitehead, the future laureate; and Dr. John Armstrong{ In Ramsay’s opinion Tom Jones is an “artful story . . . where the incidents are so vari- ous, and yet so consistent with themselves, and with nature, that the more the reader is acquainted with nature, the more he is deceived into a belief of its being true; and is with difficulty recall’d from that belief by the author’s confession from time to time of its being all a fiction.’?”* This reference occurs in a pamphlet (1753) on Elizabeth Canning, in which Ramsay took the opposite side from that of Fielding; but his admira- tion for the author as a novelist is sufficiently obvious; in An Essay on Ridicule, published the same year, Ramsay refers his readers for examples of the various kinds of ridicule to “Par- son Adams, and other characters in those instructing novels written by Mr. FIELDING.” \ William Whitehead, too, was very friendly. In a denuncia- tion in The World of the “present race of romance writers,” May 10, 1753, Whitehead asks Mr. Fitz-Adam to “forbid” his readers “‘even to attempt to open any novel, or romance unless it should happen to be stamped RICHARDSON or FIELDING.” Very few of the authors of “the more fa- miliar and more comical adventures,” he justly observes, have “as yet found out their master’s [ Fielding’s] peculiar art, of writing upon low subjects without writing in a low manner.) In 1762 (he was then poet laureate) Whitehead declared, ’Tis our own fault if Fiel/dimg’s lash we feel Or, like French wits, begin with the Bastile.*® 11 4 Letter . . . concerning the Affair of Elizabeth Canning, Lon- don, 1753, pp. 16-17. 12 An Essay on Ridicule, London, 1753, p. 78 note. 18 Chalmers’s British Essayists, XXVI, 103. The World, No. 19, May 10, 1753. According to Chalmers the article was by William Whitehead. 14 Whitehead, William, Plays and Poems, London, 1774, II, 315, 313. This essay is in Chalmers’s British Essayists, XXVI, 102-103. 15 Thid., II, 296. ot bee Per pephot ens ra, de ee eer = absiege cna eee ee vbr aire eee ant tee ane rene ren ys Crean a es i et : B i i an 4 we - ate ey Pet as TS er ee a ey aes a rer ors ae pee Se eee hae ty na ia ao het pm ey oy Vases eek nem ay et eae pen eee nae estetttas pening Reeser rye AST Ne en ar Tes pee ge be hee neeT et Slee TOT T ST TLS TESS TEL Fh PA Te eE eta ee te 2 oF be oe el Sh 2 sesetteee es earsr. elk ts 108 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Finally, hidden away in Dr. John Armstrong’s poem called Taste. . . an Epistle to a Young Critic (1753), is an al- lusion to the popularity of Fielding’s hero. By the side of the robust Tom Jones, Armstrong, though a friend of Smollett’s, places the typical effeminate young “connoisseur, addressing the latter in these lines: a wou’d-be Rake, a fluttering Fool, Who swears he loves the Sex with all his soul. Alas. vain Youth! dost thou admire sweet Jones? Thou be gallant without or Blood or Bones! *® Over in France, according to a contemporary authority, the number of effeminate young gentlemen was even greater than in England. An interesting letter, dated August 1, 1753; is to be found in the Correspondance Littéraire of Grimm, who, now well disposed toward Fielding, is curious to know why the kind of “domestic novel” exemplified by Amelia, 1s ““tout 2 fait inconnue aux Francais.” The fault rests, he says, not upon the authors but upon their “originaux”; for when “fon peint nos petits-maitres et nos petites-maitresses, on a a peu pres épuisé la matiere. Tels sont les ouvrages de M. Crébillon fils.” Fielding, whom Grimm characterizes as “Tn excellent auteur” “dans ce genre” (i.e., the “roman domes- tique’’), and who ‘“‘méritera sans doute une place distinguée parmi les auteurs qui ont illustré l’Angleterre, est trés-original, grand peintre, toujours vrai, et quelquefois aussi sublime que Moliére. Son Tom Jones, ou PEnfant trouve et surtout son Joseph Andrews et le Ministre Abraham Adams, sont des ouvrages excellents dans leur genre, pleins de traits de génie.”*" In another interesting letter (June, 1762), Grimm says a word about Mme. Riccoboni’s translation (or rather adapta- tion) of Amelia, only “la premiére partie” of which has as yet “pour savoir appeared. “‘I] faut attendre le reste,” he writes, quel sort ce roman aura en France: Mme. Riccoboni 1’a beau- coup changé, beaucoup raccourci. Vous savez par ses propres 16 Taste an Epistle to a Young Critic, London, 1753, Pp. 2. 17 Correspondance Littéraire, Paris, 1877, Il, 267. Aeliebihidhted tated Oe ane ee a RE T a RA rer: id males ee AN a sr ee oN eee al ak rar “= = a - —— eS ee Creat, Tree ees hee THE VOYAGE TO LISBON 109 See 4 ee ere r vphtnbehdtenh- pean ee ate ee ouvrages combien son style est léger, vif et agréable. II ya dans l’original de M. Fielding des longueurs et des mauvaises choses, mais il y en a aussi de bien belles.”?® Thus in spite of the “mauvaises choses,’ Grimm speaks well of Fielding, é *® and for whose whom he elsewhere calls a ‘‘célébre écrivain,” “roman domestique” he has a high regard. Whitehead clearly saw the difference between Fielding, who could treat of “low subjects without writing in a low manner,” and the host of novelwrights who had neither the same ability nor the same inclination. By an age that was too prone to judge according to the standards of elegance, how- ever, Fielding’s real purpose was often entirely missed even by those who were not inimical to him; and his political and personal assailants were shrewd enough to take advantage of the temper of the times and accuse him of the very “lowness”’ he sought to extirpate. A good example of this procedure is to be found in the pamphlet entitled Admonitions from the Dead in Epistles to the Living (1754). Letter XVI of this production is devoted to a verbose “‘admonition” addressed “¢o the Author of TOM JONES?” by the arbiter of elegance, Joseph Addison, who, accusing the novelist of ill-nature and ‘ i it ef Pat td "eT Hs 8 AF t H a) ae ah i set a 4) H ar malignity toward his fellow craftsmen, compares him to a “Dog,” that “having Power to tear the Wolf, worried the Sheep.” “Wit, the most dangerous Weapon in the Hands of an ill-nafur’d or ill Man you possess, or have possessed in a Degree superior to all your Contemporaries”; you “are allowed to be, in your Way, the first Writer of your Age and Nation.” But since “anything that has the Face of Morality” seems “‘to have fallen in your Way by Chance, rather than to have been an original Part of the Design,” for “the future,” direct your “Artillery against Vice.””° This shaft was, to be sure, from the camp of the opposition ; but, even by those who had no animus against him, Fielding # -eteepay Sor} es ere 18 Correspondance Littéraire, V, 99. 19 Tbhid., V, 273. 20 Admonitions from the Dead in Epistles to the Living, London, 1754, letter XVI, pp. 219, 217. rr ot Ee . Tho: meng > * sehen a os penne eet teeter vie fine beh een rene ieee Le tee Ot Dene iene eee LSS Oe BelPiaed eee ater eater eee OR eT. aiedeeatie Pant os 2 ae ee ee eairsaect Je A parediea ne ne hens ré ~ aeeeeaani diate eee 7 le ea et adic easiness 110 FIELDING THE NOVELIST was so frequently misinterpreted that in their joint production, The Cry (1754), his sister Sarah and Jane Collier included several paragraphs in his defense: “Nor less understood [than the author himself] is the char- acter of parson Adams in Joseph Andrews by those persons, who, fixing their thoughts on the hounds trailing the bacon in his pocket (with some oddnesses in his behaviour, and peculi- arities in his dress) think proper to overlook the noble sim- plicity of his mind, with the other innumerable beauties in his character; which, to those who can understand the word to the wise, are placed in the most conspicuous view. “That the ridiculers of parson Adams are designed to be the proper objects of ridicule (and not that innocent man himself ) is a truth which the author hath in many places set in the most glaring light. And lest his meaning should be perversely mis- understood, he hath fully displayed his own sentiments on that head, by writing a whole scene, in which such laughers are properly treated, and their characters truly depicted.”** In her own book, The Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, which ap- peared during the previous year (1753), Jane Collier shows her appreciation not only of Tom Jones but of Jonathan Wild, and speaks of Fielding himself as “a good ethical Writer.” But these, of course, are voices from the novelist’s own household. Fielding’s reputation as a “‘wit” and his influence upon certain external features of novel-writing were already so great as to be matters of common talk; yet at that time, not only in the popular mind, but in the opinion of the ‘““Judicious,” it was not he but Richardson who was regarded as the “ethi- cal’? writer. Pamphleteers might jibe, occasionally, at the long- windedness of Clarissa—even Miss Carter admitted the fault —but this “Son of Apollo” was indubitably acquiring among the “best judges” a solid reputation as a profound moralist. 21 Th. Cry ae The Cry, London, 1754, III, 122-123. The “scene” is in Joseph Andrews, II1, Chapter vii. 22 i An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting, London, 1753) pp. 88, 139, 229.THE VOYAGE TO LISBON III With Fielding the case was very different. That his sister Sarah should find it necessary to defend the innocuous Parson Adams against a complete misunderstanding of the raison @étre of that character is a fact of prime significance. And, as we look back, at this point, over the constant abuse that, from various causes, had been heaped upon each one of his novels, we have less difficulty in understanding the peculiar situation. While Richardson was exulting over the indignities to which Amelia was being subjected, he was elaborating with great care and enthusiasm a production which he and his ad- herents ‘firmly believed would put the works of his hated rival in a total eclipse. Sir Charles Grandison, the ““sood man” for whose speedy advent Mrs. Donnellan and other Richard- sonians had been so importunate, was to be, as the embodiment of every private and public virtue, a glorious rebuke to the profligate Tom Jones. Always lavish in distributing gift copies, Richardson neglected no opportunity this time, as we see from letters of acknowledgment which he received. One can im- agine the anxiety with which, after Sir Charles had made his stately bow to the public (in 1753), the little printer awaited the result. To make a long story short, Sir Charles, eminently successful, in spite of a critic here and there, en- joyed a triumphal progress both at home and abroad. Among the congratulatory missives which came pouring in was one from my Lord Orrery (November 9, 1753): “I yesterday received your most valuable present [i.e., Grandison] we thank you for sleepless nights and sore eyes, and perhaps, there are aching hearts and salt tears still in reserve for us.”’?® When the heartache and salt tears had sufficiently abated to permit of it, good Richardsonians gave themselves over to re- joicing; surely at the approach of Grandison all lesser heroes would beat a precipitate retreat. ‘The most triumphant expression in metrical form apropos of Richardson’s success emanated from the abode of Samuel Johnson. In the January number of The Gentleman’s Maga- 23 The Correspondence of Richardson, 1, 171. clad weeps i tele ee en ee eee ers us - a) Ms * naa tn nd nen i ere ws Ty a apa Aes ne ene er een ci im bth yeede-veasat Siar Sere eee PEAT ve eer lee eee te cmwf bang beste e hal Fie ri | of a eof 4 aT red ait: aa) ity a oe al att 4 | } vb ‘T) - 1 ae a i rr amy eee EPR yt aE te - « a Pe ee ae nlated oe eeeee ee aT ae ee . ee Arba al be ae ee re as _— oo ube eeeavuapaeasetain as : , u ae oes te Se Pata | 112 FIELDING THE NOVELIST , zine, there was addressed to “Mr. Richardson, on his History of Sir Charles Grandison” a turgid verse eulogy nearly a page 1, signed by “Anna Williams”; i.e., to quote Mrs. l, in lengt the “blind lady, whom Dr. Johnson took to live Barbaul« with him.’ following paraphrase of Johnson’s famous dictum regarding the service which Richardson had performed: 25 Ty the course of this laudation we come upon the Twas thine, a juster lesson to impart, To move the passions, and to mend the heart. At the close of her panegyric, the blind prophetess, looking confidently into the future, makes the oracular statement that In distant times, when Jomes and Booth are lost, Britannia her Clarissa’s name shall Boast. Grandison and his creator, to be sure, did not go entirely unscathed. The author of Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandis On, Clarissa, and Pamela (GI7iSa4) for example, com- pared Richardson’s works in some particulars unfavorably with those of his rival. Setting Grandison over against All- worthy, the writer endeavors to show that Fielding has made his “good man” more natural and much more deserving of praise. “Mr. Fielding,” he says, has “with admirable judgment denied him an university education, [and] made him a great lover of retirement, seldom absent from his country seat.” Grandison’s “benevolence,” in the critic’s opinion, “has some- thing showy and ostentatious in it; nothing in short of that graceful and beautiful nature which appears in Fielding’s All- worthy.” “To conclude,” writes the author, addressing Rich- ardson, “I think your writings have corrupted our language and our taste ; that the composition of them all, except Clarissa, is bad; and that they all, particularly that [#.e., Clarissa], have a manifest tendency to corrupt morals.” ‘The characters of all the dramatis personae, “except Clarissa’s,” are “faulty, ridicu- 24 The Gentleman's Magazine, XXIV, 40 (January, 1754). 25 The Correspondence of Richardson, Ill, 79 note (letter dated March 1, 1754).THE VOYAGE TO LISBON Isla lous, or unmeaning.” Grandison is “an inconsistent angel”; Lovelace, “‘an absolute devil’; Pamela is “a little pert minx, whom any man of common sense or address might have had on his own terms in a week or a fortnight”; and Pamela’s seducer is a “perfect ass,” who richly merits the “sirname of cc 3926 j Booby”’ which Fielding “‘very properly”?° gave him. But the view just presented of Richardson and his “sood man,” though not infrequent, was certainly not the prevailing one. In general, the formal world of the Mid-Eighteenth Cen- tury did not see Grandison as we see him now, or as Fielding undoubtedly saw him then. Young Gibbon, in a letter to Mrs. Porten, specially commends the book; to his mind it is a much greater novel than Clarissa.*" Even Chesterfield, who in a well-known letter says that Richardson “mistakes the modes” of high life, is warm in his praise of the author’s “great knowledge and skill both in painting and in interesting the heart.” Lady Luxborough wrote Shenstone: “I think I must read Sir C’. Grandison in my own defence; for I hear of him till I am tired. Let us read him here together.”””® And Shenstone himself was of the opinion that for creating Grandison (de- spite its length) Richardson deserved a bishopric. Nor is it out of place to remark here that Goethe, some time later (1768), severely takes to task (in an epistle to Frederika Oeser) those readers who will not submit To be Sir Charles’ devoted slave; And, blindlings still, will not admit All the Dictator’s teachings brave.?® Whether or not Richardson “‘mistook the modes,” his elegant 28 Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela, London, 1754, pp. 18-19, 20, 57-58, 21. 27 The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon, London, new ed., 1814, II, 36 (letter to Mrs. Porten, 1756). 28 Lady Luxborough’s Lefters to . Shenstone, London, 1775, p. 369 (letter CIII, December 21, 1753). 29 Grimm’s Life . . . of Goethe, translated by S. H. Adams, Boston, 1880, p. 152. Ore LT: teehee test ergs Naren. ey: Ure eed ee | PH - aa ety H ‘ re aE ae pm ny ee chee ee aie pees a Ret carer ee 2 —s — os re anne Oh oth ote nde wa oe om Pe pratense a ee cs he) tee ee ee PasEE SRI eT ee eee aieneateh eee rer (een eee wee ee et tanee ean ~ : ; ee) eran “ — “ p~otee ih ta ie ee ec en re irae be . ee aes Om aaa 118 FIELDING THE NOVELIST ladyship has no very exalted notion of her cousin; nor does she seem to have had a very high regard for Amelia.” Ever since Lady Louisa Stuart asserted in 1837 that her grandmother inscribed in a copy of Tom Jones the words “Ne plus ultra,” writers on the novelist ioe assiduously dis- seminated that in formaBon: But surely anyone nowadays who reads Lady Mary’s s correspondence would little suspect from her patronizing references that she held Fielding himself in very high esteem or that she was a very warm enthusiast about his writings. Read, for instance, the following passage from the letter we are now considering: “Fielding hz id really a fund of true humour, and was to be pitied at his first entrance into the world, having no choice, as he said himself, but to be a hackney writer, or a hackney coachman. His genius deserved a better fate; but I cannot help blaming that continued indiscre- tion, to give it the softest name, that has run through his life, and I am afraid still remains.” Can it be imagined that Lady Mary had any conception of the older Fielding,—the success- ful novelist, the able magistrate, the energetic reformer? As a matter of fact she left England in 1739, three years before even Joseph Andrews was pu blished; nor did she return until 1761, seven years after Fielding’s death. Lady Stuart takes it for granted, naturally enough, that her grandmother, Lady Mary, kept au courant regarding the Fieldings through her daughter, the Countess of Bute; but is there any evidence that this fine lady knew or cared much about the distressed Bow Street justice and novel scribbler? To continue with the letter in question, Lady Mary admits that since she was born “no original has appeared excepting Congreve, and Fielding”; but what follows this excellent praise? Here are the words: “[Fielding] would, I believe, have approached nearer to his excellences, if not forced by necessity to publish without correction, and throw many pro- ductions into the world he would have thrown into the fire if meat could have been got without money, or money without 89 The Letters [1861], II, 279-280 (“July” [August? ] 23 [1755]).THE VOYAGE TO LISBON 119 scribbling.” “Writing,” in her ladyship’s opinion, when ‘‘de- generated” into a trade,'is one of the “most contemptible ways of getting bread”; she had no idea, apparently, of her cousin’s habit of careful revision. When Lady Mary received the news of Fielding’s death she wrote (“September 22, [1755]”’) as follows: “I am sorry for H. Fielding’s death, not only as I shall read no more of his writings, but I believe he lost more than others, as no man en- joyed life more than he did, though few had less reason to do so, the highest of his preferment being raking in the lowest sinks of vice and misery.” How differently was the social re- former regarded in Lady Mary’s day! Fielding’s splendid ex- ertions in ridding London of thieves and murderers were en- tirely ignored by his distinguished relative. “I should think it a nobler and less nauseous employment,” she continues, “‘to be one of the staff-officers that conduct the nocturnal weddings.” With her mind still reverted to the days of Fielding’s early struggles—the only time when she knew anything at first hand of his career—she thus accounts for her cousin’s fortitude: “His happy constitution (even when he had, with great pains, half demolished it) made him forget everything when he was before a venison pasty, or over a flask of champagne.” In the Voyage, Fielding himself acknowledges a ‘‘chearfulness”’ which, he thanks God, was always native to his disposition ; but equally native to him were those qualities of resolution and perseverance the presence of which Lady Mary never sus- pected. Her ladyship’s attitude toward Fielding’s second mar- riage, of which she could know nothing except from hearsay, is clearly mirrored in the words: “His natural spirits gave him rapture with his cook-maid, and cheerfulness when he was fluxing in a garret.”*° In those early days, when Fielding was having such a hard struggle to make a living, did his wealthy cousin see fit to assist him?** The answer to this question is perhaps to be found in the following passage: “There was a 40 The Letters, London [1861], II, 282-283. *. That is, further than to accept the dedication of a play. SI os oe * ae eater tee att ere i a nes rr 4 eter bee mie ee ee ate ee el bees renee, yea ee ¥ uP eri Pi ES a { t : ca wrgnnten a Ree ee eh pe Seoul + : rhe or pbdiehibiette cateninTe ed 120 FIELDING THE NOVELIST. a at similitude between his character and that of Sir Richard Steele. He had the advantage both in learning and, in my opin- an genius: they both agreed in w anting money in spite of all their friends, and would have wanted it, if their hereditary lands had been as extensive as their imagination.” Proof, of course, is lacking; but may there not have been a reason for this expatiation upon her cousin’s improvidence? Even granting that Lady Mary knew little of the real Fielding—the Fielding who shortened his life by strenuous efforts for the pup slic good—was there nothing to be derived from the Voyage to Lisbon beyond the impression of an im- provident native ones fulness which might sustain a man w hile “fluxing in a cae ? Was there nothing in that book of for- titude, nothing of magnanim1 ity? “The most edifying part of the ie to Lisbon,” in Lady Mary’s own words, “as the history of the kitten”; and the particular reason that this epi- sode appealed to her was because she had, ‘‘a few days before found one, in deplorable circumstances, in a neighbouring vineyard.” Lady Mary, it would seem, was far more sorry for the distresses of the kitten than she ever was for those of her distinguished cousin. It was most unfortunate for Fielding’s posthumous fame that his aristocratic relative, who knew him only in the days s of his early adversity and who had no conception of or taste for his splendid achievement as a magistrate, should have become, by her position in the world of letters, one of the main au- thorities upon whom a succession of biographers from Scott downward have in great measure relied for their portrait of Henry Fielding. ‘““No one,” wrote Sir Walter, ““who can use her words [the scandalous words about Fielding’s lack of thrift] would willingly employ his own”; and Thackeray prefaces the same anecdote with the phrase, “As Lady Mary prettily says,”’ etc. Lady Stuart’s tardy story: about the “Ne plus ultra? which she saw written in T'om Jones has done very little to offset those racy stories of Fielding’s sordid indigence with which her witty but sharp-tongued grandmother regaled younge i: generation.THE VOYAGE TO LISBON 121 In characterizing her cousin’s magistracy as a “‘nauseous em- ployment,” Lady Mary had in mind the unsavory reputation of that office in the days of the “‘trading justices”; that is, be- fore Henry Fielding, by heroic efforts, endeavored to redeem it. Up to the time of his death, the old odium attaching to the post was kept so constantly in mind by the newspapers and pamphlets of his enemies that even those who took no part against him were influenced by that atmosphere of “social con- tempt” which still clung to a Bow Street magistrate. Ironically enough, even in October, 1754, the very month in which the great novelist was dying in Portugal, there appeared in the scurrilous Memoirs of the Shakespear’s-Head one of the most Vicious attacks upon him in his character as a police-court jus- tice’ that the pestilential literature of contemporary abuse af- fords. Of this production, Chapter Four of Book Two is de- voted to “d Town Morning; a Justice of Peace and his Levee,” in which “Fielding” (mentioned by name) is scan- dalously represented in full swing as a trading justice. It is unnecessary to consider in detail this indecent lampoon; but among the more quotable passages the following parody of Fielding’s mock-heroics may be given: “The Sun had now almost gain’d the Meridian, the Oeconomical Housewife was preparing Dinner for her industrious Husband; the male Vo- tary of Bacchus, the female Votaries of Venus, and the Card Table, were stretching their debilitated Limbs . . . [when] The Justice now descended, to assume his Chair of State, and administer partial Decision.” By the time the Shakespear’s- Head was published, Fielding was beyond the reach of his “Grubbean” enemies; but they had done their work effec- tively, as we shall observe in succeeding chapters. Lady Mary was not alone in failing to appreciate the Voy- age to Lisbon; very few dicta concerning the work by promi- nent people of the day have come down to us—almost nothing, in fact, in the way of enthusiastic commendation. We know from the entries in the ledger of William Strahan, that 5000 copies (2500 of each of the two versions) of the Voyage were yr $8 rye. me dieed tales Cali ots. ett pare Partie tater eee endl Se ee : yale. ae Te ae paar Ste men-erwnnnemmrecocerelgsyiiead oe Ty paper’ er Tee ae ee ehehepheimemetiaeaebiaean ee ere pe re} a iF 4 of re ve > “251 +e) ati 7 Pe? it a Ait 5) Sati eh 7 ae a ee ea aah £4 ie a) Pa oA oh ra ee | era ee 4 ya ye a - yew ipo. ea bnge y percpetetsurmanns ent conn 84a rege, Sgt Orem bee ee are ee er ae ene hy enn nee re See ie aee eer wapotibabs.n. er) ee) Pte ooh ERD repented = oR STE hy <6 eeneneen ting, Serna aE ~ hehe teti nr a eee A “ ; — he Sh te tH fd Fo Tete eee gD, 122 FIELDING THE NOVELIST printed ;*” but, though the booksellers were well supplied, Fielding’s last book made little stir in the world. Had it been greatly successful we may be sure that the pliant Arthur Mur- phy, ah jatever his attitude in 1755 when he wrote—if he did write—the “Dedication,” would not have thought it politic to refer in his introductory “Essay” (1762) to the brave cheer- fulness of Fielding in the Voyage as the “jesting” of a male- factor “on the scaffold.” Some other feature of the work would bere given an outlet for his Hibernian oratory. More direct evidence concerning the reception of the Voy- age comes from Fielding ’>s own ménage. Miss Margaret Col- lier, who had accompanied t the Fieldings to Lisbon, had re- turned with the widow, and may have helped the blind brother, John, with the many alterations in the manuscript which he regarded as necessary, wrote as follows (October 3> 1755) to her beloved Richardson from Ryde, whence she had gone for the winter: ‘“‘I was sadly vexed, at my first coming, at a report which had prevailed here, of my being the author of Mr. Fielding’s last work “Che Voyage to Lisbon? the reason which was given for supposing it mine, was to the last degree morti- fying, (viz that it was so very bad a performance, and fell so far short of his other works, it must needs be the person with him who wrote it) If a man falls short of what is ex- pected from his former genius in writing, and publishes a very dull and unentertaining piece, then ‘to be sure it was his sister, or some woman friend, who was with him.’ Alas! my good Mr. Richardson, is not this a hard case?”’** Miss Collier’s letter starts a number of questions: Was she really angry, or was she secretly pleased by the rumor regarding her authorship of the Voyage? Had she, as Professor Cross suggests, “magnified” the amount and character of the assistance she had rendered John Fielding in the preparation of the manuscript for the press, “and thus occasioned the rumour of which she com- plained?” ‘‘Perhaps she was piqued,” he continues, “because 42 See Mr. J. Paul de Castro’s article in The Library, third series, VIII, 153-154 (April, 1917). *8 Correspondence of Richardson, Il, 77-78.THE VOYAGE TO LISBON 123 she was not mentioned in “The Journal;’ she was certainly angry because Fielding interfered with her flirtations in Lis- bon; and above all else she was writing to a man touched to the quick by Fielding’s insinuation that Mr. Richardson’s novels were not conducive to the cultivation of good manners in those who read them.”** Explain the passage as we may, the fact remains that if Fielding’s Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon had achieved during the half-year and more which had elapsed since its publication a notable success Miss Colljer would hardly have written in the way she did; even more abusive she might have been, but the tone and method of her attack would have been somewhat different. We may here insert, parenthetically, the allusion (in the Voyage) to Richardson mentioned above: “I answer with the great man [7.e., Richardson], whom I Just now quoted, that my purpose is to convey instruction in the vehicle of enter- tainment; and so to bring about at once, like the revolution in the Rehearsal, a perfect reformation of the laws relating to our maritime affairs: an undertaking, I will not say more mod- est, but surely more feasible, than that of reforming a whole people, by making use of a vehicular story, to wheel in among them worse manners than their own.’”*® What the author of Tom Jones really thought of Grandison, that “good man” who (as he may have heard from his sister Sarah) was to dis- credit all frivolous authors like himself, was never, so far as we know, specifically recorded. But we may venture to guess which book Fielding had in mind when he spoke of a story built for “instruction” that had wheeled in among a people “worse manners than their own.” If so, it was a singularly mild statement from a writer who had witnessed the failure of his Amelia and the triumph of the egregious Sir Charles. To return to the Voyage, among those who enjoyed, figu- ratively, a dance upon the author’s grave was, of course, the novelist’s bitter enemy, Horace Walpole. In a letter to Richard Bentley, March 27, 1755, he coarsely sneered at the book, ** Cross’s Fielding, III, 96-97. *° Henley edition, XVI, 186. en : 5 . nl ‘: er ri ‘ i ryomnes meee te aoe ee eens S pietersaieiene —— ms ee pt ba ot ed -" EE eer ee hal tel Pane eee eel tacit eee “al et ae Suiaghtetetierupaees healer pected cada or ~i a i ew nt ss Sarnenct i ed “ ~ ~ ree a pophprhietedetes Cee a a ee I) sence = ws iF 4 ha i sd Fy Per oS tetas leis ae 124 FIELDING THE NOVELIST professing to find in it merely an account of how Fielding’s ‘teased by an inn-keeper’s wife in the Isle of cc >) cS dropsy was yrean triumph Wicht.’’*® But for the acme of funebral Terpsich« to the Richardsonians. The following letter we must turn s no commentary; while we from Edwards to Richardson need read it, the print dissolves as in a motion picture and we see, standing back of the lines, the pious Richardson himself. AS have lately read over with much indignation,” writes Edwards, “Fjelding’s last piece, called his Voyage to Lisbon. That a man, who had led such a life as he had [ Richardson had pre- sumably told Edwards about Fielding, just as he had told Defreval and Lady Bradshaigh. |, should trifle in that manner when immediate death was before his eyes,+ 1s amazing.” “From this book,” continues Edwards, “I am confirmed in what his other works had fully persuaded me of, that with all le of pretences to virtuous and humane affections, the his parac 9947 fellow had no heart. And so—his knell is knolled. How strange that one of the bravest books in the world, a book which reveals the extraordinary tenderness and cheerful- ness of an author racked by the agony of disease and standing in the very presence of death, should be thus misunderstood and maligned! The modern view of the Journal is so totally different that we find difficulty in understanding such an atti- tude. But it is just this difference between the prevalent point of view of Fielding’s day and the point of view of our own day which explains much of the lack of appreciation which he encountered in regard to all his books. There was no lack of satire during the eighteenth century, nor of rough-and-tumble burlesque—the prose satires of Swift were commended for their wisdom, and Butler’s verse satire, Hudibras, of the pre- vious century, still enjoyed high favor; but in the new genre of prose fiction it was no doubt difficult for the formal world to accept as profound an author who depicted the homely 46 Letters of Horace Walpole, edited by Toynbee, Oxford, 1913, III, 294. 47 a ee aks Correspondence of Richardson, III, 125 (May 28, 1755).See ra eet! hathaeeh temhadeentet Seen een ar tel enn eass amie _ Se te fe f Coael 3 fi t a hy + ey i a ee « MKookir del eee FIELDING AND THE LANDLADY AT RYDE eta lenneeee ae See ee hee a . } ee c SA eee, at la et iehatiihee oe a eae een —a ees shea eee Pes THE VOYAGE TO LISBON 125 scenes of common life and told truth laughingly. It was Grandison, not Amelia, that won the praise of the eminent; Ph Poe Pareeeteieteiote men eer ec Paar A phew, rece the Journal of Fielding’s voyage was proffered with apology and received without applause. care LL Et ae be he ledmae te aid nts 4 tt peices kee eee net 2 Sar eprsiiees yee yrs- ne} beat tee eh ee ere tl or md pc7ys star ttengeswee ec abal at, as ress rar - #! oe, 5 Be a if Pe] a rath oh i a bp PERS yvek) Dhoom) w Seetet etic a: GrAP. ER V Fieldin o's Contemporaries N summing up the attitude of Fielding’s contemporaries toward his novels, we notice in the first place that two of his books—Tom Jones, at least, and eventually r Joseph Andrews—were widely popular with the reading public. Even his enemy Cibber allowed that he was a ‘“‘wit”—a “broken wit”—while among his friends he was commonly reputed to possess a greater share of wit’ and humor than any other au- thor of his day. Furthermore, among the writers of prose fic- tion his name was one to conjure vith Yet when we compare his fame with that of Richardson, we see immediately that he was thought to have worked in a lesser genre: he had not the same reputation for moral purpose and profundity of thought ; moreover, he was not a sentimentalist, and literary England was highly sentimental. The body of contemporary criticism of his novels seems to be strangely lacking in those illustrious names which exert a great influence upon an author’s reputa- tion. Pope, Gray, Young, Walpole, Johnson, Hurd, Chester- field, have either ill words for him or practically none. War- burton left a reference, to be sure, but all in all he was more influential in the cause of Richardson. It is not true, as some writers would have it, that Fielding met with nothing but abuse in his own age; but it is very clear that neither up to the time of his death nor for many a day to come was he regarded “by those in authority as a greater novelist than his rival. It was Richardson who enjoyed the more exceptional triumph in England; and it was Richardson who had the reputation at “home of having been more successful than Fielding abroad. (Had Pope vouchsafed to Joseph Andrews the praise which, according to Warburton, he bestowed upon Pamela; had John- ae gereiens eine pee Cae 1“¥Vou will be pleased to note that Fielding is a Wit,” said Edward Moore, in a scarcely gracious letter, written during the novelist’s latter days. See Miss Godden’s Fielding, pp. 214-215. ee ye er eae | Prd ee Be ial itn ss Oy esFIELDING’S CONTEMPORARIES 127 son written of Fielding in the Rambler what he wrote of Richardson; had Young, the popular author of Night LVhoughts, been as indefatigable a propagandist for Fielding as for Richardson; had the popular author of the Elegy in a Country Churchyard talked of Fielding as he did of Field- ing’s rival; had Lady Mary chosen to put into print that “Ne plus ultra” which according to her granddaughter she wrote in a copy of Tom Jones; had Chesterfield seen fit to say as good things of Fielding, as, in spite of certain strictures, he did say of Richardson—or (let us cross the Channel for a moment ) had Rousseau and Diderot and other great Frenchmen been willing to praise Fielding as handsomely as they praised Rich- ardson (and had their eulogies been echoed with great satis- faction in England); had—but why go on? The fact is that none of these persons—whose vogue or authority was generally admitted—did, apparently, leave on record in any conspicuous place very much that was helpful to Henry Fielding. | On the other hand, Richardson, happy-starred, enjoyed the favor of a veritable host of influential supporters, among whom, as we have said, were the two most talked-of poets of the Mid-Century, Edward Young and Thomas Gray. A more detailed account of these writers is now in order. The Rev. Edward Young, who, as the author of Night Thoughts, had already achieved an international reputation, preached Rich- ardson early and late, wherever he went, with the zeal of an apostle. His efforts to convert the Duchess of Portland— crowned eventually with ostensible success—are a matter of literary history;? his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) purported on the title-page to be in the form of a “Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison”; and of Clarissa he once said, ““That romance will do more good than a body of divinity.”* Not only did he celebrate the novelist in verse,’ but he went so far as to declare that Richardson was “‘as great and super-eminent in fis way, as were Shakespeare and * Huchon, R., Mrs Montagu and her Friends, London, 1907, p. 23. STbid., p. 23. * Thomson, Clara, Samuel Richardson, London, 1900, p. 123. ~~ - ttre oe. be ‘etree « ee ee. eed bu et or 7 Ae ns ne Siete Ln basher eset tree ee » — setae Ee. Se sat St ct reas SE TERS Ae : OL Sree alr oe ae Si spnghy eee te ean RT ne oe ee ue ra —_ «46 woke fon Ty er oes 7 ap ore rs Mighbin aCe ee ee et ae ater te ee ee ne o ets. eee Seek et eee as ray - oe Sibir eee ie wer > ; i: Fs eo at Pr ee rae | “f an ree ae 4 t ; ba a eri bt oe Tar Pere eS Pe et ere eee et| Poet chee ree ere SECS Leet Oe ee ee v~ 7 = = = Sie i tarhhhbres bere ee Mae Ne ae arta ‘ bea eas f i . ee 4 o_o 128 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Milton in theirs.”° After Richardson’s death, as Young’s cu- rate, the Rev. John Jones, tells us, the author of Night Thoughts was desirous of placing in the hands of Joseph Spence, the anecdotist, ‘ample materials . relating to his late friend Mr. Richardson, the poetical prose- writer®> Would that Fielding might have had as his friend so unwearied and enthusiastic an advocate! Even Lyttelton, who enjoyed no mean reputation as a writer, left in his works no tribute of his own, so far as we know, to the author of Tom Jones. In his Dialogues of the Dead, the part about Fielding and his rival was deliberately handed over to Mrs. Montagu. A greater poet than Young was Thomas Gray, already dis- tinguished for his Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Faute de mieux, this author’s lukewarm criticism of Joseph Andrews has become one of the famous dicta of all time. What did he think of the rival novelists? Of Clarissa he said (according to his “Intimate Friend the Reverend Norton Nicholls’) that “¢ “he knew no instance of a story so well told,’ and spoke with the highest commendation of the strictly dramatic propriety, and consistency of the characters, perfectly preserved, and sup- ported from the beginning to the end, in all situations and cir- cumstances; in every word, action, and look.” And of Tom Jones? “I remember,” writes Nicholls, “Mr. Gray was pleased with an opinion of Dr. Johnson, related to me by Davies the player”—the “opinion” being one of Johnson’s celebrated re- marks to the effect that Fielding could tell you “what o’clock it was, but as for Richardson, he could make a clock, or a 7 ‘ watch.” Then there was the popular Shenstone, who, as we have seen, was a Richardsonian, though a mild one. Yawning over the story of Parson Adams as “tedious,” and thinking even less 5 The Gentleman’s Magazine, LIII, 924 (November, 1783). 6 Spence, J., Anecdotes, edited by Singer, London, 1820, p. 455 (let- ter of September 3, 1761). 7 Correspondence of Thomas Gray and the Rev. Norton Nicholls, edited by Mitford, London, 1843, p. 46.FIELDING’S CONTEMPORARIES 129 of Tom Jones—despite the fact that he delayed returning Lady Luxborough’s copy—this sentimental gentleman con- fessed his admiration for both Pamela and Clarissa and made his bow to the moral Grandison. Everyone knows how difficult it is to find commendatory references to Fielding in the verse of his day; yet tributes to Richardson may be gathered in abundance—from Aaron Hill’s lines, in 1740, to Sweet Pamela! for ever blooming maid! and to her author, Thou skill’d great moulder of the master’d heart! to the epitaph contributed at the time of the novelist’s death (1761) by the most erudite woman of that century, Miss Elizabeth Carter, who, well disposed as she was toward Field- ing, dicated in the following rhapsody upon his rival: never experienced any such emotion at Ais death as is in- And oft will Innocence, of aspect mild, And white-rob’d Charity, with streaming eyes, Frequent the cloister where their patron lies. This, reader, learn; and learn from one whose woe Bids her wild verse in artless accents flow: Ah, no! expect not from the chisel’d stone The praises, graven on our hearts alone. There shall his fame a lasting shrine acquire; And ever shall his moving page inspire Pure truth, fixt honour, virtue’s pleasing lore; While taste and science crown this favour’d shore.® Miss Mulso, concerned for the health of her favorite author, Seep thus apostrophizes the “relentless maid” Hygeia, Him Virtue loves, and brightest Fame is his: Smile thou too, Goddess, and complete his bliss.°® 8 Correspondence of Richardson, I, ccxii. ® Tbid., 1, clxxxi. © wa. Ter ears 2 ee eee 4 Sar OFF +h Adages men ober ohiebeetien Yoaas aw , kta ieee t tei bdr ee nee rere Mat te pee eee rns Lartare soe mo? or oA hae eee ot Paphet pe wre sweden! gaa — ee wtetg® ey at a ert t! : Hs vee $f a ary rr yar ar are are ey erent eer aes ere Sole aasnnd 1 i) er re ese arer meyer ret Se tenesJ 130 FIELDING THE NOVELIST In Byrom’s verses, Richardson is . he, who in plain Prose Without our Help has ventur’d to expose Vice in its odious colours, and to paint In his Clarissa’s Life and Death a Saint.” And that early feminist, John Duncombe, by his lines to Rich- ardson in The Feminead, won the applause not only of the ladies of England but of the Archbishop of Canterbury him- self: To these weak strains, O thou! the sex’s friend And constant patron, RICHARDSON! attend! Thou, who so oft with pleas’d, but anxious Care, Hast watch’d the dawning genius of the fair, With wonted smiles wilt hear thy friend display The various graces of the female lay; Studious from folly’s yoke their minds to free, And aid the gen’rous cause espous’d by thee.** Think of the preachers who rallied to the support of Rich- ardson, from the Rev. Benjamin Slocock, who commended Pamela from the pulpit, to the bishops and future bishops who echoed the praises of Clarissa, There was Mark Hildesley, Bishop of Sodor and Man, who spoke of Richardson as an au- thor that possessed both ability and disposition to promote “vir- tue and religion.”?* There was Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, who was so much affected by the bailiff scene in Clarissa that “he was drowned in tears, and could not trust himself with the book any longer.”’** And finally—though it would be easy enough to extend this list—there was the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury himself, who so pleasantly mentioned Grandison. 10 The Poems of John Byrom, edited by A. W. Ward, 1894, I, 1, 263 (Chetham Society Publications, Mex): 11 See The Feminiad [Feminead] by John Duncombe, London, 1754, p. 6; and Letters from Dr. Thomas Herring, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, London, 1777 (letter of March 21, 1754). 12 Correspondence of Richardson, V, 118 (letter of December 20, 1753)- 13 Prior, Sir James, Life of Edmond Malone, London, 1860, p. 439-FIELDING’S CONTEMPORARIES 131 Two future prelates of the Church of England, already distinguished in the world of letters, were William Warburton and his protégé, Richard Hurd—writers whom Murphy took pains to flatter in his essay on Fielding in 1762. Warburton, it is true, had inserted in his edition of Pope (1751) that ex- cellent footnote in praise of Fielding which we have already quoted. Was it a return for the compliments in Tom Jones and in the Journey to the Next World? Or was it a dig at Richardson caused by a temporary pique? Be that as it may, this celebrated writer, whose name was writ large in that cen- tury, had always been much more active in Richardson’s cause than in that of Fielding. It was he who discussed Pamela with Alexander Pope and sent the little printer into ecstasies by tell- ing of the great poet’s admiration for the book; it was he who supplied a preface (afterwards withdrawn) for Clarissa. War- burton’s supercilious young friend and follower, Richard Hurd, who, as we have remarked, had met Fielding (then sinking under a complication of diseases) in 1751, turned up his nose at the “poor emaciated, worn-out rake, whose gout and infirmities have got the better even of his buffoonery.”™ One may be sure that if Fielding’s standing among men of letters had been at that time anything like what it eventually became, young Hurd would never have been so insolent. Very different was his attitude, even in the early days, toward the author of Pamela. In a letter to the Rev. John Devey, he writes, ‘‘Please tell her [ Mrs. Devey] I have just read Pamela, and am glad, for the credit of my judgment, that I agree with her in admiring it. Some people have thought it odd in me, but I really like Pamela in low life better than in high. I have not room now, or I think I could give excellent reasons for my opinion . . . what pleasure could I take in talking over this with Mrs. Devey and your good self.”** And though this champion of romance disparaged prose fiction in general because it was “destitute” of the “measured sounds” of verse,*° 14 Kilvert, F., Memoirs of . Hurd, London, 1860, p. 45. TON bsasaps 15. 16 The Works of Richard Hurd, London, 1811, Il, 19. re or ner ie a nt dh Deh ee tap hes ae Are er Siren diane a " “ Sporn, te en ron adn ~+ vente i nao ee pbwrpamns ani soca: = » tes pa tute eters ee erase tenes er or are ee ee “ ete apOyr “HH s ohne dhe, yee ee eee re Teor ITS eg eee ve esLELT sts Toes eee ly Slee estat TELAT SLES tert et. FIELDING THE NOVELIST 132 he more than once confessed his admiration for the works of Richardson, whom he esteemed more highly than he did Rous- seau. Objecting to one of the scenes of the Nouvelle Héloise, he observes (in a letter to Balguy), “If this be invention, M. Rousseau does not appear so judicious as Mr. Richardson, whose manner he imitates.””*’ A more famous personage than either Hurd or Warburton was the celebrated Lord Chesterfield; why has so little from him about Fielding made its way into literary history? Surely his lordship had often been in fri¢ ndly touch with the novelist: and yet no estimate, on his part, of Fielding’s work as a writer of fiction seems to have survived except a passage in one of his letters to the effect that his young son ee Tom Jones because he loves ‘‘a chain of stories greatly. 18 Did it not occur to him that this great book was something more than a “chain of stories’? But what did he think of Ri ch: ard ison! Did he not say of the author of Clarissa that he was a writer “qui manque 19 s7 4 I?» de savoir et de style, mais qui connoit le coeur Last and—eventually—most influential of all was Samuel Johnson, already (despite Chesterfield) a power in the world of letters, and, at no very distant period, to become its dictator. Of his opposition to Fielding and his exaltation of Richardson enough has, for the present, been said.{Clarissa, in Johnson’s _ opinion, was so replete with wisdom that he pressed the author to furnish that work with an index rerum) And none of the propagandists, female or male,—not even the Rev. Edward Young,—who exerted themselves in the cause of Richard- son, ever contributed to that novelist’s fame such an im- perishable dictum as Johnson did whenl_he declared in the Ninety-Seventh Rambler, February 19, 1751, that the author of Clarissa had “enlarged the knowledge of human nature” and had “‘taught the passions to move at the command of vir- 17 Kilvert, F.. Memoirs of Hurd, p. 306. 18 Letters of . . . Chesterfield to his Godson, edited by the Earl of Carnarvon, Oxford, 1890, p. 373 (letter of April 5, 1766). 19 Chesterfield’s Miscellaneous Works, second ed., London, 1779, III, 365 (letter of October 13, O. S., 1750). ohn ~5 eet Re ete ee ee ee ET se na ~ paiabrbieteaie oe tna ee } i. eee oe cree Fi frFIELDING’S CONTEMPORARIES 133 tue. » TF anyone had said in 1754, at the time of Fielding’s death, that To Jones was richer in wisdom than Clarissa, the statement would have been regarded by the world in general as preposterous. Thus many prominent figures of the Mid-Century pass in review before us: Walpole, who disliked Richardson as well as Fielding, is conspicuous by his absence; so, too, Lady Mary, who, conceding Richardson’s power to make her weep, sup- ports her cousin, though she cannot re telling scandalous stories about him; but Pope, ee Aaron Hill, Shenstone, Young, Hurd, Chesterfield, and Johnson are all of Richard- son’s party. From across the Channel, a distinguished foreign delegation of Richardsonians is headed by Marmontel, Rous- seau, and Diderot. Then, chanting the virtues of Pamela, Clarissa, and Grandison, comes a long line of English clergy- men, from curate to bishop, too numerous to particularize; and, finally, there appears Richardson’s own garde du corps— Mrs. Donnellan, Mrs. Delany, Miss Mulso, Miss Talbot, and (for she admitted her “‘partiality”) the “learned” Miss Carter, who, as they go, make the pathway sweet with the incense of praise. Surely in the Mid-Century no such procession could be assembled in Fielding’s honor. Nowadays even Richardsonians are compelled to admit that the positions of the two novelists have been exactly reversed. Imagine the procession of modern critics who would march proudly under Fielding’s banner! It is only natural, therefore, to ask what the causes were which operated against the author during his lifetime. In the first place, there were the attacks upon Fielding himself, varied in kind and from different quarters, and due to the malice of many enemies, political, dramatic, journalistic, and personal. (His political employ- ments; his impecuniousness; his independence in marrying his “cook-maid”’; his career as a dramatic censor—so bold as to be cut short by the Licensing Act; his despised position as a police court magistrate; his journalistic battles with the denizens of Grub Street; his very efforts as a reformer of corrupt social conditions—every activity, indeed, in which Fielding was ever roeree ae oe] eros aie ~v eb etny. SPa< ona rk ee 4 Seal bee chteetoteere meee . vw e- > [renee een er Tera ren ee ee ook: lara ced on cee on Ct Er Tye hee = op ee ar ie eee ieee Se es Parr a es - event eel ‘ eee os Be me etree tee remeron oi orSiac desesercPPr Ser etgsisis oie fife F er er cig eee} Fs 134 FIELDING THE NOVELIST engaged (as well as his personal peculiarities and habits) was seized upon by his bitter assailants as a motif for the vilest kind of slander,) | Kenrick and Smollett and Bonnell Thornton; Richardson and various Richardsonians; Cibber and the Cib- berites; Aretine and the Sea Porcupines and Argus of the Hundred Eyes; Orbilius and the Historiographer of the King of the Beggars; the writer of Admonitions; the memorialist of The Shakespear’s-Head—not to mention a horde of other - anonymous oe rs—thrusting, bludgeoning, and poisoning —what a picture! Is it any ssoader that the greatness of Field- ing’s achievement as a nov elist was obscured to the view of his more eminent contemporarie s? (For the contrast picture, there is the serene and Bae tS, Richardson in his summer house, living apart from the wrangling and scurrility of political and journalistic warfare, surrounded by his “dear ladies,” com- mended by the clergy, praised by the eminent, at home and abroad—already adored to such a degree that he had almost become a cult. But to account for Richardson’s greater vogue with those competent in Hterature on the score that he esca ped the unjust calumny heaped upon his rival is to tell only part of the story. Reasons must be sought for in the character of the age itself. And the fact must never be lost sight of that Fielding’s novels V were, by the general public, very widely read and enjoyed. To begin with, his narratives were alive with incident dramati- cally elat cated: without caring for, without ever really un- derstanding the purpose of Tom Jones, one might, like Lord Chesterfield’s son, follow with great eagerness the varying fortunes of Tom and Sophia. Again, without regarding even the incidents themselves, one might still be agreeably em- ployed; for the author’s wit, humor, and irony were omni- present. Indisputably here was a clever fellow—for the novel manufacturer, for the playwright, for the journalist, for the man-about-town, each of these prose fictions was a perfect treasure mine, from which everyone might enrich his own writings and conversation. But like other humorists, before and since, Fielding paid the penalty: it is always difficult for aFIELDING’S CONTEMPORARIES 135 contemporary audience to realize that their “facetious master” is one of the wisest authors of the century; in that age, with its newly found predilection for sentimentalism, with its formal elegance and—despite actual license—conv entionality in mor- als, it was well-nigh impossible. The statement is often made that Fielding entirely ex- pressed in his novels the ideals of the eighteenth century; and it is true he portrayed the life of his times most realistically. ‘That was the trouble—or part of it. Thomas Gray, after per- functorily defending such “ight things” as Jose ph Andrews, hurried on to enjoy “eternal”? sentimental romances by Mari- vaux and Crébillon. Lady Luxborough admitted that Tom Jones was a glass in which the beauty herself might see her own deformities; but she failed to appreciate the utility of such a revelation. Lady Orrery read Amelia until she was af- flicted with a “horrid headache”; yet she complained that on the whole this picture of real life was to her “tedious.”? Francis Coventry’s fine lady, as will be remembered, objected to Mr. ' Fielding’s novels because, forsooth, they dealt with such stuff as passed every day between her and her maid. It was not quite clear why anyone who could draw ideal or elegant characters should waste his time with the trivial scenes of ordinary exist- ence. Amelia, the novel in which Fielding ventured farthest into the realm of the actual, was acknowledged by the writer himself to have been in the eyes of the public a failure. And so the author of Tom Jones and Amelia did picture the life of his times—in a way no one has ever surpassed; but, for all that, it was not he but Richardson who reflected the taste and temper of the Mid-Century. Fielding was not a mere de- lineator of his age; he was a critic and a severe critic of the faults of that age. Richardson, on the other hand, did not dis- turb conventions; he flattered and intensified them. It has been said that the author of Pamela was one of the great forerun- ners of the democratic spirit in fiction, inasmuch as he de- manded the interest of his readers in the fortunes of a servant girl; but a moment’s reflection should convince anyone that it was Fielding and not Richardson who was the actual demo- ~~ oe ees \oaeihek tet bade ee 2 ote eee reyes. : < . re: sf 5 . a , re | ¥ ni t i Fan) : &) eres wr _—— Feel ot eee he SS Ce nes ee yer ty ey rea harmayencas eowese@emndbecutar ponte, 44 Fat net kin ait be ete beet eet ne Crier te eerT2618 Pe eee ee oe sl 136 FIELDING THE NOVELIST crat. By holding out against her would-be seducer, Pamela was rewarded by a higher position in the social scale; Richardson applauded her, and, so, it would seem, did the world in gen- eral. Fielding viewed the transaction through modern eyes: in his Joseph Andrews, he makes Pamela say of Joseph’s Fanny, “She was my equal | but I am no longer Pamela An- drews; I am now this gentleman’s lady, and, as such, am above her.”?° Any serious consideration of the thesis of Jonathan Wild—that greatness cannot be real greatness unless it be ac- companied by goodness of heart—will establish the fact that Fielding was as sound on the question of intrinsic worth (in spite of what he may have believed about government by the “mob” ) as the poet who said 2 at the end of the century, ““The rank is but the guinea’s stamp ’ Colley Cibber’s charge against Fielding of trying “to cbee all distinctions of mankind on the head” was frequently repeated even by those who had no personal animus against the novelist. In short, when the history of the democratic movement in fiction is written again, a very important chapter will be devoted to Henry Fielding. Rarely in their outlook upon life have two writers been so diametrically opposed as were Richardson and Fielding. Rich- ardson threw the accent upon conduct; Fielding, upon charac- ter. Richardson’s aim, like that of most romancers, was to pic- ture ideal persons: Pamela was only a servant girl, but the author’s desire was to make her a lady; Clarissa, the virgin martyr, was exploited as a paragon; Grandison was to exhibit all the perfections of a “good man.” One thing was lacking in these impeccable characters—namely, unselfishness; Pamela had a shrewd eye for worldly advancement; Clarissa dwelt morbidly upon her martyrdom and the reward which awaited her in heaven; Grandison, the embodiment of Magnificence, assumed an intolerably supercilious bearing toward his inferi- ors, in other words, toward the rest of mankind—to under- stand him fully, one should put him beside his modern repre- sentative, Sir Willoughby Patterne, remembering the while, 20 Joseph Andrews, Book IV, ch. vii (Henley edition, I, 343). Set en eh iar ne OE RET oe ied ee i. Se ee i endade erat me ti? if : ae eS ie t a Te +] ' t t iFIELDING’S CONTEMPORARIES Sy) that Richardson was actually in earnest. Fielding, the experi- enced and accomplished dramatist, whose main business for as had been to unmask the shams and selfish ideals of the vorld, saw as clearly as any man ever did that the salvation of society depends upon a just valuation of and admiration for the quality of good-heartedness. It is a difficult m: itter, appar- ently, even at the present day, to cleave to the pure in heart rather than to the for tunate; in that age of formal manners and class distinctions it must have been even more difficult. So Fielding spoke out, accenting, as is the way with satirists and reformers, the lights and shadows of his picture. In actual life, as Fielding clearly perceived, a Parson Adams would have been scorned as “low”; the author brings him unscathed through the grossest indignities and turns the laugh upon the scorners. The gentle Amelia Booth, who a ppeared to her contemporaries “such a fool,” was pitted over against the morbid and megalo- maniacal Clarissa. By an audience that desired and expected the self-centered prodigies of previous fiction Fielding’s aim in presenting scenes in which intrinsic goodness was not ac- companied by the glamour of elegance or of a tragic situation was only too often misinterpreted. If the author depicted tav- erns and jails, it must be, forsooth, because his own mind did not rise above such places; if he portrayed an honest but im- pecunious parson, a generous-hearted but distressed wife, it was because his mind did not reach to the heights of grandeur— the assumption was that no man who could write otherwise would descend so “low.” When Boswell asked Johnson to concede that Fielding painted real life, the Doctor replied, “Why, sir, it is of very low life,’ and instanced Richardson’s observation to the effect that had he not known Fielding’s lineage he would have imagined him to be “‘an ostler. | This conception of Fielding’s achievement was not confined to the Richardsonians; it was the view of the age itself, and it col- ored and distorted criticism for a long time to come. Poets might sentimentalize upon the short and simple annals of the poor, but they must not show them in their habit as they lived; elegant divines might orate upon charitableness and true Chris- . * eS os : ray Ly e - ae a eae Prat ore bene Pe rep - ee re *> oer ey ae i i,t ie iat ie 3 : '$ ee Lo i. 3 iu | } i t Mim» osFIELDING’S CONTEMPORARIES 139 ene a “low fellow”; by the pompous clergy, he was often regarded as a buffoon; and in the minds of many otherwise worthy per- are SP Ee eit sont sons he was merely the “facetious” author of the dissolute ~ Ps Tom Jones. J One reason—probably the main one—that Fielding, in spite of his wide popularity, was not better appreciated in 1754 by those whose authority would have been valuable to his fame, was that, jn his desire to face the facts of life and to champion the rights of man, he was far in advance of the tendencies of a eer “ * rarer rrr < em ra ew Siebeitabbtn tt enaet henna - (heals piatteeh te his own genteel and formal age. To paraphrase a dictum of Warton’s at the end of the century, little did Fielding’s con- temporaries imagine that he would one day be remembered as a supreme genius when Hurd and Warburton had become mere names. argos ood He oe a A aH aay “a rt rea Sil { f 7) bs] é $e}; > tie paki t me no} ee ate een ers ot oor a a era erat tet ee et eee ven tee nye e en erty Sree te rt Beene ar a aeTele. fi GHAP TER Vi Before Murphy's Essay 1754-1762 URING the interval of eight years which elapsed be- tween the death of Fielding (1754) and the publi- cation of the collected edition of his works (1762), the writing of prose narratives was so popular that Colman the Elder made it the theme of his satirical comedy, Polly Honey- combe, a Dramatick Novel, which appeared at the Theatre Royal, December 5, 1760. To the printed copy of the play was appended a long list of current fiction, taken “from the catalogue of one of our most popular circulating libraries,” in order that even readers with no “great degree of shrewd- ness’ might realize the timeliness and justice of the author’s attack. In the play itself, Polly judges her admirers according to various characters in her beloved novels. She declares her hatred of Ledger, who is “‘as deceitful as Blifil, as rude as the Harlowes, and as ugly as Doctor Slop,” and will have her adored Scribble, ‘though we go through as many distresses as Booth and Amelia.” “Who knows,” she asks, ““but he may be a foundling, and a gentleman’s son, as well as Tom Jones?” Despite Colman’s satire, however, prose fiction was now so much in demand that the new magazines, the Monthly and the Critical, made a regular business of reviewing novels; and in their articles Richardson and Fielding were used side by side as touchstones of the novelist’s art. Of the heroine of Amanda (1758), the Monthly reviewer said: “She must not think her- self qualified to keep company with Madam Clarissa, or Miss Western: ladies of the first distinction in the records of ro- mance.” Smollett, also, was very popular, and Sterne’s T7ris- tram Shandy (1759-1767) was already the sensation of the 1 Colman’s Dramatick Works, London, 1777, IV, 54, 53. In this edi- tion the list of novels occupies seven pages. nae Speer a tak oer ne Sewanee eee ort Shaheen en beret i ste ets ce rNBEFORE MURPHY’S ESSAY 141 day; but neither Smollett nor Sterne was able to dislodge either Richardson or Fielding from his established position. Among the fiction manufacturers, Fielding’s name con- tinued to be held in high esteem ; and though not a single pro- fessed imitation of his work before Cumberland’s Henry in 1795 is now at all generally known, many would-be novelists, long since forgotten, did their best to walk in the trail which he had blazed. Among those features of the “new species of writing” imitated by Fielding’s lesser followers were: the at- tempt to present real life, especially the life of ordinary peo- ple; the humorous presentation of characters and events, par- ticularly the sprinkling-in of the mock-heroic; and, above all the introduction of the author’s own commentary, either in prolegomenous chapters or in diffused reflections. We have already seen examples of his influence, particularly of his ini- tial essays. A Monthly reviewer once complained, indeed, that Mrs. Haywood’s History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) was lacking inion > those entertaining introductory chapters, and digressive essays, which distinguish the works of a Fielding, a Smollet, or the author of Pompey the little, and which so agreeably relieve us from that over-stretch and languor of at- tention, which a continued string of meer narration commonly produces.”* With this criticism in mind, Mrs. Haywood took pains to say in a subsequent novel, Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753), that her book contained “none of those beautiful di- gressions, those remarks, or reflections which a certain would- be critic pretends are so much distinguish’d in the writings of his two favourite authors.” Possibly Charlotte Lennox® was 2 The Monthly Review, V, 394 (October, 1751). 3 The Female Quixote of this “shamefully distress’d author,” who was befriended by Richardson and praised by Johnson, was handsomely reviewed in Fielding’s Covent-Garden Journal (March 24, 1751, Jen- sen edition, I, 279-282). Mrs. Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless, on the other hand (in which Fielding’s Little Theatre was characterized as a “scandal-shop”), having been tried before the Censorial Court on the “Statute of Dulness,” was acquitted of the charge when it was shown that as a citizen of Grub Street she could be as “dull” as she pleased (February 22, 1752, Jensen edition, I, 229-231). pS OE oy ee is ier ap iens ne eae Mevic bd tehad 9 er" Sr Steet ee ee ny ee eR pare pes ter Anes 2... an ee ppenlnde yoeeertuserasonsen Pa Fe ee . oe ee ee eee ae TTT ao D - : ee bee pee Sey ena bey Sree eT Ape hes Re canary pa had eroreeas . i te i ee one hs 7 a142 FIELDING THE NOVELIST thinking of Mrs. Haywood’s attack on Fielding when she made her salacious landlady* in Henrietta endeavor to discour- age the heroine from reading Joseph Andrews by recommend- ing the far more entrancing works—‘‘the finest love-sick, pas- sionate stories”—of the author of Betsy Thoughtless. ne One of the better-known books which contained reminis- cences of Fielding was Shebbeare’s Lydia (1755). inet novel the author inserts a number of “dissertations” (¢.g., Vol. -I, ch. xxiii); indulges in mock-heroics (“the rosy-fisted morning” draws “‘the curtains” of the night); and introduces to us a Welsh chaplain, David ap Hugh, who on a salary of ten pounds a year supports a wife and six children (Vol. I, ch. vi). Evidently Shebbeare has Fielding in mind, for a few pages thereafter the author “modestly” exclaims “‘with Parson Adams—‘Non omnia possumus omnes. ”° Among the anonymia who curtsy to Fielding on their way to oblivion are Tristram Bates, David Ranger, and Hamilton Murray. In The Life of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates (1756), the hero finds in his benefactor’s room “‘some occa- sional Pamphlets,” “a Set of Spectators,” and Joseph An- drews.© The author of The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger (1757) begins with a burlesque “Invocation by way of exordium:’—“OH! comic genius, oh! . . . And oh! thou muddy, unamiable, thou unsociable demon . . . of dul- ness”; and expects “‘at least to be treated with the same favor” as his contemporaries, among whom he mentions “the multi- loquacious Henry F ”°™ More modest is the biographer of The Life and Real Adventures of Hamilton Murray (1.7.50); who professes not to have “a tythe” of “the merits of a Cer- 4 Henrietta, London, 1758, I, 36. 5 Lydia; or, Filial Piety, London, 1786. The dedication is dated May 30, 1755. 6 The Life and Memoirs of Mr. Ephraim Tristram Bates, London, 1756, p. 89. Listed in The Gentleman’s Magazine, XXVI, 405 (August, 1756). 7 The Juvenile Adventures of David Ranger, London, 1757, I, 1, 25 5. Listed in The Gentleman’s Magazine, XXVI, 549 (November, 1756). a : } ; . ie Nee ar Nh Ce hs ia i ae me je 8 meee om SP Se een Bel oo enlint Ar hn be eee é Ar leeaele : : rBEFORE MURPHY’S ESSAY 143 vantes, a Fielding, or a Smollet.’’ Obviously, Fielding’s name Was one to conjure with. Interesting as is the examination of this early ephemeral fic- tion for references to Fielding, the game is hardly worth the candle. He had set a difficult pattern, and his followers were more occupied with minor peculiarities of the form than with the major structure or the substance of his archetypal novels. The “foule de mauvaises copies,” as Voltaire calls them, have deservedly fallen into oblivion; and the great Frenchman was right when he said that they had “sensiblement diminué le gout” for the great works which their authors professed to imitate. As we pass now from imitators to assailants, it will be ob- served that attacks on Fielding did not by any means cease with his death; his enemies, personal and political, still made use of convenient opportunities to besmirch his character as a man and to diminish his reputation as a writer. Up to the time of Murphy’s Essay (1762), and even later, old animosities rankled: by those of the opposite political party Fielding was still regarded as a turncoat; among the friends of Cibber he continued to be a dangerous “leveller’; to the adherents of Richardson he was, as always, an unblushing libertine. In successive editions of Bampfylde-Moore Carew, as we have said, the passages hostile to Fielding were long retained (not for another decade or two was the objectionable matter re- moved); and in Jonathan Wiaild’s Advice to his Successor (1758), an abusive pamphlet on the subject of ““thief-taking,” Henry Fielding the Magistrate was referred to as “Henry Humbug.” Before Murphy’s Essay appeared, one of Fielding’s most prominent antagonists, the veteran Colley Cibber, had finally paid his debt to nature; but the slanders of his Apology were given new life by their inclusion in his friend Victor’s History of the Theatres (1761). In this work—a reference book for posterity—succeeding generations might read again that when 8 The Life and Real Adventures of Hamilton Murray, London, 1759) I, +t. Ie ~ ro ee XK ee Medline Oo oe Se Reece ee tee iabpbshubbatenthabhentan i Aiwenepe tient ge gl Sone) Pid bp eo eee ithe aap teeter ent Si ser oy eye Pht Cre ere | ee ee ee paaiedeeitens ba eer re Cr rir s ee ht ee, ee eee ee ST set ieehneteioh wintitiderh canteen bette een ere) te a ee wpanlnde yyeepew hee reaes aa Sareeaos iM r ie a ae 1a | a iiberialgk tetGurospeetendtanarenmssonon ee eee Seen eyhe® P ee Bi etetsee 144 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Fielding “was in the Possession of the Little Theatre’ he was “1 “the dishonest Employment” of an “Incendiary Writer,” dealing “about his Satires most unmercifully against the first Minister,” all Distinctions.’”® In the col ; again took root and flourished vingt ans agined, these il] weeds aprés; they even appeared (July, 1761) in The Monthly Re- 10 which had been most friendly to the novelist. sirit was tormented by Cibber redivivus; and, ‘fas Cibber justly observes,” ‘“‘knocking down umns of reviewers, as may be im- vIeW, Thus Fielding’s sj and there were living enemies, Whitehead and—as of yore—Horace Walpole. It ill became the place-hunting Whitehead to insult the memory of Field- lines, which occur in Am Epistle to Dr. too, among whom were Paul ing dead; here are the Thompson (1755): Rich in these gifts, why should I wish for more! Why barter conscience, for superfluous store! Or haunt the Levee of a purse-proud peer, 211 To rob poor F—/d—ng of the curule chair! Worse still was Walpole’s attack. While describing the “Parish of Twickenham” (1759), where Tom Jones was reputed to have been written in part, Walpole could not refrain from saying: Here Fielding met his bunter Muse And, as they quaff’d the fiery juice, Droll Nature stamp’d each lucky hit With unimaginable wit.” To anyone who did not know Walpole, the lines, except for the word “bunter,” might be regarded as complimentary. This one word is, however,. sufficient; “‘bunter,” according to 9 Victor’s History of the Theatres, London, 1761, I, 50-51. 10 The Monthly Review, XXV, 45. 11 4m Epistle to Dr. Thompson, Dublin, 1755, P- 4- 12 See the “Parish Register,” as quoted in Dobson’s Fielding, New York, 1894, p. 112. “Written in or about the year 1758.”—Cobbett, R. S., Memorials of Twickenham, London, 1872, p. 395. John Hoadly caught up the slander.—The Private Correspondence of . . . Garrick, IT, 139.BEFORE MURPHY’S ESSAY 145 Grose’s Dictionary, was a cant term for a “dirty low prosti- tute.” Even more bitter was Samuel Rich: ardson, in whom the old wound caused by his rival’s popularity was still unhealed. Oc- casionally an obtuse correspondent would commit the unpar- donable sin of praising Fielding. The Rev. Smyth Loftus, for example (November 12 1756), tells Richardson that “Some time ago I was much le ased with a paper of Fielding’s, wherein he represented the different effects which the labour of the hands and the head had upon the constitution.’*®= And during the following summer (May 31, 1757) Loftus again speaks of Fielding’s observation, saying, “I cannot recollect one person who has been eminent for wit, that has not laboured under a sickly habit of body.”** Such faux pas as these did not improve Richardson’s temper. We need not wonder that he wrote (December 7, 1756) the following epistle to Fielding’s sister, after a Eepemusal of her Familiar eee in which he continued to find ‘‘new beauties’’: : “Well might a critical judge of writing say, as he did to me, that your late brother’s knowl- edge of it [7.e., the human heart] was not (fine writer as he was) Seer: to your’s. His was but as the knowledge of the outside of a clock-work machine, while your’s was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside.”?> Who was the “critical judge”? Was it Johnson? At any rate, the same figure was afterwards used by the Doctor to illustrate the dif- ference between the works of Fielding and those of Richard- son himself. With this letter in mind we are in a better position, perhaps, to understand a passage in the introduction to Sarah Fielding’s Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, a novel which appeared dur- ing the following year (1757). Here are listed, cheek by jowl, apropos of certain fictitious characters that have left a vivid Impression upon the minds of readers, “the wonderful At- chievements of Don Quixote,” the “rural Innocence of a *8 Correspondence of Richardson, V, 156. tee Ibid., Vv; 166. 1° Thid., 11, 104-105. — ~~ <@ i Te ahdbed bee ee tir hgs Soe ee an a or Tr SAP tata teens LL pee ee en Ser ee yn eree whee ae ge Aosta. arene re ME
26 The Adventures of a Speculist vation here quoted was made some “thirty years” before. 27 An Eighteenth-Century Correspondence, London, 1910, p. 366. Lord Dacre was Thomas Barrett Lennard, 26th Baron Dacre, born 1717. 28 The British Essayists, London, 1802, XXVI, xix. London, 1788, II, 73. The obser- Pal oe TG a rk y Pe i oh PE al aa 47 y Le al ree} pA rad + | ; bi re Hi ey “ bo a aN neh as mereSe ee see ~ ”82 Ts this another attack vice punished, and virtue rewarded. upon Fielding? Very possibly; for there is considerable like- ness between this passage and the previous one. It may be, as one editor suggests (in view of the last sentence), an allusion to Richardson, though, as that author was thought to have taught the passions to move at the command of virtue, such an explanation is less probable. Or, again, it may be a reference to Smollett; but Goldsmith, who went out of his way to attack Sterne, was so unrepelled by Smollett’s grossness that he cor- dially welcomed Launcelot Greaves. No, it is not clear that Goldsmith here referred either to Richardson or to Smollett; if any single author was glanced at it was probably Fielding. Surely about the previous passage, the one from the Citizen of the World, there can be (despite the fact that Goldsmith was writing of the influence of fiction upon the young) no ques- tion; it clearly voices disapprobation. Three of the men, by the way, who were at different times useful to Goldsmith, were three of Fielding’s strongest defamers: Richardson, Smollett, and Johnson. Still it is to be observed that in the Vicar of Wakefield, published some years later, there is a not un- friendly reference to Tom Jones; in that novel Olivia Prim- rose, we are told, had acquired some of her notable proficiency in controversy by perusing the debates between Thwackum 82 Works, Bohn’s Library, new ed., London, 1885, III, 311-312. ee - ere reruns . ee pap hect ats . ears Tepe ar na ed . ~ - a Mite his. dortiee.- ee \F Ree ee tore ee nererenn Lc semn be Medd abtlneaan 4 oe weeer ers rere : paertep Reve ge Pen ante See roe aes ee oe ot erate momen ee nen aaa = wore re i ( 4 a es PT eh Sd rereTatas see yt PETS TT TTL Te tate LOS Sa et LoL etal ade ta bb bah ob oe tate to tate eee FIELDING THE NOVELIST 152 and oduene Again, in another place, Goldsmith speaks of Fielding’s recog gnition of the poet Boyse; 33 and in the first edi- tion of Animated Nature (1774, the year of the author’s death), he refers to Fielding’s statement ‘‘that he never knew a person with a steady glavering smile, but he found him a rogue.”’** Perhaps, like many another in that century, Gold- smith had a higher opinion of his predecessor than he was will- ing to admit. A word should now be said of the comparative popularity of Richardson and Fielding across the Channel. Concerning this matter there is an interesting passage in the Letters and Jour- nals of Mrs. Calderwood of Polton, who, inspired by Field- ing, composed a novel (Fanny Roberts), never pee which an English squire (according to her editor) “‘in talk a manners out-Westerns er squire in [’om Jones.” “All Richi- son’s books,” she writes (1756), “are translated, and much admired abroad; but for Fielding’s, the forreigners have no notion of them, and do not understand them, as the manners are so intirely English.’ »8® During the next decade the vogue of the sentimental had increased to such a degree that Wal- pole, who characterized Clarissa and Grandison as ‘‘deplorably tedious lamentations,” discovered on his visit to Paris in 1765 that Richardson was (with Hume) the reigning English fa- vorite and that his works had “stupefied the whole French nation.’’*® - This reputed popularity of Richardson over the water was noted in England with great satisfaction; so close were the literary relations between the two countries during this period that it became a ponderable element in the ascendancy which Richardson enjoyed over his chief competitor. Fielding, as we / have remarked, had been unfortunate in his translators: by 83 Works, V, 151. 4 Thid., V, 202. 85 Tetters and Journals of Mrs. Calderwood of Polton from Eng- land Holland and the Low Countries in 1756, Edinburgh, 1884, pp. 356-357, 208. 86 Walpole’s Letters, edited by Toynbee, VI, 163, 284, 370. ee m8 Mh. 8g Se - Pet ye ay erent eatin theese ss popewlsknimemy reed as \- ae ele aera ats swtne woke We : ar . ee éBEFORE MURPHY’S ESSAY 153 leaving out the “digressions” and initial essays and retaining only the mere story of Tom Jones, La Place had presented to his countrymen a Fielding utterly denatured—not until the end of the century was there an attempt to restore the omitted passages; by adapting, instead of translating, Mme. Riccoboni did even worse by Amelia. Richardson, on the other hand, had been very lucky; it is common knowledge that his style gained rather than lost by its passage into the more elegant medium of French. Of course this is only part of the story, and even to attempt to tell the rest of it would be out of place here. But it may be observed that the hue and cry on both sides of the Channel was for that very sentimentalism which Fielding had squarely opposed. Fréron (in 1751), as Joseph Texte points out, could not forgive the “low comedy” which he found in (La Place’s translation of ) Tom Jones:*" Consider- ing the frequency of editions, to be sure, we may suspect that Texte overstates the case regarding Fielding’s lack of popu- larity in France; at any rate, further research in this matter is greatly to be desired. But even if the point be some day con- clusively proved, the result either way can have little bearing on our present investigation. Our interest is solely in one ques- tion: What was the prevailing opinion in England regarding the relative fame of Fielding and Richardson abroad? The answer is absolutely clear—it was Richardson and not Field- ing who was thought to have made the brilliant success across the water. Literary people in England were justly proud of Richardson’s triumph and were especially fond of giving rea- sons for it; unquestionably the approbation of Richardson abroad was a considerable factor at home in exalting him above his great contemporary. Imagine the impression made in England by such pro- nouncements as the following. Of Clarissa, Marmontel had written in the Mercure de France (August, 1758), “I do not think that the age can show a more faithful, more delicate, ce more spirited touch”; and of Grandison—that “masterpiece 87 Lettres sur quelques écrits, 1751, V, 3, as quoted by Joseph Texte. +e rete eet ee eae eT ee ee See eee eet TT e Tra beaver seas SS ree ar Tera s we plete eee ret res Pp ee ee > dleetaeherthacietehenammneh tnaestanes temiedtinnenattneien techie etal Oe ee ee ae — saa Ne aa Atvem none pear tb PT ee rs eT er er oey oe we payee meters + — ae ce ei art ety ten as ba Be Pin 4 ie elle Celine ed hi ieel nent ee eeete pd ee eT ee Oe nent ain oo ee Prva tena —— hace ee one eee anc Pas wie = te hs J a te Eee re: 154 FIELDING THE NOVELIST of the most healthy philosophy’’—he declared, ‘Antiquity, can show nothing more exquisite.” And Rousseau, whose name was lips, wrote D’Alembert (1758) that “nothing > on everyone s 23 oa . : to” Clarissa ““in was ever written equal or even approaching i 9938 any language. When Fielding died, in 1754, the mews seems to have evoked singularly little comment; in 1761, when Richardson forth not only public eulogy from his coterie of admirers in England but almost fanatical panegyric yers abroad. Not until the end of the century, died, the event drew from his worshij when Gibbon declared in his stately way that Tom Jones would outlast the ruling house of Austria, did praise of Field- ing even approximate in fervor the rhapsodical éloge which Diderot pronounced on the occasion of Richardson’s death. Fully to realize this statement ‘t is well to have the celebrated eulogy before us; the following excerpt will recall it to memory: O my friends! ‘Pamela,’ ‘Clarissa, and ‘Grandison’ are three m reading them by important business, I felt great dramas! Torn fro I neglected my work and returned an overwhelming distaste for it; to Richardson. Beware of opening these enchanting books when you have any important duties to perform. O Richardson, Rich- ardson, first of all men in my eyes, you shall be my reading at all times! Pursued by pressing need; if my friend should fall into pov- erty; if the limitations of my fortunes should prevent me from giving fit attention to the education of my children, I will sell my books; but you shall remain on the same shelf as Moses, Homer, Euripides and Sophocles, and I will read you by turns.*® 88 This was one of the purple passages which Mrs. Barbauld’s brother, Dr. Aikin, enshrined in General Biography (1813). See CEuvres Complétes, Paris, 1909, I, 233 mote. For Marmontel see his Cuvres Complétes, nouvelle éd., Paris, 1819, X, 343) 340 345- 89 For the French original see Geuvres de Denis Diderot, Paris, 1821, III, 10-11. Diderot did not_ ignore Fielding. “I shall not be satisfied with you or with myself,” he wrote Mlle. Volland, October 20, 1760, “until I have brought you to relish the truth of Pamela, Tom Jones, Clarissa, and Grandison” (XVIII, s14); but in another letter, Septem- ber 17, 1761, he declares on a reperusal of Clarissa—“My eyes filledBEFORE MURPHY’S ESSAY 155 When a great French philosopher could express himself pub- licly after this fashion, is it any wonder that the report of Richardson’s vogue in France seemed to be confirmed? One of the striking facts about the “Essay on Fielding” pre- fixed by the editor, Arthur Murphy, to the first collected edi- tion of the Works in 1762, was the almost entire absence of dicta from those in authority concerning Fielding’s novels. Absolutely the only passage which Murphy found to quote was the little footnote which Warburton inserted in his edition of Pope.(The truth is that in spite of the novelist’s popularity— a popularity which cannot be doubted or minimized—distin- guished men of letters had not yet come forward conspicuously in his support. Not yet did he have to his credit the tributes which had been showered upon Richardson at home nor the rhapsodical eulogy of admiring notables across the Channel. again with tears. I could no longer read, I arose, and began to grieve, to apostrophize the brother, the sister, the father, the mother, and the uncles, talking aloud, to Damilaville’s great amazement” (XIX, 47).— R. L. Cru’s Diderot, New York, 1913, pp. 340-341. Cru’s references are to uvres Complétes, Paris, 1875-1877. soe ast RG EY Pe Sy oh a G6 ee i Ee a yen ney oe eleeerietek baie en antennae ro i vt 2S ome marae r FF) ee tL dias * oe == eee ET Pape errr rr wee ey 5 . i a ‘7 i i i Ret ‘*29 i 5 ~ 7" ee ona wae iey a rans eee ers2. el ees aie, Tete ta tele, Pe t5lass | CHAPTER VII Murphy's “Life” of Fielding 1762 I HEN, in 1762, Millar, the publisher, brought out the first collected edition of Fielding’s works, the time was propitious for a sane and careful biog- raphy of the author w ritten by an impartial hand. He had been dead eight years; and, though the sl: anderous stories of his an- cient enemies still circulated and obtained credence, a compe- tent biographer, with the aid of John and Sarah Fielding and others, might have estab blished a Fielding of Fact in place of a Fielding of Fiction. No such good fortune came to the novel- ist; the Life, biographical and critical, was entrusted to the shallow and pompous young Irishman, Arthur Murphy. A dec- ade before, as we have seen, Murphy, in his Gray’s-Inn Jour- nal, had warmly commended F Adin? novels and had fought on his side against Dr. John Hill. Very possibly it was he, how- ever, who furnished 1 Mi llar with the apologetic “Dedication” to the Voyage to Lisbon (1755). And now, seven years later, when the task of preparing the Life was before him, Murphy took advantage of the opportunity to exploit himself at the expense of his friend—patronizing the author in the most vul- gar manner, utterly neglecting even an elementary investiga- tion of facts, incorporating into his narrative some of the worst inventions of Fielding’s enemies, and meretriciously adorning his rhetorical essay with irrelevant disquisitions upon the ancients and irrelevant passages from two modern writers —Warburton and Hurd—whom it was politic to praise. ‘This villainous sketch of Fielding, written as it was by a supposed friend and professing as it did special lenity toward the fail- ings of its subject, was to do more harm ev entually than the combined efforts of those declared enemies of Fielding (such RP FW Et he re —_ a na la oa SE ET peers ene? ee a See noe 4 i. > eae a i 2 t. Ca) ‘err rs >HENI > “ FIELDING De betes. ed Pole ee aes Gate al des , eet eer Seapets inetiene Lien ocean <4, -4sQuie | t ane rai Lek yt : rer ee ere ins eee ee pene een a. eee " . oe wy iy i ; i ' S i ei F s i i ey § abs ¢ eat ea | Bi ee er) ney ge es ae eres ryee ae eer on a ee ere a pa nd meses eet yee iindetidieintinden eee es eee bet We a4 Mi 5 \ ; : : : 5 , ‘ . $ 5 oe eae Septet ee ee SS ne etna ee Pe: eared nt te oe Cees Se rta Pa Yi Le seee. S ard ees bh besten te eels ume te ee ete Ln MURPHIOS SEIFEC OF FIELDING 157 as the scurrilous Grub-street Journal and the malignant Old aT ae eee ee \ od er ett oy oo) England) to whose scandalous stories the young Irishman lent so willing an ear. Appearing, as it did, prefixed to the elegant frst edition of Fielding’s Works, Murphy’s “Essay” was ac- cepted practically at its face value during the last half of the eighteenth century and also during the greater part of the Poti er eer See TT Mite won ee ee il Aepeceta tebe heh tren nieces Lin aicanieel Ted nineteenth. Only within the past two generations has the flim- siness of Murphy’s performance been the subject of interested and competent investigation; and only since Austin Dobson’s biography in 1883 has the presentment of a different Fielding been at all generally accepted. nae ee eae pon ee eels 9 pas pir yer eS es Sp teas id pe ee Eee ee tt ee ee eee Murphy’s “Essay” reflects—perhaps unconsciously—the pressure of accumulated contemporary enmity; even a period of eight years had failed to dispel the odium which had attached “ to Fielding’s reputation. As we examine the evidence that has come down to us, we are amazed to find that a man who posed as the novelist’s friend should feel it necessary to assime a tone so apologetic. “Shall we now,” he asks, “after the man- ner of the Egyftian ritual, frame a public accusation against his memory?”? Murphy will do no such thing; he will not “tear off ungenerously the shroud from his remains, and pur- sue him with a cruelty of narrative till the reader’s sense is shocked, and is forced to express his horror.” Rather he will make excuses for his friend’s delinquencies: his “occasional”? “peevishness”’; his association as a youth “with the voluptuous of all ranks”; his “‘want of refinement”; his custom of inur- ing “his body to the dangers of intemperance” over “a social bottle”; the frequent “indelicacy, and sometimes the down- right obscenity of his raillery”’; the exigencies in which “that nice delicacy of conduct, which alone constitutes and preserves a character,” was “occasionally obliged to give way”; the ques- tionable “choice of the means to redress himself”? when “his finances were exhausted.” “In short,” observes Murphy, ‘‘our author was unhappy, but not vicious in his nature”; he had a “sense of honour” as “lively and delicate as most men,” Bis iH Fi f 4 i}: st ES a Fe though “sometimes his passions were too turbulent for it, or rather his necessities were too pressing’’; but “‘in all cases where ee Net See ~~ ers el 7 peta aon ee ae res ha 7 4 Smee pg = iSebaKacsceet: a ee mv > lions ~~ P =" batt Seeeertateer weiterereete et onioeens orecemeainie ~ et eee) ears — pe a Ar “ iia seer ecsenete baeeiee Me t toa 7 Seated i ved) SC el ii as Eee es 9 158 FIELDING THE NOVELIST delicacy was departed from, his friends knew how his feelings ce reprimanded him.” No, Murphy will not “disturb the manes of the dead”; he will be “more humane and generous’; he will “set down to the account of slander and defamation a great part of that abuse which was discharged against him by his enemies, in his lifetime”; still, sirabile dictu, he will de- duce “from the whole, this useful lesson’ > that “dissipation _ and extravagant pleasures are the most dangerous palliatives that can be found for disappointments and vexations in the first stages of life.” What were, we may well ask, those lapses from virtue and delicacy on the ay of Fielding over which the biographer will draw the veil? As Mr. Frederick Dickson rightly said, in his article on ““T hackers and Fielding” in The North A meri- can Review, if specific instances had been available, surely Richardson and Johnson would have found them out, and “‘ex- But the rhetorical Murphy was ploited” them, “writ large.’”” unhampered by the modern spirit of investigation. Knowing nothing of Fielding’s earlier career except from hearsay, car- c: ing nothing for the truth, and regarding the “life » merely a he a a means of self-exploitation, i d little as ace Cross has conclusively shown in his chapter on “The Shadow of Arthur Murphy”*—than “revise” the fictitious portrait which the novelist’s enemies had concocted out of their own evil hearts and out of the characters of his plays and novels, and had kept so constantly in the public eye that even before his death it had become traditional. According to Old England and the anonymous pamphleteers, Fielding was guilty of every crime in the catalogue: as we have previously related, he was accused of being a Tom Jones, a Booth, and even a Jonathan Wild; he was a “libertine,” a political “turncoat,” a “needy vagrant,” a “‘sponger,” a “‘trading justice,” a foe to “religion and virtue.” The story of these slanders—already told in part 1 “William Makepeace Thackeray and Henry Fielding,” The North American Review, CXCVII, 527 (April, 1913). 2 Cross’s Fielding, Vol. III, ch. xxxi.MURRHTGS SETRE?” OF FIERDING 159 —need not be repeated here; in them the pliant Murphy found an opportunity too good for a man of his stamp to miss. Some of the charges that had been made against Fielding, Murphy, indeed, took pains to refute; but before he finished, to use the words of Professor Cross, he had turned “most”? of Fielding’s “virtues” into “imperfections, follies, and vices.” And the resultant caricature, which he thus gave the world in 1762, did the novelist’s business for posterity so effectually that not until Professor Cross’s biography in 1918, when Murphy’s iniquitous performance was entirely overhauled, was a complete portrait of Fielding the Man at last available. As we trace the fortunes of the great novels from decade to dec- ade during the period of a century and a half that has elapsed since the “Essay,” we shall realize again and again how difficult it was for writers of succeeding generations to keep their esti- mates of Fielding’s art from being biased and distorted by Murphy’s disparagement of the man himself. Behind the books will appear from time to time the apparition of that careless, ill-governed, over-emotional, irritable, voluptuous, unfortu- nate prodigal, who smoked so furiously, drank so excessively, and squandered so ruinously. Such was the friendly office rendered by the pompous and patronizing Arthur Murphy, who, if report be true, was little qualified to sit in judgment upon the morals of Henry Field- ing. And though, as will presently be observed, that part of the “Essay” which was devoted to a criticism of the novels was far less reprehensible—nay, even in many respects commend- able—than the biographical section, it was vitiated and dis- abled by being in such bad company. As a critic as well as a biographer, Murphy had an eye to business; here was a fine chance to further his own ends. Since everyone was interested in Alexander Pope and in Warton’s Essay on that author’s “Writings and Genius,” which had recently appeared (1756), Murphy will ‘“‘pause” for a while (one seventh of his time! ), ostensibly to define the word “genius,” but actually to discuss the “Rape of the Lock” or the funeral ceremonies of the Egyptians; he will include a flattering and irrelevant excerpt > pay EET Ce ey eee — ra ery Bl baat ee er eee bhi 2 pet pe es er eS Mrti ee evi} tena canines iene aetenbeeieness colar very s oe. re. - oaaee ne he) NE ee ne ee Peer rrs 7 ca ry i of Fy | i ait if uy Path aot a ae PT rs ob, ae cee ee err eee ar eae are - i ee ee eed i ares rey a > — eed ee ae ail ee EPO ree er aesa 2a oie el ole, Telesis Tate 3 eae) ae ‘ney ae ee la ee Pr a i if i ae 7. % eee H 5: A 7 ; ‘ ! 160 FIELDING THE NOVELIST from a “Dissertation” by Hurd or from the great Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses; and he will drag in a small disser- tation of his own on the Athenian Middle Comedy. And when at last he finds time to say something of the novels of Henry Fielding, he will indulge himself in pompous rhetorical figures which, despite their orotund quality, effect little in the way of ‘llumination. The most appropriate of these analogies (which has to do with Amelia) reads as follows: ‘‘A fine vein of mo- rality runs through the whole; many of the situations are af- fecting and tender; the sentiments are delicate; and, upon the whole, it is the Odyssey, the moral and pathetic work of Henry Fielding.” Often quoted in subsequent reference books, this similitude, if left without qualifications, would be happy enough. But Murphy was not satisfied; he must make Amelia do duty in another figurative scheme. Since Joseph Andrews 1s to represent the sunrise and Tom Jones the noontide glory of Fielding’s genius, 4melia must serve as the setting sun® of the author’s day; it must illustrate the natural decline of his pow- ers. And so Murphy goes on to say that Amelia has ““marks of genius, but of a genius beginning to fall into its decay. The author’s invention in this performance does not appear to have lost its fertility; his judgment too seems as strong as ever; but the warmth of imagination is abated; and in his landskips or his scenes of life Mr. Fielding is no longer the colourist he was before.” To foist such a scheme (rise, climax, and disso- lution! ) upon a man of forty-four, whose novel-writing had all been done in less than ten years, was ill-advised and mis- leading. Amelia is different from Joseph Andrews and also from Tom Jones; it represents, however, not a falling-off of genius but simply excellence of a different kind. In a footnote, Murphy informs his readers that the Amelia of his edition is printed from a copy “corrected by the author’s own hand,” in which “‘exceptionable passages” are now “retrenched.” Here- after the public will no longer be troubled by the “noseless- ness” of Amelia; but it is sufficiently apparent that Murphy 8 Presumably a reminiscence of Longinus on the Odyssey.MURPHY’S “LIFE” OF FIELDING 161 has not forgotten the abuse which had been hea ped upon Field- ing’s heroine a decade before. While he devotes several pages to the criticism of Tom Jones, he polishes off Amelia in a single paragraph—a fact which clearly reflects the low esteem in which this novel was still (1762) commonly held. Of Joseph Andrews Murphy is not unappreciative. ‘‘Noth- ing could be more happily conceived,” he writes, “than the character of Parson Adams,” whom he comp oares—taking Fielding at his word—to the Knight of La peamen ha eee And though he thinks that the “main action” of Joseph An- drews is culpably “trivial and unimportant,” he predicts that because of its great central character, its comic situations, and its “fine turns of surprise” this novel will be ‘among the few works of invention, produced By the English writers, which will always continue in request.” It is for Tom Jones, however, that Murphy reserves the main place and space in his ‘‘Essay.” “If we consider” the work “in the same light in which the ablest critics have examined the Iliad, the #neid, and the Paradise Lost, namely, with a view to the fable, the manners, the sentiments, and the stile, we shall find it standing the test of the severest criticism, and indeed bearing away the envied praise of a complete perform- ance.” To the fable, or plot, of Tom Jones he pays a high tribute, comparing the course of the story to that of a river, “which, in its progress, foams amongst fragments of rocks, and for a while seems pent up by unsurmountable oppositions; then angrily dashes for a while, then plunges underground into caverns, and runs a subterraneous course, till at length it breaks out again, meanders round the country, and with a clear placid stream flows gently into the ocean.” This passage constitutes only a part of the Hibernian rhetoric which Murphy expends upon the perfection of Fielding’s plot, than which ‘‘no fable whatever affords, in its solution, such artful states of suspence, such beautiful turns of surprise, such unexpected incidents, and such sudden discoveries, sometimes apparently embarrassing, but always promising the catastrophe, and eventually promot- ing the completion of the whole.’ Bi : a Spx a4 Sheed beeen a re a eee re * 2m ae abe aed paiebtebathetnah mesteniaee a. vet Set athena pee ree: ey Yate rear Sak btateenietete atte ee oerenendnin oh Linc mtg “ . = See ~~. ry ay rs Se per pen Serer ere es er enn eres Se ee Pee ry Antes er ren eg ers ms Asetwe ees es TF ORT 1 vee nn yeeenenpreet Peeriet en ee heres ce. on bat pepe sreeee areas A awtoateanent eerie ries 162 FIELDING THE NOVELIST As for the dramatis personae, though Murphy praises All- worthy, he is not blind to the fact that this character is some- what “laboured”; Squire Western is most “entertaining” ; Thwackum and Square are “excellently opposed to each other”; and Jones himself, he declares, will be a “fine lesson to young men of good tendencies to virtue, who yet suffer the impetuosity of their passions to hurry them away.” “In short,” concludes Murphy, “all the characters down to Partridge, and even to a maid or an hostler at an inn, are drawn with truth and humour; and indeed they abound so much, and are so often brought forward in a dramatic manner, that every thing may be said to be here in action; every thing has MAN- NERS; and the very manners which belong to it in human life. They look, they act, they speak to our imaginations, just as they appear to us in the world. The SENTIMENTS which they utter, are peculiarly annexed to their habits, passions and ideas; which is what poetical propriety requires; and, to the honour of the author, it must be said, that, whenever he ad- dresses us in person, he 1s always in the interests of virtue and religion, and inspires a strain of moral reflection, a true love of goodness, and honour, with a just detestation of imposture, hypocrisy, and all specious pretenses to uprightness.” The estimate given above of the plot and characters of Tom Jones sounds trite enough to us now. It is only fair to at least no one say that it was not so trite in 1762; no one at all well known—had, before Murphy, given publicly so elaborate and so favorable a criticism of Fielding’s novels. And there are in the “Essay” one or two other features to be commended. Since the Journey from this World to the Next has “provoked the dull, short-sighted, and malignant enemies” of Fielding “to charge him with an intention to subvert the settled notions of mankind in philosophy and religion,” Mur- phy defends the author by quoting appositely from the preface of the Wiscellanies. From the same preface, also, he excerpts that excellent passage in which Fielding explains the signifi- cance of Jonathan Wild; and though obliged by his rhetorical figure to assert that this great book falls “very short of thatoe te ~ oe Me ert de ere Pactubverssipets MO REHIES: SETRE OF PIEEDING 163 A mhojpwjage are Siitete niente higher order of composition which our author attained in his other pieces of invention,” he obviously appreciates its ‘“‘noble purpose.” In general, Murphy declares, “Fielding was more oe eyes Sy arte ee i neal BRE) Te attached to the manmers than to the heart”: the “strong specific qualities of his personages he sets forth with a few masterly strokes, but the nicer and more subtle workings of the mind he is not so anxious to investigate”; yet by this Murphy does ree menane eee en ee ee SELL D ores eens seese weer een ae not mean that Fielding is superficial, for he regards as one of his chief claims to excellence the fact that ‘‘he saw the latent sources of human actions”—a point which Hazlitt elaborated many years later. ‘There are good things here—for we must allow the devil his due—yet, all in all, Murphy’s stiff and pompous essay gives us a very inadequate idea of the radiant comédie humaine which it discusses ; while his bearing toward the author is noth- ing short of intolerable. We get from him little notion of Fielding’s ability and success as a magistrate (though he de- fends him against the charge of corruption in that office); the general impression which he conveys is that of a reckless and rather dissolute fellow whose follies and vices terminate in ruin and in misery—even the gallant and intrepid spirit of the Voyage to Lisbon (to the biographer actually reprehensible) is Hf Ay 73 ne ate at) a ret (tt ea: ne ety aos at the “jesting” of a condemned man upon “the scaffold.”” The results of modern investigation have tended more and more to discredit this view of Fielding; it has become increasingly cer- tain that the man himself was no such Boothlike creature as Murphy would have us believe. Why, we may well ask, should he so represent him? Did he really and righteously disapprove of his elder friend’s morals? Or was he borne down by com- mon adverse report and opinion? Of Fielding’s early life he knew nothing at first hand; when he was publishing the et a a ee Nhe hee et eet ce ee oes ee m ae prea e" aera rey peer eae a ] re A " i Por vee ee ire mere re eo ak armevenene aad Gray’s-Inn Journal, a few years before Fielding’s death, he was still in his early twenties; when Joseph Andrews appeared he was only a boy. We have no particular reason for thinking that Murphy bore any malice toward Fielding; it is even pos- sible that he actually believed he was writing handsomely of his former benefactor. But what he really did was to fashion oeFIELDING THE NOVELIST 1 the forces of Grub Street 164 portrait out of the libels whicl had, by their violent and continued scurrility, succeeded in making popular. Such materials, as Murphy presumably real- ized, furnished a much more picturesque biographical sketch than the sober truth; furthermore, he was well enough assured of the prevailing attitude toward Fielding to write after this The “Essay,” therefore, as far as the biographical a reflection of a contem- fashion. part is concerned, may be considered porary enmity that had not yet passed away. II So far as we may judge, Murphy > account of Fielding, bio- graphical as well as critic a was regarded by his audience as entirely satisfactory. In 1762, of course, the Newspaper War of the previous decade and the abuse to which Fielding had been subjected were still fresh in the minds of a great number of Murphy’s readers. No wonder the magnanimous biogra- pher’s professed intention of drawing “the friendly veil” over the writer’s “failings” was taken at its face value. Compared with the scurrilous aspersions of former enemies, this apolo- getic defense from one who posed as a friend of the novelist must, indeed, have seemed to the general public “handsome” treatment. Oddly enough, those who did know what a rascally per- formance Murphy’s “Essay” really was (Fielding’s sister Sarah and his brother John, for example) seem not to have left on record any intimation of the fact. John Fielding, who appeared a 1 number of times in print, had taken occasion in ws Extracts (1761) to praise Henry’s efficiency as a magistrate; and in on ade avoring to insure the success of The Fathers, he included more praise of his brother in the dedication of the play to the Duke of Northuml berland.® But if he ever 4 Extracts from such of the Penal Laws, as relate to the Peace of the Metropolis, new ed., 1769, Ppp. 4, 321, 322- First edition published in October, 1761 5 The Works of Henry Fielding, new ed., London, 1783, IV, 369- 70. ” 3 Sedna aie leer ted fmt be te : wel te etre lt e eet hie ete een et eed ‘4 * ae ae pa tetas : | tae es éMURPHY S) LIE” OF FIFE DING 165 remonstrated against Murphy’s Life no account of such re- monstrance has, apparently, come down to us. It should be remembered, perhaps, that upon Henry’s brother John fell the burden of supporting the widow and the children; and though —to his credit be it spoken—he manfully performed this obligation, it is conceivable that, while be: aring up under the whims of that lady (there appears to have been some friction at times) and under the irritating condescension of those who still sneered at the “‘cook-maid”’ sister-in- law, he may not have been exactly in the mood to set Mur phy to rights concerning his celebrated brother. How was it with Fielding’s worthy and accomplished sister? As has been seen, Sarah Field ding nobly defended her brother during his (eecie against the unjust abuse of his contempo- raries. But if she had any quarrel with Murphy’s portrait she seems not to have recorded it. In spite of her generous early defense of her brother, was there a tinge of jealousy in her mind? We have already spoken of Ruchariconze praise, two years after Fielding’s death, of the “finer springs and move- ments”® which distinguish mot the superficial Henry but the profound Sarah Fielding. Imagine the flutter of pride which she must have experienced to be thus praised by the man to whom she bowed in worship! And there was Margaret Collier, who had written to Richardson the year before (October 3, 1755), “If they [7.e., women authors] write well, and very ingeniously, and have a brother, then to be sure—‘She could not write so well; it was her brother’s, no doubt.’ ”? We may take it for granted that Sarah Fielding heard not a little talk of this kind; nor would it be unnatural for her to agree with her friends in their opinion. Still one wonders how both brother and sister could have kept their composure in the face of Arthur Murphy’s misrepresentations. By the general public Murphy seems to have been taken at his own estimate: he as- sured his audience that he was doing well by Fielding, the 5) Man and the Author; and the reading world Gree him. ° Correspondence of Richardson, 11, 104-105 (December 7, 1756). * Tbid., Il, 77. eer Pre a or : Seat ear ws ee aN sat eit athe pe * eres ae Die ome aoe C- tee Sahd ieee ee or pen a ee Pate rp ee ors vem Od et ee ee er 7 Sieh pitebetatietash kien ae arene Sea Sis seas Larner an te Toe rN ir Ml _ [ee ee bt weer want eteemennepiglesoten tnt re ip peeete 4 2 “a een eer Siete edhe tet tenet te rea net oF} 3% chy ae et z ae © Vee able rete SS Se ee SOY ees ae rary ee eet oe ents * _— m= 4 eee wey Te bee ev pene ber eer eryre let ener teetT eLaraseee FIELDING THE NOVELIST not a word about the beautiful new edition (except the item in the “‘List of Books”) was allowed to appear ‘n The Gentleman’s Ma gazine. And though Murphy known how Johnson (w hose favor he was now he was doubtless chagrined 166 As was to be expected, must have courting ) regarded the author, when Mr. Urban utterly ignored not only Fielding in his ele- gant dress but the elegant essay which introduced him. By the two literary periodic: als at this time influential, however, —the Monthly and the Crt tical Murphy, s “Essay” was well re- ceived; in The Annual Register, also, it was honored by a long excerpt. Adapting Mur phy” s own statement, Ihe Monthly Review (which printe< d copious extracts from the ‘Essay’ ) declared that “the ingenious Biogr: apher”’ had “not deviated from the custom of those who wr! ‘te the life of a favourite author, in displaying his good qualities to the best advantage, and drawing a friendly veil over his failings.’® In The Cre al Review for July, 1762, Fi elding is charz acterized as the “‘neg- lected slave of an ungrateful Pee who admired without rewarding his genius”; and Murphy’s prefatory life 1s styled “an elegant monument” erected to his memory, an essay in which “sood sense, delicacy, and taste shine forth in every page.” The reviewer speaks of Murphy’s digressions, especially the opening platitudes, and his emph: asis upon the author’s writ- ings rather than upon his life; yet he declares that, after all, the digressions constitute “the greatest excellency of the per- formance” before him, which 1s allowed to possess all the baer of good writing. > Only one stricture does he make on Murphy’s estimate of the novels: ““We know that many readers al condemn the taste of the critic, for giving ‘Tom Jones the preference to Joseph Andrews,” which in his opin- ion, though not so intricate, and regular in “fable,” possesses more humor and “natural painting.”” Murphy had, there- fore, no cause to complain of the two excellent notices in The 8 The Monthly Review, XXVII, 55 (July, 176 62). The article began in May (XXVI, 364- eae ran on into the Ap oetate for January-June (XXVI, 481- -494), and was concluded in July (XXVII, 49- 56). 9 The Critical Review, XIV, 1-21 (July, 1 762). a Se yard ie es exe = Ss <2 are ns i derestenteekandieeumteaatemaetete wd i si _ * ay i tf j MS a osMURPHY’S “LIFE” OF FIELDING 167 ere ees 3 oo ~ pe ener Peaetheistete et ere ee ds bes ~ Monthly Review and The Critical Review concerning his ef- forts both as a critic and as a biographer. Moreover, Andrew * — ¥ meets ha eenen Millar had taken particular pains with the book-work; in the words of that great admirer of Fielding, George Colman, the edition was an “elegant” one.?° In the literary world not very much stir was created, appar- ently, by Murphy’s edition of Fielding; yet it presumably fur- nished the inspiration for the following excellent verses by Christopher Smart, which, by the way, appeared in several MagaZines: The master of the GREEK and ROMAN page, The lively scorner of a venal age, Who made the publick laugh, at publick vice, Or drew from sparkling eyes the pearl of price; Student of nature, reader of mankind, In whom the patron, and the bard were join’d; As free to give the plaudit, as assert, And faithful in the practise of desert. Hence pow’r consign’d the laws to his command, And put the scales of Justice in his hand; To stand protector of the Orphan race, And find the female penitent a place. From toils like these, too much for age to bear, From pain, from sickness, and a world of care; From children, and a widow in her bloom, From shores remote, and from a foreign tomb, Called by the WORD of LIFE, thou shalt appear, To please and profit in a higher sphere, Where endless hope, imperishable gain Are what the scriptures teach and emtertain.™ Hr, Be er? Fa he {! It is significant of the state of affairs in the Mid-Century that for a real appreciation of Fielding (in England) such as this ere ~*~ —— *° Colman’s Prose on Several Occasions, London, L787 Ly 2/7. 11 Smart, C., Poems on Several Occasions, London, 1763, pp. 13-14. This is the most satisfactory version of the poem. For others see The St, James’s Magazine, Il, 312 (July, 1763); The London Magazine, XXXII, 441 (August, 1763). per ee ere yee pad Loteeteetenh ciataedeh tate tne Wh eteh eelaatee nt ticah heii tnd ae = Te ah Prey . ~ 4 nee Bemese ohh y etaired) gene pene venir ape ery Sey ee eer, re een ep gee SererOe ee ere a ene a pee eee — ~~ Sa ae a a ae eS ere petal te ao ibheiabehidete tele ets enh ee end * ee ee on reas a game : i j a in 168 FIELDING THE NOVELIST hionable coteries and seek out 12 we must turn away from the fas a poor mad poet whom the novelist had befriended Not the earnest and “‘lively scorner of a venal age” of Christopher Smart’s verses but the improvident and dissipated genius depicted by Arthur Murphy was the standard represen- tation of Henry Fielding after 1762. Placed in the first vol- ume of the collected Works, Murphy’s “Essay” held a com- manding position thro ighout the eighteenth century. It was reprinted and reprinted (in succeeding editions of the Works), it was frequently abridged or paraphrased; but until Watson’s Life appeared in 1807 there was not even a competitor—and Watson, as will be seen, who did little more than expand the “Essay,” was perhaps worse than Murphy himself. One of the frst influential immediate adaptations of Murphy’s “Essay” was the account of Fielding which appeared two years later in D. E. Baker’s The Companion to the Play-H ouse (1764). Though, quoting Murphy, he declares that it “Swill be an hu- mane and generous Office, to set down to the Account of Slan- der and Defamation, a great Part of that Abuse which was discharged against him by his Enemies in his Life-Time,” Baker simply repeats from Murphy’s “Essay” the old stories of Fielding’s extravagance and dissipation. Of the great books, he omits all detailed criticism, contenting himself with the statement (which by the way, has been often repeated since) that the “celebrated Novels,” Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, are “too well known and too justly admired to leave us any Room for expatiating upon their Merits.” The omission of Amelia in this enumeration is doubtless not due to haste or carelessness. Murphy had slighted Azmelia, but he wound up by calling it Fielding’s Odyssey; Baker is evidently afraid to say that it is admired at all. Baker’s account is, then, little more than a rehash of Mur- phy’s “Essay,” which thus became part and parcel of one of the main authorities on the English theatre; renamed and added 12 The editor of L’Année Littéraire (1763, Il, 26) writes: “| Field- ing] s’est rendu immortel par les romans de Joseph Andrews et de Tom Jones: on baise aujourd’hui la trace de ses pas.”MURPHY’S “LIFE” OF FIELDING 169 f to by others, The Companion to the Play-House finally ap- peared as the celebrated Biographia Dramatica. In consequence, Murphy’s despicable representation of Fielding was purveyed to great numbers of readers who lacked either the opportunity or the inclination to turn to the works themselves. On the other hand, Baker’s assertion that Tom Jones and Joseph An- drews were “well known” and “justly admired’* was soon a commonplace in various reference books. “Well known” they undoubtedly were, and admirers steadily increased in number; but in 1762 their author had not yet received to any marked degree the public approval of the leading spirits of the age. Had Murphy been able to flatter other eminent persons beside Warburton by including their dicta about Fielding, we may be quite sure that he would have done so. 18 Baker, D. E., The Companion to the Play-House, London, 1764. Continuations were by Isaac Reed, 1782, and Stephen Jones, 1812. —* eos _ ew Se eee aeons Fr ere Se Forte tis * er es eet bares * #8 neh dhe gagng, ME POBad, none. * Aye Hib Abad minprimve 4 Sealant a eke im =a Wey Tod dom nr CPs) bores res re es ee #7475 Se ee ee. ee nnne pera - o a o P - - tI o sf ‘se oh ? tt a Sy oa ei : be 5 A ay re «arate nrepminns enti UA. nhs bhvee nan Siasty= Akees inte) =. 02m Bare se gnyaeag® SETA RA anes =ofat et eiyx es ee ee ae CHAPTER VIII The Turning of the Tide 71 a 1762-1 ESPITE the fact that Murphy’s unfortunate account of Fielding’s life was fixed for good and all in so commanding a position, the handsome (though very incomplete) edition which he gave to the public was no doubt influential in gaining for the novelist a higher standing in the world of letters. It is true that the Fielding of the “Essay — became a traditional fig- different from what he really was ure upon whom was fathered from time to time some new foundling story of improvidence and impecuniosity; but meanwhile the great books, appropriately clothed, were able to speak for themselves. And as one of the principal causes of delay in the understanding of Fielding was the activity and bitterness of his enemies, this cause, as time went on, became less operative. Notwithstanding the great vogue of Sterne, Fielding’s novels vied with those of Richardson in demand among imitators; while to the playrights on both sides of the water they furnished themes for dramatic and operatic adap- tation. The decade following the appearance of Murphy’s edition was, therefore, a period of quickening interest in Field- ing; and though this interest sometimes expressed itself in ways detrimental to a true understanding of his works, it doubtless played a contributory part in the better appreciation to come. In the opinion of Joseph Texte, the metamorphosis of Tom Jones into comic operas was instrumental in bringing about in France a depreciation of the seriousness of the author’s purpose. This was no doubt the case; assuredly it was so in England, al- though there is another side to the story. By far the best of the dramatic adaptations of T'om Jones was Colman’s Jealous Wife (1761). Unquestionably it was most successful; even Murphy admits that “the play met with applause,” while te a re See ~ 5 Pirdethtyinye aie. ons-powhvbcamenes perel lat bn i / are a belitetidh dite on ot ae | : osTHE TURNING OF THE TIDE 171 Peake, in his Memoirs, declares that it “established Colman’s dramatic fame’’ and was “the most popular piece of its epoch.””* According to Davies, who reports that Colman “was greatly commended” for his play, that “part of the fable which was borrowed from Tom Jones was certainly not the best” part “of the comedy; for Squire Russet was but a faint copy of that inimitable rustic brute Western”; and Lady Bel- laston, “a richer picture of profligacy in high life than Lady Freelove.”* In Murphy’s opinion Colman’s dramatization of Lom Jones had “demonstrated” that the characters and inci- dents of the novel lose “‘much of their comie force and beauty, when attempted to be realized to us on the stage.”” This is put- ting it mildly; in every one of the dramatic versions of Field- ing’s books the artistic significance almost entirely disappeared ——a fact especially true of the various comic operas. Not only the novelists, as has been seen, but the dramatists as well, by ignoring the serious purpose of their “‘facetious master” aided in emphasizing the view, which had always been prevalent, that Fielding was a mere entertainer. Still, the frequent adap- tations of his works during this period must be regarded as both a factor in, and an indication of, the author’s increasing fame. Unlike many of those who borrowed materials from Field- ing, Colman freely acknowledged his indebtedness. ‘““The use that has been made in this comedy of Fielding’s admirable novel of Tom Jones,” runs the advertisement to The Jealous Wife, “must be obvious to the most ordinary reader.”* In the prologue, written by Lloyd and spoken by Garrick, the original of the play is referred to as “what a master’s happy pencil drew” ;* and in the following verses, first printed in The * Peake, R. B., Memoirs of the Colman Family, London, 1841, I, 64. 2 Davies, T.. Memoirs of . David Garrick, third ed., London, 1781, I, 330. 8 The Dramatick Works of George Colman, London, 1777, I, 2. * Ibid., I, 9. In his satire entitled Expostulation, Murphy, unfriendly toward Colman, thus scores The Jealous Wife and its author: “From Fielding’s page raise contributions due, And classically drunk—sing, ‘I love Sue.?”—The Examiner, Lon- don, 1761, p. 12. aod La a. as * bt deol ut ee eet eeete et eet era bene ebdied tas jae: o in ees en ee nr Sees a as rs ear y arr en om "} Teen atneakt mre es: et Oe er ee ee nn ene A + 5 ty Fr iH 4] a “34 ef i ae Pi ui v4 th 5 =f Pho] real ‘Ts i “SLY re reel es a ra a3 i rs a yar 2) ease - " eee ats te eneSeas Sete ta teed a ‘helene teed ibaa weeen eee Sen aR fone Soeencnare a Se ee ae ' ee j i) t t { a Sebebe it a a 172 FIELDING THE NOVELIST . ( . i SPs SN E . . < St. James’s Magazine (May, 1793); Lloyd, in his “Cobler of Cripplegate’s Letter,” again alludes to Colman’s indebtedness: And Colman too, that little sinner, That Essay-weaver, Drama-spinner Inform him, Lloyd, for all his grin That Harry Fielding holds his chin.°® To Lloyd, “the late inimitable Henry Fielding” was the mas- ter of satiric comedy; to be named in the same breath with Rabelais and Swift, but kindlier than they: Those giant sons of RIDICULE, SWIFT, RAB’LAIS, and that favourite child, Who, less eccentrically wild, Inverts the misanthropic plan, And, hating vices, hates not man: How I do love thy gibing vein! Which glances at the mimic train Of sots, who proud as modern beaux Of birth-day suits and tinsel clothes, Affecting cynical grimace With philosophic stupid face, In dirty hue, with naked feet, In rags and tatters, stroll the street.° Colman himself, a fellow student of life and of the classics, was never weary of referring to Fielding; he was, indeed, one of the novelist’s most intelligent and devoted admirers.” Three years or so after the appearance of The Jealous Wife, Antoine Alexandre Poinsinet transformed Tom Jones into a comédie lyrique, the music for which was written by A. D. Philidor. According to Waldschmidt this comedy was first performed at Versailles on March 30, 1764; at any rate, its first appearance in Paris was on February 27, 1765, at the Comédie Italienne. Revised during the following year, it en- 5 Colman’s Prose on Several Occasions, London, 1787, Il, 303-304. 6 Anderson’s Works of the British Poets, London, 1795, X, 676. 7 Colman’s Prose on Several Occastons, 1, 94; Il, 6, 27, 90, 2453 ete.THE TURNING OF THE TIDE 173 joyed a long-continued success; even Walpole, who saw it in 1766, admitted that the piece was popular. As full accounts of the production are at hand,* nothing more need be said here ex- cept that whatever undoubted excellences this sparkling lyric comedy may have, its character is necessarily very different from that of Tom Jones. The discrepancy was noted at the time by a writer in the Journal Encyclopédique, who de- nounced the opera for the very reason that it bore no resem- blance to its celebrated original.® Squire Western’s spirited hunting song ends with this jubilant Gallic stanza: L’animal forcé succombe, Fait un effort, se releve, enfin tombe. Et nos chasseurs chantent tous 4 l’envi: ‘Amis, goatons les fruits de la victoire; Amis, Amis, célébrons notre gloire. Halali, Fanfare, Halali Halali.” In the same year (1765) that Poinsinet’s opera started on its career in Paris, a play in German based on Tom Jones was written by a certain J. H. Steffens;*° and two years later there was performed at Vienna another German Tom Jones by Franz von Heufeld.* But what relates to our present purpose more closely is the comic opera which made its appearance in English. Though this production—Joseph Reed’s Tom Jones, a Comic Opera—was not presented until January 14, 1769 (and printed during the same year), the author takes pains to say in his preface that the last act was written “‘in June 1765”; as a matter of fact, however, having adapted several of Poinsinet’s songs, he was forced to concede that he had been influenced somewhat by the French version. How re- 8 Waldschmidt, Carl, Die Dramatisierungen von Fielding’s Tom Jones, Wetzlar, 1906, pp. 29-46. ° Journal Encyclopédique, April 15, 1765, pp. 127-134. *° Thomas Jones, ein Lustspiel . . . nach der Grundlage des Herrn Fielding, Zelle, 1765. ‘Tom Jones. Ein Lustspiel . . . nach dem Englischen Roman, Wien, 1767. See Waldschmidt, pp. 57-68. eile pee en Aditi 1 Voltaire’s Guvres Complétes, nouvelle édition, Paris, 1879, XL, 190. For L’Avare, see XXIII, 115. 0 Tbid., XXV, 182. 41 7 ¥ 7 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XL, 454-456.THE TURNING OF THE TIDE 183 1785), who is known in biographical dictionaries as the au- thor of an epistle “‘On Genius considered in its Relation to the Fine Arts.” The extract is accompanied by such sputtering footnotes on the part of the “‘Editor” of the Gentleman’s that one wonders why he ever allowed it a place in his columns; probably it was because eulogy of Richardson, too good to lose, was inextricably bound up with an estimate of Fielding. c »”? After interrupting the “unhappy Clarissa” to ‘‘mix” his “tears with hers” and after telling us that Grandison is “‘the book which most inspires virtue, Plutarch and Plato not ex- cepted,” Barthe turns to Fielding, who “may justly be styled his [ Richardson’s] rival,” and says some very handsome things: “‘No man in the world (without excepting Moliére) was better acquainted with the shades which diversify characters; and he is the Author who has best seized the manners of the people. A living picture animated with its caprices, its passions, its follies; a true, singular pencil; a simple, lively moral, which naturally results from various scenes; all this insures to Fielding a distinguished place among thosé Writers whose fertile imagination has drawn Nature as she really is. Less sublime, less pathetic than Richardson, but more chearful, more original [The reviewer breaks in with, ‘““This will scarce be allowed by the admirers of Richardson, nor does it seem true.” |], he engages us as much as the other makes us weep. If the one has opened all the treasures of morality, the other, with a wise economy, has insinuated it with an imperceptible art into the soul. The one paints with large strokes, at- tracts the heart on every side, and imperiously hurries it away; the other by varied, chosen, delicate touches, brings smiles on the lips, and tears into the eyes. Indeed he soon dries them; but this transition is so managed as not to be abrupt. His style has the same effect as that ancient music, whose art made the soul pass gently, or, as it were, insensibly, from joy to sorrow; thus producing various and even opposite emotions. In short, Rich- ardson is more grand, more formed on models which will live throughout all ages; the other is more simple, more instructive ae AE er = SE a trees yo ae ia. +a, meek ery ee r “a _ papers — ee en See pret Aeanirt ids ee eh i hs eeres) Ss en ee ere Ts es oy = hl eaeiy rab eee Sa i Meets et ett te el toti Seeerhathe lettres eee eteeereees ee ee pirate ate a Se en oe = 4, 4 Alleah leet cota cha aden on tes ae ~~ 184 FIELDING THE NOVELIST [Again the reviewer says, “This too will not be allowed.” |, and his admirers being less idolatious [st¢] he will have, per- haps, a still greater number of readers.” Protest as he might, the editor of The Gentleman’s Maga- zine could not help being aware of the evidence of Fielding’s increasing vogue. If he glanced through the satirical verse of the hour his eye would rest perhaps upon such a reference as the following: Now, muse, if after all that’s said You love ’em [i.e., the Scotch]; be it on your head. But never blush to own your yielding To Garth and since to Harry Fielding.*” If he picked up a chap-book in the stalls it might have for a title-page: THE HUMOROUS AND DIVERTING HISTORY OF TOM JONES, A FOUNDLING: CONTAINING .. . THE HUMOURS OF SQUIRE WESTERN, The Famous FOX- HUNTER; And the droll and whimsical Adventures which befell Honest PARTRIDGE . . Interspersed with many curious Love- Particulars Between Mr. JONES AND THE Beautiful Miss SO- PHIA WESTERN.* If he looked at the new book of travels by Philip Thicknesse, the Useful Hints to those who make the Tour of France, he would find that the author “‘could tell you many stories” of the eccentric rector of the royal hospital at St. Germain “which would do honour to Parson Adams.”** If, turning to more se- rious reading, he dipped into Dr. Burn’s History of the Poor 42 Included in A Collection of Scarce, Curious, and Valuable Pteces , from the _ Most Eminent Wits of the Present Age, Edin- burgh, 1785, pp. 5-6. Listed in The Gentleman’s Magazine, XL, 192 (April, 1770). 43 The second ed., London, .d. Printed for R. Snagg (ca. 1770). 44 Useful Hints to those who make the Tour of France . . . by Philip Thicknesse, London, 1768, letter IX, p. 105.THE TURNING OF THE TIDE 185 Laws, he would find praise not only of the subject matter of Fielding’s Proposal but of “that strong sense and energy of ex- pression, of which that author was happily possessed.”*> Or, if he examined a recent installment of The Letters of Junius, he might run across the following query: “Is the union of Bli fil and Black George no longer a romance?”*® and would infer from this allusion that, with the general reader, the fictitious Blifil and Black George stood as little in need of annotation as the living persons whom they represented. No wonder the reviewer for The Gentleman’s Magazine considered it neces- sary to warn his readers against M. Barthe’s extravagant praise of Richardson’s competitor. bel ea ee ened eee eee ta Sorry oe es eters Speen ee wee The fact is that the great novelist’s works, released from the jeopardy of personal malice against the author, were being at last more often judged upon their literary merits. A clear indication of this change of attitude is to be observed in the procedure of Fielding’s ancient enemy, Tobias Smollett, who, in the Continuation (1766) of his History of England, en- deavored to make amends for past iniquities. ““The genius of Cervantes,” he wrote, “was transfused Into the novels of Fielding, who painted the characters and ridiculed the follies of the age with equal strength, humour, and propriety.’’4? It Is such a far cry from the scurrilous Habbakkuk Hilding to this just and elegant compliment that one is tempted to lend an attentive ear to the following well-known bit of history. Ac- cording to Walter Scott, Smollett was often accused by his con- temporaries of “literary envy”; certainly this was true in the case of Churchill, who, several years before this tribute to Fielding appeared, had kept the story of Smollett’s jealousy in circulation by thus attacking him in his Apology G7o1):: ilk) = a een, weer ee Ps # a ead ee ee See et nhs ote | a “ Se TET rrr ae ee ee ieattheh peaiekaad ce ee #9 Burn, Richard, The History of the Poor Laws, London, 1764, p. 196. *8 The Letters of Junius, edited by John Wade, London, 1850, I, 402 (letter LVII, September 28, 1771). *7 Continuation of the Complete History of England, London, 1766, II, 160. “ Tar er eer = ees rr - opr. ST ierblese ttl bie tee nT eee eee ene ne ee eee in teeny ae ee rear r +e rr a ee ie Nt se epee Pe Fel + La ~ EBe ows4 . Ot Lal Lebel Fae se ete Pete FIELDING THE NOVELIS as For let me hoary FIELDING bite the ground So nobler PICKLE stands superbly bound; From LIVY’S temples tear th’ historic crown Which with more justice blooms upon thine own. Compar’d with thee, be all life-writers dumb, ho wrote the Life of TOMMY THUMB.* 3ut he w In his satire The Ghost (Book I, published 1762), Churchill again alludes to Fielding’s fame as a novelist when he pictures, among a group of departed authors, BIOGRAPHERS, whose wond’rous worth Is scarce remember’d now on earth, Whom FIELDING’S humour led astray, And plaintive FOPS, debauch’d by GRAY.*?® i Whether Smollett’s praise of Fielding was influenced by these ll’s or whether it was instigated more by honor than by shrewdness, its inclusion in the History of Eng- .m Jones was now attaining thrusts of Church land implies that the author of J in the world of letters a higher position than had been accorded him during his lifetime. In the decade after the appearance of Murphy’s edition, Fielding’s fortunes, then, were growing brighter; yet, as we compare his fame with that of Richardson, we realize that he had not yet succeeded in wresting the palm from that popular moralist and sentimentalist. What did Smollett say of Rich- ardson in his History? Did he not paraphrase Johnson’s famous dictum and declare that Richardson had enlisted “the passions on the side of virtue”? Did he not say that Richardson’s “knowledge and command of human nature” were ‘‘amaz- ing,” and that his “system of ethics” was “sublime”? “Thus not only as a delineator of human nature but as a “sublime” moralist the author of Clarissa and of Grandison had scored again; nor was this instance at all uncommon. Everyone has heard that Pamela was recommended from the pulpit by the 48 The Apology, London, 1761, p. 8. 49 Churchill, C., Poems, London, 1763, p. 210 (The Ghost, Book II). ee Can, aL eee ee at ee asian ersten es nececie SEN eet ieee ter aol aemetiare We Ne a a eee eS 5 th ree ae Ea os oy 7 . 7 aed ~THE TURNING OF THE TIDE 187 Rev. Benjamin Slocock; but is it generally known that, twenty-five years later, the Rey. James Fordyce, that popular preacher, in his extraordinarily popular Sermons to Young Women (1765) singled out for commendation “the beautiful productions” of the “incomparable pen” of Richardson? Is it generally known that Fordyce, quoting (or rather misquoting) that “indisputable judge” of literature, Dr. Samuel Johnson, who “ ‘taught the passions to move at the command of reason [sic], declared that Richardson had put the female “‘sex under singular obligations”? And what did the reverend gen- tleman say of Fielding? Not once, in this publication, did Fordyce mention him by name; but there can be little doubt of his opinion. Tom Jones was to be found, presumably, among “certain books, which we are assured (for we have not read them) are in their nature so shameful, in their tendency so pestiferous, and which contain such rank treason against the royalty of virtue, such horrible violation of all decorum, that she who can bear to peruse them must in her soul be a prosti- tute, let her reputation in life be what it will say, ye chaste stars, that with innumerable eyes inspect the midnight behaviour of mortals—can it be true, that any young woman, pretending to decency, should endure for a moment to look on this infernal brood of futility and lewdness??”®° It was very dificult for Henry Fielding “of facetious memory” to dis- lodge a rival so deeply intrenched behind a “‘sublime system of ethics”; yet had he lived but seven years longer and been knighted—as his brother John was—the task, no doubt, would have been easier. °° Fordyce, James, Sermons to Young Women, sixth ed., London, 1766, I, 71-72 (Sermon IV). ey ehaaed et as ie ee ra niet Fig ee ed eae | om prtiees ee een Pebvets Sree ae hae, rs a oe nbd bbl bs he te pac =f IN ame btet J d e « : ” t i ov) 4 mst ta BE Lai aaa ht t Hf as pa a tr Pet 7 he hei et Hi ae er ers or ee wie hea ee nel taht ere ee na ee eee setehamieienme bea hee een itunes elit bos enh Teer eitciapeb i ee ee Teeny yt penn ataCHAPTER Ix Scholarly Recognition 1772-1784 I Dr. Johnson and the Burney Circle URING his lifetime, Fielding’s most continuously active enemy among literary persons was his rival Richardson. A careful examination of the evidence shows clearly that the author of Pamela exerted every effort to promulgate the idea not only that Fielding’s books were “wretchedly low and dirty” but that their author was a man of vicious “principles.” This abuse on the part of a fellow novelist did more actual injury than has ordinarily been 1m- agined. In the first place, Richardson’s position was a somewhat commanding one: even before his death literary pilgrims came to worship at his shrine; moreover, among contemporaries, his pious posture and his shakings of the head, taken in conjunction with his paternal intimacy with Fielding’s sister Sally (who was proud to be one of his “daughters” ) must have forestalled for the most part the suspicion of his true animus. At last (in 1761), Richardson died; but he was survived for nearly a quarter of a century by the foremost of his ardent propagan- dists, the most brilliant talker and greatest man of letters of the age, the most famous of all English literary dictators— Samuel Johnson. In 1764, three years after Richardson’s death, the celebrated literary “Club” was formed, which during Johnson’s lifetime included among its members Reynolds, Johnson, Goldsmith, Hawkins, Garrick, Murphy, Joseph Warton, Colman the Elder, Fox, Sheridan, Dr. Burney, and Gibbon. From all of these we have expressions of opinion concerning Henry Field- ing that will be, in the course of this history, considered. At the home of the Thrales and elsewhere Johnson had met be- aegotnnnca @teaminoieyinleeeie eee 3 pr tate olor reece ae eeee nee NShedn aan ane “ _ waaube mht - Sale et ene te ee a J wet ptele - oe tiesSCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 189 fore his death nearly all the literary people of England who were not members of the Literary Club. From 1764 until his death (1784), he was the > acknowledged king of the world of letters; and, as we have observed (Gone before he had attained to this position he had made up his mind about Henry F ielding?) Very early, it would seem, he silently and effectually opposed that author in The Gentleman’s Magazine; by 1756, presum- ably, he was using his “‘clock-work” comparison; and now, during the entire twenty years of his reign, neoneniel de- nounced Fielding and eulogized his rival. Few writers have found in the literary dictator of their century so strong and indefatigable a champion as Richardson was blessed with in the person of Samuel Johnson. Wherever the Great Cham went, to new acquaintances as well as old, he sang his friend’s ae “The first time I was in company with Dr. Johnson,” writes Miss Reynolds, “which was at Miss Cotteril’s, I well remember the flattering notice he took of a lady present, on her saying that she was inclined to estimate the morality of every person according as they liked or disliked Clarissa Harlowe.[He was a great admirer of Richardson’s works in general, but of Clarissa he always spoke with the highest enthusiastic praise. He used to say that it was the first book in the world for the knowledge it displays of the human heart.’* |The Richardsonian Miss seer who was certainly no friend of Johnson’s, wrote in 1786, “The late Dr. John- son, amidst his too frequent injustice to authors, and general parsimony of praise, uniformly asserted [Clarissa] to be not only the first novel, but that perhaps it was the first work in the English feveuapec? That splendid phrase of his about teaching the passions to move at the command of virtue had been echoed and reéchoed, as we have seen, ever since it ap- * The Life of Samuel Johnson, new ed., by J. W. Croker, New York, 18375 115 491- * The Gentleman’s Magazine, LVI, 16 (January, 1786). Miss Sew- ard refers to the article as hers in a letter of March 29, 1786; see Let- ters of Anna Seward, Edinburgh, 1811, I, 135. ea Paint sitchtetdieceh eat tt ere ape 4 ae Perr" weed ee Sethabedines chee Leen at hia pe vad a oe n : Oe phe ey ee enna aad painters bas eee LT Eh Tit ty rt Peri oe Tt were rese ew edalc ee. Pay ae etd be Q ll rhe” reared FEB) mw ee Se (one mes. neae ma z oe se i PP al : ae i / : i + ee si ei ‘ ee oe Ge eee eee tie ee ed eer tena potty = 9 Soret hee / goals oe eee bee ener at eee eee tes ~ECE R CEL SL OL ISP ee Pe te ese le of se ae eet et gies 4 FIELDING THE NOVELIST 190 peared, February 19, 1751; in the ninety-seventh Rambler ; and now, in the days of Fanny Burney, he was still preaching Clarissa with unabated zeal. No doubt his denunciation of Fielding began as early; certainly it continued as late. \In expressing his admiration for the works of Richardson, Johnson was undoubtedly sincere. Nor is it difficult to imagine the reason for his preference; the author, in his eyes, was a profound moralist: he really had “‘taught the passions to move at the command of virtue,’ and he had, by his sentimental analysis, enlarged the “knowledge of human nature’ —you must read the novels not for the story but for the “sentiment,” he once said. Laudation of Richardson, however, was not suf- ficient for Johnson; he was equally indefatigable in his de- nunciation of Richardson’s competitor. Why was it that he disparaged Fielding? This question, which has exercised the ingenuity of many pens, can hardly be answered with absolute certainty. It has been said that Johnson was opposed to Field- ing politically: Fielding was a Whig, and according to the Doctor, the first Whig was the devil himself ;° but the gener- 2 ally accepted opinion as to why Johnson condemned Fielding / seems to be that he was very deeply indebted to Richardson as a friend: when he was held for debt in a sponging-house, it was Richardson who bailed him out. The tone of his own ac- count of the matter indicates apparently that he was at that time on excellent terms with the novelist, for he says: “[I] was so sure of my deliverance _ that before his reply was brought I knew I could afford to joke with the rascal who had me in custody, and did so over a pint of adulterated wine, for which at that instant, I had no money to pay.””* | Dr. Burney, several years after his great friend’s death, con- $C. E. Vaughan (English Literary Criticism, London, 1896, Pp. Ixiii) thinks Johnson was afraid of Fielding’s self-reliant originality, inasmuch as Tom Jones dealt a blow at “the indispensable laws of Aristotelian criticism,” 4G. B. Hill’s edition of The Life of Samuel Johnson, Oxford, 1887, I, 304 note. ares enitamaen arene Eee. wheat pene ele oo SSP pee per al taSCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 191 tributed to an edition of Boswell the following explanation: “Johnson’s severity against Fielding did not arise from any viciousness in his style, but from his loose life, and the prof- ligacy of almost all his male characters.” And to support the Doctor in this attitude Burney asks, ““Who would venture to read one of his [Fielding’s] novels aloud to modest women? His novels are male amusements, and very amusing they cer- tainly are.” Dr. Burney tells us, furthermore, that ‘Fielding’s conversation was coarse, and so tinctured with the rank weeds of the garden [Covent-Garden], that it would now be thought only fit for a brothel.”* But on this point Austin Dobson has a pertinent word to say. Citing the evidence given by one® of Fielding’s contemporaries, he observes, ‘Mrs. Hussey’s testi- mony as to his [Fielding’s] dignified and gentlemanly man- ners, which does not seem to be advanced to meet any particu- lar charge, may surely be set against any innuendoes of the Burney and Walpole type as to his mean surroundings and coarse conversation.”’ Where did Burney get his information regarding Fielding’s loose life and immoral conversation? Possibly from other sources, for he was an organist in London in 1749; but presumably long afterwards from Johnson him- self. As for reading Fielding aloud, it is to be noted that Dr. Burney could read Pasguin with his daughter Fanny in 1783. Moreover, when Evelina appeared, five years before that, he said it was the best novel he knew “excepting Fielding’s”; for Smollett’s novels were “so damned gross” that they were not “fit reading for women.” He thus implied that Fielding’s were fit reading for women. When Dr. Burney wrote the note for Boswell’s Johnson, he was obviously taking advantage of the greater refinement which was growing popular at the end of the century in order to palliate Dr. Johnson’s prejudice. To Boswell, who should have known more about the matter ° Croker’s edition of The Life of Samuel Johnson, New York, 1837, I, 292 note. ® Smith, J. T., Nollekens and his Times, edited by W. Whitten, 1917, 104-106. " Notes and Queries, 6 S., VIII, 162 (September 1, 1883). eer era baatetens See Ps a en oy ro } Ss f re EI} n | fq 2, at ett ote st aoa re “es x t ett] rf Be tf \ Th HS H ed cece bo) PREHS pop) Bhai > 2) io eh a, 0 a ee abe ot ee ee Eee Slatted, SL ae eb ahatehanitiageetie O48, 2 OS he rn eensEAE TTL ST OL ee COL aL OL PLEA EE Pe ee Toye le oe. eS Tote T See SOS Te SPOT Ey eed td £44 oe a 8 ES eee FIELDING THE NOVELIST 192 than anyone else , Johnson’ s disparagement of Fielding was inexplicable. Whatever may have been the causes of his animus, the fact Johnson eulogized Rich ardson and denounced he happened to be. But though his mission- friend among the members of the remains that Fielding wherever ary work in behalf of his Literary Club was, in all likelihood, active from the begin- ning, the first specific utterance which has become a part of literary history was made, according to Boswell, during the spring of 1768. | “Sir,” said Johnson to Boswell, “there is all the difference in the world between characters of nature and characters of manners; and there is the difference between the characters of Fielding and those of Richardson. Characters of manners are very entertaining; but they are to be understood, by a more superficial observer, than characters of nature, vate a man must dive into the recesses of the human heart.” Many a writer has. cudge ‘led his brains in the effort to ex- cuse or explain this dictum—Boswell, Hazlitt, Scott, and John Forster, among the older men of letters, and numerous critics of our own day. And yet the matter is sufficiently clear: John- son does not use the word “‘manners” in the sense in which Gibbon used it later; what_he means is that Fielding is “‘su- perficial.” (Hazlitt, who was very fond of Richardson, in- fers from the above criticism simply that Johnson preferred to actual truth the truth “of reflection.” But to all except Rich- ardsonians the rejoinder of Professor Saintsbury will seem to fit the case better. No one can say, he declares, “that Fielding is shallow because he does not choose to give us all his sound- ings; nor that Richardson is profound because he is always turning out the contents of his little drag-net on the demon- 399 stration table for exhibition. Taking up our Boswell again, we find Johnson, four years 8G. B. Hill’s edition of Boswell’s Life of. Johnson, Oxford, 1887, IT, 48-49. ® The Bookman (London), XXXII, 7 EE ee 8 (April, 1907). oe Dante a i. i He ie he At eR } on e 2 ; I EeeSCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 193 later (April 6, 1772) at Sir Alexander Macdonald’s, calling Fielding a “blockhead,” and explaining that what he means by a “blockhead” is “a barren rascal.” As on the previous occa- sion, young Boswell remonstrates. BOSWELL. ‘Will you not allow, Sir, that he draws very ; natural pictures of human life?’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, it is of very low life. Richardson used to say, that had he not known who Fielding was, he should have believed he was an ostler. Sir, there is more knowl- edge of the heart in one letter of Richardson’s than jn all “Tom Jones. I, indeed, never read Joseph Andrews.’ Then Erskine, who, like Boswell, must be regarded as representing the younger generation, enters his demurrer. ERSKINE. ‘Surely, Sir, Richardson is very tedious.’ JOHNSON. ‘Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sén- timent, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.’?° \Nearly twenty years later, when Boswell pub- lished his Life of Johnson, he looked back in amazement at the Doctor’s “excessive and unaccountable depreciation of one of the best writers that England has produced,”™* and inserted in his great book an excellent defense of Fielding’s art and ethics—but that belongs to a later chapter. Meanwhile the foremost moral and critical authority of the age—as he was frequently called—conducted an energetic campaign. for Samuel Richardson; surely no other English nov- elist has ever been blessed with so active and powerful a propa- gandist. Everyone knew who had “taught the passions to move at the command of virtue,” and everyone knew who had made this great pronouncement. Nor did Johnson stop with this; in his life of Rowe (1781) he went out of his way to include, apropos of Lovelace, the following praise: (“It was in the power of Richardson alone to teach us at once esteem and de- 10 Hill’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Il, 173, 174, 175. a lisd lewao: ew Ft ertetans oe ee beeen eT rts ey a ee re i C2 tO: Ss era Aine ee ares ae 3 +} i + rat ny am “7 rey Fr Sif ef 36; ey ea] hve aes i: ‘ eet is ren Tae oer ree ay ana Rae eee ir eers Ser eeteeient Rehabs sera A earner ee bebe press fe Ss tae “i aT rid - re a ta pas Ss >—— rs ere ee eee matin stivernwphet ea batelipns? 2a personas banat betel aden, a = —iattbabenine taper tae saath eee 5 ee tA <3 fF ; a hemes om oé 194 FIELDING THE NOVELIST testation ; nevolence which wit, elegance, and courage naturally excite, 9312 to make virtuous resentment overpower all the be- and to lose at last the hero in the villain.” ~ | Among those whom the Doctor seems to have influenced was the well-known moralist Hannah More; the following letter, written to her sister in 1780, 1s self-explanatory. “I never saw Johnson really angry with me but once,” she says, “and his displeasure did him so much honour that I loved him the better for it. I alluded rather flippantly, I fear, to some witty passage in ‘Tom Jones’: he replied, [1 am shocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book. I am sorry to hear you have read it; a confession which no modest lady should ever make. I scarcely know a more corrupt work.’ I thanked him for his correction; assured him I thought full as ill of it now as he did, and had only read it at an age when I was more subject to be caught by the wit, than able to discern the mis- chief. Of Joseph Andrews I declared my decided abhorrence. He went so far as to refuse to Fielding the great talents which are ascribed to him, and broke out into a noble panegyric on his competitor Richardson; who, he said, was as superior to him in talents as in virtue, and whom he pronounced to be the greatest genius that had shed its lustre on this path of literature.”*® It is sometimes said that Hannah More did not agree with Johnson in exalting Richardson above Fielding; but though in 1780 she may have taken his scolding with more deference than contrition it is clear that later in life (when, to use the words of a famous critic, she had become ‘“‘encrusted with Calvinism”) she was as good a Richardsonian and anti-Field- ingite as the Great Cham could have desired. Her attitude in 1799 toward the character of the author of Tom Jones may be inferred from a parenthetical remark of hers to the effect that the “late celebrated Henry Fielding” was “a man not 12 Johnson’s Lives of the English Poets, edited by G. B. Hill, Oxford, 1905, Il, 67. 13 Roberts, William, Mesnoirs of Hannah More, New York, 1836, I, 101 (the preceding letter is dated “1780”).SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 195 likely to be suspected of overstrictness.””"* Her opinion in 1805 of Fielding’s greatest novel is to be found among the “Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess.” In this compendium, Miss More counsels every “young female” to read the Oriental Queens rather than Tom Jones, to the end that she may “not identify her feelings” with those of the characters, “as she too probably does in the case of Sophia Western.” Romances, such as Almoran and Hamet, “inno- cently invigorate the fancy’; novels like Tom Jones “convey a contagious sickliness to the mind.”’** Miss More’s opinion of Richardson may be inferred from one of the speeches of Sir John Belfield, a character in her novel Coelebs ( 1808). Rich- ardson, according to Sir John, possessed “deeper and juster views of human nature, a truer taste for the proprieties of fe- male character, and a more exact intuition into real life than any other writer of fabulous narrative. . . . In no other writer of fictitious adventures has the triumph of religion and reason . . . been so successfully blended.”** That in 1819 Miss More was entirely in accord with Johnson’s opinion is shown by the fact that in her arraignment of that “Unprofit- able Reading” which had aided in relaxing the “general man- ners” of the times she commended the “old restraints” by in- stancing Dr. Johnson’s talk with her years before. ““The writer remembers to have heard Dr. Johnson reprove a young lady [Hannah More herself] in severe terms for quoting a senti- ment from ‘I’om Jones—a book, he said, which, if a modest lady had done so improper a thing as to read, she should not do so immodest a thing as to avow.””*” In Mrs. Thrale, of course, Johnson found one of his strong- est supporters. Her letter to him of November 11, 1778, shows 14 See her “Strictures on Female Education,” in Works, new ed., London, 1830, Vol. V, ch. viii, p. 141 mote. 1° The Works of Hannah More, new ed., London, 1830, Vol. VI, ch, Xxx; Pp: 33.6. 16 Coelebs, London, 1808, Vol. II, ch. xxxv, pp. 210-211. 17 See “Unprofitable Reading,” in Works of Hannah More, new ed., London, 1830, IV, 337. Bri te ba tat i}: a] 4c i: a3) ia 4 ] Pi « Aenea es Or “rap. nn eye She fewessal” tetris Lpetebeaee tet plete - ee tess Stee aa en ye epee a . meant pe ee ce Ett ates Ls Pr - hime te ie Se oer d bile ate, or ae ~ i sealto iad Lael eee ay 196 FIELDING THE NOVELIST not only her own bias but the interest which, on account of the forthcoming production™ of Fielding’s play The Fathers, was at this time taken in the merits of the rival novelists. “Burney shall bring you on the 26th,” she writes, “so now we may talk of Richardson or Fielding, or of anything else but of coming home.” In the course of her letter we meet with the following Johnsonian echo: “’Tis general nature [i.¢., “that letter in Clarissa” ], not particular manners, that Rich- ardson represents. Honest Joseph, and Pamela’s old father and mother, are translatable, not like Fielding’s fat landladies, who all speak the Wiltshire dialect.’ ““But I dare not add an- other word on this subject,” she concludes, ‘“‘though you are a Richardsonian yourself.”*” When, at last, death had compelled Johnson to wi ithdraw from the fray, Mrs. Thrale (now Mrs. fees continued to do battle as before. In her Anecdotes 1786) she reports Johnson as saying that ‘‘Richardson had rae re kernel of life while Fielding was contented with the husk’;2° and since the superficial author of Tom Jones obstinately refused to be extinguished during her life- time (she lived until 1821), she wrote in her Autobiography that the book was “‘not yet obsolete.”** According to the for- gotten laureate H. J. Pye, Mrs. Piozz1 “exceeded every stretch of hyperbolic partiality, in preferring Richardson to Fielding as a painter of manners. tT Still, in spite of Johnson and his adherents, of women and clergymen and male sentimentalists, Richardson, during the last quarter of the century, was losing rather than gaining in reputation. This may be inferred from the testimony of his well-wishers. Even Miss Carter, who composed at the time of 18 First performed November 30, 1778. 19 Piozzi, Hesther Lynch, Letters to and from . Samuel Johnson, London, 1788, II, 30, 31. 20 Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes, London, 1786, p. 198. 21 Autobiography of Mrs. Piozzi, edited by A. Hayward, Bos- ton, 1861, p. 178. 29 - - ‘ 22 Pye, H. J., Sketches on Various Subjects, second ed., London, 1797), 196 note. Pp. aesertatiul teltraemeserebae tenet oe “4 nee hae Lee et Ree o — FH 3 is 6 Pe i Yr i : 7 E 4 he Le ; ai 3 gySCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 197 the novelist’s death (in 1761) an ebullient epitaph, admits in 1775 that his works are not so greatly admired in England as in France. The “reason”? for this, according to her letter to Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu, is ‘ ‘probably” not so much “from our being less accurate judges of the subject,” as from the fact that Richardson’s defects “in expression and manners, which are so very striking to ourselves, as to conceal much of his very great merit in other respects,”’ are not so cle arly perceived by those who “are not acquainted with our language, and our customs.’’2° But the most notable confession w as made by Mrs. Chapone, who as Miss Mulso, a generation before, had fought for her literary “father” tooth and nail. On a re- -reading of Pamela (in which she still found “amazing genius”), she wrote, “It appeared to me somewhat different from what I Oueht of it thirty years ago.”’** Despite the fact that the sen- timental trash which filled the fin de siécle public libraries was immediately or remotely related to the works of Richardson, its celebrated progenitor himself was losing with the younger generation some of that prestige which he had so long enjoyed. “You can’t think with what scorn I listen to little misses, and very little masters,” complained that inveterate Richardsonian, Mrs. Grant of Laggan, October 3, 1778, “who tell us in par- rot phrase, ‘Nobody reads Clarissa now. People mow think it languid and tedious.’ 25 In Johnson’s own ‘‘Club,”? Boswell and Erskine, as we have seen, could not agree with him con- cerning the comparative merits of the rival novelists; and it will presently be shown that during the Seventies and the "Eighties, the Doctor failed, in his campaign against the au- thor of Tom Jones, to convert several of the most distin- guished members of his own literary coterie. It should not be forgotten, of course, that, notwithstanding his wholesale disparagement of Fielding, Johnson had a good 23 Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montagu, London, 1817, II, 322. 24 The Works of Mrs. Chapone, London, 1807, I, 175. 2° Grant, Mrs. Anne, Letters from the Mountains, second ed., Lon- don, 1807, II, 46. pep reta tebe ces i anes Pe can Tee wes s LPStzcer rene ro Ke er Fa 2 aa Fr # * ! o ee u cra ae zd rd] Te a “i 4 8 re} Pa $0 heh ade mld er ee ie LE ae ee nt on 98 ig ere Siri. ees.FIELDING THE NOVELIST 198 word for Amelia. One evening in April, 1776, w hile supping é at the Crown and Anchor Tavern with Rey nolds and others, ‘Te told us,” writes Boswell, that “he read Fielding’s AMELIA through without stopping.”** To this statement should be added the celebrated dictum about Amelia’s nose. When Mrs. Thrale praised Clarissa to him as a perfect char- acter, he replied: “On the contrary you may observe there is always something which she prefers to truth. Fielding’s Amelia was the most pleasing heroine of all the romances (he said); but that vile broken nose never cured, ruined the sale of per- haps the only book, which being printed off betimes one morn- ing, a new edition was called for before night.”*’ That great Johnson scl holar, G. B. Hill, who found it “strange that while Johnson conden Fielding, he should ‘with an ardent and liberal earnestness’ have revised Smollett’s e pitaph,”’*” fi- nally decided, in view of the well-known dicta Me : in the Burney Circle, that the Doctor “did not think so lowly of Fielding’s powers” after all. This seems to be the most reason- able view of the matter, as will shortly appear. Instead of going on with Johnson, however, we should say a w ord con- cerning F anny Burney’s Evelina, which came out in [77 oot is interesting to observe what she thought of the great nov el- ists who preceded her. Of Fanny Burney’s attitude as a girl toward Fielding and Richardson respectively, the editor of the Early Diary writes, “Through Fielding’s novels she did but ‘pick her w ay, but 1G reminds Susan of their early love of Richardson’s novels.” “Richardson’s novels,” says Austin Dobson, “had been the pas- 26 Hill’s edition of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Oxford, 1887, III, 43. 27 Mrs. Piozzi’s Anecdotes, London, 1786, pp. 221-222. 28 Hill’s Boswell, Oxford, 1887, II, 174 mote. The quotation is from Boswell’s Hebrides, October 28, 1773. 29 The Early Diary of Frances Burney, edited by Annie Raine Ellis, London, 1889, I, lxxvii; also Mrs. Ellis’s edition of Cecilia, London (Bohn), 1906, p. v: “And we know that she only picked her way among pages of Fielding.” papain i SR ee ery Se Oe aOR . : A eee ow MD eyre”. ened na ! iS ao ~ f Res,SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 199 sion of her . . . girlhood, and her first book, Evelina, is writ- ten in letters.”*° Though she used the epistolary form, how- ever, the young authoress adopted the manner not of the psychologist but of the satirist; doubtless she had Fielding in mind on more than one occasion. At any rate, Dr. Johnson’s disparagement of that author did not prevent her from doing a rather daring thing: in short, she classed the creator of ‘“Ras- selas” himself as a fiction-writer with Fielding and the rest. It is evident that in 1778 prose narrative as a genre was looked down upon; in an apologetic note Miss Burney asks pardon for ranking “the authors of Rasselas and Eloise as Novelists.” Nevertheless she gallantly defends her profession and thus al- ludes to those who have gone before her: “However I may feel myself enlightened by the knowledge of Johnson, charmed with the eloquence of Rousseau, softened by the pathetic powers of Richardson, and exhilarated by the wit of Fielding and humour of Smollet; I yet presume not to attempt pursuing the same ground which they have tracked”; she then tells of the new country of manners which she intends to ex- plore. How popular the book was; what praise the charming young author received; how she worked off her exuberant spir- its by dancing around the mulberry tree in “Daddy” Crisp’s garden—all these things are a matter of literary history. Natu- rally enough, Evelina (as well as Cecilia, which followed in 1782) was compared to the works of those famous predecessors whom she named in her preface. In Cecilia, for example, the Monthly reviewer discovered “much of the dignity and pathos of Richardson; and much of the acuteness and ingenuity of Fielding.”** Successful as both novels (particularly Evelina) were, however, there was practically no question in the minds of anyone—except perhaps Dr. Johnson—about the superiority of Fielding; what he said of his “little Burney,” and what success his anti-Fielding propaganda met with in the Burney Circle it is now time to consider. 8° Dobson’s Samuel Richardson, London, 1902, p. 199. °* The Monthly Review, LXVII, 453 (December, 1782). he oe erentheterasenenttplat oe Pan i betel ern hy Shite tt pee eo pes a i ee Pm Sieh er ere oer ee Abel oor md ea HE Grate ae : hte - oie ee Re tas ees ble UIT Gr YE entienees si teree treet Lat ns to ang@hep ay < Syogusreartene dahl i —— ee eee bet be ceed te et errr er ee Din bE fF hy a Phy. ey F ae orks bots eee Et peer ne ee nahae ee oy Se er sete pear at eS a aaa ae Tee ate waavotonwne hbo benand .* - nwteee ee eee eae sales = mgivted ety iheara ala, asco aan 7 = m+n ~ saddles eae atiaeem nse La ee as te a 200 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Here is the full text of the “real sentiments” of Fanny’s father in 1778 concerning Evelina: “Why—upon my soul I think it the best novel I know, excepting Fielding’s—and in some respects it is better than his. . I wish I may die if I do not believe it to be the best novel in the language Fielding’s d gross that they are not excepted—for Smollett’s are so d fit reading for women with all their wit’—an observation which Fanny transcribes in her diary of June 18.°* Whatever Dr. Burney was pleased to write some years afterwards in a note to an edition of Boswell’s Life, it is evident from this passage that in 1778 Fielding stood first in his regard. That he held Richardson in less esteem—notwithstanding the exer- tions of his friend Dr. Johnson—may be gathered from an explosion on the part of Miss Seward, who 1s scandalized by his ‘idea so opposite to Johnson’s, that Richardson can be equalled by even the most accomplished novelist of this or any future period. 4 As a great admirer of both the author of Clarissa and the author of Evelina once pointed out, it is not on record that Johnson—whatever he might say of Fielding—ever exalted his “little Burney” above the great Richardson; but the fol- lowing passages—in praise of Evelina—sound very different from the celebrated assertions that the author of Tom Jones was a “blockhead,” a “barren rascal” “Oh, Mr. Smith, Mr. Smith is the man!’ cried he [ John- son], laughing violently. ‘Harry Fielding never drew so good a character!’ “I almost poked myself under the table,” writes the delightful Fanny, “Never did I feel so delicious a confusion since I was born!” (August 23, 1778)." A few days later, Johnson said, “It’s very true . . . Rich- ardson would have been really afraid of her . . . Harry Fielding, too, would have been afraid of her; there is nothing 32 The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1, 231; and Diary & Let- ters of Madame D’Arblay, with notes by Dobson, London and New Works 1904, 1, 33- 883 Letters of Anna Seward, Edinburgh, 1811, IV, 311. 84 Dobson’s edition of the Diary, London, 1904, I, 72.SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 201 so delicately finished in all Harry Fielding’s works, as in Evelina! . . . Oh, you little character-monger, you!”*® And again there is the passage in which Dr. Johnson told Mr. Lort that “there were things and characters” in Evelina “more than worthy of Fielding.” “ “Oh ho!’ cried Mr. Lort, ‘what, is it better than Field- ing?’ “ “Harry Fielding,’ answered Dr. Johnson, ‘knew nothing but the shell of life.’ “So you ma’am,’ added the flattering Mrs. Thrale, ‘have found the kernel.’” Whereupon Fanny Burney exclaims, “Are they all mad? or do they want to make me so?” There is also this passage: “ ‘Dr. Johnson, ma’am,’ added my kind puffer [Mrs. Thrale], ‘says Fielding never wrote so well—never wrote equal to this book; he says it 1s a better pic- ture of life and manners than is to be found anywhere in Fielding.’ * ‘Indeed?’ cried Mrs. Montagu surprised.”*? On another occasion, when Miss Burney sat “‘next to Mrs. Horneck,” the latter said, “I have seen nothing like this [Evelina] since Fielding.”’** Obviously Mr. Lort and Mrs. Montagu were much “sur- prised” that the Doctor should rate Evelina above the novels of the celebrated Fielding. Back in 1760, Mrs. Montagu (though she preferred Richardson) had spoken well of the au- thor of Tom Jones in Lyttelton’s Dialogues; and in the mean- time the fame of that novelist had gone on increasing. But how about the plays? Why had they not been equally success- ful? Accordingly, in the Doctor’s presence she made the fol- lowing innocent observation: ~ “Fielding, who was so admirable in novel-writing, never succeeded when he wrote for the stage.’ “ “Very well said,’ cried Dr. Johnson; ‘that was an answer 8° Dobson’s edition of the Diary, I, 90. 8¢ Thid., 1, 95. 87 Tbsd., 1, 122. 88 Tbid., 1, 173, 174. ee reat ars eee te ee oe Te ee need ae om se saeereeesesdhestt>> ees torres a oe es 5 preteen bmn Sibson ES bar sa ore tee eee Cet Sa pee oe we bephect a ew 3 My ; : ae] , t ee Prt] a aot soe ¥ F 4} r+} Fr il he i?! a : Pa ai a 3 i ? hae 4 ah sol ; . el tet a rae ta es By | ps 3] ae eal +7) - we et Seth it ay pe oeLE OL ISTE eT Tate ot oe et bee da tet Sere) eFurs f 202 FIELDING THE NOVELIST which showed she considered her subject.’”*°” For once, at least, the Great Cham—caught entirely off his guard—had ad- mitted that Fielding’s novels were admi rable. By “Daddy” Crisp as well as by Dr. Johnson, Mrs. Mon- tagu’s remark was received with approval. In a letter of De- cember 8, 1778, he declares that Mrs. Montagu “very justly and judiciously enforces” her “observation” by “the instance she gives of Fielding, who, though so eminent in characters and descriptions, did by no means succeed in comedy.” Of the yet unpublished Cecilia, he wrote (April 5, ee that “nothing like it had ponent since Fielding and Smollett.””™ Crisp, we may believe, had been as little TS by John- son’s partizanship as had Dr. Burney himsel f.* It is hardly necessary to observe that, in reminding Fanny Burney that even Fielding had failed on the stage, Mrs. Mon- tagu sae the greatness of the novelist. And so, absent- mindedly, did Dr. Johnson himself when he applauded her ob- servation, ed his attention was presumably centered on Fielding’s failure. The exclamation of surprise on the part of Mrs. Montagu and of Mr. Lort, the eagerness of Mrs. Piozzi to spread the news of. the Doctor’s comparisons, the unfeigned delight of Fanny Burney herself, as well as the more moderate judgment of “Daddy” Crisp and of Fanny Burney’s father all go to show that these members of the aaa Circle volun- tarily or involuntarily admitted Fielding’s high repute in the year 1778, in spite of the abuse which their idol, Dr. Johnson, chose to inflict upon him. As for Johnson himself, his manifest desire to have his charming Fanny outshine even Fielding 1s a tacit admission of that writer’s worth which sounds very dif- ferent from the ‘‘blockhead”—“barren-rascal” talk. To rank Fanny Burney above a “‘blockhead” would be no compliment. Finally, in spite of his inveterate disparagement of that “bar- 89 Dobson’s edition of the Diary, I, 126. *0'bad., 1, 151-152. eal bad: 11.80; 42 According to Fanny Burney, the only novel in her father’s library was Amelia—Preface to The Wanderer, London, 1814. el ni : ' e 2 - 4 oa : Tr - : : 5: ie 4 Fs re iis > ie rr. ? pe aSCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 203 ren-rascal,”’ Johnson wrote Boswell (February 11, 1784) in the last year of his life, when he was considering the relief to be obtained from a milder climate: “Fielding was sent to Lis- bon, where, indeed, he died; but he was, I believe, past hope when he went.”’* A humorous sequel to the story of Johnson vs. Fielding comes from an unexpected quarter—in short, from the elegant gentleman at Strawberry Hill. The account of Horace Wal- pole, left unfinished in a previous chapter, may be thus com- pleted. Walpole’s abuse of Fielding, both at home and abroad, as we have remarked, began early and continued late; in the ’Seven- ties and the "Eighties he had still been busy. Here is the passage at arms between him and Mme. du Deffand. On July 14, 1773, she writes: “‘Je viens de relire Tom Jones, dont le com- mencement et la fin m’ont charmée. Je n’aime que les romans qui peignent les caractéres, bons et mauvais. C’est 1A ot Von trouve de vraies lecons de morale; et si on peut tirer quelque fruit de la lecture, c’est de ces livres-]a; Vos auteurs sont excellents dans ce genre.”’** This was too much for Walpole, who replied: “Je n’accorde pas, comme vous, le méme mérite a nos romans. Tom Jones me fit un plaisir bien mince; il y a du burlesque, et ce que j’aime encore moins, les mceurs du vul- gaire. Je conviens que c’est fort naturel, mais le naturel qui n’admet pas du goiit me touche peu. Je trouve que c’est le goiit qui assure tout, et qui fait le charme de tout ce qui regarde la société. . . . Nos romans sont grossiers. Dans Gil Blas, il s’agit trés-souvent de valets . mais jamais, non, jamais ils ne dégofitent. Dans les romans de Fielding, il y a des curés de campagne qui sont de vrais cochons.—Je n’aime pas lire ce que je n’aimerais pas entendre.”*® But Mme. du Deffand was not so easily squelched. “Pourquoi les sentiments naturels ne ser- aient-ils pas vulgaires?” she retorted (August 8, 1977.3))) *3 Hill’s Boswell, Oxford, 1887, IV, 200. *4 Lettres . . . &@ Horace Walpole, Toynbee ed., Londres, 1912, II, 519. 48 Tbid., Il, 525 note. - a ar Oe ee a bhai oe etch ents eee t Peet dt ie trees s ~! «heey a ad TPL ieee ere et tates} Ne Ee ae ee bhateete eee oe ere if ab 7 A M F, oo 4. <.8 9M e een ee eee bee ead i takabebiial cel Cron204 FIELDING THE NOVELIST ‘CN’ est-ce pas |’éducation qui les rend grands et relevés? Dans Tom Jones, Allworthy, Blifil, Square et surtout Mme. Miller, ne sont-ils pas d’une vérite infinie? Et Tom Jones, avec ses défauts et malgré toutes les fautes quils lui font commettre, n’est-il pas estimable et aimable autant qu’on peut l’étre? En- fin, quoi qu’il en soit, depuis vos romans, il m’est impossible d’en lire aucun des néotres.””*® Realizing that he could not con- vert the lady, Walpole replied: “Nous ne sommes nullement d’accord sur nos romans; c'est le défaut du naturel qui me dégout. Tom Jones ne me fait pas la moindre impres- sion.”*" A dozen years later he was still harping on the same string. In a note to John Pinkerton (1785 ), he writes: “Fielding had as much humour, perhaps, as Addison; but, having no idea of grace, is perpetually disgusting. His innkeepers and parsons are the grossest of their profession; and his gentlemen are awk- ward when they should be at their ease.” More evidence of the same sort comes from George Hardinge, who wrote, in his corrections to the Literary Anecdotes of John Nichols, “‘Mr. Walpole has often told me that he himself had no enjoyment of Tom Jones. ‘It might be nature, he said, “it might be hu- mour ; but it was of a kind that could not interest him? I pitied him, as I should pity a man who had not all his five senses.”*” Hardinge attributes this imperfect sympathy to the lack of an appreciation of humor, of which, in his opinion, neither Wal- pole nor Chesterfield, despite their “wit,” had any “concep- tion.” For nearly half a century the malicious Walpole had li- beled Fielding and disparaged his works, when, in May, 179! (only a few years before his death), he chanced to read in “the two new volumes” of Boswell that the poetry of his 46 Lettres a Horace Walpole, Toynbee ed., II, 525. 47 Tbid., Il, 525 note. 48 The Letters of Horace Walpole, edited by Mrs. Toynbee, Oxford, 1915, XIII, 281. 49 Hardinge, G., Corrections to Literary Anecdotes by Nichols, VIII, 525-526. Sra ate brenyaalayens ye " > " - rn li nee ON ray et “seis he 4 a) [ 13] ve -SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 205 friend Gray was “dull, and that he was a dull man!” This was more than he could endure; he had long been angry with Johnson for that critic’s efforts “‘to degrade my friend’s super- lative poetry.” While inwardly raging, as he turned the pages of Boswell, he came across the “blockhead” passage; and then —forgetting for the moment his old animus against Fielding —he wrote to one of his friends as follows: “The same oracle dislikes Prior, Swift, and Fielding. If an elephant could write a book, perhaps one that had read a great deal would say that an Arabian horse is a very clumsy, ungraceful animal. Pass to a better chapter!”*° Thus two of Fielding’s most inveterate detractors for over a generation—the fribble and his ‘“elephant”—came at last unwittingly to acknowledge, before they died, the literary standing of the man whom they had maligned. But they had done injuries that could not easily be righted; Walpole’s scan- dalous story of the Fielding mémnage and Johnson’s charge that the novelist was “superficial” were destined to have a flourish- ing career in a century which was eager to listen. II Popular Voices (1772-1784) The increasing refinement of manners that by the time of Evelina (1778) was distinctly to be noticed in contemporary comment, militated of course against Fielding’s novels, for no longer was the talk of a Squire Western admitted into the fic- tion of the day. Even Richardson was occasionally criticized on the score of improper scenes, though, in general, the crea- tor of Grandison continued to hold his own as a moralist. This difference in attitude may be illustrated by Hannah More’s change of feeling—prompted by Dr. Johnson—to- ward Tom Jones, which as a girl she frankly enjoyed. There °° Letters of Horace Walpole, Toynbee ed., XIV, 439. “089 ne a tt hitsoge Aer erhe few, — 5S ‘we lwk - Se een se ee Lo Sees poeple bee ey ant Earn nie teas ort oe “oe wend hetbowaneemtiptarse panes pets onerr wichita eee Prete te mes vrai Pry oe ors | Sen eRe eee, t : ee | ree 4 ae FS “sh ee be i $i “Eh ‘1 : zi fy i + ‘3 aeFIELDING THE NOVELIST 206 is also a significant letter—to which we have previously al- luded—by Fanny Burney ete After reading Pasquin with she wrote Mrs. Philly s, October 3; 1783: “‘T must h pe in all F ielding’ s dra- 1 heart even at his wit, excel- her father, own I too frequently meet w! it matic works, to laugh wi ith a goor lent as it is; and I should never myself think it worth wading irt to get at. Where any of his best strokes through so much di am always highly are picked out for me, or separately quoted, I pleased, and can grin most cordially; but where I hear the bad ates too heavily to suffer my mind 9951 with the good, it pr eponder to give the good fair play.’ In the Seventies the vogue of the Mathias’s phrase, was still undoubtedly very great. [hat popular novelist and man of all work, “Courtney Jo Andrews. Melmoth” (Samuel Jackson Pratt), whose A Farce,” was performed at Drury Lane, April 20, 1778, doubtless truthful picture a the senti- Pupil of Pleasure, ma party of into a ose “ublime instinct of sen- timent,” to use gives an amusing and mentalists of that day. In his mighty pretty women” come “rustling’’ shop and ask with “a ea accent” for something senti- mental, such, for exampl The Mistakes of the Heart. When Joseph Andrews 1s Sr IAT one of the ladies ex- claims, “Oh la! Ma’am how can you possi bly read such low stuff the adventures of a footman, a kitchen-wench, and a strolling parson.” Tom Jones is then suggested, w here- upon “a pale languid lady” replies, “Aye, TOM JONES is tolerable enough if he would but say more about the seraphic SOPHIA, and give us less nonsense about the old vul- gar father, the fusty aunt, and those unentertaining horrid creatures, THWACKUM and SQUARE. He is shockingly tedious about those fellows. As to his Introductory Chapters I always skip ’em. fo SI Madam,” agrees another, “and if he was a little plainer in telling us what we were eee to expect, at the top of his chapters, it would be as well; which case I really think it would be a goodish, prettyish, sort 51 Dobson’s edition of her Diary, London, 1904, II, 226. ee hae bt bak ona NA eget sane en pt Ae ee RI Os ae — hideea Rothe eee ee eh ee ne eeeSCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 207 of a novel, to read once.” Tom Jones, it seems, was “now in reading by Lady Sallow’s coachman.”®? “Courtney Melmoth” was one of Fielding’s staunchest de- fenders. In Liberal Opinions (1776) he wrote: “It was the opinion of Horace, Rabelais, and Le Sage, of Cervantes, Swift, and Fielding” that “laughing satire was the likeliest to succeed”’;°* and, retorting upon those who assailed the novelist as “low,” he asked, “Who ever thought of charging Shake- speare with immorality, for having drawn an Iago?”°* Though he acknowledged Richardson’s high standing in the literary world, he drew attention to his lack of verisimilitude—a “fault” which is to be observed not only in Grandison but in Clarissa, while Pamela is “worse than either.?® Fielding, he held to be “indisputably the most admirable”? of “English Novel-writers” because he is “the most natural.” “Whether humorous or serious, all his characters are taken from life; and so correct, that we instantly feel the resemblance . . . we are charmed by every stroke, because it is a faithful transcript from the volume of Human Nature.” Smollett, who trod “pretty successfully” in Fielding’s “steps,” is, according to Pratt, inferior to his master; for “his wit is more studied, his laugh more laboured, and his sentiment less simple.”°° In low station or in high the devotees of “Sensibility” were, of course, lovers of Richardson and Sterne. But, despite the increasing refinement of manners just referred to, a counter- movement against senseless fastidiousness was now distinctly palpable; at least, the representation of scenes from ordinary life in both drama and novel was not so often stigmatized as “low.” The introduction into a story of a Joseph Andrews or a Tony Lumpkin was less frequently regarded as proof of what Walpole called a deficiency in “taste’’: the ‘““Branghtons” °? The Pupil of Pleasure, by “Courtney Melmoth,” second ed., Lon- don, 1777, pp. 28-30, 31. °8 Liberal Opinions, London, Vol. III (1776), p. v. 54 Tbid., IV, ix. °° Pratt’s Miscellanies, London, 1785, III, 122. So Lb¢d sy Tarzana: Sa PE PS sAneesmverwrnserdeis geeeat yy - Peg 7 omery Perrmearwent Pease ee ns tenes Cringeen see esbananpeasdtbeerbannebgege, Pr ' tena eee Aare tia nty ese yeayaweme ea ei ei »o +o 2) aa ty ee Peo pea) ag a-ater tee pet eee ee, Ba lg kee eater eee a qe OF earsFIELDING THE NOVELIST choug: 1 repugnant to an ultra- -sen- were a complete success. But 208 in Fanny Burney’s Evelina, timentalist like Miss Sew ard,® this state of sage had been long delayed. In the words of Mr. Dobson, ‘Not until sentimental comedy lay dead or dying, was Colman able to write, »» as he did in the prologue to Miss Lee’s Chapter of Accidents (1780): When Fielding, Humour’s fay’rite child, appear’d, Low was the Orda word each author fear’d! TS]] chac’d at length, by Pleas santry’s bright ray, Nature and mirth resum’d their legal sway; And Goldsmith’s Genius bask’d in open day.° Defying those who, like Walpole and Mme. Riccoboni, complained of Fielding’s lowness, Colman sent out more than one counterblast; alw a warm in his praise, he was never onee “foremost of the Hum’rous train.” of alluding to him as No doubt he was somewhat instrumental in bringing about a saner view of what was then called “taste.” ‘Humour,’ he s), “is not the growth of a frippery stoutly maintained ( 177 “polished manners. It can only be cul- age, nor founded on tivated by bold manly wits, such as Cervantes Fielding,” and others, who teach us “to de spise a delicacy of manners that produces effeminacy.”””” By the beginning of the eighth decade of the century, then, notwithstanding the fact that the gross- ness of language formerly allowed in print was now t thooed: “low? scenes—that is, scenes taken from the lower levels of society, were being released from the ban. Walpole had often declared that he did not care to read about people with w hom he would not associate; but the Walpoles were growing fewer. There can be no question regarding the popular interest in Fielding during this period (1772-1784). As Charles Dibdin, the dramatist and song-writer declared, somewhat later, re- 57 Letters of Anna Seward, Il, 341. To her mind, “low” and “insipid characters” were “too frequently obtruded.” 58 Dobson’s Samuel Richardson, p. 119. 59 Colman’s Prose on Several Occasions, London, 1787, Ill, 227. 60 Jbid., III, 240. 61 Jbid., I, 172. Sinha Nts behl bod Sree abies Bie ee er heathheteseaiel a nN Ped wang oa oeSCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 209 ferring to Jonathan Wild, which he had planned to transform into a sort of Beggars Opera, “every body either has, or ought to have, FIELDING almost by heart.”’®? In his Com- plete History of the Stage, he asks, ““Whoever copied CER- VANTES so faithfully as FIELDING?”’® and inserts the following enthusiastic passage: “FIELDING . . . has left behind him one species of reputation which no author ever so eminently possessed. His novels have hitherto been unequalled. I’om Jones is, perhaps, the finest assemblage of natural char- acters and happy incidents in any language. Joseph Andrews has a vein of the purest and most gratifying humour within the conception of human ingenuity; and were it not that it is professedly written as a satire on one author, and in imitation of another, it would be very nearly a complete work in its kind. Amelia manifests a most astonishing judgment of FIELDING’S knowledge of the world. There is scarcely a person or circumstance introduced in that novel but every body knows to be somebody or something already seen in real life. In short, though these novels may have—and indeed so has the sun, resplendent as it is—something to cavil at, yet the worst of them greatly excels the best of any other author, if nature, truth, interest, humour, and character are the requisites of such productions.’ About this time the popular Beauties of Fielding—there were several editions within the year (1782 )—took its place beside the Beauties of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Sterne in a series which, “principally intended” for the “youth of both sexes,” had been, according to the publishers, “introduced into the most respectable Schools and Academies.”®* The Beauties was, of course, merely a collection of noteworthy passages from Fielding’s works; out of school hours, however, the books themselves were very popular with the youth of that day. John Thelwall, we are told, had as a boy (ca. 1780) a 62 The Professional Life of Mr. Dibdin, London, 1803, II, 62-63. 83 4 Complete History of the Stage, London, n.d., V, 43. 64 Tbid., V, 38-39. 6° The Beauties of Fielding, second ed., London, 1782, p. 204. os bee ee iene ee abe peweneg.” Peete ree ea tenet es = a — os — la eee as rene r nies ry ears tat be Mba ee Te rae pdt ieiiettieteaataen tds oaks Ot OP ye Piles ~ ses Laer ews ae Tt eee } ns ‘f Le | a Gi a eh i i 4 iy i a0 _ rs , -\*. opeeereesy aa ee ee ears ry eT aT ere rr Bes es rd210 FIELDING THE NOVELIST “sort of prejudiced contempt” for novels, ‘‘those of Fielding” being “almost the only ones” which he would read.®° And, some years before this, William Beloe, the future Greek scholar, found, in his boyhood days, great delight in Tom Jones—an enthusiasm which he recalled with pleasure at three- score. “Shall I say,” he asks, in his Sexagenarian, “which was the first book that most strongly excited my curiosity, and in- terested my sensibility? It was Tom Jones. My female Mentor tantalized me without mercy. She would let me have but one volume at a time; and not only would not afford me any clue to the concluding catastrophe, but rather put me upon a wrong scent. Sometimes too when my impatience of expectation was at the very highest point possible, the succeeding volume was mislaid, was lent, was not impossibly lost. However, after a long and most severe trial, after hating Blifil with no com- mon hatred, forming a most friendly intimacy with Partridge, loving Sophia with rapturous extravagance, I complacently ac- companied dear wicked Tom to the nuptial altar. I endeav- oured of course to procure the other productions of this popu- lar author, but I well remember that I did not peruse any of them. no not within a hundred degrees of the satisfaction, which the Foundling communciated.”*" That Fielding was widely read and generally popular can hardly be doubted by anyone who examines the books and pam- phlets of the period. If Dr. Johnson had turned to an article in The Edinburgh Evening Courant on the feminine mania for reading, he would have been astonished to find that he him- self was competing for popularity with the author whom he called a “blockhead.” Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, complains the writer of the skit, have “nearly starved my youngest daughter at breast,” while Fielding has received so much at- tention that he hints of starting “damages against ‘Tom Jones.”°* This observation was written by Creech, the famous bookseller, who asserts elsewhere that Fielding is one of the 66 Poems, Hereford, 1801, p. Vil. 67 Ra aha Wrrenyara ; 2 T a 7 Beloe, W., The Sexagenarian, London, 1817, Vol. I, ch. 15 p:. 13 pales ee : Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces, Edinburgh and London, 1815, Pp. 342 Se 4 hak od Py ~ 7 ae rt P pea le helenae aaa ead \ Oe ht ae roy ~~ > a Re apharhiecatntinsos cee eeeenenstpien tet at i‘ | : | : 43 eee iss . OF ten pa Fa nae ey =] ger yest eee ar et a PT eee eyhnteebepnepe ate eter ieee vit en a pees beeen atm Be 212 FIELDING THE NOVELIST says that “‘everybody knew her” to be “‘what nobody chose to O call her.’"> There was, too, the extended passage. William Jackson, the eminent musician and landscape painter, lament- ing in his Thirty Letters (1782) the neglect of genius, dis- courses as follows: ‘Poor, unhappy, half-starved Field- ing! Does it not grieve you to be told that the author of Tom Jones lies in the factory’s burying-ground at Lisbon, undis- tinguished, unregarded—not a stone to mark the place!””** In Love and Madness (1780) by Sir Herbert Croft (who con- tributed the life of Young to Johnson’s Poets) a reference to Fielding is introduced into the Hackman-Ray correspond- ence.”? And in the Essays, Letters, and Poems of Edmund Rack there are frequent allusions. “Being last night employed in reading the facetious works of the late inimitable Fielding,” Rack falls into a “profound meditati yn” and produces some Sse it nonsense entitled the ‘‘Dissection of an Author’s Head.”* Though like many of his betters Rack thought nov- “See were not to be taken very seriously, and though he said that the “productions of Fielding, and the rest of our best novel writers, if they have not injured the cause of virtue, have never contributed to its support or advancement,’ he listed Fielding with those authors whose works “afford agreeable employment, in the hours of relaxation from higher studies.””*° Another hack writer who was never tired of referring to Fielding was the indefatigable William Combe, whose Dr. Syntax is of the Quixotic breed of Parson Adams. In his Original Love-Letters (1784), he tells us, thinking perhaps of 1 The Excursion, London, 1777, I, 62. 76 Thirty Letters on Various Subjects, London, 1783, 1, 79 (letter XXVI). Ten years before, Wraxall had found Fielding’s grave “nearly concealed by weeds and nettles.”—-Historical Memoirs, London, 1836, I, 54. 77 Love and Madness . . . In a Series of Letters, London, 1780, p. 30 (letter XIV). 78 Rack, Edmund, Essays, Letters, and Poems, Bath, 1781, p. 391. 78 Thid., p. 462. SO Tbid., p. 265.SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 2nie Gray, that “‘to build airy castles of fancied paradisaic happi- ness, is. . . toprefer . . . a Tale of the Genii to the History of Lom Jones, or an Indian fire-screen to a picture of Ra- phael’s.”** Whether or not the very popular Letters (1780) of the “wicked Lord Lyttelton,” the son of Fielding’s patron, were fabricated by Combe*’ or were really authentic is im- material; whoever wrote them counted on an audience that knew and enjoyed Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. In Letter the Forty-Third, we are given a lengthy description of a clergy- man of “blunt simplicity and unpolished benevolence” who “has no other name” than Parson Adams, and who is made to furnish amusement for many pages. We see him emptying his pockets for the lost sermon, breaking “‘the cordage of the bell, in the violence of ringing it,” and gorging himself on “the best part of a fowl, with a proportionable quantity of ham,” which he “‘seized on’’ “ 9983 without grace or apology. Thus the fame of Fielding was made use of by writers of this period. Even the sentimental Hayley had a pleasant word for his novels, though—naturally enough—his enthusiasm was kept for the author of Clarissa.\In order that he (Hayley) may “rank” as “Virtue’s friend,” he seeks the guidance of those two “immortal minds, of philanthropic mold,” Samuel Richardson and Edward Young, whose “effluence bright of highest genius”®* will set his feet aright. But for all that he can thus refer to Fielding—in his verses on Hogarth: While Truth of Character, exactly hit, And drest in all the dyes of comic wit; While these, in FIELDING’S page, delight supply, So long thy Pencil with his Pen shall vie.®® 81 Original Love-Letters, London, 1784, II, 56, 57. 82 Thomas Frost (The Life of Lord Lyttelton, London, 1876, pp. x, xi, xix) thinks they are Lyttelton’s; but see Encyclopaedia Britan- nica, eleventh ed., VI, 751. 83 Letters of the late Lord Lyttelton, eighth ed., London, 1793, LI, 98 ff. In the History of Johnny Quae Genus (new ed., New York, 1903, preface dated May 1, 1821), Combe was still alluding to Fielding. 4 Poems and Plays, by William Hayley, London, 1785, VI, 4, 5. eS bedal5y.29% Co ee eh ies Rh ent ‘ektubtehtabaedeath mieten tC het hs ee! mya oh Oi wee mam aeons Ane o <. . ras memarerierereereoetase gee ate a 4 im ES i Pa : er rt] re "ite H hed a4t oy ea) wal ray te : \ ee “4 M i a ie tt a! > i RF Ry hein aamine rae nS eee ee ne Stet phen ake ee ee ~~ ea ene ane os J ie : ie e] Fs ) 7 FIELDING THE NOt TELIST 214 In the winter of 1778, the production of the Good-Natur’d Man, which Garrick fur- and which was first discussion of Fielding’s works was stimulated by long-lost play, The Fathers: Or, the 1 with a prologue and an epilogue performed November 30 at Drury Lane. “T have finish’d my prol: & Epil: for Fielding’s play,’ wrote Garrick enthusiasti- h More, ‘“‘and have been very lucky—I have nishec cally to Hanna in y° first ‘ntroduced the Characters in Tom Jones & Joseph Andrews pleading at y° Bar of y© Publick for y® Play—it iS nothing about it.°* In the light really tolerably done say of various anecdotes which reflect the famous actor’s love for Fielding, the prologue and epilogue to The Fathers possess more than ordinary interest; the prologue, which is one of the best Garrick ever wrote, shows an excellent appreciation of the characters of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews Amelia, significantly enough, 1s not even mentioned: But who the author? need I name the wit, Whom Nature prompted as his genius writ! Truth smil’d on Fancy for each well-wrought story, Where characters, live, act, and stand before ye: et First pleads TOM JONES- -grateful his heart and warm; 3rave, gen’rous Britons—shield this play from harm: My best friend wrote it, should it not succeed, Though with my SOPHY blest—my heart will bleed.— Then from his face he wipes the manly tear; Courage, my master; PARTRIDGE cries, don’t fear: Should Envy’s serpents hiss, or malice frown, Though I’m a coward, zounds! I’ll knock ’em down. Next, sweet SOPHIA comes—she cannot speak— Her wishes for the play o’erspread her cheek; In ev’ry look her sentiments you read: And more than eloquence her blushes plead. Now BLIFIL bows—with smiles his false heart gilding: He was my foe—I beg you’ll damn this FIELDING. 86 Baker’s Some Unpublished Correspondence of Garrick, Boston, 1907, p. 105 (letter dated November 23, 1778). Garrick sent copies to Lady Spencer, who gave him her opinion.—T he Private Correspondence of David Garrick, London, 1832, II, 318.Sa. eae 7 Rew Wyte pesenaee py a ae rn ee 7 OT eel rr tee SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 215 Right, THWAKUM roars—no mercy, Sirs, I pray— Scourage the dead Author, thro’ his orphan play. What words! (cries PARSON ADAMS), fie, fie, disown ’em; Good Lord!—de mortuis nil nisi bonum; If such are Christian teachers, who'll revere ’em?— And thus they preach, the devil alone should hear ’em. Now SLIPSLOP enters—tho’ this scrie’ning vagrant & 74§ ) TR et Sa SN ert ieee aires ei i g > ea ei it Salted my virtue, which was ever flagrant, Yet, like black >TTHELLO, I’d bear scorns and whips, Slip into poverty to the very hips, T°exult this play—may it decrease in favour; And be its fame immoraliz’d for ever! "SQUIRE WESTERN, reeling, with October mellow, Tall, yo!—Boys!—Yoax—Criticks! hunt the fellow! Damn ’en, these wits are varmint not worth breeding. What good e’er came of writing and of reading? Next comes, brim-full of spite and politicks; His Sister WESTERN—and thus deeply speaks: Wits are arm’d pow’rs—like France attack the foe; Negociate ’till they sleep—then strike the blow! ALLWORTHY last pleads to your noblest passions— Ye gen’rous leaders of the taste and fashions; Departed genius left his orphan play, To your kind care—what the dead wills obey: O then respect the FATHER’s fond bequest, And make his widow smile, his spirit rest.8” P In The St. James’s Chronicle appeared the following news from Drury Lane: “Last Night a Comedy called The Fathers, or The Good-natured Man, was performed for the first Time at this Theatre. It was written by the late Henry Fielding, one of the first Geniuses that ever adorned this Island.”** The comedy had started out under good auspices; for Sheridan, then the manager of Drury Lane, withdrew his own very popular School for Scandal for several nights to give it room, and Garrick, who had identified the play in the first : ant a aE en eee ry ee rah Parties eer at re a errr ee et ee nnes 87 Fielding’s Works, new ed., London, 1783, IV, 371-37 88 Quoted in Cross’s Fielding, III, 107.a-ha a e Se) bo Be. -_ 216 FIELDING THE NOVELIST place and had acted as its foster father, occupied his box with “the ‘heavenly Lady Spencer’ and her friends.”*® His prologue, according to Ihe Gentleman’s Magazine, “was delivered by Mr. King” with “great humour, and received with universal applause.” Not until the night after the performance did out- siders find out—so closely had the secret been guarded—that the prologue (and epilogue ) had been written by Garrick. One can therefore imagine the interest which was created when this bit of news ran the rounds of the periodicals. Thus, in the winter of 1778, all literary London was talking of Garrick and the comedy and of that “son of fame”—to use the words of the prologue— Whom Nature prompted as his genius writ. In his dedication of The Fathers to the Duke of North- umberland, Sir John Fielding, who, by the way, seems always (except possibly in the matter of Murphy’s “‘Essay””) to have acted admirably in all affairs connected with his brother, 1m- proved the opportunity to insert the following tribute: “The author of this play was an upright, useful, and distinguished magistrate for the county of Middlesex; and by his publica- tions laid the foundation of many wholesome laws for the sup- port of good order and subordination in this metropolis, the effects of which have been, and now are, forcibly felt by the public. His social qualities made his company highly entertain- ing. His genius, so universally admired, has afforded delight and instruction to thousands. The memory of such a man calls for respect; and to have that respect shown him by the great and praise-worthy, must do him the highest honour.”””* nate > . . . Sir John’s statement that his brother’s genius was “univer- sally admired”? was much nearer the truth in 1778 than at any 89 Cross’s Fielding, III, 104, 105. 90 The Gentleman’s Magazine, XLVIII, 587 (December, 1778). See also The London Magazine, XLVII, 561 (December, 1778). ®1 Included with the play in the “new edition” of Murphy in 1783, IV, 369.SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 217 previous time; as has been shown, indications of popular favor were increasing in number and variety. Within two years after the appearance of The Fathers, Kane O’Hara’s burletta of Lom Thumb” (the form in which Scott and Byron and others of still later date knew and enjoyed the play) brought not only the adapter but the original author before public no- tice. Iwo years later still, at Paris, Desforges’s “TOM JONES 4 LONDRES,” a verse comedy in five acts, was played “pour la premiére fois, par les Comédiens Italiens - le Mardi 22 Octobre 1782.”°* And in 1787 Desforges pre- sented at Paris another five-act comedy (first performed by the “Comeédiens Italiens” April 17) entitled “TOM JONES ET FELLAMAR, SUITE DE TOM JONES A LON- DRES.”** Meanwhile, to judge from the numerous editions (an account of which will be given in the next chapter), Fielding’s novels had more readers on both sides of the water than ever before; a “new” London edition (which includes The Fathers) of the Works appeared in 1783 (there was also a London edition of the Works in 1780 and another in 1784); and, three years before, in the first volume (1780) of Harrison’s Novelis?s Magazine, the popular Stothard had be- gun, with Joseph Andrews,* that series of illustrations for the works of Fielding (and other fiction-writers) which so much delighted the readers of the century-end. Manifestations of popular interest in the novels of Fielding are thus to be found on every hand—to the playwright and to the playgoer; to the patron of the circulating library and to the buyer of books; to the publisher, the illustrator, and the literary hack, the celebrated narratives were a source of either pleasure or profit. °? Performed October 3, 1780. See Oulton, History of the Theatres, London, 1796, I, 98. ° From the title-page of the printed copy. . °* For the “history” of the picture which was designed by Dodd and amended by Stothard, see A. C. Coxhead’s Thomas Stothard, London, 1906, p. 61. beh ge, om bet cm oe Ee Shee Pee 2 Seotyeniatetie eet a eu phabanh gases Cae Hao ern. ay _ a . Byte. - Peer ele ert ree een nes eran . . : EY arr i iH ci) $3) ‘ . i 4) aN hal eM Fi 7] $ tS 14] Fy re ret ha 5 Paes thy oh tar be Pa Pea rel . wi ea re i ef, ae Pi ~b Pie 4 Sed i ret sZt Pe a ‘

+ rote Beattie, in his “Essay on Poetry and Musick,” “we have two exquisite models in English, Amelia and Tom Jones of Fielding.’ 98 He saw the value of the initial dissertations. “‘A certain French author [La Place],” he says, “to render his translation of Tom Jones more acceptable to his countrymen, and to clear it of what he foolishly calls English phlegm, has greatly abridged that in- I mean the comparable performance, and, in my opinion, expunged some of the finest passages; those conversation pieces, I mean, which tend more immediately to the elucidation of the characters, than to the progress of the story.””” He paid a tribute to Field- ae attainments as a scholar, “many parts” of whose works “discover at once a brilliant wit and copious erudition.””*°? And of Fielding’s indebtedness to Cervantes he declared: “‘I believe there are few criticks in Great Britain, who do not think in their hearts, that Fielding has outdone his master.*”* If Beattie’s contemporaries really felt “in their hearts” toward Fielding as Beattie says they did, most of them made sure that their hearts did not get into printer’s ink. For Fielding’s structural art, Beattie has always the highest praise. He asserts (as did Murphy) that both T'om Jones and Amelia “would bear to be examined by Aristotle himself,” and “if compared with those of Homer, would not greatly suffer in the comparison”—statements which he justifies as follows: “This author, to an amazing variety of probable oc- currences, and of characters well drawn, well supported, and finely contrasted, has given the most per fect unity, by making them all codperate to one and the same final purpose. It yields a very pleasing surprise to observe, in the unrave elling of his plots, particularly that of Tom Jones, how many incidents, to °5 Beattie, re W orks, Philadelphia, 1809, V, 275 mote. 99 Tbid., VI, 271. The “Essay on Laughter” was written “in the year 1764."—VI, 125. 100 Thid., VI, 356. “On the Utility of Classical Learning.” Written in 1769. 101 bid. VI, 358.: Te ra ea. 4 era hewenek sn erty“ < heetneet pba ie nae peta oe ary x rere errr eee bd re! eee Share tebeediee tee nbceeteteien Latkes wings, i dq] a “st oe ets “ +h 4 va 7) ri ny ia aan i #1 / ; ti H hi H THE DOOR FLEW OPEN AND IN CAME SQUIRE WESTERN (Tom Jones, Book XV, Chapter V) yer -eeaee e 3.3 4 oer per bs ry’ ety rr 7 oar pri eeay SR Ae et ee ee LE EFF eee ye rereee ee een enters ee ee a me pry i i : : f t j i } ere ee een te cs . eG RE bathe tan UE EN et ad Sapna wiralatplpesyn ais pa pepepldeseeney aSCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 221 which, because of their apparent minuteness, we had scarce attended as they occurred in the narrative, are found to have been essential to the plot. And what heightens our idea of the poet’s art is, that all this is effected by natural means, and hu- man abilities, without any machinery.” Even Cervantes, Field- ing’s “great master,” declares Beattie, was “obliged to work a miracle for the cure of Don Quixote.’!”” The various essays in which these passages occur were pub- lished together in 1776 ;*°° some of them, however, had been written in the ’Sixties,—the essay on “Laughter,” for exam- ple, dating from 1764, two years after the Life by Murphy, with whose criticisms Beattie shows himself familiar. Even as early as 1770, in the “Essay on Truth,” Beattie had not hesi- tated to refer to the novelist as an authority on the subject of human nature. “Great vicissitudes of fortune,” he wrote, “gave Fielding an opportunity of associating with all classes of men, except perhaps the highest, whom he rarely attempts to describe.’” Then, quoting the “compliment” Fielding paid Aristotle,—that no one ever understood human nature better, —he declares that this testimony from such a witness will “be 99104 As we examine the allowed to have considerable weight. works of other philosophic writers—Reid, Gerard, Kames, Hume, and Burke—we are inclined to suspect that those grave persons must have gone out of their way to avoid Fielding; not only to quote but to quote with approbation from the works of that facetious gentleman required boldness. In 1783 Beattie included in his Dissertations’®® an essay on fiction, which gave a more detailed account of Fielding’s novels than had appeared in the Essays. It is obvious that fic- tion had not as yet come into its own; he tells Forbes (January 18, 1780), for example, that he will finish up his essay on romance-writing “not because it is important, but because it 102 Works, V, 275-276 note. “Essay on Poetry and Musick.” 103 Essays, Edinburgh, 1776. 104 Works, V, 92-93, 95. +08 Dissertations Moral and Critical . . . By James Beattie, London and Edinburgh, 1783. rd — Pe et Ero bit ene Letina teen te et etecnct setter era basher eased rar eee eee ee Serer ys ee tieeed bieeeteee nd s ton er pein hy Sire ee, ree ees Se See ne a) a — PS mate eee vor ce maa rd] y 3 : a 2 BI iF +, § tees be sas} wee | id “ ag! V4 frer estessve? Vata ei TL ese ete te 222 FIELDING THE NOVELIST is amusing, and will require no deep study.”*°® Still, no one can doubt that Beattie wrote with interest the dissertation “On Fable and Romance,” particularly that part of it which deals Smollett, to his mind, is the inferior artist, 1n with Fielding. not to have known “how to contrive a regular that he seems fable”; while as regards “morality,” one “cannot compli- ment” at all an author so “Gnexcusably licentious.” Beattie then proceeds as follows: “This form of the comick romance [1.e., the ‘““Comick, and Poetically Arranged,” which includes Fielding’s three main novels] has been brought to perfection in England by Henry Fielding, who seems to have possessed more wit and humour, and more knowledge of mankind, than any other person of modern times, Shakespeare excepted ; and whose great natural abilities were refined by a classical taste, which he had acquired by studying the best authors of antiquity: though it cannot be denied, that he appears on some occasions to have been rather too ostentatious, both of his learning, and of his wit. “Some have said, that Joseph Andrews is the best perform- ance of Fielding. But its chief merit is parson Adams; who is indeed a character of masterly invention, and, next to Don Quixote, the most ludicrous personage that ever appeared in romance. This work [however], though full of exquisite hu- mour, is blamable in many respects. “Tom Jones and Amelia are Fielding’s best performances; and the most perfect, perhaps, of their kind in the world. Since the days of Homer, the world has not seen a more artful epick fable. The characters and adventures are wonder- fully diversified: yet the circumstances are all so natural, and rise so easily from one another, and co-operate with so much regularity in bringing on, even while they seem to retard, the catastrophe, that the curiosity of the reader . . . grows more and more impatient as the story advances, till at last it becomes downright anxiety. And when we get to the end . . . we are amazed to find, that of so many incidents there should be so 106 Forbes, An Account of the Life . of James Beattie, p. 323- Se rs BL oer ayes eet tied _ — 3h ciel eT ne eta EBL mle Seu eee etersSCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 222 few superfluous; that in such variety of fiction there should be so great probability; and that so complex a tale should be perspicuously conducted, and with perfect unity of design. These remarks may be applied either to Tom Jones or to Amelia: but they are made with a view to the former chiefly ; which might give scope to a great deal of criticism, if I were not in haste to conclude the subject. Since the time of Fielding the comick romance . . . seems to have been declining apace from simplicity and nature, into improbability and aitectation.2--—” Soret _ eae paaireagt ‘There is much in Beattie’s works about Fielding; but enough eee oe as he ee Te Se ee en eee Pern ie PONbE ie its has been given to show that his admiration was as great as it was intelligent. His private correspondence contains more than one allusion to the characters and incidents of the novels. In one of his letters, he speaks of a certain Major Mercer as pos- sessing the “sensibility of Rousseau, and the generosity of Tom Jones”; *°* and, in another (December 12, 1789), he says that » Fielding’s imitation” of a scene from the De Coverley pa- pers, “in that part of “Tom Jones’ where Partridge goes to see “Hamlet,” is hardly inferior”? to its source. Moreover, he warmly recommended the reading of Fielding to his son dur- ing the boy’s “last illness.”” The following lines by that youth- ful versifier are indicative of the novelist’s popularity at this time: rT eee ee Pre tet aT | zt a +) 4 A er cA a ea rf of 1 cel rey , The beau buys Fielding’s works complete, Each page with rapture cons, Sophias finds in every street, And is himself Tom Jones.1?° Still the younger Beattie was not so enthusiastic as the elder. He “read Tom Jones,” writes his father, “and, I think, Amelia,” and “gave that author no little praise for his hu- mour, for the very skilful management of his fable, the va- ae seoery ene er earner err Seer nee ae Ss ae i 107 Works, III, 108-112. *°8 Forbes, 4n Account of the Life . . . of James Beattie, p. 297 LOO Ene 110 Works, X, 251.TE Ce TPL aL, vet Sf el ege 224 FIELDING THE NOVELIST riety and contrast of his characters, and, with a few excep- tions, for the beautiful simplicity of his style”; yet he felt that “there was more danger from the indelicacy of particular pas- sages, than hope of its doing good by the satire, the moral sen- timents, or the distributive justice dispensed in winding up the catastrophe.””*** In this criticism, however, there is probably as much of the doting parent as of the boy himself; at least, so we may judge from Beattie’s own remarks on Fielding in one of his last works, The Elements of Moral Science, in which he made the following admission: “Of Fielding, as a novelist, I admire the humour, and his artful contexture of fable; in which last respect I think he has no equal among the moderns: but his morality and delicacy are not what I wish they had been; and his style, though in general excellent, especially in his latter works, is not always free from bombast, and some- times betrays an unnecessary ostentation of learning.”**” In fact, Beattie had come to the conclusion that “‘romances” were “a very unprofitable study,” “most of them being unskilfully written, and the greater part indecent and immoral.” As ex- ceptions, he lists Robinson Crusoe, the “novels of Richardson,” and those of Mackenzie and Fanny Burney; and declares that he “might have found” others, if he “had not for many years, by want of time and of inclination, been restrained from this sort of reading.”’*** But this was the talk of a moral philoso- pher at the end of his career. The dicta which everyone knew were the passages in the Essays and the Dissertations. In his Essays he had asserted that by “‘versifying Tom Jones and the Merry Wives of Windsor, we should spoil the two finest com- ick poems, the one epick, the other dramatical, now in the world.”’!** In the Dissertations he had said of Tom Jones that 111 Works, X,; 163. The young man died in 1790, aged 22; and his father appended to an edition of The Minstrel, 1797, an account of his 112 Thid.. IX, 190. The Elements of Moral Science, Vol. II, Edin- burgh and London, is dated 1793. See ch. i of Part IV. 118 Thid., LX, 189, 190. 114 Thid., VI, 99.SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 225 the hero “might be vindicated in regard to all censurable con- duct” had the writer “‘been less particular in describing it.” Very firmly did he draw the line between the author of Tom Jones and the author of Peregrine Pickle; ‘“Smollet’s system of youthful profligacy, as exemplified in some of his liber- tines,” was “altogether without excuse.” “Crimes that bring dishonour, or that betray a hard heart, or an injurious disposi- tion” should “never be fixed on a character” who js “recom- mended to our esteem.” For a professor of moral philosophy in one of the estab- lished universities to defend in a scholarly treatise the morals of I’om Jones; and, in the face of the Richardsonians, assert that Fielding’s knowledge of the world (rather than Richard- son’s) might be mentioned in the same breath with that of Shakespeare, was a bolder deed than we can easily realize to- day. Among the letters which Beattie received apropos of his rashness was a remonstrance from the celebrated Lord Hailes. “You don’t censure the indelicacies of Fielding with sufficient severity,’ complains his lordship, “‘his indelicacies are gener- ally the dullest parts of his work. His knowledge of human nature was not from a sort of intuition or moral sensibility as Shakespeare’s, but merely from acute observation; hence Whenever he wanders into genteel company he loses him- self.”"™** Thus the old charge of “lowness” as opposed to “‘gen- tility,” of “observation” rather than “Imagination,” was again preferred against the facetious Fielding. Meanwhile the Essays and the Dissertations became ‘so popular that in due time there appeared a Beauties of Beattie, and the author’s reputation was still considerable in the days of “Christopher North.” Look where we may, we find no one before Beattie of equal authority and popularity (whose ob- servations were incorporated in works of a serious nature ) that wrote so often of Fielding and so well. It is true that he was unfortunate in accenting the distinction (then generally 115 Works, III, 110-111. *16 Forbes, Margaret, Beattie and his Friends, Westminster, 1904, pp. 193-194. Hf “Hi “f) th pA ener ee ear er —t% pibpeintondem neater leer re taste PEM ce ee saree ee ee eee es Ere +s " ean bd ye ee ee ene rats bea traeeniede koe CLT the ened See eel te ee reer aneTe TeT eT ates te te Le be. S. 226 FIELDING THE NOVELIST accepted) between the serious romance of Richardson and the comick of Fielding. He was somewhat responsible, moreover, for the popular notion at the end of the century that Fielding was rather pedantic and bombastic. Finally, toward the close of his life, he was less firm in his stand about Fielding’s “‘mor- ality.” These things, however, count little compared with the excellent remarks which are strewn throughout his other works. It is worth while to observe that Beattie was the earliest writer of standing to champion frequently in his serious publications the cause of the unfortunate Amelia, a novel which Murphy slighted and which Garrick (in his Prologue) entirely ig- nored. Highly as he esteemed the productions of Richardson, Amelia seems to have given him more pleasure than Clar- issa27 In his Dissertations he had gone so far as to include Clarissa in a list of “gloomy compositions captivating to young people,” to whom “misfortune and sorrow are novel- ties.” Lovelace, he says, ‘‘with a little more skill” in the “use of the small sword,” might have “triumphed over Clarissa’s avenger” and “‘the censure of the world.”? And Grandison himself, inferior to Fielding’s Allworthy because less “hu- as to forbid “‘all cordial ” man,” is “‘so distant” and “‘so formal”’ attachment.” Before Beattie’s time, it had been almost a con- vention among critics (witness his friend Mrs. Montagu) to subordinate Fielding to Richardson. Sentimentalist as he was, the author of The Minstrel reversed the order; eventually, as will be seen, he had many followers. In brief, no one before Beattie of similar standing who had the ear of the public had spoken (and spoken appositely) of Fielding in the same breath with Shakespeare, had found him comparable in certain re- spects with Homer, and had pronounced him in certain other respects superior to Cervantes. With Beattie a new era for Fielding had begun. Moreover, during the generation which preceeded the publication of Waverley (1814), the spell in which Richardson had held his readers ever since the beginning now showed signs of weakening. That predilection for formal 117 For Richardson, see Works, III, 102-106 (“On Fable and Ro- mance”); also I, 298.SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 227 elegance which had militated against the author of Tom Jones was giving way—despite the vogue of the Gothic romance—to a better understanding of his artistic purpose. Another writer of reputation, who was not afraid to lend a scholarly name to the cause of Fielding, was Beattie’s some- time neighbor, Lord Monboddo, the learned Scotch judge, whose third volume of the Origin and Progress of Language appeared in the same year (1776) as did Beattie’s Essays. Lord Monboddo was fearless enough to proclaim Fielding “one of the greatest poetical geniuses of his age.” “Nor do I think,” he continues, “that his work has hitherto met with the praise that it deserves.”**® True, his lordship makes some stric- tures: he objects, for example, to amy inclusion of the mock- heroic; the “squabble in a country churchyard” (Tom Jones, Book IV, ch. viii), though “an excellent parody of Homer’s battles,” is “not proper for such a work.” In the first place, it Is “too great a change of style,” greater than in “any work of a legitimate kind, which I think Fielding’s is, from the simple and familiar to the heroic or mock-heroic”; no “regu- lar work” ought to have a “patch” of this sort, “shining” as it is. “Secondly, because it [the mock-heroic style] destroys the probability of the narrative, which ought to be carefully studied in all works, that, like Mr. Fielding’s, are imitations of real life and manners, and which, accordingly, has been very much laboured by that author. . . . This, therefore, I cannot help thinking a blemish, in a work which has otherwise a great deal of merit, and which I should have thought perfect of the kind, if it had not been for this, and another fault that I find to it, namely, the author’s appearing too much in it himself, who had nothing to do in it at all. By this . . . I mean his 5 J reflections with which he begins his books, and sometimes his chapters.”’**® Monboddo accepts Fielding’s own classification of Tom Jones as a comic-epic: “There is lately sprung up, among us,” 18 Of the Origin and Progress of Language, Edinburgh, 1776, III, 298 note. 119 Tbid., III, 296-298. a Pe ark | 4 Bf if at A ity inl i Pe / erin mee _ ete SS nee ipet ru SS as ee ee nes2S tS5ITF 228 FIELDING THE NOVELIST he says, ‘“‘a species of narrative poem, representing likewise the characters of common life. It has the same relation to comedy that the epic has to tragedy, and differs from the epic in the same respect that comedy differs from tragedy; that is, in the actions and characters, both which are much nobler in the epic than in it. It is therefore, I think, a legitimate kind of poem; and . . . the reason why I mention it is, that we have, in English, a poem of that kind, (for so I will call it) which has more of character in it than any work, ancient or modern, that I know. The work I mean is, the History of Tom Jones, by Henry Fielding, which, as it has more personages brought into the story than any thing of the poetic kind I have ever seen; so all those personages have characters peculiar to them, in so much, that there is not even an host or an hostess upon the road, hardly a servant, who is not distinguished in that way; in short, I never saw any thing that was so much ani- mated, and, as I may say, all alive with characters and man- ners, as the history of T’om Jones.?**® In a footnote Monboddo allows very high praise to the plot of Tom Jones. ‘“The fable of this piece is, I think, an ex- traordinary effort both of genius and art; for, though it be very complex taking in as great a variety of matter as, I be- lieve, any heroic fable, it is so simple as to be easily compre- hended in one view. And it has this peculiar excellency, that every incident of the almost infinite variety which the author has contrived to introduce into it, contributes, some way or other, to bring on the catastrophe, which is so artfully wrought up, and brought about by a change of fortune, so sudden and surprising, that it gives the reader all the pleasure of a well written tragedy or comedy. And, therefore, as I hold the in- vention and the composition of the fable to be the chief beauty of every poem, I must be of opinion, that Mr. Fielding was one of the greatest poetical geniuses of his age.””"” Farther on, Monboddo pays a tribute to Fielding’s “‘wit” (i.e., “the uncommon turn given to the thought. . . which 120 Of the Origin and Progress of Language, III, 134-135. 121 Jhid., III, 298 note. 4 By ry i PP es 2. 4 iam | ie e.5% ian , ie +) Fi ~*de erence SE Sistine settee WE iptentebpdanen leer SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 229 a tt eserin otherwise would be nothing but plain sense”), saying that there is “no less wit than manners and characters” in Tom Ad mie: Lat ae tna ttee i" Jones; he will not quote instances, “‘because they are to be ee found in every page of the work.?22 And jn still another place he says: “I do not know any work in English, nor indeed Ad-n04eb@ err ae Saeyene nee. any work, in which there is more humour, as well as wit, than in . . . Tom Jones. All the characters in it are charac- ters of humour, that is, of the ridiculous kind, except that of Mr. Allworthy, Jones himself, Sophia, and Blifil, who is a complete villain, and, perhaps, two or three more; but he has tre esl biter ae taken care never to mix his wit with his humour; for all the wit in the piece is for himself, or, at least he does not put it into the mouth of his characters of humour.”?22 Lord Mon- boddo, though eccentric (he scandalized his own generation by suggesting that men were derived from monkeys! ), was — a Pe Peds. nl emkieomae aes ee ed rH at ee ee i not only an eminent magistrate but a Greek scholar and a rhetorician of considerable prominence. His praise of Fielding in The Origin and Progress of Language was significant of the fact that learned men were now deigning to regard him as worthy of scholarly consideration. Frequently quoted, it was influential in bringing about a_ higher appreciation of the novelist’s works. Less enthusiastic than Monboddo, but notable as coming from the celebrated master of Tunbridge School, was the criticism of Fielding by the Rev. Vicesimus Knox. “The cul- tivated genius of Fielding,” he declares,** in his Essays (1777), “entitles him to a high rank among the classics. His works exhibit a series of pictures drawn with all the descrip- tive fidelity of a Hogarth. They are highly entertaining, and will always be read with pleasure.” Speaking as a schoolmaster, Knox admits that Fielding occasionally discloses ‘scenes, which may corrupt a mind unseasoned by experience”’;*?° even Richardson was not, he felt, in this respect unexceptionable. te ay iif i ik 2 ey Pad ef : y er oa lage! 122 Of the Origin and Progress of Language, Ill, 328-329. md btd AN, aavenia *24 Knox’s Essays, new ed., London, 1782, I, 69. 128 Tbid., 1, 69. Leben dita sa bot) Lea itthishelieiaiabetieb tied ha ee eT a TRL cinta. ele tte ee Oot Ain aeteege chee a. Ci peer peti re OT Sn delete eyFETE SETI Asa eed a) Se Pe ST ee tt SE SES 28 ea Seer a tee nn een ert al Er ea 4 Ce pee aT Pty te F. a eae re ane 7 - *threngueewcs, ve “ . , ot; apa 230 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Novel-reading was not for children anyway; for a boy “will not study old Lilly, while he can read Pamela and Tom Jones.” On the other hand, older people “may always find agreeable refreshment, after severer study, in the amusing pages”. cf Fielding, who as a writer of fiction “‘yields to lescription of manners.”**" Knox evidently regards but it was something few in the « him in the main as a mere entertainer; for a popular “moral” essayist who was not only a clergyman but a schoolmaster to concede to the author of Tom Jones a “high rank among the classics.” Stil] another notice of Fielding by a writer who was reputed for his learning was the well-known estimate by the gram- marian and critic, James Harris,—that “sound sullen scholar,” —which appeared (posthumously) in 1781. In the old days, Harris was acquainted with both the Richardsons and tHe Fieldings. Back in the year 1745, as Mr. de Castro recently pointed out, Harris had gone bail*** with Fielding for Arthur Collier, brother of Jane and Margaret, though it may have been Fielding who paid the money. He is said to have helped Sarah Fielding with her translation of Xenophon and to have contributed some pieces to her Familiar Letters; and it has been surmised that he may have made some slight contribution to The Covent-Garden Journal. No doubt he thought he was doing very well by his former acquaintance when he casually mentioned “a witty Friend of mine, who . . . used pleas- antly, tho’ perhaps rather freely, to damn the man, who in- vented Fifth Acts”; and added as a footnote: So said the celebrated HENRY FIELDING, who was a respect- able person both by Education and Birth, having been bred at Eton School and Leyden, and being lineally descended from an Earl of Denbigh. His JOSEPH ANDREWS and TOM JONES may be called Master-pieces in the COMIC EPOPEE, which none since have 126 Knox’s Essays, I, 71. 127 « rT: a - < [ ~~ fe oo ee . : Winter Evenings,” No. CXIV (in The British Essayssts, edited by Berguer, London, 1823, XLIV, 108). 128 Aloo: ae : / Notes and Queries, London, 12 S., II, 106 (August 5, 1916).ent gts oie een aah ek et New SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 231 “ a ~e equalled, tho’ multitudes have imitated; and which he was peculiarly qualified to write in the manner he did, both from his Life, his Learning, and his Genius. Had his Life been Jess irregular (for irregular it was, and spent in a promiscuous intercourse with persons of a// ranks) his Pictures of Human kind had neither been so various, nor so natural. Had he possest less of Literature, he could not have infused such a spirit of Classical Elegance. Had his Genius been less fertile in Wit and Humour, he could not have maintained that uninterrupted Pleasantry, which never suf- fers his Reader to feel fatigue.129 This tribute to the novelist’s “learning” and “classical ele- gance,” coming from a man who had a reputation for schol- arship, was a notable addition to Fielding criticism, even though accompanied by a manifest and priggish disapprobation of that author’s alleged “promiscuous intercourse with persons of all ranks.” Another learned man of note Gin Dr. Parr’s opinion “no critic of his day excelled him”) who delighted in Fielding was Dr. Burney’s friend, the Rev. Thomas Twining, translator of Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry. From the time when he had "Just read” the reference to Blifil and Black George in The Letters of Junius, October 6, 1771,” to the end of the cen- tury, April 10, 1799, when he referred to Mrs. Slipslop’s “figure of ironing,”** Twining’s enthusiasm is apparent. On October 27, 1782, he wrote his brother that his “present read- ings” were “Plato, Aristotle, and Tom Jones.”**? It is inter- re bee = Ts pete ale Dt api i f Fa] if ee et Terry en eee tes nee *2° Harris’s “Philological Inquiries,” in Works, 1781, III, 163-164. +80 Recreations . . of a Country Clergyman, London, 1882, p. 22 (letter of October 6, 1771); p. 234 (letter of April 10, 1799). Other references are: January 27, 1776 (to Joseph Andrews), p. 333 March 14, 1783 (to Tom Jones), p. 118. *81 Francis Grose, the antiquarian, devoted his twenty-second Grumbler to an essay “On Slip-Slopping”—taking his cue from “a character humourously delineated by Fielding, in one of the most popu- lar of his novels.”—T he Olio, London, 1792. 132 Selections from Papers of the Twining Family, London, 1887, p. 109. eS wien, “Ae tenerve Genie. pore pees ned eal set PA dees AS pen ae ve PO path ot rey ry » s iSCited essorrrsairees Tele [esos r ar oh oe (SP TELSESS 232 FIELDING THE NOVELIST esting to observe what the learned translator of Aristotle has to say about one of Richardson’s characters. In the course of his rendering of the Treatise he asks, “Is not the Lovelace of Richardson more out of nature, more improbable, than the Caliban of Shakspeare? The latter is, at least, consistent, I can imagine such a monster as Caliban: I never could im- agine such a man as Lovelace.”*** On Fielding’s characters, Twining made no such strictures; and he hugely enjoyed their creator’s witty sallies. Harris’s story to the effect that Henry Fielding “fused ‘to execrate the man who invented fifth acts’ 2 so caught his fancy that he gave it place in his notes to the Treatise itself. A greater lover of the novelist than Twining was that other translator of Aristotle, Henry J. Pye, the laureate, author of A Commentary Illustrative of the Poetic of Aristotle. The idea of examining Fielding’s prose epics in the light of Aris- totelian criticism was not a new one; Beattie, taking a hint from Murphy, had asserted that both Tom Jones and Amelia would stand the test. But it was the author of the Commen- tary who reversed the process and endeavored to establish the validity of the famous treatise on poetry by reference not merely to the classics but to the works of fiction and particu- larly to those of Fielding. We are not here concerned with the many allusions to specific characters and incidents of the great novels which abound in the Commentary. And the au- thor’s performance, it must be confessed, is not fun) to his ee When, for example, he tells us that in the “catastro- ” of Tom Jones “‘the Rehanion of Sophia on her meeting” a her lover, her ‘‘obstinate refusal of him, and her extraor- dinary mode of afterwards consenting to an immediate mar- riage with him” are “perfectly unnatural,” we prefer to side with the creator of Sophia rather than with her critic. But Pye’s observations are well worth exhuming. He has read his Fielding carefully, discriminatingly, enthusiastically; he boldly takes 1838 ~ ‘ . . . Twining’s translation of Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, second ed., 1812, I, 184 mote. The first edition appeared in 1789. ses bd. Ll, ax Penenpepa@tednimegay pyiad ein! hret tena po ae St PN aabepeent aed Se erent ne oe “e es 3 7 FE . *SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 233 issue not only with Bishop Hurd—that disparager of prose fiction in general—but with that disparager of Fielding and eulogist of Richardson, Dr. Johnson; and he is courageous enough to say—thereby furnishing matter for speculation to Coleridge, no doubt—that the Oedipus I’yrannus, though a “masterpiece” of plot-building, is in some respects “by no means of equal merit” with Tom Jones.1* Pye, the laureate, long since buried deep in oblivion, was even then a lesser light; but the name of Dr. Joseph Warton was luminous for several decades yet to follow. Nothing shows more clearly the change that had come about in the estimation of Fielding since his own day than the fact that Warton, who, on his visit to Fielding back in 1746 was “Inexpressibly di- verted,” took occasion a generation later to pay a tribute to the novelist’s erudition. In the first volume of his Essay on Pope, in 1756, Warton had referred to both Cervantes and Le Sage, but, in spite of his admiration, made no mention of Fielding; in the second volume, 1782, he wrote: It “‘may be worth ob- serving, that the chief of those who have excelled in works of wit and humour, have been men of extensive learning. We may instance in Lucian, Cervantes, Quevedo, Rabelais, Ar- buthnot, Fielding, and Butler.*** It is true that Warton found it “not easy to say, why Fielding should call his Joseph Andrews, excellent as it is, an imitation of this manner liter the “serious” manner of Cervantes]” ;'*7 it is also true that in making his oft-quoted pronouncement that the madness of Clementina rivaled that of Lear, he paid a higher compli- ment to Richardson than he ever accorded Fielding; but in his edition of Pope’s Works in 1797, a few years before his death, he went so far as to declare that Fielding was the rival of Jonathan Swift. Objecting to that slur of Swift’s (see the *8° Pye’s Commentary, London, 1792, p. 358. For other references see pp. 98, 100, 182, 279, 309, 313, 314) 321, 335) 357) 373) 4379 4475 454, 459, 463, 562. *86 Warton, J., 4 Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, Lon- don, 1782, II, pp. 403-404. Le7 1 bid= li aon Pre irs a ee bee ee een eam inen en anh qeteeet ; F 4 iif ered i ies ei wy mete” en oe ee <> syria of bebepreat Py hee 4 f+ mye aaa ISI re weeeessl al oeats setae Cer ae eek pees =v Sian rr Tr 5 ee WN ai ee aa eet erry Cee ort aoa T hina dpptoatantns Se Seba oe oy Bsmene: Ye ae tare Sane ee ee ere ree ee — : iS - ere heen ee 234 FIELDING THE NOVELIST 5 of Pope, Warton added this comment: “Little did Swift im- Ratsody), which had long done duty as a footnote in editions agine, that this very Fielding would hereafter equal him in works of humour, and excell him in drawing and supporting characters, and in the artful conduct and plan of a Comic Epopée.’”’ When men like Beattie, Monboddo, and Warton found it worth their while to praise Fielding in works of learning, it is not strange that the popular and elegant Hugh Blair—who feared that novels as a class might be considered “‘too insig- nificant” to deserve ‘‘particular notice”—was compelled to in- clude a brief mention of him in his Rhetoric, published in 1783. “Mr. Fielding’s novels,” runs the passage, “are highly distinguished for their humour; a humour which, if not of the most refined and delicate kind, is original, and peculiar to himself. The characters which he draws are lively and natural, and marked with the strokes of a bold pencil. The general scope of his stories is favourable to humanity and goodness of heart; and in Tom Jones, his greatest work, the artful con- duct of the fable, and the subserviency of all the incidents to the winding up of the whole, deserve much praise.”*** Of Richardson, Blair said, ‘“The most moral of all our novel writers is Richardson”; and for more than a generation chil- dren in school were catechized upon this point. As we turn the pages of an ancient and honorable copy of this book, which was the most popular rhetoric for several decades, how odd it seems to find among the questions at the chapter-end, “Who is the most moral of all our novel writers?” and to picture our ancestors dutifully answering, “Richardson.” But Blair had done his best by Fielding; and his influence—whatever we may think of him now—is not to be despised. While occupy- ing the chair of rhetoric at Edinburgh for nearly a quarter of a century, he had won so high a place in criticism, that, when 188 The Works of Pope, edited by Joseph Warton and others, Lon- don, 1797, V, 161. 189 Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric, London, 1834, pp. 509-510. Printed “verbatim from the original copy.”SCHOLARLY RECOGNITION 235 his Lectures were published, they were accepted, as a recent writer has put it, “as the supreme code of the laws of taste.” Finally—to go a little beyond the limits of this chapter— came that sonorous praise of Gibbon’s which has reverberated down through generations; at last Fielding had won a dis- tinction which was on a par wifh the best of those which had been conferred upon Richardson. So highly did the great his- torian esteem the novelist that in his Decline and Fal] of the Roman Empire he referred to him in a footnote as a “great master,” whose Journey from this World to the Next—which c in his opinion ‘‘may be considered as the history of human na- *’—he was “almost tempted to quote”’ as an authority. ture The splendid passage which everyone knows, however, is to be found not in the Decline and Fall but in the Autobiography. Our “immortal” Fielding’s “Romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners,” he declared, “will out- live the palace of the Escurial, and the imperial Eagle of the house of Austria.”*** This is in Memoir D, written, according to Murray, in the years “1790-91.” While composing Memoir E (“March 2, 1791”’),1*? Gibbon indulges the hope that “‘one day his mind will be familiar to the grandchildren of those who are yet unborn.” He was thinking, he tells us in a note, of that “first of ancient or modern Romances,” Tom Jones, and of the “beautiful” invocation to Fame, in which ‘“‘this proud sentiment, this feast of fancy” was “enjoyed by the Genius of Fielding.”*** Even before this splendid eulogy was —by Lord Sheffield—made public property, the great historian had made at least two converts. His lordship’s vivacious daugh- ter, Maria Josepha, who according to the story assisted her *#0 J. B. Bury’s edition of The Decline and Fall, London, 1897, III, 363. “4. The Memoirs of . . . Edward Gibbon, edited by G. B. Hill, London, 1900, p. s. “42 The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon, edited by John Murray, second ed., London, 1897, pp. 346-347, 347 note, 419. 148 The Memoirs of . . . Edward Gibbon, edited by G. B. Hill, PP. 243, 243 note. Shi let are Se een ere Fae tee ate et Sy a nn teen) bert mseietal Sitaueert reaccas’ ven at pps a yr rg . Lite ee > Spt ve hte a Ore eae ' 4 Nal 13h ae, cP Sf236 FIELDING THE NOVELIST her in piecing together the manuscript, wrote on February 1794, “Aunt Serena and I read Tom Jones by turns; but fat 2; 99144 I am afraid Aunt’s turn comes oftenest and lasts longest. 144 The Girlhood of Maria Josepha Holroyd, London, etc., 1896, p. 268. Hes si eat 2 oe he ie eh ia We He RP i peeepens areas adie er ean 5 a ee mCHAPALER X The End of the Century 1784-1800 O have your name mentioned by Gibbon, declared Thackeray, is like having it emblazoned on the dome of St. Peter’s; but this Statement, though true enough ultimately, does not exactly describe the situation at the end of the eighteenth century. Even then, of course, Gib- bon’s praise of Fielding was an Important influence. In a letter dated October 7, 1788, Lord Chedworth, for example, won- ders that he “was so stupid as never to read” Fielding’s Jour- ney from this World to the Next, until he came across Gib- bon’s allusion to the work as “the romance of a great master, which may be considered as the history of human nature.” “Fielding,” Lord Chedworth continues, “was certainly a great master of human nature; he ranks very high in my estimate: far, far above Sterne: as a moralist he may be compared with Johnson; I mean for knowledge of the human heart, and I am yet to be convinced that he yields to him; perhaps to few writers in the language. The first indisputably is Shake- speare.””* It must be remembered that to many persons at the century-end Gibbon was a forbidden writer.? Later still, Elizabeth Barrett in her girlhood was commanded by her father not to look into the works of Gibbon or into Fielding’s Lom Jones, to which injunction, she says, she was literally obedient, reading instead the equally “‘irreligious” Hume.® * Lord Chedworth’s Letters, Norwich, 1840, p. iii. *It is significant that a certain “R. R.,” who reviewed the Miscel- laneous Works in The European Magazine (XXX, 23) in July, 1796, transcribes the passage about the “nobility of the Spencers” and the Faery Queen but utterly ignores the part concerning Fielding and Tom Jones! ° The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, New York and London, 1899, I, 404. ato ee ret ~~ 7 ePorisintetediecas othr ht ere hae eet eb Hee os ae be ee oral Cert lr ea pearance bale id ee eee Leta a pti h yh « ere ra ee teres eet ohn t athens ae > ewan bterwanre cele, Pe’ Pe ens re) f +f z s} 4 ! apy oe- ne *pawlngeteect ap tem Ba arenoe te Pe tele 238 FIELDING THE NOVELIST We see, then, that even when the great honor of being eulo- 1 by Gibbon came to Fielding, that distinction was not o1ZeC known to the world, though at the immediately and widely end of another generation ‘Thomas Dibdin, the bibliographer, made thé statement that the Autobiography had been “perhaps the most popular production, of its kind, of modern times.’”” Meanwhile, in the closing years of the century, t he old bat- tles raged over the respective merits of Fielding and Richard- son, with occasional debates on the subject of Fielding and Smollett. Compared with the popularity of Richardson, how- ever, that of Smollett, in spite of his Scotch supporters, was not at all formidable. “About 1780,” writes Andrew Lang, ‘the vendors of children’s books issued abridgments of “Tom Jones’ and ‘Pamela,’ ‘Clarissa’ and ‘Joseph Andrews,’ adapted to the needs of infant minds. It was a curious enterprise, certainly, but the booksellers do not seem to have produced ‘Every Boy’s Roderick Random,’ or ‘Peregrine Pickle for the Young.’ Smollett, in short, is less known than Fielding.”® Still Smollett had his friends, chief among whom were Dr. John Moore, author of Zeluco; Anderson, his biographer; his old friend Alexander Carlyle; Lord Gardenstone; Campbell, the poet; and, most partisan of all, William Godwin. With Dr. John Moore the case rests between Fielding and Smollett. Despite the fact that he is Smollett’s editor, and grants to that author “‘strong masculine humour, just observa- tions on life, and a great variety of original characters,” Moore does not claim for him “‘invention”;°® Fielding, on the other hand, he commends not merely for “powers” of “in- vention,” but for Cervantic “‘style and manner” (in Joseph Andrews), “knowledge of human nature, » and “skilful plot.’ In the opinion of Alexander Carlyle, the Scotch Pres- byterian divine, Fielding “only excelled” Smollett “in giving 4 The Library Companion, second ed., London, 1825, p. 548. 5 Lang’s Adventures among Books, London, etc., 1905, pp- 175-176. 6 “The Life of Dr. Smollett,” in Works, London, 1797, I, clxxix. 7 “A View of the Progress of Romance,” in Works, I, lxxxix,THE END OF THE CENTURY 239 a dramatic story to his novels,” and “was inferior to him in the true comic vein.’® The eccentric Lord Gardenstone went so far as to say that for “the talent of drawing a natural and original character, Dr. Smollet of all English writers, ap- proaches nearest to a resemblance of the inimitable Shake- speare.”” Here and there in occasional verse his lordship re- ferred to Fielding; Eng. FIELDING, and twenty others, tell us, That long since an Olympic race—!° an imitation of Horace (I, i); and a line in a poem called “The Newspaper”: Goldsmith how slow, how rapid Fielding wrote;14 but he severely criticized a number of Fielding’s plays,’? and never did he become so eloquent over Tom Jones as over . Random’s tuneful reed.13 Campbell, the poet, was, in his earlier years, a stout champion of Smollett, whose grotesque characters used to throw him jnto “paroxysms of laughter,” and whose occasional romantic scenes were much to his liking. Everyone has heard of the cele- brated Fielding-Smollett disputation between Campbell and Crabbe at Holland House, which lasted “the better part of a morning,” and in which neither gained the victory;** but a fact of still greater importance has never received sufficient publicity. Realizing at last the greatness of Fielding, and de- siring to make amends for his boyish prejudice against him, ° Autobiography of . . . Alexander Carlyle, Edinburgh and Lon- don, 1860, p. 26s. ® Lord Gardenstone’s Miscellanies, second ed., Edinburgh, 1792, p. 194. 10 Tbid., p. 27. 11 Tbid., p. 236. *? Ibid., pp. 120, 151, 155. 18 Tbid., p. 103. ** Huchon, R., George Crabbe and his Times, London, 1907, p. 394. It was the morning of June 26, 1817. mionegas ee eee oe OIF Os es F “3 7 A : A «f' eta “i ea | “i ps a : ea we et “ah eT ey ee tj eel ea A 3 ‘eef aie os ~— — Ce ees Fee PSs sue, ob oka eee ceneiaemet baie eee ra240 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Campbell wrote, “I had not then mind enough to grasp and appreciate the thoughts of that admirable writer.”*° More ven- turesome than most of his contemporaries was Robert Ander- son, who, in his account of Smollett in the British Poets (1794),'° asserted that “Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphry Clinker . _ undoubtedly . . . rival the pro- ductions of the moral, the pathetic, but tiresome Richardson, and the ingenious but diffuse Fielding, with all his knowledge of the human heart.”’ Conceding that Fielding “repeatedly dis- plays a thorough acquaintance with nature,” he declares that “after perusing the common place introductory discus- sions and diffuse narrative of “Tom Jones,’ ‘Joseph Andrews,’ and ‘Amelia,’ we never quit them with such reluctance as we feel on closing the pages of Smollett.”*? This telltale argu- ment, which needs no comment, is included here for the in- fluence which it apparently exerted later upon Scott, who, ac- cording to his own testimony, wrote his famous defense of Smollett with Anderson’s Life before him. Strangely enough, the most severe attack on Fielding by the adherents of Smollett was made by the Englishman, William Godwin, whose puzzling and equivocal attitude toward him now demands our attention. Endeavoring in his Enquirer cc to support the thesis that the “‘ordinary standard of elegant composition at the present day [1797 ]” was higher than it had formerly been, Godwin deliberately set about to disparage Fielding’s style.** After a prefatory concession to the effect that Tom Jones is “certainly one of the most admirable per- cc. formances in the world,” that the “structure of the story per- haps has never been equalled,” and that there is no work which 15 Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell, edited by W. Beattie, New York, 1850, I, 67-68. 16 See also Anderson’s prefatory “Life” of Smollett in Miscellaneous Works, second ed., Edinburgh, 1800, I, ciil. 17 Tn the “Life” of Smollett prefixed to “The Poetical Works” (in Poets of Great Britain, Vol. X), Edinburgh, 1794, p. 946. 18 The Enquirer, London, 1797, Part II, Essay XII (“Of English Style”), Section 6, pp. 455, 462, 464, 467, 470. Maer terete ee nd aS re ee ‘ a letra ne aaa re ~ - —e eile ae cee eet penteks ES ettTHE END OF THE CENTURY 241 “more frequently or more happily excites emotions of the most elevated and delicious generosity,” Godwin begins his tirade. In his opinion Fielding’s style is “glaringly inferior to the con- stituent parts of the work. It is feeble, costive and slow. It cannot boast of periods elegantly turned or delic: ately pointed.” Furthermore, though Tom Jones is “Interspersed with long discourses of religious or moral instruction,” these “have no novelty of conception or impressive sagacity of remark, and are little superior to what any reader might hear at the next parish-church.” “The general turn of the work,” continues Godwin, ‘‘is intended to be sarcastic and ironical”; but the “style of irony, or ace MTSU. In which nearly the Ww whole work is written” is a “hide-bound sportiveness,”” which “hard, pedantic and unnatural.” It is true that the author’s “efforts” in the novel of Tom Jones, “in the character of Parson Adams,” and in “‘a few other Instances, are exquisitely meritorious” ; but “when Fielding delights us, he appears to go out of heels The general character of his genius, will probably be found to be jejune and puerile. For the truth of this remark, we may appeal, in particular, to his comedies.” Then he adds, “ Everything that is the reverse of this may be affirmed of Smollet,” in whose “lightest sketches, there is nothing frivolous, trifling and effeminate.” It may be im- agined that what the frigid and unhumorous Godwin really pects & In Fielding was a lack of “elegance” and ere 3 as we read on in the essay we come upon this state- ment: “It is the office of the poet and the novelist to adorn the style of their characters, and to give to real life the most im- pressive form.” Incidentally that singular crux in Hazlitt’s criticism (1815)—to the effect that the only particular in which Fielding is deficient is style——m: ry possibly be explained In part by Ee great admiration of that critic for William Godwin. Thus Smollett had his followers, who, as we shall see, in- creased in number at a subsequent period; but Andrew Lang’s statement still holds—at least, if we may believe the testimony of an eminent Frenchman. Chateaubriand, who lived in Eng- oe aT as ee ee etches Se ara ap anethemebamen ne Lee Ce ee “ye > il — s I He PN oe ied i cnet eter ete eed - ease PY Pe ame % raat me este Proved 4 Oy 5 Se eeenll a. ee er Sees Tene hall 2 tot hy peewee eeadck 5 : fi a M ‘ 3] " i . ve Minin oe <9aS RO Se eee men ise, Py dit ie oe or Mieeyne. cen - sheath one a eas Serie 242 FIELDING THE NOVELIST land during the last decade of the century, tells us that during this period: “Richardson dormoit oublié, ses compatriotes trouvoient dans son style des traces de la société inférieure, au sein de laquelle il avoit vecu. Fielding se soutenoit bien; Sterne, entrepreneur d’originalite, étoit passé.””*® Smollett he does not even mention. Although what he says of the lack of popularity of all these writers is unquestionably exaggerated, there is some truth in the estimate. Fielding was gaining; Richardson, losing; while Smollett was held in less esteem than either. As a matter of fact, Richardson was very far from being “‘oublié”’; for some of the most glowing praise of him belongs to the end of the century. In the Rev. Martin Sherlock—whom Walpole pleasantly notices in his letters,”° though he cannot agree with him in the pronouncement which Richardson found one of his most fervid encomi- follows asts. This reverend gentleman challenges the “universe” to “name” him “three men, chosen from all ages and all coun- tries, equal** to Newton, Shakspeare, and the author of Cla- rissa”; declares that the “greatest effort of genius that perhaps was ever made, was forming the plan” of that book, and the accomplishment next in rank, “executing that plan”; and finds “whole volumes” in Richardson that “‘it is impossible to read without crying and sobbing from beginning to end.” Ex- travagant as this outburst seems to us now, it was not so re- garded at the time; many years later John Nichols esteemed the passage so highly that he gave it a commanding place in the account of Richardson which he prepared for his Literary Anecdotes. A greater man than Sherlock—Isaac Disraeli— wrote in the same vein when he asserted, in his Literary Char- acter, that “‘a Homer and a Richardson, like Nature, open a embracing a circuit of human volume large as life itself 19 Euvres Completes de Chateaubriand, Paris, 1837, XXXIV, 282 (“Essai sur la Littérature Angloise”). 20 Walpole’s Letters, edited by Mrs. Toynbee, Oxford, 1904, XII, 169, 170. 21 New Letters from an English Traveller, London, 1781, p. 204. ) 992 : ““ Letters on Several Subjects, London, 1781, I, 223; 153-154.THE END OF THE CENTURY 243 existence!”** And, if we may allude to the passage once again, the celebrated Joseph Warton, whose prestige was unques- tioned, regarded the madness of Clementina in Richardson’s Grandison as rivaling that of Shakespeare’s Lear. Still, even the devotees of Richardson were sensible of his waning popu- larity. Martin Sherlock cried out against a certain “coldness” toward his favorite, and found it “astonishing” how “many men of parts I have met with who speak of him with con- tempt.’”** Disraeli protests that the “censure which the Shake- speare of novelists has incurred . . . is extremely un just.”’”° And that veteran campaigner, Miss Anna Seward, the “Swan of Lichfield,” becoming alarmed at the turn of popular favor, abjured “the coarse unfeeling taste,” of those who preferred "Fielding’s romances” to the immortal volumes of Richard- son,” “the highest efforts of genius in our language, next to Shakespeare’s plays.” One of the most notable and enthusiastic Fieldingites was the dramatist Richard Cumberland, whose Henry (1795)— which will be discussed farther on—was destined to be the only elaborate imitation of a Fielding novel to survive entire oblivion. As early as 1786, in his Odserver, Cumberland had spoken his mind so boldly that all the Richardsonians were up in arms. Miss Seward, for example, in a letter to that fervente of Richardson, Mrs. Piozzi, February 13, 1789, declares that she never wishes “‘to read a novel written by one who has pro- claimed . . . Clarissa inimical to the right formation of the female mind.”*" Clarissa, Cumberland had asserted, though modeled “upon the most studied plan of morality,” was a most unnatural fiction, inasmuch as what the celebrated heroine “is made to do, and what she is allowed to omit,” were 23 The Literary Character, London, 1818, p. 169. In his “Preface” Disraeli says that the first “sketch” of this work appeared “in 1795.” 24 Letters on Several Subjects, I, 153-154. °° Curiosities of Literature, new ed., London, 1866, p. 199. 2° Letters of Anna Seward, Edinburgh, 1811, I, 293 (letter of May 10, 1787). 27 Ibid., Il, 244 (letter IL D.Q)- rr ieetee te een en ae 0 loruan sas” ees = SSE Sheree eae Nos m4 Pepe bedihabiehh od tit card cod 4 on ro, a Set ari tte Lo ee cate eee « Hi on = ee ‘es! ae, er Pia e ers - rh ie) ¥ Fem P NHN eereanns gal nee aera tatehee ee a eensPES RET Pe PE aes ed Cen eee mar SAL Ct edo Pe EE STE af a erga ames S coiheet heen Seba eae eran Se oa Tn 244 FIELDING THE NOVELIST “equally out of the regions of nature”; in short, Richardson’s masterpiece was “one of the books, which a prudent parent will put under interdiction.” Cumberland admits that “per- haps” the “epistolary mode of writing may be best adapted” to “nathetic” themes; but Fielding, he thinks, “‘pursued the more natural mode” of telling a story; and, though—at this time— he regards the introduction of initial chapters as an unsafe “practice” for imitators, he believes that Fielding “has exe- cuted” these “‘so pleasantly, that we are reconciled to the in- c terruption.” To conclude, the ‘inimitable novel of The Foundling” is “universally allowed,” says Cumberland, to be “the most perfect work of its sort in ours, or probably any 22 other language.’ At the end of the century, debate over questions of fiction was much more general than ever before; violent attacks on the novel and spirited defenses of it occupied many a paragraph in periodical or pamphlet. The day was past when a Hurd could discourse upon romance and ignore both Richardson and Fielding.” In 1785 there appeared an extended treatise in English (apparently the first of its kind) on the history of fiction; this was The Progress of Romance, by Mrs. Clara Reeve, who, by the way, had always been a great admirer of Richardson. In her Champion of Virtue, some years before, she had exclaimed, ‘“‘Happy the writer” who “like Richardson” can not only “excite the attention,” but also “direct it to some useful, or at least innocent end’’;*° and before her Progress of Romance was printed she went over the proof sheets with Richardson’s daughter, with whom, she says, she has “lived many years in intimate friendship.” 28 “The Observer,” No. XXVII, in The British Essayists, edited by Chalmers, London, 1817, xxxviii, 180, 181, 182. 29 See an Essay on Novels, Edinburgh, 1793, by Alexander Thom- son, who defends the genre against Bishop Hurd. 8° The Champion of Virtue, London, 1777, p. iv. 81 The Gentleman’s Magazine, LVI, 117 (February, 1786). For the account of the quarrel between Mrs. Reeve and Miss Seward regarding Richardson’s novels, see this article and Miss Seward’s (LVI, 15-17).THE END OF THE CENTURY 245 The characters of Mrs. Reeve’s little dialogue are two rather prim ladies, Euphrasia and Sophronia, and an equally sedate and deferential gentleman, Hortensius. After both ladies have warmly commended Richardson, Euphrasia says: ~The next Author . . . whom Hortensius feared ] should forget, is Henry Fielding, Esq., whose works are universally known and admired.” The ladies are then made to point out Fielding’s faults; Hortensius, to call attention to his virtues, Euphrasia thinks Fielding “superior” to Richardson in “wit and learning,” but “inferior” in “morals and exemplary char- acters”; she is afraid Tom Jones may be bad for “young men of warm passions.” To this the other spinster agrees, saying, “There are many objectionable scenes in Fielding’s works” ; and the dialogue thus proceeds: Horrensius. . . . I allow there is some foundation for your re- marks, nevertheless jin all Fielding’s works, virtue has always the superiority she ought to have, and challenges the honours that are justly due to her, the general tenor of them js jn her favour, and it were happy for us, if our language had no greater cause of complaint in her behalf. Eupurasia. There we will agree with you. Hortensius. . . . Fielding’s Amelia is in much lower estimation than his Joseph Andrews, or Tom Jones; which have both re- ceived the stamp of public applause. . . . “The Genius of Cer- vantes (says Dr. Smmollet) was transfused into the Novels of Fie/d- ing, who painted the characters, and ridiculed the follies of life, with equal strength, humour and propriety.” Eupurasia. We are willing to join with you in paying the tribute due to Fielding’s Genius, humour, and knowledge of mankind, but [getting in a parting shot] he certainly painted human nature as 7 1s, rather than as 7 ought to be,** Despite the fact that she is working somewhat against the grain, Mrs. Reeve bears testimony that in 1785 Fielding’s works were “universally known and admired.” Though her 82 The Progress of Romance, 1, 139-141. “Zeluco” Moore, in his Progress of Romance, ignored Mrs. Reeve’s volume (to the surprise of Anderson) ; and so, in 1814, did Dunlop. mL bee ee en eeeremenea a ees ae ry . ed bite ees rer He Faeyr 4 ~7 ny A fewest ete eee ses i ery teeters ee et eet Sieteeelnten es beta ee ee RE a aan yosemnmbrenterengupialags! a eran poknaths te rrree eae vera at sh elbbpiaparcia, 2 ——— “ety f a] fe) et De 4 Pf] 5 3 a as Hy t H ee en oP rs _ Seiuhed pines ank eee ee eee Sol oe oe Se an eee a es eo Sy Poe Ct bates oe teatis ete ee Roa rhe PS re eS fe ae ae a252 FIELDING THE NOVELIST premier novelist.”* In a little skit of his on the fin de siécle craze for fiction he refers to Richardson also: O LEAVE novéls, ye Mauchline belles— Ye’re safer at your spinning wheel! Such witching books are baited hooks For rakis like Rob Mossgiel. Your fine Tom Jones and Grandtsons They make your youthful fancies reel! They heat your brains, and fire your veins, And then you’re prey for Rob Mossgiel.°® Sentimentalist though he was, Burns held Richardson’s char- acters—those “beings of another sphere”—to be less true to nature than the people of Fielding, who were more to his taste. As we look through his correspondence with Mrs. Dunlop and with his “Clarinda” (Mrs. M’Lehose) we notice that the celebrated novels were a matter of common interest to all three. On receiving Burns’s autobiography, Mrs. Dunlop wrote (September 9, 1787) that it had given her “more pleasure than Richardson or Fielding could have afforded me.”°® And again she asks (March 14, 1788), “Who ever read Tom Jones but felt that there are even reasons that vindicate a man’s em- bracing . . . [the profession] of a highwayman . . . W here he seems to ennoble it?”®” Some time before (January 9, 1788), “Clarinda” had asked, “Did you ever read Fielding’s Amelia? If you have not, I beg you would. There are scenes in it, tender, domestic scenes, which I have read over and over, e!”°® Burns’s reply, with feelings too delightful to describ 54 Heinrich Molenaar’s Robert Burns’ Beziehungen zur Literatur, Erlangen, 1899. 55 Henley and Henderson, The Poetry of Robert Burns, Edinburgh, 1897, IV, 11 (Farming Memorandun, 1784). os Bea ber? Burns and Mrs. Dunlop, edited by W. Wallace, New York, 1898, I, 44. &t Tbid., I, 75-76. ene Correspondence between Burns and Clarinda, Edinburgh, 1843, p. 128. For Burns’s letter (January 10, 1788), see p. 131. ae i Pe ; | Meee baa ae Tt ; ~ “rk rereTHE END OF THE CENTURY 253 which he sent off the very next day, reads as follows: “Booth and Amelia I know well. Your sentiments on that subject are just and noble. “To be feelingly alive to ae and to unkindness,’ is a charming female character.”? After making due allowances for the tender relationship which ex- isted between the poet and his “Clarinda,” we must believe that he was sincere when he spoke of ne appreciation of Amelia; the union of humor and pathos in the book touched a vibrant chord in the heart of Burns. One may well believe, also, that by em phasizing true worth above money or place the novelist found a sympathetic listener in the poet who wrote, “A Man’s a Man for a’ that.” Rogers, despite his liking for Richardson, was a great ad- mirer of clita His comment on the device of the screen which, in his opinion, Sheridan discovered in Molly Seagrim’s bedroom, has already been noted. He was De iccccual in the fact that Horne Tooke read Tom Jones “again” while in the Tower (1794) ;°° and, as Miss Godden w rites, he “‘was heard to speak with great admiration” of that chapter (III, xiii) in Joseph Andrews “entitled ‘A curious Dialogue which passed between Mr Abraham Adams and Mr Peter Pounce:ssae On a famous evening at the home of Rogers the entire “company” agreed that “Don Quixote, Tom Jones, and Gil Blas, were unrivalled in that species e, composition.””°? None of the well-known poets, however, excelled in his de- votion to Fielding the obscure and ill-starred ‘Thomas Der- AOD vho left home as a boy of ten carrying in his pocket “the second volume” of Tom Jones, a book which, according to his own testimony, “determined him on this adventure.?® °® Rogers, Samuel, Recollections, London, 1859, p. 139. °° From a “MS. note by Dyce, in a copy of Joseph Andrews, now in the South Kensington Museum.”—Miss Godden’s Fielding, p. 135 note. °*! Recollections of the Table Talk of Samuel Rogers, New York, 1856, p. 249 note. 62 Raymond, J. G., The Life of Thomas Dermody, London, 1806, Peon. vate hee ethan eet ete et on ie pore arers ere ieee ee aoe Hea eee . Ryhleae a wh ' it tsecnonelh < ry eebebe Pree : Seer aebhetabs ete f ben ae = yr time ee - Ct ate a tee ee ny PoP Ee oe od a PG be et} Ne ee a 7 ar See eee See tt ah eva ti bed . H Rf a M rr 44 74 a] 25 i LA ol “7 ash H a fi Pe H , ere eer 5 ee Orr pw 5 4*4°% S hetphaamememins thea hee el a ao ae ee ee J = Fee pay rere Seay weekdonate met tn we oheew hn gr eaee male ee Cee ee or ee ee a a ere ha 254 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Dermody was never tired praising him. In one place he calls him ‘“‘that truly epic his- and in another, he says, ““Were I sure of sitting by covers the dust of Henry Fielding, of referring to Fielding and of . >) torlan j; the little hillock which es in the Factory’s burying-ground at Lisbon, I would who li 9963 not grudge the fatigue or expence Obes He can find no sweeter praise for Holcroft’s Alwyn than that “+ ranks “next to Fielding’s work” in possessing the “most af- journeying thither. fecting and sportive scenes that ever adorned” a novel.” In his ode ““To Comic Romance” his enthusiasm bursts forth in the following indifferent but laudatory verses: Next the gymnastic Parson [Parson Adams] caught the smile, In cassock’d wisdom, but resistless mirth; Created to inform, and glad the earth, And half allay the pastor’s gloomy toil. But soon the sun of Laughter [ T'o7 Jones] rose; 3urst through a cloudy host of foes, And rainbow wreaths of varying hues combin’d; With sweet instruction sooth’d the aching mind; 3risk sprightly warmth, a nymph divine, Flam’d in the radiance of each artless line. Amelia’s harrowing tale lay yet untold, Ripe in design, and in pure judgment bold: Domestic love there breathes his tender soul, And anxious nature trembles o’er the whole.® Fielding’s admirers at the end of the century were to be found in many different walks of life; statesmen, political economists, and architects, as well as poets and novelists, joined in his praise. Among this varied company may be mentioned the celebrated orator and statesman, Charles James Fox, who, on a trip to Paris in 1802, according to the Rev. Mr. 68 Raymond, J. G., The Life of Thomas Dermody, Il, 239 (Praelu- dium to “The Battle of the Bards”) ; II, 268. 64 Hazlitt’s Life of Holcroft, Waller and Glover ed., II, 280 (letter of June 15, 1796). 65 Dermody, Thomas, The Harp of Erin, London, 1807, II, 96-97:THE END OF THE CENTURY 255 Trotter, delighted in Nearing read aloud Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones.®* Sir Frederic Morton Eden, the English diplomatist and writer on political economy, com- mends®* in his State of the Poor . in England (1797) Fielding’s own treatise on the poor as showing, to use the words of Scott, “‘both the knowledge of the magistrate and the energy and expression of the novel writer.’?® Joseph Far- ington, the landscape painter, trav eling in Wales (in 1800), gives us in his Diary a pen picture of an inn- -keeper and his wife who put him “in mind of the descriptions of Fielding.” And the distinguished architect, James Cavanah Murphy, who visited Portugal in 1788, observes regretfully that i grave of “‘the celebrated Henry Fielding” was “‘without a monu- ment, or any other obsequious mark of distinction, suitable to his great talents and virtues.’°® Two years before, the French consul at Lisbon, the Chevalier de Saint-Marc de Meyrionet, had prepared a memorial for Fielding ; but for some reason it was refused admission into the cemetery.’° It was, however, given a place in the cloisters of the old Franciscan Convent, where Murphy saw it and, transcribing the verses, included them in his Travels in Portugal. The epitaph ended rather un- fortunately; for the author predicted that in centuries to come this monument would do honor not only to the name of Field- ing but to the French nation and, indeed, to the Chevalier himself. Murphy’s comment on this piece of vanity took sarcastic turn; but when his own Travels came out in French the translator retorted that there was “plus d’?humeur que de 66 See Landor’s Charles James Fox, ed. by S. Wheeler, London, 1907, PP. 106, 107, 110, 116, 142, 143; for the original passages, see Trot- ter’s Memoirs, London, 1811. °7 So, too, Dugald Stewart, the Scottish philosopher, makes his bow to the “eminent writer” of “The Increase of Robbers.”—The Collected Works, Edinburgh, IX, 333, 27s. °§ Referred to by Scott (who follows Watson in his Life of Field- ing. See Eden’s State of the Poor in England, London, 1797, I, 320-328. °° Murphy, J. C., Travels in Portugal, London, 1795, p. 173. 70 The European Magazine, XXIII, 408 (June, 1793). > BP yn A le roa marpeea sins tp eectae ices ood @, 9M, er yee hte ae ~ " SE a eee tat ot pramend ary ent eel errr - Te F dice oe s . ae, 4 » Suerte, Se Cota bie eet ee eee teen eee ih — ae re ee pee lnket a ne tf 4 7 7 TT eee eee ee “ ae roy oO ere ene Yarn Pee ee eet ere ee te tene re |Sf pt ategreers ssl bee 256 FIELDING THE NOVELIST justice” in Murphy’s critique and rightly scored the English , - . ris 997 “cet écrivain célébre.””™ for their inexcusable neglect of © While the Chevalier was endeavoring to place a suitable mark of respect on Field: ing’s grave in Lisbon, back in Paris the novelist’s star was in the ascendant. Mention has already been made of Desforges’s dramatic adaptations, Tom Jones a Londres (1782), and the sequel, Lom Jones et Fellamar (1787). In the preface to the former, the author asserts that Fielding’s great work is “entre les mains de tout le monde.” In 1800 there appeared i slea Le Portrait de Fielding, a fanci- ful “Comédie en un Acte, mélée de Vaudevilles,” by “‘les citoyens SEGUR, jeune, DESF AUCHERETS et DES- PRES.” and based on the old anecdote according to which Garrick impersonates Fielding in order that Hogarth may ob- tain a likeness. A part of ts dialogue between Hogarth and Mme. Miller runs as follows: Hocartu. Cherchez, au rang des moralistes, les romans écrits par Fielding. Mone. Miter. Parm1 _ les moralistes? HocGaRTH. Oui, sans doute. And then to a lively air 1s set the following characterization: C’est un Philosophe, un sage, Qui, seul, a pu concevoir Ces ees ou chaque page Nous apprend notre devoir: Fielding, par ces heureux songes, Tient son lecteur enchanté: Ses romans sont des mensonges Que dicta la vérité.”” Further evidence of the growing interest in Fielding across the water was the appearance in 1796 of a translation of Tom Jones (by “le Citoyen Davaux”) in which “on a rétabli les morceaux supprimés” by La Place. The interesting preface 71 Vow > . > Voyage en Portugal, Paris, 1797, Il, 68 note, 69 note. 72 Q > 5 a ; . > Le Portrait de Fielding, Paris, 1800, p. 4 “Le ran 8 ee Pe mare kon mae ere cesiumenaiieatantiaine meine eseneea sererenerer ae eee er 2 > FF eeeTHE END OF THE CENKUR Te 257 begins: “ENCORE TOM JONES! Il est si connu en roman, en comédie, en opéra-comique. Je le sais, et Je crois cependant donner un ouvrage absolument nouveau. Vous connaissez TOM JONES, ami lecteur; mais vous ne connaissez pas Paimable philosophe FIELDING, plus gai, plus sensible que RICHARDSON, et peut-étre aussi profond.”* As usual, this popularity of Fielding in France helped to swell the nov- elist’s account in England; but of more importance than Davaux’s version of Tom Jones or the various dramatic fan- tasies au sujet de Fielding was the eulogy pronounced upon him by the great critic La Harpe, who, in his Cours de Littéra- ture (begun in 1786) asserts that for him, Tom Jones is “Je premier roman du monde."* The English, he says, though their taste is not.so severe as that of the French, have felt the “défauts” of Richardson, and “en générale ils lui préférent Fielding”—who like Moliére has remained “seul de sa classe” —and then he adds, “‘J’avoue que pour cette fois je suis de leur avis.” Certainly during the lifetime of either Fielding or Richardson it could not be shown that Englishmen preferred Fielding to his rival; nor can the statement go unchallenged as applied to the closing years of the century. La Harpe’s words are, however, indicative of the turn criticism was then taking; and the fact need not be emphasized that his enco- mium on Fielding, the highest so far conferred upon him by any distinguished Frenchman, was heard and reéchoed across the Channel. Of Fielding in Germany it is unnecessary to speak at length here, for the fame which he won there was not as yet greatly noticed in England. An extended discussion of the novelist’s influence is given in Augustus Wood’s Einfluss Fieldings auf die deutsche Literatur, Yokohama, 1895. It was Richardson, not Fielding, who created an immediate furor in Germany, as the Klopstock letters in his Correspondence abundantly "8 Tom Jones, ou L’Enfant Trouvé, par le Citoyen Davaux, Paris, 1796, Preface. ‘4 J. F. de La Harpe’s Lycée ou Cours de littérature, Dijon, 1821, XVI, 271-274. mer wT ae vacoelg sey _ Yi ae be bye one ni ath ehaheek tate > et be Se tality eT ae epee tei Tee pinot a errr nd ty etnd: ee enh a nae Yt Pas : i ‘ . \ } ot i at 5 i 7! Be A Fy 1 ; ; o258 FIBLDING THE NOVELIST show. Later on, according to Coleridge, Richardson’s senti- mentalism was one of the most corrupting influences on the German drama at the time of Schiller’s Robbers. But the counter-movement of those who championed Fielding was from an early date distinctly perceptible, and it included first and last among its supporters several notable men. The earliest out-and-out opponent of Richardson was Musaus, whose Grandison der Zweite (1760-1762) ridiculed the vogue of that hero”=—a novel which he made over (and changed the character of ) long afterwards (1781-1782) as Der deutsche Grandison. Wieland was in the beginning a Richardsonian (he wrote a play entitled Clementina von Porretta); but in his Don Sylvio he became a Fieldingite; and his A gathon— highly esteemed by Lessing, Herder, Goethe, and Schiller— was very obviously influenced by Tom Jones. It is significant that Blankenburg, in his Versuch tiber den Roman (1774); relied for his expansive theory of fiction upon the initial chap- ters which he found in Fielding; and, to pass from theory to practice, that J. J. Bode, refusing to follow La Place and Mme. Riccoboni, presented in his translation of Tom Jones (1786-1788 )—which, by the way, he made at the request of practically the entire book. As a rule the imitations Lessing of Fielding’s initial chapters, interpolated stories, and inci- dental disquisitions ran to the limit of absurdity; and though Lichtenberg (that great admirer of the novelist who was called—though inappropriately—“The German Fielding” ) planned a work which he hoped would become the Tom Jones of his native land, no such production by him or by anyone else ever eventuated. Lichtenberg died before the magnum opus was finished, and there was no one to take his place. It is on record that Fielding’s novels were enjoyed by three great men, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe, though Lessing was in the main a Richardsonian. Goethe, who several times referred pleasantly to the author of Tom Jones, asked Eckermann the celebrated question, ‘“Whence have come our novels and plays, 75 See Wood’s Einfluss Fieldings, pp. 23-24; also C. H. Clarke, Fielding u. d. deutsche Sturm u. Drang, Freiburg, 1897. do) Se ere - aban - een er ere a a nena Te eR eee enemyTHE END OF THE CENTURY 259 if not from Goldsmith, Fielding, and Shakespeare?” The most enthusiastic of the group was Schiller, whose exclamation has long since become famous, “Welch ein herrliches Ideal musste nicht in der Seele des Dichters leben, der einen Tom Jones und eine Sophia erschuf!” But we have stepped beyond the limits of our chapter. Whether before the end of the cen- tury Fielding’s influence in Germany was great or meagre has only a remote bearing on our present investigation; for there is little evidence—as there was in the case of France—that the novelist’s fame in England was affected by it. As for America, at the end of the century, it is hardly nec- essary to observe that nothing that was said there was of much service to Henry Fielding. The time for influence from that quarter had not yet arrived. But, incidentally, the impressions of two young men who were destined later to become celebri- ties may now be recorded. Young John Quincy Adams, after- wards the sixth president of the United States, wrote in his diary: ““At home all the forenoon reading Tom Jones, one of the best novels in the language. The scenes are not only such as may have taken place, but they are similar to such as almost every person may have witnessed. The book cannot lead a person to form too favorable an opinion of human na- ture; but neither will it give a false one.”’’® And here is a pas- sage from a private letter written by young James Kent, afterwards chancellor of the State of New York and author of the celebrated and extraordinarily popular Commentaries on American Law. “No writer that ever lived,” he declares (September, 1796), “‘was superior to Fielding.” He “was a man of wonderful talents and inimitable humour. I now own all his works.’?*? 6 Life ina New England Town: 1787, 1788. Diary of John Quincy Adams, Boston, 1903, p. 16 (August 17, 1787). His excellent mother was “passionately fond of all” the works of Richardson, who, she de- clared, had “done more towards embellishing the present age than any other modern I can name.”—Letters of Mrs. Adams, fourth ed., Boston, 1848, p. 261. Memoirs . . . of James Kent, by William Kent, Boston, 1898, p. 240. — +e par et SA Ie es oe Se a a SNE d D =: rhe: bibete atta eee ee eee ener ae een aera g ey ree “ie eee ee cers rn ae She ee ee eee te mee ee 4 pubeaapek tee ee Cor Ye . e Pra) i a PY 4 A F at Se he cas uP}! eed é ar] “i Pa bee re ey ime fe Pee prc ul a ai = ai - oI ; aan rete res wee ha 4 pee ere epee NS vo eer eres aTate ser visi 260 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Though this assertion by the enthusiastic young American would have been considered extravagant in England, there can be no doubt that during the final years of the century in the world of letters was becoming Fielding’s importance One of the best ways more and more adequately appreciated. “1 which to realize this fact is to consider the opinions that had been expressed at different times by various members of Dr. Johnson’s “Club.” ‘To this group belonged Boswel ll, Murphy, Colman the Elder, Garrick, Burney, Reynolds, Joseph War- Tone) NOx, Gold smith, Sheridan, Gibbon, aad Sir John Hawkins—all of whom eve been discussed except Sheridan, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and Sir John Hawkins. Sheridan, who despite his borrowings from Fielding professed not to care for realism (praising Sidney’s Arcadia instead ), considered Field- ing and Smollett the best of the English novelists.’° Sir Joshua Reynolds, also, severely as he criticized the famous scene of Partridge at the play, seo Tom Jones to be ‘‘otherwise a work of the highest merit.””*” If we mi ike allowance for Gold- smith’s stricture on Fes m ine and Joseph Andrews as im- proper reading for girls and boys, nothing that sounds like Dr. Johnson’s denunciation of Fielding has come down to us from any of the persons mentioned except from Sir John Haw kins, while the admiration of Gibbon was placed where all the world might read. One of the stoutest defenders of Fielding was Boswell himself, whose comment upon Johnson’s opposi- tion may now be given in more detail: “It always appeared to me, that he estimated the compositions of Richardson too highly, and that he had an unreasonable prejudice against Fielding. In comparing these two writers, he used this expres- sion, ‘that there was as great a difference between them, as be- tween a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate.’ This was a short and figurative state of his distinction between Tene AKT iy yee >* ; 7 Rae, W. Fraser, Sheridan, a Biography, New York, 1896, I, 234- 235 (letter to Grenville, October 30, 1772). 79 Reynolds’s Discourses, edited by Roger Fry, London, 1905, P. 362 ee re nad Peer eta ~ - aphrhitee tale eee eae ores | a ~heeteaa’ A nenTHE END OF THE CENTURY 261 drawing characters of nature and characters only of manners. But I cannot help being of opinion, that the neat watches of Fielding are as well constructed as the large clocks of Rich- ardson, and that his dial-plates are brighter. Fielding’s charac- ters, though they do not expand themselves so wide ie in disser- tation, are as just pictures of human nature, and I will venture to say, have more striking features, and nicer touches of the pencil; and though Johnson used to quote with es ation a saying of Richardeene s, ‘that the virtues of Field ng’s heroes were the vices of a truly good man, I will venture to add, that the moral tendency of Fielding’s writings, though it does not encourage a strained and rarely possible virtue, is ever favourable to honour and honesty, and cherishes the benevo- lent and generous affections. He who is as good as Fielding would make him, is an amiable member of society.’ And again he said, “TI cannot refrain from repeating here my won- der at Toheeene S excessive and unaccountable depreciation of one of the best writers that England has produced, T'om Jones has stood the test of publick opinion with such success, as to have established its great merit, both for the story, the senti- ments, and the manners, and also the varieties of diction,??®! Several years before Boswell’s Life appeared, the notorious prig and formalist Sir John Hawkins had written of Fielk ling in a manner which outdid even that of Johnson himself. Thus runs his tirade: “At the head of these [novel ists] we must, for many reasons, place Henry Fielding, one of the most motley of literary characters. This man was, in his early life, a writer of comedies and farces, very few of which are now remem- bered; after that, a practising barrister with scarce any busi- ness; then an anti-ministerial writer, and quickly after, a creature of the duke of Newcastle, who gave him a nominal qualification of rool. a year, and set him up as a trading- Justice, in which disreputable station he died. He was the au- thor of a romance, intitled ‘The history of Joseph Andrews,’ 8° Boswell’s Life of Johnson, edited by G. B. Hill, Oxford, 1887, IT, 49. 81 See April 6, 1772. a ener: Ne oe a pr Med Sot reetp ero 4 9A wii oe Pulthabhebtubbesass an Gere: Pa bt a ae Y “ | Tes reapRate ee ete Sp Re Re pars, ae SSC So heat seul eeelarns oher-te sepia traaba wlgeLp-ssebMoweloa eid! < RY oe : | ‘ ys FIELDING THE NOVELIST another, ‘The Foundling, or the history of Tom = Q 262 and of Jones,’ a book seemingly intended to sap the foundation of that morality which it is the duty of parents and all public in- lcate in the minds of young peop ple, by teaching structors to incu that generous qualities that virtue upon princi iple iS imposture, alone constitute true worth, and that a young man may love and be loved, and at the same time associate with the loosest women. His morality, in respect that it resolves virtue into good affections, 1n contré adiction to moral obligation and a sense of duty, is that of lord Shaftesbury vulgarised, and is a system of excellent use in ps alliating the vices most injurious to society. He was the inventor of that cant- -phrase, goodness of h is every day used as a substitute for probity, and . more than the virtue of a horse or a dog; in short, heart, whic means little he has done more towards corrupting the rising generation than any writer we know of. He afterwards wrote a book of the same kind, but of a less mischievous tendency, his ‘Amelia. 8? This abuse might have been dipped from the running filth of the prev1 ious generation. What aw kins’s ani- mus may have been we do not know; but regarding Fielding as he did he must have been exasperated by such complimen- tary references to him as had appeared in Beattie’s Essays (1776) and Dissertations (1783), in Monboddo’ s Origin and Pr ogress of Language (1776), in Harris’s Philolopical In- guiries C7 81), in the second volume of Warton’s Essay on Pope (1782).°° It should be observed, of course, that his wor- ship’s ahal aught was not directed at Fielding oe but rather against the entire fraternity of fiction- -writers, at “the head of whom,” for “many reasons,” he placed the author of Tom Jones. After all, censure from Sir John Hawkins, if we may judge by contemporary accounts of that gentleman, should 82 The Works of Samuel Johnson, edited by Hawkins, London, sell I, 214-215 3 Even by fies who had no very high opinion of Fielding, this at- tack was regarded as absurd and extravagant (Watson, for example, 1 in 1807, retorted to it). Taine, far along in the Victorian Age, eagerly seized upon it as a bonne bouchée.THE END OF THE CENTURY 263 really be construed as very high Bese Apropos of the-change which had come about in the “Club” since the early days, John Forster asserts that “the spectacle of Charles Fox jn the chair, quoting Homer and Fielding to the astonishment of Joseph Warton” was one which Johnson “could not get reconciled 0.”** In 1787 Hawkins’s jeremiad seemed, no doubt, to most sf his fellow club-members almost an anach 1ronism. It is not improbable that in the glowing tributes uttered by the great and influential critics of the following generation— Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt—we catch something of the de- light in Fielding which characterized the period of their boy- hood. A Heenled treatment of these writers belongs to a later chapter; but a word may be said here of their early enthusi- asms. Coleridge, who was to:be one of the greatest admirers Fielding ever had, at first, to the amazement of the youth ful Hazlitt, declared (in 1798) that he “liked Richardson, but not Fielding.”®* Yet some years before, when as a lad of Bune he wrote the verses entitled “With Fiel: ling’s ‘Ame- lia,’”’ he must have felt differently. After scoring the in- sipidity of the “soft tale” that claims “the useless sigh,” Cole- ridge says: With other aim has Fielding here display’d Each social duty and each social care; With just yet vivid colouring portray’d What every wife should be, what many are. A mother, in his opinion, may well indulge the “hope” that her loved progeny In all but sorrows shall Amelias be!8¢ Charles Lamb, whose conversion by Hazlitt remains to be dis- cussed, was in his youth an admirer of all the great eighteenth- 84 Forster’s Goldsmith, second ed., London, 1854, II, 168-169; and Letters of James Boswell, edited by Tinker, Oxford, 1924, II, 292. The meeting referred to was in 17 791, some years after Johnson’s death. 85 The Waller and Glover edition of Hazlitt’s Works, XII, 27 86 Coleridge’s Poetical W orks, London, 1907, pp. 20, 56s. th ree. aa ae ar a. babhetebaned tarts eer Reo be ae hind ee ened aan PEPE rie, — iY yi La ey ee Pi hae fi Bis es! ett ~ tog aid elle Lt end chot ee eee 0 # ah ee ees ee eee =. 424% ee tere sane =a me rs - — er ee eee Let eee ee Sere eeeFIELDING THE NOVELIST “To T. Stothard,” the fa- 264 century novelists. In some verses mous illustrator, he recalls the works he loved as a boy: In my young days How often have I with a child’s fond gaze Pored on the pictured wonders thou hadst done: Clarissa mournful, and prim Grandison! All Fielding’s, Smollett’s heroes, rose to view; I saw, and I believed the phantoms true.®? Even heartier than Coleridge or Lamb was young Hazlitt. Looking back on this golden age, he tells of the joy which he experienced on reading these books for the first time. He was “intimately acquainted” with Richardson’s “‘heroes and hero- ines”; he “was deep in Peregrine Pickle”; and as for Field- ing, he “knew Tom Jones by heart.” It was in one of the numerous ‘‘Cooke” pocket editions, he tells us, that he got his first delicious taste of Fielding’s novels. “T do not think any one.” he writes, “can feel much happier—a greater degree of heart’s ease—than I used to feel in reading “Iristram Shandy,’ and ‘Peregrine Pickle,’ and “Tom Jones: = For two notable contemporary estimates of the comparative reputations of Fielding and Richardson (the real struggle for supremacy was between them) during the closing years of the century, we may refer to an account®® by T. J. Mathias in The Pursutts of Literature (1794-) which, according to De Quincey, was the “most popular book of its day’; and to a “History of Literature and Science for the year 1799” (in The Historical Magazine) by Robert Bisset, a biogra- pher of Burke. “Every person,” says Mathias, “should be well acquainted with the whole of Cervantes, of Le Sage’s un- equalled and unrivalled Gil Blas, and of Tom Jones, (that great comick Epick poem) by Fielding. These perhaps are all, 87 The Works of Lamb, edited by Lucas, London, 1903, Vs 75: 88 “On Reading Old Books,” Waller and Glover, VII, 222, 223; also EX. 64: VII, 302. 89 Mathias, T. J., The Pursuits of Literature, seventh ed., 1798, PP- 59 note, 60 note. RS TT ee ER a ” sen a - Sieh eh fe T= “ye leke ce eee eS Taf ee ~omee StL 2 “ we ish) : * i bee 2 i ‘ i i { edad A4 Sy —=s aa te be , ap ? gom SONZ, 5, c) vr Et + Xt N}) 4 * EN PARTRIDGE SHOWS THE MUFF TO JONES (Tom Jones, Book X, Chapter V1) BG gt oy adi : {Wess | arn lt oe pedietet Serge a ary | babi tbh i > Fi I ee t 5 a — Hine TL f bi qt Se are " eater nebo es mt BY —so VeSerie reprise pe 8. Ae OO SY ete mA er bs ee eet ee ees or pete ee Nat Pa Ali ante Misddtiine bl > 4 , , c a es Oe ae ee ee Se ae Se we nkek et Vethenee Se ere ne edna ya) ER nS neg in etre Soe!THE END OF THE CENTURY 265 which it is mecessary to read. They afford illustration to every event of life.” Smollett, in his opinion, has “much penetra- tion, but is frequently too vulgar to please”; and though he regards Clarissa as “‘the work of a man of virtue and genius, which is too celebrated for any additional praise,” his enthu- siasm is obviously kept for Tom Jones. The following account by Bisset, though less known than the one by Mathias, was especially commended by The Anti- Jacobin as sound and able criticism: ‘“The best fictitious work that Britain has produced for the last fifty years,” writes Bis- set, “is, beyond all question, Tom Jones”—a true “copy of real life.” He speaks of the “extraordinary success of Field- ing’s performances,” and the “deservedly great, though de- servedly inferior success of Smollett’s.”? Miss Burney, in his opinion, is the only one of the “imitators of real life” who “approached Fielding.” Richardson, “‘instead of portraits and historical paintings,’ drew “fancy pictures”; and although “few or none” have equaled him “in that kind of writing, yet it was a much easier imitation.” Squire Western, Partridge, “result of accurate ob- servation of actual existence”; while Sir Charles Grandison is and ‘Tom Jones, he declares, are the “a mere personification of all bodily and mental perfections.” In fact, Richardson’s chief characters might have been formed from the perusal of ‘any tolerable book of practical mor- ality,” without acquaintance with actual life. The “lower kind of novel writers,” he justly observes, “imitate Richardson much more than Fielding.”®° In his own attempt at fiction- writing called Modern Literature, in which he inserted an ac- count of his predecessors, Bisset declared that Le Sage and Fielding had “carried the exhibition of human nature and pas- sions, the manners and characters of the times, to a degree of 9° The Historical, Biographical, Literary, Scientific Magazine, 1799, I, 55-56. Bisset was one of the first to observe that “neither Fielding nor Smollett . . allow very great height to their heroes. Roderick Random and Joseph Andrews did not exceed 5 feet 10. Even Tom Jones was overtopt” by the six-foot man.—pp. 84-85. ee ee babhent thine tare ee Ce eT WORE Ones ee — saad eiehiainanhe ones Renee ne ten ee ee aa eel eatin ee ee Shek ileal pore iro) ae et ee rr ei a, ee: “7 rity ty t! i. LAS if ioe =~ erene Oe St eae : ‘oad la ee ie | ge oe ee» i od - ? ri 2 Fs ie a u 1? i 4 i i ' re A 266 FIELDING THE NOVELIST perfection that has not been equalled, and scarcely could be surpassed.’””” From neither Mathias nor Bisset, however, do we get an ‘dea of the actual state of affairs; for in certain quarters an- tagonism toward Fielding was only equaled by admiration for Richardson. This was particularly true of the Evangelical clergy, the different sects of which were at this time growing steadily in numbers and influence. That the Evangelicals were, in general, opposed to all fiction is a well-known fact;”” but it has not perhaps been so generally observed that, except with the more rabid, Richardson escaped the ban. A generation later, Macaulay, defending in his famous “Copyright Speech” (1841) the purity of Richardson’s works, drew attention to the fact that William Wilberforce, who condemns even the most celebrated novels, “‘distinctly excepts” Richardson from this “censure.” In his Practical View of Christianity (1797), which passed through fifty editions in as many years, Wilber- force, while repudiating both Sterne and Rousseau, does not specifically mention Fielding; but his pointed attack on the “vicious” doctrine of “goodness of heart” was doubtless as well understood by his readers as if he had called the promul- gator of this doctrine by name.” Blair, the Presbyterian preacher, in 1783, had proclaimed Richardson the “most moral of our novel-writers”; and, as will be seen, this idea continued to flourish until far along into the nineteenth century. Anyone who cares to turn over the dusty pages of The Evangelical Family Library will be sur- prised to find how vigorous and long-lived was the idea of a “moral” Richardson. It is not strange, of course, that Grandi- son (the real progenitor, doubtless, of the smug youths of the old-time Sunday School Library) was held to be improving reading for the family circle; but Pamela and Clarissa, oddly §1 Bisset, R., Modern Literature, London, 1804, Il, 216. ®2 Note the attitude of The Christian Observer. 93 Wilberforce, William, 4 Practical View, first American edition, Philadelphia, 1798, p. 271. The Practical View was afterwards included in The Evangelical Family Library.THE END OF THE CENTURY 267 enough, were also regarded, to use the phrase of a recent writer, as “Sunday and edifying.” According to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Grandison was the only novel which used to have, in New England, a place beside the Bible on the “toilet- table of godly young women.”** This attitude toward Rich- ardson’s works of a rapidly increasing religious body was a tremendous force in his favor; on the other hand, the tendency of members of the Non-Conformist persuasion to regard his rival with holy horror added one more misfortune to Field- ing’s heavy load. Richardson had a strong hold not only in religious but in educational circles. In France, in 1783, the only novels which Mme. de Genlis exempted from her wholesale condemnation were, as Professor Raleigh observes, “the trio of Richard- son.”°®? And Clara Reeve, who looked somewhat askance at Fielding, included all of Richardson’s works in her list of reading “For Young Ladies.” It is true that Tom Jones was then commonly read by children, as we gather from the testi- mony of two young persons of that period—Sir William Wat- son’s niece, and the Eton boy, George Canning (the future statesman); but in both instances Fielding was considered défendu for youths and misses, while the moral Richardson was felt to be entirely edifying. Sir William Watson’s niece, after having been brought up on Mrs. Barbauld’s Prose Hymns for children, was suddenly inducted (1787-1788) into her uncle’s library, where the “shelves” were “desecrated” by the works of Fielding and Smollett. The pernicious volumes of these authors, she tells us, were not only “open to all,” but they were even “put into the hands of all.” Many years after- wards she looked back “with horror” upon “this pestilential literature,” and upon “its deleterious effect both on myself and on those under whose care I was placed.”? Much more to her liking were “the distresses arising from those entangle- ments of sentiment or etiquette” which Harriet Byron “‘so de- °* A Library of Famous Fiction, New York, 1873, Introduction. °° The English Novel, London, 1894, p. 249. adie a. dy * wae - pray Pe aA ey Ruan eer at aihel haat tater ee SS EP rn Fe a Cotte wane then cere ea ries @etain. - ket J ne ene ee SIUD ET een ewan nenwrenesece angi ae Aas 2) rat $4 Ad a i <7) bed fa] a e 4) Ay rea . ‘St re: ai) rm ie ie ‘ = 38 rks aa} — C4 Enea OS ee eats ~ a ree, P< vhatee Le eee init eee eee cee te rt ee91h Al ensapebhsdesmernbresebaiat “ se’ ae 2 > z Ca ) H ¥ 4 ry ; ts i ‘ F ‘ AES 3S 268 FIELDING THE NOVELIST lichted in.”°° The youthful Canning, in an essay in the Eton Microcosm (May 14, 1787), was also of the opinion that Richardson was preferable virgimibus puerisque. here cannot be, he says, ““a more partial admirer” of T'om Jones than him- self; but is it not, he piously asks, “however excellent a work” it may be, put “too early into our hands?”? He admits that Tom “is a character drawn faithfully from nature,” and “most exquisitely finished”; yet “Is it not also a character, in whose shades the lines of right and wrong, of propriety and misconduct, are so intimately blended, and softened into each other, as to render it too difficult for the indiscriminating eye of childhood to distinguish between rectitude and error???" In receiving the moral approval of the great Wilberforce, Richardson had again scored heavily over his competitor. And though, as has been noted in this chapter, the fame of Field- ing was broadening and deepening at home and across the Channel, we are less startled—-when we take into account Richardson’s reputation as a moralist—at the discrepancy be- tween the story told by the editions and the story told by The Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1797. Here is a list of editions— between the years 1775-1800." as given by Professor Cross Of Amelia there were the following: London, 1780; Leipzig, 1781; Leipzig, 1781-82; Milan, 1782; Rheims, 1784; London, 1785; Venezia, 1786; London, 1790; [Paris] 1790; Madrid, 1795-96; Leipzig, 1797; London, Cooke [1798]; London, 1799; London, 1800. Of Joseph Andrews: Berlin, 1776; Abridged, Newbery | 1778! |; London, 1778; Paris, 1779; London, 1780; 1oth ed. London, 1781; London, 1781; Dresden, 1783; London, 1783; Reims, 1784; Berlin, 17845 Frankfurth und Leipzig, 1784; London [1785° | 2 1 me ‘7 > 10 . serlin, 1786; Lipskar, 1787; London, 1788; London, 1790; Phila- delphia, 1791; Gottingen, 1792; Edinburgh, 1792; Leith, 17925 London [1793]; Philadelphia, 1794; London [1794]. > London, 17853 96 [; 1 7 > Life of Mary Ann Schimmelpenninck, London, 1858, I, 124, 118. 97 ’ com : ‘Reprint of The Microcosm, 1835, p. 64. Qg ‘ ae 2 88 Cross’s Fielding, III,THE END OF THE CENTURY 269 Of Tom Jones: Paris, 1776-77; Paris, 1777; Abridged, London, 1778; Edinburgh, 1779; London, 1780, 4 vols.; London, 1780, 9 vols.; London, 1780, 3 vols.; Paris, 1780, 4 vols.; Paris, 1780, 8 vols.; Edinburgh, 1780; Nurnberg, 1780; London, 1781; Geneva, 1782; London, 1782; London, 1783; Londres, 1783; Polish tr. Warszawie, 1783; Paris, 1784; Reims, 1784; London [1785?]; London, 1786; Leip- zig, 1786-88; Polish tr. Wien, 1786-88; London, 1787; Moscow, 17875; Lipsk, 1787; Carlsruhe, 1787-88; Wien, 1788; Paris, 1788; London, 1789; London, 1791; Basel, 1791; Gotha, 1791; Edin- burgh, 1791; London, 1791; Abridged, London, 1792; London, Cooke [1792]; London, Murray, 1792; London, Longman, 1792; Warsaw, 1793; London, 1794; Paris, 1794; Philadelphia, 1795; Geneva, 1796; Madrid, 1796; Paris [1796]; London, Cooke [1798]. From this list of editions we get some notion of what was really happening in that last quarter of the century; but the news had not yet reached such standard reference books as The Encyclopaedia Britannica. In the “Third” and “Greatly Im- proved” eighteen-volume edition of 1797 under the word RICHARDSON we read that “The most eminent writers of our own country, and even of foreign parts, have paid their tribute to the transcendent talents of Mr. Richardson, whose works have been published in almost every language and coun- try in Europe.” Then follow, in all their glory, the splendid passages from Diderot, Rousseau, Dr. Young, Dr. Warton, Dr. Johnson, ete.—the whole occupying a column and a half. Under the word FIELDING,” the manifold activities of that dramatist, journalist, novelist, magistrate, and social re- former were covered in half a column. It is more exact to say that they were almost utterly ignored; for the brief space al- lotted him was given over to shreds and patches of scandal from Murphy’s “Essay”:—Fielding’s “propensity to galety and profusion drove him to write for the stage” at the age of °° The Encyclopaedia Britannica, third ed., Edinburgh, 1797. In the ninth edition (1879), Fielding had three pages and more to Richard- son’s one. Pree ees ee Shdhed haere ~ “ ‘anosed (reimimieay oat ents Srtthecretereeorl acti ee rer ~enerenaete Pa teeta rnd titanate ont eteresecerd tetas a Capa Sr eee ime fe 4 Se ee errs Oe ap abe p in ) rb a 14 ct 4 | ed f a} eth TES rd Poy, Fes5 . r ft Pv i, re mas ; ‘ i 1 a a ie 5 oe an rt Le nate ete Seer es FIELDING THE NOVELIST “managed to dissipate in three 270 twenty, and subsequently he years” his wife’s fortune of £1500 as well as an allowance (which even Murphy declared was mythical ) of £200; in “losing his fortune, he acquired the gout,” and finally accepted the office of justice, “an employment much more profitable than honourable.” So much for the man. And of the author? Simply this sentence: ‘He wrote a great number of fugitive pamphlets and periodical essays; but is chiefly distinguished” by his Joseph Andrews and his T'om Jones (Amelia, as usual, was not even mentioned )!CHAPTER XI Before “Waverley” 1800-1814 S was seen in the previous chapter, The Encyclopaedia Britannica notwithstanding, the vogue of Richardson showed signs of waning even before the century was out; in the present chapter, which ends with the appearance of Waverley (1814), it will be observed that Fielding gained perceptibly upon his rival. It is a great mistake to im- agine with Chateaubriand that Richardson was by this time an almost forgotten writer; the general public, of course, read little save current fiction, just as it does now, but, among those competent to judge, Richardson was regarded with an esteem and reverence well-nigh incomprehensible. The following in- stance may be considered typical. In an essay On Novels, by Thomas Sanderson in 1805, Fielding is mentioned, to be sure, but of Richardson the author says, “None except Shakespeare has displayed such a profound knowledge of human nature . he has analysed the human mind; he has delineated with picturesque accuracy the operations of the passions, and dived into the recesses of the heart for the motives of action.” A decade or two later, the condition of affairs had changed; in 1829 the clergyman who edited the Literary Remains of San- derson felt obliged to say in a note to the passage above: “‘Some persons will smile at the praise bestowed upon Richardson.””* But at the beginning of the century, as the outward refinement of society became more general, the old idea managed to per- sist that it was Richardson rather than Fielding who was on the side of taste and morality. So far, no Coleridge had ques- tioned Richardson’s “sublime system of ethics” or called atten- tion to the “profound distinction” which Fielding drew be- tween conduct and character. * The Life and Literary Remains of Thomas Sanderson, by the Rev. J. Lowthian, Carlisle, 1829, p. 106. OP oe ate ke eunp oes Oe Sa ee eae tae. Pe nian Or Er? i rig su st) FH ca iy A arg iy H Ay Ay Phy, ea) ea! i t i] is iy t ; Ss ome es PO ES a sate rege TYG ] =~ et eras ores — Ps - Ll aad oe ee Reminding prepeneewimngas quits amen Noosa lel a: yeaa a ee eer teeFIELDING THE NO VELIST 272 Women writers (and at this time fiction was chiefly in the hands of women) were, as a rule, of Richardson’s party. Char- lotte Smith, to be sure,—who took Fielding as the model for her reform novels, and declared that if even he failed “of having effect” in his attack on the “legal pestilence,” her “feeble pen” could avail little, boldly asserted, in her preface to Marchmont (1796), that the author whose methods she was studying was the “great master of novel-writing.” But Charlotte Smith was clearly in the minority. Of Clara Reeve we have spoken before now; and of Hannah More, who, in Coelebs (1808), paid Richardson a very great compliment. Then there was Mrs. Brunton, whose Self-Control (1810) was resolutely “attacked” by Viscount Bryce in his youth, though a later book, Discipline, was “to9 much” for him.’ Self-Control contained a long dialogue on the subject of “Tom Jones, in which a prim, Richardsonian character named Laura severely reprehends the frivolous Miss Dawkins for being in love with “that bewitching character,” and declares with some feeling that “Tom Jones’s warmth of heart and generosity do not appear” to her to be “of that kind” which qualifies a “man for adorning domestic life.’”® Lady Charleville (in 1809) entreats the popular Amelia Opie to begin another “good, long, Clarissa-like’”* story ; and Jane Porter tells us in the preface to Thaddeus of Warsaw (1803) that “‘Agreeably to the constant verdict of good taste, I have ever believed the novels of Richardson to be unequalled.”® Stealing a plume from Fielding with which to adorn his rival, Miss Porter says that the works of Richardson, the “contemplation” of which has “tempted” her to imitate, are fully entitled by their “pure morality” and their “unity of design’”’ to be called “‘epic poems in prose.” 2 Bryce, J., University and Historical Addresses, London, 1913, P- 374+ 3 Mrs. Mary Brunton’s Se/f-Control, fourth ed., Edinburgh, 1812, I, 134. 4 Memorials of Amelia Opie, Norwich, 1854, p. 139- 5 Thaddeus of Warsaw, London, 1803, p. Vil.BEFORE “WAVERLEY” 273 One is tempted to ask, however, whether to the greater women novelists of the day—Jane Austen and Maria Edge- worth—who are linked to Fielding by the satiric touch— whether, indeed, to them also Richardson appeared to be the greater artist and the greater.moralist. Miss Edgeworth and, in fact, the entire Edgeworth family seem to have been Rich- ardsonians. When the Correspondence was published, Maria’s father wrote Mrs. Barbauld that he had just taken a precious volume “out of the hands of one of the eight readers round our table this 4th of September, 1804,9 p.m... . but the book could not be spared to me.” Mr. Edgeworth praises Richardson’s “enthusiasm for virtue”—his “true politeness of heart and conduct”—and says that “we love the man as much as we admire the author.”® Maria herself, as we may judge from a number of allusions in her writings, was an ardent Richardsonian. On the subject of Fielding she has little to say; but a passage in one of her letters deserves mention. When Waverley appeared, she complained (October 23, 1814) about Scott’s “occasional addresses” to the reader. “They are like Fielding,” she says, “but for that reason we cannot bear them, we cannot bear that an author oe OF such original genius, should for a moment stoop to imitation” ——a statement in which is implied a higher estimate of Field- ing than its author was willing to profess. Almost equally reticent was Jane Austen. “It would be interesting to know,” writes Lady Margaret Sackville in a recent book, “how far she was influenced by Fielding—though there is little trace of any definite influence at all in work so wholly individual. But she must have deeply appreciated the former’s magnificent irony—his brilliant character drawing— his unfailing vitality, and doubtless learnt a considerable amount from him.”* From a reference in one of her letters ° Memoir of Mrs. Barbauld, by A. L. Le Breton, London, 1874, pp. 94-95. "Miss Edgeworth’s Life and Letters, edited by A. J. C. Hare, Bos- ton and New York, 1895, I, 226. 8 Jane Austen, by Lady Margaret Sackville, London, BA Dee X ae aren * Poe ADS ein peeese went ah alt aap hemnene errs ea a sek be et bal ee ene Pr peer re a ey) re ie nf 45 4 1 i”) ae ee beOe ene ne ae es peer mt PO Re pee eee ee ote ee ne ey ee TC ees ane ome, 2a iiairtddeeinieh ieee a . oT oe ee - 274 FIELDING THE NOVELIST (January 9, 1796), it is clear that Jane Austen had read I'om Jones. Mr. Tom Lefroy, who had been their guest, has in her opinion “but ove fault, which time will, I trust, entirely re- move—it is that his morning coat is a great deal too light. He is a very great admirer of Tom Jones and therefore wears the same coloured clothes, I imagine, which he did when he was wounded.”® A careful examination of her novels may some day confirm the suspicion of Mr. Dobson, who says:’° “Not- withstanding that the fact is ignored by her biographers, we suspect _ [from the] evidence of the admirable second chapter of Sense and Sensibility, where Mr. John Dashwood gradually persuades himself to give nothing whatever to his mother-in-law and sisters—that she was not unacquainted with the works of Fielding.”” Of her enthusiasm for Richard- son we need not speak; yet much as she resembled him in her method of minutiae, this method was used in an entirely dif- ferent service: her aim was not photographic, sentimental, or moralistic, but satiric. Of direct reference to Fielding, how- ever, Miss Austen’s writings yield us practically nothing. “Novels are the stupidest things in creation,” announces the rattlepated Jack Thorpe, in her Northanger A bbey*— “there has not been a tolerably decent one come out since Tom Jones, except the Monk.” Earlier in the book Miss Austen had specifically refuted these statements by citing Cecilia, Camilla, and Belinda. Even those successors of Fielding in the satiric vein—Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen—did not, then, all told, put on record much opinion regarding him. While they agreed with women writers in general in considering Richardson’s books not merely decorous but profoundly moral, presumably they felt it not quite proper to acknowledge that familiarity with the works of Fielding which is suggested by their own writ- Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Lord Brabourne, London, 1884, I, 128-129. 70 Cae re a: oa : ; Dobson’s edition of Pride and Prejudice, London and New York, 1895, p. Xl. 11 Chapter vii.BEFORE “WAVERLEY” 275 ings. Dorothy Wordsworth, we may remember, speaks in her diary (November, 1800) of reading both Tom Jones and Amelia; but what she thought of these productions she has failed to record.*” For half a century after Fielding’s death his biography was allowed to remain practically where Murphy left it. When- ever an account of his life was desired, the compiler resorted ” and, though he gathered with full to the “Essay on Fielding, hands, usually invented little. And it must be admitted that Murphy’s account, though reprehensibly careless, officious, and sensational, was at least free from the slanderous remarks of Richardson, Walpole, and Lady Mary, and from any assault upon the morality of the books themselves. But in the early years of the nineteenth century, when controversy over the rival claims of Fielding and Richardson became particularly sharp and bitter, the publication of the letters of Lady Mary (1803) and of Richardson (1804) set going libelous stories which found credulous listeners not only among the friends of Clarissa but even among those who should have been Fielding’s friends. Again, in 1807, on the occasion of the centenary of Fielding’s birth, a Scotchman by the name of William Watson undertook an overhauling of Murphy’s “Essay” (Murphy had died in 1805), and produced a biography even more villainous than his predecessor’s. Furthermore, determined efforts to dis- parage Fielding were made by several influential Richard- sonians: by Mrs. Barbauld, in her “Life” of Richardson pre- fixed to the Correspondence (1804), and in the prefaces to the British Novelists (1810); by her brother, John Aikin, in his account of Fielding in General Biography (1803); and by William Mudford, in the introductory essays to his British Novelists (1811). There was also a series of diatribes on the part of the Rev. Edward Mangin, an editor of Richardson who did his best early and late to bring opprobrium upon the rival of his favorite. Thus the malice of contemporary de- 12 Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth, edited by W. Knight, London, 1897, I, 57, 58. Oye ~~ ®; 1Oys Ree vr is Pr error a ti aap ob. Le rietehenid oa ee eee - Fe etka oe + * a ors Oe eee ee ttl. Se oe SS 7... mi ler htierarreie ke ee . bet ah pat ete >. Sint ~at ati mh Rpepedtit)<, a4 04 ol ter eh ct ree nr ad arr ey ean ee eee ts iH iy ri oj- Seah ee eee ere va wnlnge! Pye arr lr yes are a hese pe eee pre ea nP en be rte re rs a 4 MORN nm - Tar tee ——T, peta te bate reer ot ay ae See ve enh Vee nee seas Sas — y aa Feel RS ee Be eye corres276 FIELDING THE NOVELIST famers was again put in circulation, and was manipulated and augmented by those of modern times. One of the most frequently quoted reference books of the nineteenth century was General Biography, of which Mrs. Barbauld’s brother, Dr. John Aikin, was editor in chief. His articles on Fielding (Vol. IV, 1803) and Richardson (Vol. VIII, 1813) show clearly where his preferences lie; it is ob- vious that he regards Fielding as an improper person, whose books are lacking in gentility. Considering the estimation in which Fielding was held by the generality of readers, Aikin did not dare to be entirely outspoken; but he tempered his praise with damaging qualifications, critical as well as bio- graphical. He was, for example, one of the first to promulgate the libel that the author of Amelia “had not always been a faithful husband” to his first wife, the beautiful Charlotte eink me Ne Pali Cradock! Even the sensational Murphy, who had a flair for scandal, was warm in his praise of Fielding’s “constancy.” As for the novels, Aikin contents himself with derogatory con- cessions; mindful of his position as a critic and man of letters he can hardly do otherwise. Elsewhere** he draws a contrast between Addison’s Sir Roger and Fielding’s Squire Western, in which the latter (regarded merely as disgusting ) comes off second best; we are prepared to hear, then, that all Fielding’s stories are lacking in the requisite elegance. Joseph Andrews is not, indeed, “‘without strokes of excellent sense and sound morality”; but the “persons and events are almost exclusively of the comic cast”” and drawn chiefly from “low life.” In the the editor of General Biography had to make even greater concessions. He can say nothing against the case of Tom Jones, artistic shaping of a novel which ‘“‘all agree” is a “master- piece,” there being perhaps ‘“‘no fable, ancient or modern” in which ‘“‘the final catastrophe is kept so long and so well con- cealed, and is yet so natural’ and unforced”; but in this book, “as well as in the other writings of the author,” the scenes “display too much of the vices and crimes of mankind.” Since Teeny Laterne Essays Literary and Miscellaneous, London, 1811, p. 346.BEFORE “WAVERLEY” 25.5 it contains, however, a “‘considerable admixture of nobler mat- ter,” the biographer is good enough to allow that Fielding’s “Intentions were to favour the cause of virtue.” Amelia, said Aikin, may be “justly placed below Tom Jones in point of variety and invention”; and theugh it affords “many valuable moral lessons,” it is “not free from the faults objected to” in its predecessor. At this point, Mrs. Barbauld’s brother, remem- bering certain passages in the yet unpublished Correspondence of Richardson, made the statement that the materials for Amelia were “drawn, it is supposed, in part” from the author’s “own family history”; while for more information concern- ing Fielding’s career, he directed his readers to Jonathan Wild, wherein is displayed “a familiarity with the scenes of low profligacy, which it is extraordinary that a person in de- cent life should ever acquire.” Obviously John Aikin was no lover of Fielding; but he was perceptibly less “outrageous” about him than his sister, Mrs. Barbauld (that writer of children’s books dubbed by Dr. John- son a “Presbyterian in petticoats”), whose edition of Richard- son’s Correspondence together with a biographical sketch ap- peared during the year following her brother’s article. Mrs. Barbauld did not dare, to be sure, either in her introductory life (1804) or in the preface to the British Novelists (1810), openly to deny Fielding’s ability in novel-writing; but she passed lightly over Richardson’s malignant abuse (which she “quite graceful in a rival author’) speaks of as merely not and said specifically that Fielding and Fielding’s greatest work were both immoral.** It is apparent that she enjoyed Richard- son’s slander of his distinguished contemporary and that she was very willing to accept it all as true. To her mind Field- ing’s character was nothing short of depraved; and though she allowed his fame to be considerable and (later) said a number of appreciative things about his books, she skillfully insinuated here (and flatly asserted elsewhere) that his choice of person- ages and view of mankind were the natural consequence of 14 Correspondence of Richardson. I, Ixxix. ) > Te A t . ‘ iate Tete ese Sea ah eee eres 278 FIELDING THE NOVELIST what she chose to believe was a vicious life. Richardson’s slan- ders she offered without comment, thinking, one may suppose, that they would be received with approbation. Partizan as she was, Mrs. Barbauld, in her “Life” of Rich- ardson, had exercised consid lerable restraint; she was even good enough to place Fielding on the “same shelf”? with Richard- son, though her own opinion as to their comparative merits is sufficiently clear. But in the prefaces to her British Novelists, six years later, she became bolder. She returned to the charge hat Fielding ‘“‘could not describe a consistently. virtuous char- acter’;*° and, despite more or less recognition of his ability— allowing him to be “the most distinguished 1 novel-writer in the walk of humour,”’?® praising Parson Adams for being ludi- crous without being contemptible, and commending Tom Jones for its artful construction and its richness in “humour and character’—she criticized Amelia for a fainter humor and “less original” characters; his “omen” for their “yield- ing easiness of disposition” ; and finally declared that if “Fielding had written only” Joseph Andrews, “there could have been no doubt of his being ranked among the friends of virtue.” Mrs. Barbauld’s method of vitiating ostensible praise of Fielding with qualifying end-emphasis and skillful innu- endo was insidiously effective. Long be fore Thackeray and even before Scott, she harped upon the idea that by * ‘seeing much of the vicious part of mankind, professionally in’ his latter years and by choice in his earlier,” Fielding’s “mind received a taint which spread itself in his works.” And this patalni toa a her opinion, had become manifest in Fielding’s heroines. ‘‘A man of licentious manners, otis such was Field- ing,” she declared, “seldom respects the sex.” She accuses him of keeping “down the characters of his women”: even the charming Amelia is to her only an example of an “vielding disposition” which is the quality Fielding “seems to lay the greatest stress upon”; while as regards Sophia, “A young TEU Recs 2 AT acre lcche + 5 The British Novelists, new ed., London, 1820, I, xi. 16 7}; , or ; Ibid., XVIII, i. For the passages which follow, see pp. X1Vv, X1X, XXV; Xl, XV1, Xi.BEFORE “WAVERLEY” 279 woman just come from reading Clarissa must be strangely shocked at seeing the heroine of the tale riding about the coun- try on post-horses after her lover.” One can imagine the smile with which Charles Lamb may have read these strictures; a year or so before the Correspondence appeared he had written Coleridge, “Damn them!—I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights and Blasts of all that is Human in man and child. Richardson’s Correspondence was reviewed at length in the magazines, notably in The Anti-Jacobin, in The British Critic, and (by Jeffrey) in the newly established and powerful Edinburgh. The British Critic, a religious periodical, went so far as to “defy any reader of taste to open either Pamela, Clarissa, or Sir Charles Grandison without being for some in- terval agreeably detained and amused’”’;"® but The Anti- Jacobin, though praising the novelist, characterizes his letter to Mrs. Donnellan as a “fine specimen of literary rivalry.” Jeffrey, in the Edinburgh, in spite of much obvious admira- tion for Richardson, strongly condemned ‘that most absurd and illiberal prejudice” which he “indulged against all the writings of Fielding.”*° In the opinion of another writer for the Edinburgh, the Richardsonian Mackintosh, the Corre- spondence was “certainly, in many parts, rather dull, as the reviewers justly say”;** yet the “‘dulness of Richardson” inter- ested him “more than the wit of most reviewers”; the edi- tor’s preface he regarded as “altogether excellent.”? Mrs. Bar- bauld, who was a woman of real ability and standing, was *7 E. V. Lucas’s edition of Lamb’s Works, London, 1905, VI, 253. 18 The British Critic, XXIV, 507 (November, 1804). 19 The Anti-Jacobin, XIX, 174 (October, 1804). 20 The Edinburgh Review, V, 38 (October, 1804). *1 “ “Richardson’s Correspondence’ has been called disappointing.”— The New Monthly Magazine, Il, 145 (1821). 22 Memoirs of Sir James Mackintosh, second ed., Boston, 1853, I, 247. The poet Blake, who had engraved some of Stothard’s plates for Grandison, declared that Richardson had won “his heart.”—Geoffrey Keynes, 4 Bibliography of William Blake, New York, 1921, pp. 64, 227 pe ary me rhs ji r Peron pkeh entero eugene ) rer eer er ae ae sot baa ee Sadabiiabiiebeeieat ee ee 4 RPsrtarectet eens rr ait a pn oy SS a ti es a ¢! Bq =] iv “ tb if) if Si Ln ol rate eh | Bel eo Pet eu = 9) myn hnoy ThA eee bebh i, eo eee eesti Le eer E teeta — Rete Se ae remy a ak eet ata het oleate ot eT Pens meee purer tt pike bain et hte ese reer ere eee tenn288 FIELDING THE NOVELIST and more, eulogy of the author of Clarissa took the form of a complaint against the growing vogue of his rival. So much a favorite was Fielding in 1807 that Sir Egerton Brydges (who, though not blind to some Meereclicnees of the Great Comic-Epic, was sealed of the tribe of Sentimentalism) se- verely castigated a public taste which could ‘‘wade” through the “ordure of a circulating library,” and ‘‘delight in the filthy amours of ‘Tom Jones.”** It was Brydges, by the way, who endeavored to perpetuate Miss Mulso’s abuse of Fielding —which had now become public property—her attack upon Amelia appearing to him “‘so just, and so powerfully stated, that I think it my duty to transcribe it.’>’ In the following year, the Rev. Edward Mangin—editor of Richardson—wno stigmatizes Fielding’s works in general as “vulgar trumpery” and Tom Jones in particular as the ‘whole craft and mystery” of “breeding illegitimate children,” begins his onslaught on improper fiction by vilifying T’om Jones, for the reason that “it is more or less the prevailing fashion to read, and quote, and praise in particular Mr. Fielding’s ‘History of a Foundling.’ ” Indeed there “are few persons in these coun- tries, I believe, of any age, sex, or condition, amongst those who can read, to whom the adventures of Tom Jones are not familiar. Something like a sense of shame would accompany the acknowledgment of never hz ving read Tom Jones. It is commonly the first book laid hold of by the youth of both sexes.” But the time will come, prognosticates the Rev. Mr. Mangin, when I’om Jones, a “fit” manual (with Joseph Andrews and Jonathan Wild) for the “rake and the courte- san,” will be found “‘only in the cabinets of the curious and the reprobate.’’** As an instance of the avidity with which the “youth” of that period “laid hold” of Tom Jones, we may cite the case of the future novelist, William Carleton. Of an odd volume 36 ae a ke 2 Censura Literaria, London, second ed., 1815, VII, 252. 87 Ibid. VII, 386. 88 / . + . . Mangin, E., An Essay on Light Reading, 1808, pp. 34, 48) 31) 46, and passim. His edition of Richardson’s Works appeared in 1811. SERN VE es hee maha Se OE | her ets re es mano stele baa eo ee ene ea 1 eae. oes i ‘ : onBEFORE “WAVERLEY” 289 which he picked up when a boy he writes, “I have not the slightest intention of describing the wonder and the feeling with which I read it. No pen could do justice to that.”®® But the most surprising confirmation of the popularity of the cele- brated book comes from Walter Scott’s little friend, Marjorie Fleming, who, not over six years old, wrote in her diary, “Tom Jones & Greys Elegey in a country churchyard are both excellent and much spoke of by both sex particularly by the mene Whether or not “Pet Marjorie” was right concerning the vogue of Fielding, there was no question about the decline of Richardson. ‘‘In these times of trifles,” writes the Rev. Perci- val Stockdale, the “productions” of Richardson are neglected and despised; a “corrupt taste” is so “universally diffused” that the reading public “‘will not deign to read a page” of that “immortal,” that “divine” writer, in whose works he discovers the “simple and pathetick oratory of CHRIST.’*? He works himself into a frenzy against Cumberland, who has “vainly endeavoured to obliterate the eternal fame of the authour of CLARISSA.” Moreover, The Quarterly Review for May, 1810, bemoans the fact that the “elegant and fascinating pro- ductions” of Richardson, whose object was ‘“‘to exalt virtue and degrade vice,” have “entirely vanished from the shelves of the circulating library.” Even Mackintosh, who was so af- fected by Richardson that he wrote (March 24, LGiT2)) eae have just finished poor ‘Clarissa,’ and my body is too weak for writing a criticism—even if my mind had power to do it,” was compelled to admit—much against his will, as we see from the following passage—that Fielding was in the lead. “And now I hear a clamour around me,” he wrote, September 1, 1811, “Tom Jones is the most admirable and popular of all °° Mrs. Cashel Hoey’s Life of William Carleton, London, 1896, I, 74. *° Lachlan Macbean’s Pet Marjorie, fourth ed., London and Stir- ling, 1914, p. 38. Her first winter in Edinburgh was in 1808-1809. 41 The Memoirs of . . . Percival Stockdale, London, 1809, pp. 95, 96, 93, 98. MiPi ih tenth pemeante ee nt thet aed - - ie or nee SFR art eal raat SE ean tt ee eee sates ot Om veal Pe aT ae beeen ltt Leek heneesbemthbeieeioen Lick test nas re a oe mm oh te ee es Rwy eee hart oo werent Wore be tetas Hen nde +, 8s ne ees ees an bee tt eee pee Sree ee ere tener!Seuseenetnndhtataaedeanentanieed beta Pe ee Phere EE ene —— eee a er ie ' > ae , i ? ee a! 290 FIELDING THE NOVELIST English novels, and will Mr. Philosopher pretend that Tom Jones is a moral book? With shame and sorrow it must be answered, that it does not deserve the name, and a good man, who finds such a prostitution of genius in a book so likely to captivate the young, will be apt to throw it from him with in- dignation; but he will still, even in this extreme case, observe, that the same book inspires the greatest abhorrence of the du- plicity of Blifil, of the hypocrisy of Thwackum and Square: that Jones himself 1s interesting by his frankness, spirit, kind- ness, and fidelity—all virtues of the first class.” Four years later, he endeavored to explain in one of his articles for The Edinburgh Review why the author of Clarissa was less popu- lar: “Richardson has perhaps lost, though unjustly, a part of his popularity at home; but he still contributes to support the fame of his country abroad. The small blemishes of his dic- tion are lost in translation. The changes of English manners, and the occasional homeliness of some of his representations, are unfelt by foreigners.” Of the author of Tom Jones, with some reluctance, he is bound to say: “Fielding will for ever remain the delight of his country, and will always retain his place in the library of Europe, notwithstanding that unfortu- nate grossness which is the mark of an uncultivated taste, and which, if not yet entirely excluded from conversation, has been for some time banished from our writings.”** To go forward a few years in this history, it is a significant fact that the Blackwood’s reviewer of Scott’s Lives, on their original appearance in the Ballantyne library of novels, declares that Sir Walter has been too lenient with the author of Clarissa and asks (April, 1824), ‘““Who reads Richardson?” This, of course, should not be interpreted too literally; but we see very clearly what was happening in the decade or so before the appearance of the “Great Unknown.” While Rich- ardson retained to a great extent his supremacy as a moralist, his epistolary form was felt more and more to be cumbrous Pee cg Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mackintosh, from the second London ed., Boston, 1853, II, 238, 131, 132. 48 The Edinburgh Review, XXV, 485 (October, 1815).BEFORE “WAVERLEY” 291 and antiquated; on the other hand, Fielding, though censured continually for licentiousness in some of his scenes, was gain- ing a solid reputation as a literary artist. Even the religious British Critic in its review of Mrs. Barbauld had declared that Richardson spoke “with an unbecoming contempt of Fielding, whose reputation as an author is at least equal to his own.”” Tom Jones, continues the reviewer, “ever has found, and always will [find], as many admirers as Clarissa ; though beyond ques- tion, as a moral writer, Richardson claims and deserves the pre-eminence.”** Defying tradition, The Anti-Jacobin (1804) had censured Mrs. Barbauld for “supposing Richard- son far superior” in pathos to Fielding; and, instancing pas- © sages in Amelia and elsewhere, had asserted that Richardson “oftener” but not “more strongly.” In appeals to the pathetic the reviewer’s opinion, Richardson’s genius was ‘over-rated by himself and his friends,” albeit he was the ally of “religion and virtue.” But it was the powerful Jeffrey in The Edinburgh Review who had the temerity to question the morality of Rich- ardson’s’ novels. ““That his pieces were all intended to be strictly moral,” he writes, “‘is indisputable; but it is not quite so Clear, that they will uniformily be found to have this tend- ency.” He discovers in Richardson’s virtuous characters a “certain air of irksome regularity, gloominess and pedantry.” Grandison, he thinks, is more likely to excite derision than ad- miration; and even in Clarissa herself there is something far from “winning and attractive.”** To be sure, Jeffrey was never a Fieldingite. He was perfectly willing to accept Lady Mary’s account as published in the edition of her Works, which he had reveiwed in the Edinburgh* for July, 1802. Her ladyship’s talk about the “sorry scoundrels,” Jones and Booth; her identification of Booth as Fielding; and her dis- paragement of T'om Jones and Amelia as “mischievous,” were presented at length, and the “extract”? was commended as “very judicious.” In the course of his various articles there are 44 The British Critic, XXIV, 513 (November, 1804). 45 The Edinburgh Review, V, 44 (October, 1804). <1 bid=alices ng: we. ee eae Ny a a ee ier ner ee ey wrt Tere ereer erre Tera ro E iene iAy Cit. aa nds cans pbs ieee eet et eee eer en yt reed ene] rr oven chp Pe yr rnate vent abewneacs. Sa ae eae wees ar Le iB | tf ri rt) a aH 3 Fal eH eal a ca or “ ee oad “ oa) oi a re eases Pe ee is on era aad Lette aie P anit oietintae-npeaniee ters - ee are eer ee rs Tare ae me Oe er beak bet eee reer ee ewtune ete: age Se eee eae et ONE hg we pretPies ear eraz 292 FIELDING THE NOVELIST other references to Fielding, whose standing he recognizes; though he is scarcely hearty in his praise.** Nevertheless, his review of Richardson, despite much commendation, is a for- ward-looking document; it represents the breaking up of the old Johnsonian adulation. Jeffrey’s engaging colleague on the Edinburgh, the Rev. Sydney Smith, already celebrated for his charm as a lecturer, recognized in Fielding a kindred spirit. In his review of Hannah More’s Coelebs, which he finds dry and didactic, he commends Grandison as a book which “teaches religion and morality” to “many who would not seek it” in the pages of Sherlock and Tillotson; but for all that, he is not afraid to characterize the story of Richards yn’s good man as “‘less agree- able than Tom Jones.”*® In one of his extraordinarily popular addresses before the Royal Institution (1804-1806), he made an adroit use of Fielding’s remark that “Aristotle is not such a fool as many people believe, who never read a syllable of his works.”’*” Not all preachers of the established church were so open in their admiration of the novelist as Sydney Smith; but not in- frequently under the mask of grumbling do we find a tacit recognition of Fielding’s place as a writer. Iwo instances in point are those of the Rev. W. L. Bowles—that latter-day Parson Adams, as he was called; and the Rev. Edmund Cart- wright, prebendary of Lincoln, who was celebrated as an in- ventor. Bowles, who was a great admirer of Richardson, took issue with Warton concerning the excellence of Squire West- ern—‘‘a grosser caracature,” he says, “was never drawn.” Yet in the same breath he admits that the “humour” of this char- acter is “unrivalled.”°° Cartwright, in his Sonnets Addressed 47 The “morality” of Wilhelm Meister, he says (in 1825), is “not worse” than that of “many works on which we pride ourselves at home —Tom Jones, for example.”—Edinburgh Review, August, 1825. 48 The Edinburgh Review, XIV, 146 (April, 1809). 49S. J. Reid’s Sketch of the Rev. Sydney Smith, second ed., London, 1884, p. 136. 50 Bowles’s edition of Pope’s Works, London, 1806, II, 339. hese tat weienresnetensten pees nome ee iat hetateeeticeesteied Oe aren SO Te _ sot ale = ane nee eee ; = ee 7 -BEFORE “WAVERLEY” 293 to Lord John Russel, is evidently very well read in an author with whom he pretends to quarrel. His sonnet on “Prudence” is introduced with the following remark: ‘Fielding, Sterne, Churchil, and other loose moralists”’ consider Prudence “but as a sneaking virtue at the best”; while the one on “Patience” is accompanied by a refutation of a saying of Fielding’s that ‘Patience is a virtue which is soon fatigued with exercise.””> Meanwhile, in the reviews, the old strictures and compari- sons continued from time to time up to the advent of Waver- ley. In the course of an article on Mme. Cottin’s Amélie Mansfield, the writer inveighs against that “warmth of col- ouring”’ of which “Fielding is notoriously guilty”; yet, at the same time, he implies that Fielding’s novels are “frequently” observed “in the parlours of respectable families.”°? In 1814, Lhe British Critic is disappointed in Dunlop’s History of Fic- tion because the author has neither “‘praised” Richardson “for the purity of his language and sentiments,” nor “censured” Fielding and Smollett “for the offense they so frequently give 8 “Tet the admirable construction of fable in both respects. in Tom Jones,” wrote Mrs. Brunton, August 15, 1814, lead “to a moral like Richardson’s.”°* Thus the two great exem- plars were used as standards by which to judge contemporary fiction.*° But it is to be observed that in respect to artistic shaping Fielding was more often considered the superior. In an account of Cumberland’s John de Lancaster, the Quarterly reviewer (said to be Walter Scott) writes as follows: “We cannot place Arundel and Henry on the same shelf” with “Fielding or Smollett, and we are the less inclined to do so as the latter novel, being a close imitation of Tom Jones, serves particularly to shew the wide difference between the authors.” Speaking of Cumberland’s borrowings, the writer calls attention to Ephraim Daw, in Henry, as “a methodistical ®t Letters and Sonnets, London, 1807, pp. 50, 125. °2 The Quarterly Review, 1, 304, 305 (May, 1809). °8 The British Critic, N. S., II, 180. °4 Mrs. Brunton’s Emmeline, Edinburgh, 1819, p. Ixxiii. °° See Mrs. Jane West’s reference in Refusal, London, 1810, I, 47. . J -t i mand Fee ei u rT ‘i ci cf) ea zr | iF ret ‘et a el eon oe Se eeeeewe ts wrmanns e wens ee 4 i" oa iene warns tee ee hn g bh ih 4y Hi 4 emheie irk mh ~,00, loath eeiniesetnioacisetaeal ielaeaienene miata biamenebieme atin etaetenatemmmae ieee a resSeeiseczesszreetss $2 La Leto 22025 294 FIELDING THE NOVELIST parson Adams, having the same simplicity of character, the same goodness of heart, and the same disposition to use the carnal arm in a good cause”; Robert de Lancaster, he says, is derived in part from Squire Allworthy, “who may not be utterly unknown to some of our readers.”®* And in the Quar- terly article on Miss Ex lgeworth’s Patronage (January, 1814) the statement is made that any “‘comparison with so happy an effort? as Tom Jones of “‘so great a master” as Fielding “would necessarily be unfair.”°’ What the reviewer “most” admires in that celebrated novel is the “wonderful variety of incidents arising without improbability, and introduced with- out confusion, and tending through a story constantly rising in interest, to an unforeseen catastrophe.’ ‘ The assertion is frequently made that Fielding was for- gotten before Waverley; but—as has already been seen—such a notion is utterly erroneous. Had the characters of the great books been lost in oblivion in 1813, Colman the Younger, who was a good judge of his audience, would never have written that long poem on Fieldi ng” S parsons W hich runs (in part) as i ee bee follows: Tell me did FIELDING dip his powerful pen In gall, to stigmatize all Clergymen! Although he shews their need,—nay, shews, to boot, This Priest a Drunkard, that a selfish Brute, Who, in his senses, ever understood He aim’d at writing down the Brotherhood! Ye Novel-Readers! Plain Nature’s feast, unpepper’d with a Ghost, such as relish most Tell me, how many Parsons there may be In JOSEPH ANDREWS'’S adventures —Three. The first,—the choicest Punch-Maker, by far, Of Customers behind the Dragomn’s bar; Who, ere the Bowl’s replenish’d, reels up stairs, And, o’er a wretch deem’d dying, hiccup’s prayers; 56 1), ia 8 The Quarterly Review, 1, 337) 338, 339 (May, 1809). SU Tbid., X, 307. EE BE era eakmeans 4 cheieee Pe EN ek tr # +. A ie i 4 - oe : - me: u Pe ei rs ie i yas erveyBEFORE “WAVERLEY” 295 While no one ventures, though impatience burns, ee ea * ens EGR bears Mini yibeietiena mena rete Seiten rT ve To squeeze the Oranges till he returns. The Second,—witless in the bashful art Spin 0 Cribeeete et ye ons That hides a sulky savageness of heart; Who, though a multitude of sins had He, Would scorn to cover them with Charity ;— eee eee es Etat ee A bare decorum, and his Cure, to keep, Sure as the Sabbath comes, attends his Sheep Drives to the Fair fat Porkers that he feeds, A much more genuine Hog than all he breeds. The Third,—oh FIELDING! there, thy Master-Hand Will Truth deny? can Gravity withstand? There Genius, Observation by his side, craeed “ ’ Chere rs een ee} Peers ores er bees Has taught us how to sort, yet not deride; There the keen Artist, the poor Churchman’s Friend, Bids Laughter, Moral, and Religion blend. Seek contrarieties in Man combine’d: mre et Saas Sh rte efe neta erhnte wovreaste es ablt =! rahe wer Book-knowledge, with no knowledge of Mankind; . *, { 4] H ea a Good parts, good nature, open to the shaft Of worldly Ill, for want of worldly Craft; Virtue so pure it ne’er suspects Deceit, Though, every hour, it suffers by a Cheat; Simplicity of Soul that claims respect, But leaves its Owner threadbare, in neglect ai} tp H | aa “ft aa if] a8] an ‘ a eit es | eR: a) } Seek, in one Person mix’d, the traits that move, At once our pity, mirth, esteem, and love So Adams sprang, to offer Taste a treat, From Fielding’s brain, a Character complete. And though the Curate meets with many a rub; Is souse’d, alas! into a water-tub Does, then, the good Man’s Ducking, Candour, say! His, or his Order’s, virtues wash away? If so, then Fielding, doubtless, would infer Scandal by Barnabas, and Trulliber; Infer the reverend Clergy’s weightiest work Consists—in making Punch, and fatting Pork.’’®8 °8 Colman the Younger, “Vagaries Vindicated,” second ed., in Poeti- cal Vagaries, London, 1814, pp. 203-204 (Advertisement to first ed., dated June 17, 1813).leernameee = = Cea ett ad ae ee "arma ee ere tins os ee see iphrhieesien eee velelatae = we tetinge lev ah aoe re ome ener a 296 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Clearly enough the great nov elist was popular at this time but the reputation which his rival enjoyed of having at home; triumph abroad was to all good Field- achieved the greater ingites somewhat disconcerting. ‘The explanation commonly given was that Richardson was less provincial, less ultra- English than Fielding; while Richardsonians went a step farther and, fortified by Johnson’s famous dictum, asserted that his wide appeal was due to a greater ororuneien Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, for example, while conceding that Field- ing had “attained the highest eminence” in novel-writing, in- sists that foreigners “neither can taste his works, nor will he ever attain to the fame of Richardson beyond the limits of his own country”; that Clarissa and Clementina will “‘penetrate”’ where Sophia Western and Parson Adams “‘never can be known or appreciated.” And the reason for this (here he quotes Johnson’s opinion as given by Mrs. Piozzi) is that Fielding painted “mere manners” while Richardson depicted “general nature,” that “Fielding gave us the husk of life while Richardson picked out the kernel.”°> Mr. H. B. Wheatley, to whose edition of Wraxall we are referring, adds a perti- nent footnote to the effect that “The criticism of to-day [1883] as to the rival novelists would be very different”; but Wraxall’s views were indisputably common in 1815. That ardent propagandist for Clarissa, Mme. de Staél—who be- came so strenuous in her activities that she disgusted the Field- ingite Byron—was a powerful advocate on both sides of the water for the profundity of Richardson. It is true she had a good word for Tom Jones, which, she says, “cannot be con- sidered simply as a novel,” though “the abundance of philo- sophical ideas, the hypocrisy of society, and the contrast of natural qualities are brought into action with an infinity of art”; yet to her mind Richardson was “‘first in rank.”’*° So common was the notion that Fielding was the most “English” 58 Memoirs of Wraxall, edited by Wheatley, London, 1884, lear, 38. 60 - : . 0 Influence of Literature on Society, tr. from the second London ed., Boston, etc., 1813, I, 293.5 we eS *heeee. eee ae — ee eh BEFORE “WAVERLEY” 297 of all English writers that more than one foreigner who de- 8 OE IR an “ Pubteebhete hheaent cee ee eet oe sired to learn not only the idiom but the “manners and pecu- cod ne aera 9961 i“ rs om liarities of England turned to a novel of his as to a hand- book. Still, La Harpe’s famous praise had not only found its way into Suard’s account of Fielding in the Biographie Uni- verselle,* but was already making an impression upon periodi- Se he ee Ye rrr ie ee Dip reece een eee ee TRS cal reviewers” in England. For several years.before Waverley the three men who were to be the greatest critics of the new century were, by compan- ionable “repercussion,” perfecting themselves in the theory and practice of their art. Of the “many lively skirmishes we used to have” at Lamb’s “Thursday evening parties” Hazlitt has left a glowing record. ‘““The Scotch novels,” he writes, “‘had not then been heard of: so we said nothing about them”’; but over “‘the old everlasting set”—Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Richardson, and “all those things that, having been once, must ever be’’—discussion “‘ran high.” It is to be noted that the affections of the “Companions” were catholic enough to per- mit the enjoyment of all four of the great novelists. With Coleridge, catholicity was a point of doctrine. “I have no re- pugnances,” wrote Lamb, “Shaftesbury is not too genteel for me, nor Jonathan Wild too low.” ‘‘Most men’s minds,” com- plained Hazlitt, ‘‘are like musical instruments out of tune”; they “adore Richardson but are disgusted with Fielding.” He praises Fawcett, his “‘first literary acquaintance,” for having a “taste accomodated to all.” On one celebrated evening, ac- cording to Hazlitt, the subject of discussion was ‘‘Persons One would Wish to Have Seen.” ““We were now at a stand for a short time, when Fielding was mentioned as a candidate: only one, however, seconded the proposition. ‘Richardson!’—‘By all means, but only to look at him through the glass-door of his back-shop . . . [not] to go upstairs with him, lest he +. pate ee ee ieee tet Sot Lee Cees a ee Ty iG a fi Rr ans eal e ees] 1H Le 04) aa be cas a Pr! 81 Autobiography of A. B. Granville, London, 1874, I, 273. Sc suome XV pps soi pe, baris, 18-5. 63 The British Critic (xxiii, 638) in a review of General Biography, objecting to Aikin’s statement that Fielding is “little relished by for- eigners,” cites La Harpe and others. Bi hcabincdicn rath *dtheuabtitpiah=Leindin oo + Ne eee et Peer te eee adSoenper en dul bet siresrese ee eatceecteheeeet om nee a eee eee RS Secret OE ow pose aseoeteeenialeenennia oes neers 298 FIELDING THE NOVELIST should offer to read the first manuscript of “Sir Charles Grandison”’ in eight-and-twenty volumes octavo, or get out the letters of his female correspondents, to prove that ‘Joseph Andrews” was low.’ ”’™* This passage has been used to show that Fielding was not popular in this period—an entirely mistaken idea—but if we may believe Hazlitt, neither Coleridge nor Lamb was at first of his party. Between Hazlitt and Coleridge the controversy presumably turned upon the relative merits of Fielding and Richardson. In 1798—to recall the story—some dozen years before the parties began at Lamb’s, the youthful Hazlitt, who had made a special journey on foot to meet Coleridge (whom he admired at a distance), was disappointed to find that the latter should prefer Richardson to Fielding, and was unsuc- cessful in weaning him from that preference. But before he died Coleridge became a staunch Fieldingite, and even before Waverley he had been turning away more and more from the author of Clarissa. His first marked revulsion against him seems to have resulted from the perusal of Mrs. Barbauld’s Correspondence. He writes in his diary in 1805: “T confess that it has cost, and still costs, my philosophy some exertion not to be vexed that I must admire, aye, greatly admire, Richard- son. His mind is so very vile a mind, so oozy, hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent! But to understand and draw him would be to produce a work almost equal to his own; and, in order to do this, ‘down, proud Heart, down’ (as we teach little children to say to themselves, bless them! ), all hatred down! and, instead thereof, charity, calmness, a heart fixed on the good part, though the understanding is surveying all. Richardson felt truly the defect of Fielding, or what was not his excellence, and made that his defect—a trick of un- charitableness often played, though not exclusively, by con- temporaries. Fielding’s talent was observation, not meditation. But Richardson was not philosopher enough to know the dif- 64 . 4 t , Lucas’s Life of Charles Lamb, New York and London, 1905, I, 529-BEFORE “WAVERLEY” 299 ference—say, rather, to understand and develop it.”®* Between Hazlitt and Lamb one of the chief subjects for debate was the comparative excellence of Fielding and Smollett. In fact, Hazlitt’s well-known essay on the English novelists in The Edinburgh Review, February, 1815, was the result, he in- forms us,°° cussion with Lamb (“some years” before) kept up till mid- night. It was to such a debate as this, that Hazlitt referred of a “sharply-seasoned and well-sustained” dis- when he said: “I remember the greatest triumph I ever had was in persuading” Lamb, “after some years’ difficulty, that Fielding was better than Smollett.”® Even before prose-narrative was rescued by Walter Scott from the scorn of reviewers, the great critics then coming into power—Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt—were giving serious attention to the older writers. One of the most notable out- ward manifestations of this increasing interest was the publi- cation (by John Dunlop, in 1814) of the first extended His- tory of Fiction—a work much more compendious than the previous account by Clara Reeve. In the brief section which is devoted to modern novelists, Dunlop perfunctorily accepts the old eighteenth-century categories—“serious” (for Richard- son) and “comic” (for Fielding and Smollett), adding to these the “romantic” (in order to include the tales of terror). “At the head of the first class” he “unquestionably” places the “works of Richardson.” Tom Jones, he says, is “the most cele- brated” of Fielding’s novels, and “perhaps the most distin- guished of all comic romances’’; for never “‘was a work more admirably planned,” and “‘besides,” “what humour and nai- veté, what wonderful force and truth in the delineation of incident!”°* Only one fault does he discover in the book— Tom’s illegitimacy. Possibly Walter Scott was thinking of Dunlop when he defended Fielding against this curious inepti- tude. In default of a better, The History of Fiction—despite °° Anima Poetae, London, 1895, pp. 166-167. 86 The Waller and Glover edition of Hazlitt, VIII, 499. 87 A. Birrell’s Hazlitt, New York and London, 1902, p. 122. ®8 Dunlop, J., The History of Fiction, London, 1814, III, pp. 372 ff. Fe i + kann Os m Wes ae et 3 — See eee Fk el ~ lbh Mbt cet pameninet shes ns — nS 40 verney Stee tet red as eT Se ee erent arenes 7 ew het ie ett invent bane " : . S ve ri 4 ) > pI 1 nl rs a py tal 18 a te rf ef mi +” ra re yr ry ee eee ee Re aoe prapoerpecietnnsan RN aa er ht pe al Rage Fe ee ee ener tee es oe ene300 FIELDING THE NOVELIST its inadequacy—occu] yied the field for half a century or more after its publication; but even at the time there was one critic in England who was aware of its shortcomings. Hazlitt, who reviewed the book for the Edinbur gh, desired to see “‘the His- tory of Fiction executed on a very different plan,” with a Bones spirit of philosophical inquiry and critical acute- ness.°? Presumably it was with Dunlop’s treatise in mind (as well as the famous discussion with Lamb) that Hazlitt wrote the excellent sketch which appeared (in The Edinburgh Re- view) the following February. Thus the ground was being great critical era immediately forthcoming. artistically Fielding was winning and Rich- = prepared for the It is clear that ardson losing; but Richardson still held his own as a profound moralist, and that difference in altitude between the rival novelists which is now generally conceded was as yet rarely perceived. ? 69 The Edinburgh Review, XXIV, 58 (November, 1814). vig Hy 5 q fs io? . a A YP J ere Hi 3 3 oe res 2 ete Cn *CRAP ARE YR: Xo From “ Waverley” to the Death, of Scott 1814-1832 I The Great Critics F’ those “who are charmed with the writings of Cer- vantes, Richardson, Fielding, and Rousseau,” ran an article in The Quarterly Review for January, 1814, “a very large portion are quite unaware that they are to be numbered among the most successful efforts of human wit, ingenuity, and eloquence.”* In after years, Jeffrey himself, looking back (1843) on his own early papers in the Edin- burgh, thus excuses himself for his cavalier treatment of prose fiction: “It may be worth while to inform the present genera- tion that, 72 my youth, writings of this sort were rated very low with us—scarcely allowed indeed to pass as part of a na- tion’s permanent literature—and generally deemed altogether unworthy of any grave critical notice. Nor . . . in spite of Cervantes and Le Sage . . . and even our own Richardson and Fielding at home—would it have been easy to controvert that opinion, in our England, at the time.’? But after Waver- ley (1814) the reviewers of novels resorted less and less often to apology; it was Scott who secured for fiction the respect to which it was entitled. Even before the appearance of his popu- lar romances, as we have observed, the three greatest critics of the age were not above turning their minds on occasion to the subject of prose narrative. It follows, therefore, that the years we are now to consider are incomparably richer than any pre- vious ones in dicta concerning Fielding’s works. Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Scott, Hunt, and others have left a consider- 1 The Quarterly Review, X, 302. 2 Jeffrey’s Contributions to the Edinburgh Review, London, 1844, III, 396. The preface is dated November 10, 1843. re ere. pba ter ee Seman bneter ee tec teem eel a. twee eee eet eer enen ty tT) Si) ihpauopedauele, Mebenie hate eee ToT Ett tee eet amen ancenstnlat Vee. yj aan | es — Sete ee Se eee a A it tf reas | AD +5 5 ai if rey) Pent et ene) toot et eee pomlnde yyeeeewete ere ne ee ee ee a ee eT aneSIR TTT Less FIELDING THE NO VELIST . body of opinion on record; and though the criticisms of only two of them (Hazlitt and Scott) extend to the length of an essay on the novelist, the authority of the authors was con- siderable enough to make a difference with posterity. Indeed, the casual reference to Fielding by a celebrity like Byron be- came a greater future asset to him than many a well-expressed and ably substantiated paragraph by writers of lesser reputa- tion. As we take account of the influences which from 1814 to 1832—a period notable for its romantic tendencies, its criti- cal ability, and its growing outward refinement—affected the name and fame of Fielding, certain questions naturally present themselves. After the new points of view made popular by the romances of Scott, with what eyes did the general reader look back upon T'omm Jones? How did its author endure the test of the criticism employed by Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt? Did the exponents of the refinement of manners continue to esteem Richardson above Fielding? Such questions as these will be the main concern of the present chapter. Sir Walter Scott’s triumph with Waverley and its successors need not be rehearsed here—the fame of the “Great Un- known” shot up like a century plant. In a letter of December 10, 1814, Mrs. Brunton laments the “unfortunate” circum- stance that her novel Discipline (1814) made its appearance “after Waverley”—the “most splendid exhibition of talent in the novel way, that has appeared since the days of Fielding and Smollett. What a competitor for poor little me!”’* During the next fifteen years the world of fiction-readers was almost entirely under the spell of Sir Walter’s picturesque historical narratives. In the minds of such influential writers as Jeffrey, Lockhart, and Wilson, these romances, with their strong infu- sion of the poetical, belonged to a higher genre than the un- romantic novels of Fielding. But the greater critics, —Cole- ridge, Lamb, and even Hazlitt,—it is interesting to observe, ee he Ere t ™ SN el Er ae : or el eine et ee rene Snes etmnyesete were never guilty of such an opinion. Their acquaintance with Fielding began early, and in each instance their admira- - : : mas 8 See Mrs. Brunton’s Emmeline, Edinburgh, 1819, p. Ixxvi. SF rea ie Peers coer ie“WAVERLEY” TO DEATH OF SCOTT 303 tion for him increased with the years, expressing itself in en- thusiastic phrases which have stirred the blood of posterity. It was before the days of the “Scotch Novels” that their famous discussions of the eighteenth-century writers began, and, as we shall observe, their judgment was never deflected by the vogue of Scott; yet the true comparative altitudes of Richard- son, Fielding, and Smollett were not quite clearly seen by them, although both Lamb and Coleridge came at length to realize the superiority of Fielding. On account of the impor- tance of these great critics, a somewhat extended consideration of their dicta will now be given. HAZLITT Of Hazlitt’s early enthusiasm for Fielding’s novels we have already spoken. “I think of the time ‘when I was in my father’s house, and my path ran down with butter and honey’ ”—he writes (in his essay “On Reading Old Books” ) —*when I was a little, thoughtless child, and had no other wish or care but to con my daily task, and be happy !—Tom Jones, I remember, was the first work that broke the spell.” Coming in “numbers once a fortnight,” which “regularly con- trived to leave off just in the middle of a sentence” and “in the nick of a story,” it “was to me a dance through life, a per- petual gala-day.” Of the heroine of Joseph Andrews, Hazlitt says, “‘there is a picture of Fanny” which the reader “should not set his heart on, lest he should never meet any thing like it.” He was also fond of Amelia. “With what eagerness,” he exclaims, did I “look forward to’the next number, and open the prints! Ah! never again shall I feel the enthusiastic delight with which I gazed at the figures, and anticipated the story and adventures of Major Bath.” It was in 1815, after his famous debates with Lamb, that Hazlitt’s most elaborate and best-known assessment of Field- ing appeared. He describes him, at the outset, as a master of the “double entendre” of character, who “surprises you no less * Waller and Glover ed., VII, 222, 223. rt A ai i ry a 7 _ TT errr errr RP rt Rb I eepenrb Sw rpanhs aa! eer apap eundt hednbnh eens cele bak Pe ie Rel Pr et to eee atone memes ei tub aay Pt fas Sh ae eu ] , ey wie ere eed reat wa — j tle ors wire epauhe wither ra ene ert oebaied8m pew eee aosinan are wrnnggn kaa Pe ean Fee pubes Su Ssi nthe 0 Sperber wet mere ante a ene Met ae o FIELDING THE NOVELIST 304 by what he leaves in the dark, (hardly known to the persons themselves), than by the unexpected discoveries he makes of the real traits and circumstances in a character with which, till then, you find you were unacquainted.” Farther on, he re- futes and endeavors to explain Johnson’s charge that Richard- son is profound and Fielding superficial. “Richardson,” says Hazlitt, ‘presents you with a conventional and factitious na- ture, instead of what is real. He furnishes his characters on every occasion with the presence of mind of the author. He makes them act, not as they would from the impulse of the moment, but as they might upon reflection, and upon a careful review of every motive and circumstance in their situation.” In short, “‘if the business of life was carried on by the post (like a Spanish game at chess), human nature would be what Richardson represents it.” “Dr. Johnson,” concludes Hazlitt, “seems to have preferred this truth of reflection to the truth of nature.” Hazlitt was not content to repeat the platitude that Fielding shows a “profound knowledge of hu- man nature”; he defined his terms and drew distinctions. The word “manners,” he says, implies “the sum-total of one’s hab- its and pursuits”: Fielding, in his opinion, is a true novelist of “manners”; Miss Burney, only of “manners of people in com- pany.” Moreover, Fielding must not be carelessly bracketed with Le Sage, who does not “trace the peculiar and shifting shades of folly and knavery as they are found in real life’; nor with Smollett, who was not an observer of “the characters of human life,” but of “its various eccentricities.”® And in general, writes Hazlitt, Fielding “has brought together a marked with greater variety of characters in common life, more distinct peculiarities, and without an atom of caricature, than any other novel writer whatever. The extreme subtilty of observation on the springs of human conduct in ordinary char- acters, is only equalled by the ingenuity of contrivance in bringing those springs into play, in such a manner as to lay open their smallest irregularity. The detection is always com- ar pe St It is only your “common-place” critic, he says, who “prefers Smol- lett to Fielding.”’—Waller and Glover, I, 138.WAVE REET A shO DEATH OF SCOTT 305 Pon Er ig bok oy ink tobe heniethahanah a ee wie aaa plete—and made with the certainty and skill of a philosophical experiment, and the ease.and simplicity of a casual observation. a es er sas The truth of the imitation is indeed so great, that it has been estinaetinn rte Bes y est PaaS Ay Pere ete ee pears argued that Fielding must have had his materials ready-made to his hands, and was merely a transcriber of local manners ee and customs. For this conjecture, however, there seems to be no foundation. His representations, it is true, are local and in- =r | dividual; but they are not the less profound and natural. The feeling of the general principles of human nature, operating in particular circumstances, is always intense, and uppermost 125 ~~ in his minc - re ett kine ee This celebrated Edinburgh article (which with some oes changes and additions appeared four years later as Lecture VI of the English Comic Writers, 1819) attracted little attention at the time, though it was warmly praised (April 24, 1815) by the diarist, Crabb Robinson, as “very intelligent”—the perce, res Be PEN Sent cbs “discrimination between Fielding and Le Sage particularly > excellent.”* Its “critical acuteness” makes us regret that Haz- litt never produced a longer treatise on Fielding and his con- 2 JOSEPUANDRYEWS.Y.1 BI. Ch.9.P, Fayury falsatings at hearing unexpect edly the Voice of Jofepl: Audrewa, sf , =uneuseauanpsnonnesssomnenel MU Sawhine wilt Lawna adler Ciwke hitcrander how san 2 46 Ri vorbvild ded PARSON ADAMS FLINGS HIS ASCHYLUS JONPARO) ADSI, ITO a ee ae Serres— ad le om —— ra rears ie | i ) H f.WAVERED ZA hODEATH OF SCOR ans more than once,’ “tend to diminish that ‘fastidiousness to the concerns and pursuits of common life, which an unrestrained passion for the ideal and the sentimental is in danger of pro- ducing.’ ”’ As will be seen, the tide of fastidiousness swept on past Lamb; and, during the Victorian Age, came nigh over- whelming Fielding. COLERIDGE Enthusiastic for Fielding as Hazlitt and Lamb both were, none of their dicta about him ever gained the reputation or had the influence which came in after years to the pronouncements of Coleridge. Yet the fact is not generally known that Cole- ridge was at first a Richardsonian, that in his earlier days he considered Richardson more profound than Fielding, and that it was not until the last years of his life and after considerable reflection and deep study that he reached the summit of his praise. It is interesting to observe the steps in this evolution.*® Mention has previously been made of the earliest notable reference to Fielding by Coleridge, a poetical one, in which the author praised the realism of Amelia (17/92) se butein spite of this early admiration for the pattern wife, Coleridge seems to have been more impressed by the heroines of Richard- son; in 1798, as we have seen, young Hazlitt found that his idol “liked Richardson, but not Fielding,” and would not yield to argument.*’ Even after being shocked in 1805 by the Correspondence which Mrs. Barbauld gave to the world, and after describing in detail in his journal—in a passage given before—the vileness of Richardson’s “mind,” and declaring himself “‘vexed” that he “must admire, aye, greatly admire” him, he still preferred the author of Clarissa to the author of Lom Jones (whose talent was “observation, not meditation” ). 3° The Works, edited by Lucas, I, 327 (“De Foe’s Secondary Nov- els,” 1829). Lamb quotes incorrectly from his own “Hogarth” (1811), I, 86. “© Acknowledgment is made to the University of California Press for permission to use parts of my article in The Gayley Anni- versary Papers, Berkeley, 1922, pp. 155-163. °7 Waller and Glover edition of Hazlitt, XII, 274. eres See NS ae ve beSh ous e et eheek tates ot pOniehisbetotieies meta ert = “+ ~ ae —s St iradal teen eis, ngreaehdnreccch resebaial . stetetele T= - ie e 318 FIELDING THE NOVELIST favor. In his stricture on Wordsworth for undue attention to biographical details, Coleridge implies Fielding’s artistic excel- lence by comparing him with Defoe, whose Moll Flanders and Colonel Jack were “‘meant to pass for histories,’ not for such novels as ‘“‘a Tom Jones, or even a Joseph Andrews.””*® To the emphasis which Fielding laid upon g goodness as opposed to elegance he had again referred sometime before this in a little critique entitled “A Good Heart.” He was very much pleased, he says, with Thomas Abbt’s remarks upon that sub- ject and particularly with that author’s “‘counterposition of Tom Jones and Sir Charles Grandison.””*”* In 1820, while the vogue of Scott was overshadowing the reputations of all former novelists, Coleridge again looked back to Parson Adams and eee in a letter to Allsop,*° that the author of Waverley had not produced his equal. He asserted, moreover, that a “higher degree of intellectual ac- tivity”*® was necessary for the ‘admiration of Fielding” than for an appreciation of Scott. This excellent observation 1s vitiated, however, by the fact that as regards intellectual sub- stance Coleridge subordinates Scott not only to Fielding but also to Sterne and even to Richardson. Furthermore, in a list of male characters that in his opinion are better than Scott’s we find not only Parson Adams but also Lovelace; while his list of female ee excludes all of Fielding’s women, even Amelia, and includes Richardson’s Miss Byron, Smol- lett’s Tabitha Bramble, and even Mrs. Bennett’s Betty. In this criticism, made in 1820, Coleridge allows Parson Adams and his creator the place of honor; but it is obvious that he has not yet fully perceived the difference in altitude between Fielding and that novelist’s contemporaries. It was during the period from 1820 to 1834 (the year of 43 Biographia Literaria, Il, 147 44 Coleridge’s Table Talk and Omniana, Oxford Press, London, 1917, Pp. 400. 45 Biographia Epistolaris, Bohn’s Library, London, 1911, II, 184- 185. 46 Tn January, 1821, he repeats this observation, declaring that it is o “fancy or croaking of my own.”—Letters, New York, 1836, p. 92.“WAVEREEY?? EO DEATH OF SCOTT 319 his death), while he was living at Highgate, that Coleridge’s appreciation of Fielding rose to its culmination in the famous praise which everyone knows. At this time the vogue of Scott was greater than that enjoyed by any novelist since the days of Richardson. Coleridge read the romances as they appeared with a lively interest: in 1820 (in the letter to Allsop just cc quoted) he declared that the “number Of characters so good” produced by “one man” and “in so rapid a succession, must ever remain an illustrious phenomenon in literature’ ein 1822 he thought “Old Mortality and Guy Mannering the best of the Scotch novels”; ** and at the close of his life, during a painful illness, he said that almost the only books which he could bear reading at such a time were the works of Scott. But he never regarded Scott as Fielding’s equal. Coleridge’s position in this respect was similar to that of Lamb and Hazlitt, neither of whom was swerved from his regard for Fielding by the vogue of Sir Walter. So much was Fielding’s star in the ascendant even during the earlier years of Scott’s popularity, that Thomas Dibdin the dramatist de- clared in 1826 that it was “‘a sort of high treason to imagine a fault” in the “prince of novelists,” ‘just as it would be to say a syllable derogatory to Shakspeare.”*® The Seer of High- gate, it may be imagined, noted this enthusiasm with satisfac- tion; and when, during the last years of his life, the adverse current had set in more strongly against Fielding’s novels, he came forward with a very carefully reasoned defense. “Even in this most questionable part of Tom Jones” [i.e., the Lady Bellaston episode, Book XV, ch. ix], he wrote, “I cannot but think, after frequent reflection on it, that an additional para- graph . . . would have removed in great measure any just objection, at all events relating to Fielding himself, by taking in the state of manners in his time.’’*® “TI do loathe the cant,” *7 The Complete Works, VI, 256. 48 Reminiscences of Thomas Dib: din, New York, 1828, II, 158. 49 Mr. Dobson, who transcribed this passage, says that the copy of Fielding in which it was written oe a shee of 1773) ‘thas Gillman’s book-plate.”—Fielding, New York, 1883, pp. 125-126. sO et eegohe. re mye Pee mene % ' Te ehtbiebadh peek ead bs qi + A . G " 4 rial} ‘ oe} ets 7? "oii uM 3! +e, ey “ ie ef a ch al Si an i er Ty rr ar Ree weanEe AE ~.fiace Pm eee. oe wea Oa ee aie toe ene Seen aistrimardasnp-sephvicwecoa bent aiats FIELDING THE NO VELIST he exclaims, “‘which can recommend Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe as strictly moral, though they poison the imagination of the young with continued doses of timct. lyttae, while Iom Jones is prohibited as loose. I do not speak of young women; ings can be injured, 320 —but a young man whose heart or feeli yassions excited, by ought in this nov el, is already thoroughly corrup _ ‘There is a cheerful, sunshiny, breezy spirit ils everywhere, strongly contr asted with the close, In short, let or even his | that preval hot, day-dreamy continuity of Richardson the requisite allowance be made for the chee refinement of our manners,—and then I dare believe that no young man who consulted his heart and conscience only, without adverting to what the world would say—could rise from the perusal of Fielding’s Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, or Amelia without feeling himself a better man;—at least, without an intense conviction that he could not be guilty of a base act. 2 Jonen comes the praise for Fielding’s exaltation of character above conduct. Citing the instance of BIifil’s restoration of ‘‘Sophia’s poor captive bird,” he continues, “If I want a servant or me- chanic, I wish to know what he does:—but of a friend, I must know what he is. And in no writer is this momentous distinction so finely brought forward as by Fielding. We do not care what BIifil does;—the deed, as separate from the agent, may be good or ill; but Blifil is a villain;—and we feel him to be so from the very moment he, the boy Blifil, re- stores Sophia’s poor captive bird to its native and rightful liberty.””” Coleridge’s numerous remarks on Fielding were not con- fined to Tom Jones; aset of notes on Jonathan Wild, 51 dated February 27, 1832, show how great was his interest in the novelist during the last years of his life. Finally, on July 5, 1834, three weeks before his death, Coleridge exclaimed: “What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the C&dipus Tyrannus, the Alchemist,” and 50 The Complete Works, IV, 380, 381. 51 Thid., IV, 382-383. 52 7 a . : On February 17, 1833, he had said of Ben Jonson, “Some of /“WAVERLEY” TO DEATH OF SCOTT 321 Tom Jones, the three most perfect plots ever planned. And how charming, how wholesome, Fielding always is! 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.”®$ The second great pronouncement (more influential than that of Gibbon) had been made upon the art and “morality” of Fielding’s novels; it was a deliberate judgment upon mat- ters which Coleridge had pondered for over a generation. When he said, ““‘We do not care what Blifil does;—the deed, as separate from the agent, may be good or ill,” he seized upon that shifting of accent from conduct to character which brought Fielding in direct opposition to the popular teaching of Richardson and of mid-eighteenth century formalists in general. By observing that in “no writer is this momentous dis- tinction so finely brought forward as by Fielding,” Coleridge ran counter to the still prevalent idea that it was Richardson and not Fielding who was the profound moralist. But the boldest stroke of all was his charge that the much-vaunted Clarissa was actually poisonous to the mind, A word in detail should now be said regarding the anno- tations upon Jonathan Wild; with Lamb and Hazlitt and un- like Scott, Coleridge was not blind to the merits of that mas- terpiece, which in his opinion ‘‘is assuredly the best of all the fictions in which a villain is throughout the principal charac- ter.”** He appreciates the difficulty of the task that Fielding set himself: “How impossible it is by any force of genius to create a sustained attractive interest for such a ground-work, and how the mind wearies of, and shrinks from, the more than painful interest, the puoyrdv, of utter depravity,—Field- ing himself felt and endeavored to mitigate and remedy by his plots, that of the Alchemist, for example, are perfect.” Mr. J. W. Draper suggests (M. L. P., XXXVI, 399, September, 1921) that “prob- ably Coleridge drew from Pye” [4 Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle, London, 1792, pp. 182-183] his obiter dictum on the per- fection of the plot of Tom Jones. °$ The Complete Works, VI, 521 (“Table Talk”). °* [bid., IV, 382-383 (February 27, 1832). Apres o. nge dubbed hake tat eee ee erera wins hee om steeen BY A Pe tok te ae = aren edn ee Se eT er Oa vay eae ed Se eee ah eee a Sr SRE Crit that as = als | ia aa oo £2 eel es tla . _— ere rs hehe ee Ae tet ite i ois ef Re Ph) Pad ret aT i ei res) " Pi $ Poa en iw d pT aa f ee ee ar rr aad Sol eben ee ee nt eer eee eeonan aa SE Se eras ec ae TO rs ra ee = o ; Pa bi H a7 | ons Parte tre 322 FIELDING THE NOVELIST the (on all other principles ) far too large a proportion, and too quick recurrence, of the interposed chapters of moral re- flection, like the chorus in the Greek tragedy,—admirable specimens as these chapters are of profound irony and philo- sophic satire.” In his judgment, “Chap. VI, Book 2, on Hats, brief as it is, exceeds any thing even in Swift’s Lilliput or Tale of the Tub.” Remembering Coleridge’s praise of the style of Swift in his “Lectures,” we can appreciate the value of this remark. What is chiefly to be noted in his account of Jonathan Wild is that his first concern, as in his criticism of Tom Jones, is to seize upon Fielding’s artistic purpose. While the romantic and unphilosophical Scott, looking into the book as in a glass darkly, could see nothing but a picture of unre- lieved villainy, Coleridge, who appreciated in all its bearings the force of Fielding’s moral satire, was probing into minute details of its structure. ““Whether the transposition of Field- ing’s scorching wit (as B. iii, c. xiv.) to the mouth of his hero be objectionable,” he writes, “on the ground of incredulus odt, or is to be admired as answering the author’s purpose by un- realizing the story, in order to give a deeper reality to the truths intended,—I must leave doubtful, yet myself inclining to the latter judgment.” In thus applying to every detail the standard of the author’s total artistic significance, Coleridge stands head and shoulders above every other writer thus far mentioned. By way of summary of the attitude toward Fielding of the great critics—Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt—we observe, in the first place, that all three were, originally or eventually, enthusiastic to eloquence over the novelist’s art. Charles Lamb was particularly fond of Parson Adams; Hazlitt drew atten- tion to what he called Fielding’s double entendre of character; Coleridge, who began with a prejudice against him, became in the end his greatest champion—praising the plot of his Tom Jones as one of the three best in the world, his health and sanity, and his wonderful style. It is true that none of these three critics clearly perceived the real difference in stature be- tween Fielding and his fellows—+that had to be left for a laterSWAVERER ITO DEATH OF SCOTT B28 period—nor can we believe that any of them had that con- ception of Fielding the Man which has been growing ever clearer during our own generation; but all three came to the opinion that Fielding the Artist ranked second to none of his contemporaries—Richardson, Smollett, or Sterne. Moreover, all three joined in repudiating the idea of the previous century (and, to a great extent, of their own age) that the works of Fielding were immoral—while those of Richardson were moral—and stoutly defended their wholesomeness. Lastly, it is to be observed, that the popularity of Scott, the “King of the Romantics,” despite the fact that this was the romantic period par excellence, did not turn any one of them a hair’s breadth from his high opinion of that professed foe to the marvelous, Henry Fielding. Still, as ill luck would have it, the influence of Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt in the cause of Fielding was not, for one reason or another, greatly perceptible while any one of them was alive. Coleridge’s famous praise was confined to mar gi- malia and table-talk that were not published until after his death. Lamb’s Elia, which contained the eloquent passage on Lom Jones, did not enjoy a second edition during the author’s lifetime. Finally, Hazlitt’s essay on the “Novelists,” reprinted in his English Comic Writers, was obliged to wait for its tri- umph until later in the century. This delay was due in part to the many Animosities which were felt toward the author; but in 1824 so little known was the famous criticism that John Galt, who in that year appropriated the original Edinburgh article for his Bachelor’s Wife,°* declared that the author was Francis Jeffrey, despite the fact that the title-page of the 1819 volume specifically read, “By William Hazlitt.” It is a significant fact that Thomas Roscoe, who compiled the memoir for the one-volume edition of Fielding in 1840, ut- terly ignored Lamb, Hazlitt, and even Coleridge (whose Lable-Talk had appeared only a few years before). The popular attitude toward Fielding during the vogue of °° The Bachelors Wife . . . By John Galt, Esq., Edinburgh, 1824, PP. 405-427.FIELDING THE NOVELIST 325 Scott (1814-1832) was not so friendly as that of these three great critics. Nor 1s this surprising: Leslie Stephen was right when he said that English fiction took a new beginning with Waverley; and our wonder is, that, in the full flush of ro- manticism, in the period of Scott and Keats, the realistic Field- ing should have risen in the minds of three of the greatest critics which England had produced to a higher position than he had thus far attained. Before turning to the lesser lights— the men who used the romances of Scott as a new touchstone on which to try his predecessors—an account should be given of the “Great Unknown” himself, particularly of his own views on Fielding, which, by the way, owing to the writer's extraordinary popularity, became, for the immediate future, the most influential criticism of the novelist both at home and abroad. II WALTER SCOTT It seems like a further manifestation of that ill luck which pursued Fielding dead as well as alive, that the person to whom it fell to compose the most frequently quoted sketch of his life which appeared during the first generation of the nine- teenth century should be a writer whose sympathies were at best imperfect. Scott was a Jacobite, Fielding a Whig; Scott was a romancer, Fielding a realist; Scott tried to minimize the importance of form and plot, Fielding was a master- builder; Scott regarded fiction as simply a means of entertain- ment, Fielding—vitally in earnest—lacked little of being as much a reformer in his books as in his office as a magistrate. Naturally enough, therefore, we find that Scott’s account of Fielding, though in some respects most commendable, is, in others, exceedingly unfortunate and damaging. His two most extended criticisms of his great predecessor are, of course, the two Ballantyne “‘Lives” (1821 )—the Field- ing and the Smollett; but these should be supplemented by the introductory epistle to The Fortunes of Nigel (1822), the wetanin-4te samp ae, + aE tc bm Ce eee. Sessa lad nr eel teehee noe ater eit rast See ha ee Ne i! & ab r 4 : t { em ee LaWAV BREET. TO DEATH OF SCOTT 25 foreword to The Monastery (1830), and various references scattered through his Journal, his Letters, and Lockhart’s Life. With the biographical part of the Ballantyne Fielding we are not here concerned; but it may be remarked in passing that Scott seems to go out of his way, in his brief sketch, to make derogatory insinuations against Fielding’s character. He was greatly impressed, apparently, by the stories of Walpole and Lady Mary, whose tales about the novelist had been put in cir- culation not long before and had run the rounds of the peri- odicals; and though he exclaimed against Richardson’s ma- lignity he did not hesitate to print what that writer said to Fielding’s sister about her brother’s “lowness.” Among the materials which Scott had before him were Murphy’s unfor- tunate “Essay,” the ill-natured biography of Watson, and the injurious accounts of Mrs. Barbauld and her brother; he made use, however, of John Nichols’s article and of the admirable essay by Hazlitt. In the way of research he did absolutely nothing, the biographical part of his ‘‘Life” being a hasty com- pilation ; as he told Lady Louisa Stuart’°—modestly but truth- fully—the “Lives” were “rather flimsily written,’ done “merely to oblige a friend.” The critical part of the Fielding, though evidently put to- gether in haste, mainly from suggestions in the works at hand, contains several very excellent passages. Scott has no hesitation in declaring that Fielding (not Richardson) is the ‘‘father of the English novel”; and though he presumably borrowed this phrase from Watson, his own position as a writer was such as to give the dictum considerable force. Richardson’s works, he says, “still dealing in improbable incidents, and in char- acters swelled out beyond the ordinary limits of humanity,” are “but a step from the old romance,” while Tom Jones, the “first English Novel,” is “truth and human nature itself.”” To Wipe out with a stroke of the pen that old prejudicial antithe- sis of “serious” and “comic” (which had held sway from Beattie to Dunlop); to characterize the works of a writer who °6 Lockhart’s Memoirs of the Life of . . . Scott, Boston and New York (Houghton), 1910, II, 595-596. eer eee Peete renee bibtehedeeredi ae ree ae suf ah a . ee Se oes Citebase Pa ee ere at “ft te Rf otal ie i Fie «| L ' | ; one a es RT Pe peri ae Stee ete ed et ee ee ee328 FIELDING THE NOVELIST even according to Chesterfield never mistook nature as little nearer reality than the old romances; and to proclaim Fielding (rather than Richardson) the “frst of British novelists” —was a sufficiently daring procedure in the year 1821; and the Wiz- ard of the North was one of the few magicians potent enough to make these revisions influential. Nor did Scott’s good offices end here; annoyed by the constantly reiterated charge that Fielding’s masterpiece was an immoral book, he rose to a gal- lant defense of that author’s ethics. The “follies of Tom Jones,” he writes, ‘‘are those which the world soon teaches to all who enter on the career of life nor do we believe, that, in any one instance, the perusal of Fielding’s Novel has added one libertine to the large list.’’ Moreover, though certain pages in the book may offend delicacy, they are “rather jocu- larly coarse than seductive’; and even these “fare atoned for by the admirable mixture of wit and argument, by which, in others, the cause of religion and virtue is supported and ad- vanced.” For the plot and characters Scott expresses great admiration. In “forcible yet natural exhibition of character,” Fielding, he says, is “unapproached as yet, even by his successful follow- ers”; also in the handling of plot the author of Tom Jones “cannot too often be mentioned with the highest approbation.” To him the “‘felicitous contrivance, and happy extrication of the story, where every incident tells upon, and advances the catastrophe, while, at the same time, it illustrates the charac- ters of those interested in its approach,” were a constant mar- vel. Two exceptions “‘to this praise” he considers, explaining one and refuting the other. In his opinion, the unnecessary in- terpolation of “the Story of the Old Man of the Hill? was due to a compliance with the custom of Cervantes and Le Sage; while the illegitimacy of om Jones was not what the malicious Richardson would have it but simply a device for holding suspense. “For,” writes Scott, “had Miss Bridget been privately married to the father of Tom Jones, there could have been no adequate motive assigned for keeping his birth ’ a Rare ae een) secret from a man so reasonable and compassionate as All- Raabe wee ee eae Desay bee Coptieehieaeee en enna : ; ; ee BE“WAVERLEY” TO DEATH OF SCOTT 327 worthy.” Adapting (as so many have) the figure of Arthur Murphy, Scott pictures the reader of Lom Jones gliding “down the narrative like a boat on the surface of some broad navigable stream, which only winds enough to gratify the voyager with the varied beauty of its banks.”®? “But even the high praise due to the construction and arrangement of the story,” he continues, “‘is inferior to that claimed by the truth, force, and spirit of the characters, from Tom Jones himself, down to Black Georges = = Amongst these, Squire Western stands alone’; though he “ought not to have taken a beating so unresistingly from the friend of Lord Fellamar.” On such a point, as more than one critic has since Suggested, Fielding was probably a better judge than his Jacobite censor; but this matter, once so important, is now rather trivial. Much less excusable is Scott’s disparagement of Amelia. While he pays a tribute to the “feminine delicacy, and pure tenderness” of the heroine, he finds the tale, “on the whole, unpleasing.” In Joseph Andrews, however, in spite of the “wicked spirit of wit” which prompted it, and of its pedantic mock-heroic style (copied, as Scott thinks, not from Cervantes but from Scar- ron), the “inimitable character of Mr Abraham Adams” js alone “sufficient to stamp the superiority of Fielding over all writers of his class.” Undoubtedly there are good things here, and they are ex- pressed with the author’s customary ease and assurance; still, as we put down the essay, we feel that Scott was never quite at the point of view of the man he criticized. Regarding the novel as a “mere elegance” and “luxury” of “polished life,” and believing that, although it may “sometimes awaken” the “better feelings and sympathies,” it is read ordinarily without “the least hope of deriving instruction” therefrom, he looked for no deeper motive in Fielding than his own romantic fic- tion possessed, The “professed moral of a piece,” he declares, °7 In his account of Mackenzie (the Ballantyne Novels, V, lii), Scott says, “The reader’s attention is not rivetted, as in Fielding’s works, by strongly marked character, and the lucid evolution of a well-constructed fable.” Ey CO a rant thy ny ewer er ear ee bn. Sy eS rere a eens aan ht PATS Sei woe Eo nt eipinceh-rurrab iets terete ts . ; reed Pe Fi oF ee eo) ys Ee ey eA + i> het reatTE Te TOL aT ESTs SEL GEOL TS CeT 328 FIELDING THE NOVELIST “< like the mendicant, who cripples after_some splendid and gay procession” —no one regards him. This lack of apprecia-__ tion of Fielding’s ethical motive often leads Scott astray. It yarage Jonathan Wild: “It is not easy,” he — leads him to disj lding proposed to himself by a picture writes, “to see what Fie lete vice.”®* It leads him to do scant justice to Amelia. of comp 1 in the working out of Disregarding the razson @étre of Bootl book, he dispraises the entire novel be- the significance of the own sake—‘“We__ cause he cannot admire this character for its have not the same sympathy for Booth,” he declares, “which we yield to the youthful follies of Jones.” It leads the central thesis of Fielding’s greatest novel—that the ‘“‘character of Jones” is “unnecessarily de- he nature of his intercourse with Lady Bellaston.” him to say—missing graded by t Finally it leads him to misinterpret the character of the author himself. Earlier in the essay he had quoted unsuspectingly— even approvingly—Lady Mary’s aristocratic sneer at Fielding’s marriage with his “cook-maid,” and (probably recalling that “taint? which was discovered in Fielding’s “mind” by Mrs. Barbauld and her brother) had inferred from the *“humiliat- ing” Walpole anecdote that the author’s “mind had stooped itself completely to his situation.” He now asserted that the inclusion of the Lady Bellaston incident in Tom Jones in- clines “us to believe, that Fielding’s ideas of what was gentle- man-like and honourable had sustained some depreciation, in consequence of the unhappy circumstances of his life, and of the society to which they condemned him.” In his “Life” of Bage, he makes a similar observation: “Fielding, Smollet, and other novelists, have, with very indifferent taste brought for- ward their heroes as rakes and debauchees, and treated with great lightness those breaches of morals, which are too com- 58 Dobson suggests that as Scott may have “found the subject repug- nant and painful to his kindly nature,” he did not “study the book very carefully,” for he entirely ignores the Heartfree family.—Fielding, London, 1883, p. 105. As a matter of fact, the idea of a “picture of complete vice” had already been made current by Mudford and other mee at od = C arr eel ae Coe et ne bese etna on hacen ee een . ’ ~ 4 eas - calumniators of Fielding.“WAVERLEY” TO DEATH OF SCOTT 329 monly considered as venial in the male sex.” Tom Jones and Booth were portrayed as rakes, he thinks, because the moral sense of their creator was blunted; and what made him sure ‘of this point was the scandalous gossip of Lady Mary and Horace Walpole. One reason for this misinterpretation of Fielding, as has been suggested, lay in Scott’s attitude toward fiction, and, in fact, toward life itself. It was a Coleridge and not a Scott who could interpret and enjoy a satire such as Jonathan Wild. And this brings us to the famous crux as to why Scott took so much trouble to put Smollett on the same shelf with his great contemporary. Many critics have asserted that he held a brief for Smollett because of his patriotism; and it is true that Scotchmen have been proverbially loyal. Even Carlyle, who shied at Fielding’s “morality,” declared that one of the “sun- niest”’ days of his life was when he read Roderick Random. Moreover, Scott’s defense was presumably influenced by the volumes of his compatriot, Anderson, which, he admitted, lay open before him. Still, he was, ordinarily, too generous a man to resort to any wilful sophistry; it is worth while to consider his argument in detail. To begin with, Fielding is far and away the superior in plot construction: “The art and felicity with which the story of Tom Jones evolves itself,” he writes, “is no where found in Smollett’s novels, where . . . the ad- ventures recorded” bear neither “‘upon each other,” nor “‘on the catastrophe.” Nor does Fielding yield the palm in respect to character: “We should do Jones” great “injustice by weigh- ing him in the balance with the savage and ferocious Pickle.” By granting superiority to Fielding in regard to both plot and character, Scott would seem to have a hard case to prove; this, however, is what he says: ‘““The deep and fertile genius of Smollett afforded resources” sufficient to make up for these “deficiencies; and when the full weight has been allowed to Fielding’s superiority of taste and expression, his northern con- temporary will still be found fit to balance the scale with his great rival. If Fielding had superior taste, the palm of more brilliancy of genius, more inexhaustible richness of invention, ‘ 4 oF - >) ota ta HH % . “ ret a ae Hs “fT a? eos ii . arn pyr et ee eee re ettamhch poeta, eet ee Pan ee" s ht bee ak Se ee bh inthetoe LE ant Peth~pehabene ebbdhea het nal Ta ieee 7 Pr Sf PS eye ae Tt Oe a ET Pe aR pe Ph ob rr pings ean . we Pai ary 4) 4 es and for that he was not obliged to resort to “extrinsic matter,’ so managing his “delightful puppet-show”’ that he had no need of “thrusting his head beyond the curtain.” In his “Life” of Fielding, however, he speaks very highly of the initial essays. “Those critical introductions,” he asserts, “which rather in- terrupt the course of the story, and the flow of the interest at the first perusal are found, on a second or third, the most en- tertaining chapters of the w hole work.” What Scott wrote of Fielding the Artist is thus a mixture of praise and censure, though some of the praise is very excel- lent. He first became acquainted with the novels when he was a lad of thirteen;®® and on his own last journey he carried with him for solace The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon.® Ina letter to Ballantyne, he had written, “My present idea is to go abroad for-a few months, if I hold together as long. So ended the Fathers of the Novel—Fielding and Smollett.””° The fol- lowing passage from Lockhart is of interest at this point: “ ee 2, fe re es Pe mY ie 7 ms a J re “ ki ce te fc tf = 342 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Haziirr. Why, perhaps, Fielding is to be excused as a disap- pointed man. All his success was late in life, for he died in 1754; ane Joseph Ana ; (the first work of his that was popular) was published in 1748 sii ]. All the rest of his life fe had been drudg- ing oe sr the booksellers, or bringing out unsuccessful comedies. He probab bi anticipated the same result in his novels, and wished to be ae the favour of the reader by putting himself too much for- rd. His prefaces are like Ben Jonson’s prologues, and from the same cause, mortified vanity; though it seems odd to say so at pres- ent, after the run his writings have had; but he could not forsee that, and only lived a short time to witness it. Norrucore. I can bear any thing but that conscious look—it 1s to me like the lump of soot in the broth, that spoils the whole mess. } F IRL te i fe ee y . Fielding was one of the swaggerers. J Hazuitrr. But he had much to boast of. NortHcore. He certainly was not idle in his time.°” TALFOURD It is a relief to turn from the grumbling Northcote to a less rabid Richardsonian, the ebullient Talfourd, whose essay on “British Novels and Romances” (it appeared originally in The New Month ly Magaz ine, February Ic 1820) reflects that spirit of enthusiasm which we have previously found in Cole- ridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt. In his eulogy of Rich ardson, [al- fourd pictures “‘the good housewife,” employed “‘all her life in the severest drudgery,” thinking of the ““well-thumbed volume” of Clarissa, which she “found, when a girl in some old recess, and read with breathless eagerness, at stolen times and moments of hasty joy.”®® Clarissa, in Talfourd’s opinion, is one of the few books which leave us different beings from those which “they find us; “‘sadder and wiser” we “arise from its perusal.” In brief, he declares Richardson’s works to be 66° } rs . . - among the grandest and most singular creations of human 89 Waller and Glover Hazlitt, VI, 457-458. 90 This passage is singularly like the one about the seamstress two years later in “Detached Thoughts” (1822) by Lamb (Works, edited by Lucas, II, 73).SAV ERODE KO: DEATH OF SCOT Is 24a Pe eee Po kek eue ee oe us. STEER a paihart etigeh tet 4 genius.” But Talfourd was also very fair to Fielding. In the following remark, he seems to anticipate Coleridge—at >a a a least, in print. When “we read Fielding’s novels after those of Richardson, we feel as if a stupendous pressure were removed from our souls”; we ‘“‘seem suddenly to have left a palace of ey enchantment,” illumined “by a light not quite human, nor ” 3 Pp Fie aa fs fh i +3} nm Ph an yet quite divine,” and, traveling ‘“‘on the high road of hu- manity,” to revel again in “the fresh air, and the common ways of this ‘bright and breathing world.’ ” The mock-heroic of Fielding, to his mind, is “scarcely less pleasing than its stately prototype,” and though there is not much that “‘can be called ideal” in him “except the character of Parson Adams,” “How vivid are the transient joys of his heroes!” Tom Jones is “quite unrivalled in plot, and is to be rivalled only in his own works for felicitous delineation of character.” All- worthy is like “one of the best and most revered friends of our childhood”; and ‘Was ever the ‘soul of goodness in things evil’ better disclosed, than in the scruples and dishonesty of Black George . . . ?_Did ever health, good-humour, frank- heartedness, and animal spirits hold out so freshly against vice and fortune as in the hero?” Was there ever “‘so plausible a hypocrite as Blifil, who buys a Bible of Tom Jones so delight- fully?” Of the wholesomeness of the great novel Talfourd says that while the story of Lady Bellaston is a “blemish,” if “there be any vice left in the work, the fresh atmosphere dif- fused over all its scenes” will “render it innoxious.” Joseph Andrews has “far less merit” as a story, but Parson Adams is a character that “does the heart good to think on”; he ““who drew” this character alone “would not have lived in vain.” To conclude, Smollett had more “touch of romance” than Fielding, but no such “profound and intuitive knowledge of humanity’s hidden treasures.” Thus, worshiper of Clarissa as he is, Talfourd joins Lamb, Hazlitt, and Coleridge in the joyful chorus. Very different this paean of praise from the silences and the vilifications of the age to come—the age of Carlyle and Ruskin! c ee ete $e een an aenceen ten eT a bo pee eter re re php neet ak ORS Oa wl eyreeer! en ae Oe yg eee ort i aE ’ aa 7 ee ry a er eh age344 FIELDING THE NOVELIST SOUTHEY Great as was the enthusiasm of Talfourd (and his betters), no one of any note seems to have thought of writing a biog- raphy of Fielding except, perhaps, Southey, who, on one occa- sion, came near making a Fielding “find.” Caroline Bowles, it seems, was acquainted with a very old lady—‘“‘a_ living chronicle of the past’—who, intimate as a young woman with Miss Collier, once had in her possession some of Fielding’s letters. About two months before this fact was discovered, the old lady, thinking she was about to die, had “destroyed with ruthless unsparingness”’ the “long-treasured correspondence.’””” Southey was also interested in the other eighteenth-century novelists, particularly in Sterne, whose influence is to be noted in The Doctor. One recalls the Shakespearean passage in which the author says jokingly to Miss Graveairs, “Banish Tristram Shandy! banish Smollett, banish Fielding, banish Richardson! But for the Doctor banish not him!” Like Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt, Southey had the highest regard for Field- ing and was fond of quoting from his works. Long before Coleridge had come to his final conclusion about Richardson and Fielding, Southey had written (November 4, 1812), “My own opinion of Richardson is, that for a man of decorous life he had a most impure imagination, and that the immorality of the old drama is far less mischievous than his moral stories of Pamela and Squire Booby (how I like Fielding for making 9398 out that name), and of Clarissa.”** Moreover, Southey was one of the first influential literary men (along with Lamb and Scott) to set a high value upon the Voyage to Lisbon. In a let- ter to Caroline Bowles (February 15, 1830), he calls it “the most remarkable example I ever met with of native cheerful- ness triumphant over bodily suffering and surrounding cir- cumstances of misery and discomfort.” And again (on Whit- °1 The Correspondence of Southey and Caroline Bowles, edited by Dowden, Dublin and London, 1881, pp. 184, 186, 195, 196, 198. ®2 The Doctor, London, 1834, I, 185 (ch. xix). 8 Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, edited by Warter, London, 1856, II, 297. Sa ee a ee Side eine ec re rete an ae ee neon a eee ee “ amen ne A at AN ie haSWAVERLE IG lO DEATH OF SGOT Te 245 cle ee een oT) aetna pkehetataeremh peeenn le ee at Set ee ehee nie sunday, 1830) he writes (in another letter to Caroline Bowles): “His account of that voyage is to me the most ex- ai ot ra Pr a aya re. : traordinary, and perhaps the most interesting of all his works. Never did any man’s natural hilarity support itself so marvel- lously under complicated diseases, and every imaginable kind of discomfort.”** In a letter to Sir Egerton Brydges during the same year, Southey tells of meeting (some dozen years be- fore) William Fielding, the magistrate, of whom Hazlitt also wrote. “‘He received me,” says Southey, “in a manner which had much of old courtesy about it, and I looked upon him with great interest for his father’s sake. 9995 LEIGH HUNT An even greater enthusiast than Southey, in fact one of the warmest admirers Fielding has ever had, was Leigh Hunt, whose many allusions to the novelist almost rival in number those of William Hazlitt. Richardson he held in less esteem, though he referred very frequently to scenes and characters in his works; the following passage from The Indicator (1821) sounds as though it had been written a hundred years later. Twitting Charles Lamb for considering Richardson “extraor- dinary,” Hunt goes on to say, “‘[ Richardson] was the more extraordinary inasmuch as he writes the most affecting books, in a spirit, which to us at least appears one of the most unfeel- ing imaginable. He writes seven or eight thick volumes on the tortures of a young woman; and seems at the end as if he could have written seven or eight more, had it been politic as a matter of trade. There is wonderful ability in his books, wonderful knowledge of all sorts of petty proceedings, won- derful variety of character; and with all this one cannot help being interested at a first reading. But in all the finer as well as larger meanings of the word, he wants humanity. He neither knows what vice nor what virtue is, properly speaking. He 94 The Correspondence . . . with Caroline Bowles, pp. 184, 198. 95 The Autobiography . . . of Sir Egerton Brydges, London, 1834, II, 267-268. The meeting “must have been in 1817.” a ‘Sakeetl read CN kee pap venene Sree rie ryt) Maem ws DOTSee ee ee es pe ee Prete. Fete te ~ ee a ee ee nn Leena en eee " i 53 i i ¢] ri a 2 } oe Wid Pa 346 FIELDING THE NOVELIST even, not infrequently, makes them change sides,—his vice being occupied at any rate in some kind of sympathy with others, while his virtue at bottom thinks of nothing but itself. He does not _ hurry over an agonizing incident, or touch ‘t with some sweet, unaffected, unconscious superiority to its situation neither does he, like Shakspeare, bring about it all the redeeming graces of poetry and humanity cea DUL there is a pettiness and detail of preparation,—a pedantry and ostentation of virtue, even in its retirements,—and a cool never-ending surgical anatomy of suffering, equally destruc- tive, in our minds, of the real dignity of the SUDIeCi ae He wrote like a sentimental familiar of the Inquisition giv- ing off so many sheets an hour with as little wear and tear as a mangle.”®® At another time Hunt had said, ‘“There are some books which with all their undoubted genius we would as soon read again, as see a man run the gauntlet from here to Land’s End. The pain is too long drawn out, and the au- thor’s portrait looks too fat and com fortable.”’** Not Richardson but Goldsmith, Fielding, and Smollett were, according to the Autobiography, the ““favourite prose authors” of Hunt’s youth.®* Very early in his career he seems to have preferred both Fielding and Smollett to Richardson; for in a letter to Shelley (October 20, 1819) referring to Smollett’s burial at Leghorn, he says, “It is a curious coinci- dence that our other chief novelist, Fielding, lies buried at Lisbon.”®® From 1819 onward, Fielding sat higher and higher in the heart of Leigh Hunt, as may be inferred from many an eloquent passage. Some time before Scott exalted Fathom above Wild, Hunt had declared in The Indicator that Fathom ‘ was “not at all to our taste,” implying his appreciation of “% 5 the mult- Jonathan Wild, which, he says, is caviare 96 The Indicator, No. LXIX, p. 134 (January 31, 1821). 87 Tbid., No. XLI, p. 321 (July 19, 1820). °8 The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt, edited by Ingpen, Westmin- ster, 1903, I, 158. 88 The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, London, 1862, I, 148.“WAVERLEY” TO DEATH OF SCOTT 347 tude.’ ”*°° Fielding’s Amelia, too, was also an early favorite with him; as we look down the Dictionary of women’s names in No. XVIII of the same periodical, we find the following entry: “Amelia . . . Beloved. The name of Fielding’s cele- brated conjugal heroine.”*’* “As to Parson Adams . . . ,” he writes again, “let everybody rejoice that there has been a man in the world called Henry Fielding to think of such a char- acter, and thousands of good people sprinkled about that world »*"* But it was Tom Jones which was Leigh Hunt’s prime favorite. James Russell Lowell, in to answer for the truth of it. his famous Taunton speech on Fielding, made the statement that the margins of Hunt’s copy of the book, then in his pos- session, were “crowded” with “‘admiring’” comments. We may well believe it, for the published writings of that genial author are sown thick with allusicns to the novelist. Looking back over his long life, he says of his early enthusiasm, “I felt though I did not know, till Fielding told me, that there was more truth in the verisimilitudes of fiction than in the assump- 93103 tions of history. And in 1853 he declared, only a few years before his death, that he had just read Tom Jones “again”’ with “‘increased admiration.’*”* In more than one instance a fellow liking for Fielding served as an excellent passport to Leigh Hunt’s esteem. He was fond of recalling the fact that “Barnes, who stood next me on the Deputy Grecian form” at Christ’s Hospital—the Barnes, that is, who became editor of “the J772es newspaper’’—was “famous among us” for “his admiration of the works of Fielding,” though he admits that had his friend “cared for anything beyond his glass of wine and his Fielding”’ he might have “‘made himself a name in wit and literature.””*°° For the attorney-general, Sir Vicary Gibbs, a “little, irritable, sharp- 100 The Indicator, No. XIII (January 5, 1820), p. rot. 101 Thjd.. No. XVIII (February 9, 1820), p. 139. 102 Hunt’s Wit and Humour, new ed., London, 1890, p. 61. 103 Autobiography, edited by Ingpen, I, 159. 104 The Correspondence, II, 188 (letter of July 1, 1853). 105 Autobiography, edited by Ingpen, I, 116. — ou* [Saree mt np dee ee ee ri Se ie re ake phere athe nn as eeteneeines a eee anaey“iss 5 We | ee ay | Pe J a Sf {' ra ht we ee at ee oe ee ee ee Se ees . hye, 04 Pe ee ee eR <& repel ged Seated re a eer ee ett ee I ar ee eer rea bo oe ee peer -* eet hate et es todernetee nett ean a emda ena pl eatied ale tie ort SS eee re eee Boe 4 | ete 348 FIELDING THE NOVELIST featured, bilious-looking man,” who was “none the worse” for “imbuing himself with the knowledge of Fielding,’ Hunt “had a secret regard,” though he had never seen him.?°° And he transcribes with evident pleasure a reference to Allworthy by his friend Leigh, who—to give an idea of the senior Mr. Leigh—quotes the “beautiful passage” from Tom Jones be- ginning, “It was the middle of May, and the morning was 99107 remarkably serene. Perhaps Hunt’s idea of Fielding the Man was not much better than that of his critical contemporaries, in common with most of whom (except Southey) he cared little for biographi- cal research. “What Lady Mary Wortley*®® said of her kins- man”—‘that give him his leg of mutton and bottle of wine, and in the very thick of calamity he would be happy for the time being’*°’—was accepted by him without question; and he seems to have heard a similar story about the magistrate William, for he tells us that “‘Fielding did not love his bottle the less for being obliged to lecture the drunken. Nor did his d him in taste and office.”?*® Again relying e makes the remark in his Table-Talk that c : son, who succeede on Lady Mary, h just as the heroes of Smollett were “caricatures” of their au- thor, so Fielding’s “brawny, good-natured, idle fellows” were caricatures “of him." Still, his belief in the tonic whole- someness of this “‘idle fellow’s” books was as firm as that of Coleridge and of Lamb. The following allusion, in tact might have been made by Lamb himself. In a Literatura Hilaris, a “‘cordial extract of Parson Adams”’ being as “wholesome” for the heart “as laughter for the lungs.”** In short, the according to Hunt, “Fielding should be the port,’”— 106 Autobiography, edited by Ingpen, I, 237. ee Lota le a 1 108 For Hunt’s review of the Wharncliffe edition, see London and Westminster Review, XXVII (1837). 109 Autobiography, edited by Ingpen, I, 18. OU bial 207. 111 Table-Talk, London, 1851, p. 44. een Osae Oy Tei).Mie eee iO DEATH OF SOO T= 26 characters of Fielding are “immortal people,” who belong to the “‘deathless generations” of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Cer- vantes. ““Are we as intimate, I wish to know, with our aunt, as we are with Miss Western? Could we not speak of the char- acter of Tom Jones in any court in Christendom!” Does not peer. ewen og weres tans an gh ae tey Parson Adams remain “stout and hearty as ever’’? It is true that “Sir Charles and My Lady Grandison,” very “brilliant and decorous,” are guests at Leigh Hunt’s “Novel Party,” as >> yo ee ee Seat veneees wr AWM ere is also “Mrs. Booby,” who revels in her newly acquired sta- tion; but the “‘most delightful” group of people there are “Mr. Abraham Adams’’—a “whole body of humanity in him- self?’—and ‘“‘all whom he loves.’’*** BYRON Another great lover of Fielding was Lord Byron, whose aie >, erate et at Seis rw ate kere mony 4 interest not only in the three major novels but in Jonathan Wild and the Journey to the Next W orld is sufficiently proved by checking up the references in the Prothero-Coleridge edi- tion. In 1807 Byron recorded in his journal that he had read cc above four thousand novels, including the works of Cer- vantes, Fielding &c”;*** and from then on till the end of his life his interest in the author of Jom Jones never oye ears eel J rae “ et) Ay ark! 3 Ad H 44 i Fy ny Be Pa 7 5 ae wae i $ 4 waned. Everyone knows the passage in “Don Juan” in which L he takes a fling at the “bhlackouardism” of “Tom and the ‘“‘em- phatic” quality of Sophia There now are no Squire Westerns, as of old; And our Sophias are not so emphatic, But fair as then, or fairer to behold: We have no accomplished blackguards, like Tom Jones, 15 But gentlemen in stays, as stiff as stones. er na en We may note also a number of passages in his correspondence eer saetthn sis n tense wisearkne — an (accan nn law-esekeemeyenn ae yreeaneirhetetttge nem nna and in ‘Don Juan” in which he protests that his own work is 113 Vien, Women, and Books, New York, 1847, I, 88, 89, 91, 96. 14 Letters and Journals, edited by Tom Moore, London, 1830, I, 98. 115 G@anto XIII, st. 110. See “Poetry,” VI, 515, 1n Works (Prothero- Coleridge), new ed., London, 1903. ett ph het ee ST Ss ne Pow “ oreer = —FIELDING THE NOVELIST B52 not so March 25, 1821, for example, Byron explains the difference immoral as that of Fielding or Smollett. In a letter of between vulgarity and blackguardism. “Vulgarity,” he says, ‘Gs far worse than downright blackguardism; for the latter comprehends wit, humour, and strong sense at times; while the former is a sad abortive attempt. » “Tt does not de- pend upon low themes, or even low language, for Fielding revels in both;—but is he ever vulgar? No. You see the man of education, the gentleman, and the scholar, sporting with his Especially when “Don 93116 subject,—its master, not its slave. Juan” was attacked, was Byron fond of defending his own “blackguardism”’ by saying that Smollett was ‘“‘ten times worse” and “Fielding no better.” This idea he even incorpor- ated in ‘Don Juan” itself : Tis all the same to me; I’m fond of yielding, And therefore leave them to the purer page Of Smollett, Prior, Ariosto, Fielding, Who say strange things for so correct an ape. Among allusions to Joseph Andrews there is the passage in “Don Juan” in which he speaks of The spouse of Potiphar, the Lady Booby ;**® and that other in which he tells us, A great impression in my youth Was made by Mrs. Adams, where she cries, “That Scriptures out of church are blasphemies.”**° With Fielding’s parsons, by the way, the poet shows himself well acquainted; in an “Advertisement” to his translation of the “Morgante Maggiore,” for example, he declares that it 1s 116 - . sia T ; y i Byron’s “Letters,” V, 592, in Works, Prothero-Coleridge ed., London and New York, 1901. 117 t . ) ‘ - eee / 7 > ‘Don Juan,” Canto IV, st. xcviii (“Poetry,” VI, 210). See also Byron’s letter to Murray, October 25, 1822 (“‘Letters,” VI, 156): 3 ‘ ee Smollett ten times worse; and Fielding no better.” 118 . Canto V, st. cxxxi (“Poetry,” VI, 254). 149 : vem 19 Canto XIII, st. xcvi (“Poetry,” VI, 511). Rw tnevbapsenet 3 Ser egal het areas eee abet mae eedearenl itn eas ne Pere Ree Sen Se See ieeieehicenetetne Cee ee ee ie aR tad rs 4SAA VE REE eh O DEATH OF SGO Inlay asi ) ae Tee “as unjust to accuse”’ the author of that poem of irreligion as as ead netmebbesetatans nikene , _ neeiaiiebtash= hemes ee eerie etree att ne ceeteteset en he cee eed to “denounce Fielding for his Parson Adams, Barnabas, Thwackum, Supple, and the Ordinary.”**° These—and many other references (to Joseph Andrews, to Tom Jones, to Amelia, and to Jonathan Wild)—are to be found in the ew works of Byron; but the dictwm which caught the popular ear was a parenthetical remark—from the Journal in Italy—in eer te rene ar which (echoing Murphy, who in turn got the hint from. Field- ing himself) he characterizes the creator of T’om Jones as the “rose Homer of human nature.” Musing on the circumstance (which came out in a murder trial) that the leaves of Pamela had been used as wrapping paper in a grocery store, he exclaims (January 4, 1821): “What would Richardson, the vainest he who, with Aaron Hill, used to prophesy and chuckle over the pre- and luckiest of living authors (1.e., while alive) sumed fall of Fielding (the prose Homer of human nature) and of Pope (the most beautiful of poets)—what would he have said, could he have traced his pages from their place on the French prince’s toilets . . . to the grocer’s counter and the gipsy-murderess’s bacon! !!’*** This pronouncement was et (after the publication of the Journal) frequently incorporated in accounts of Fielding—Thomas Roscoe, for example, in 1840, elaborating upon it at some length. Since that time, few = 7. ey et) Br oar | #4 ef] 4 ~ it ba 7 earn tl ost Pee ei, Pet | crt 2 - i ee t : Le | J- vi admirers of the novelist have neglected to repeat Byron’s fa- mous phrase; but the most interesting of all the passages is one which has attracted singularly little notice. Apropos of Field- ing’s democratic spirit, he writes, in the year 1821, “I have lately been reading Fielding over again. They talk of Radical- ism, Jacobinism, etc., in England (I am told), but they should turn over the pages of ‘Jonathan Wild the Great.’ The in- equality of conditions, and the littleness of the great, were never set forth in stronger terms; and his contempt for Con- querors and the like is such, that, had he lived mow, he would have been denounced in ‘The Courier’ as the grand Mouth- piece and Factionary of the revolutionists. And yet I never 120 “Doetry,” IV, 284. 121 “T etters,” V, 147-149. Se er bwrmomns «. er qocwyesee elie ce hres YT Oy ry er ere ir tf oe bee Sy ed edSits Te tet Feds ee een eee enero tied ee FIELDING THE NOVELIST recollect to have heard this turn of Fielding’s mind noticed, though it is obvious in every page - 5 Not only in Byron's day but ever since, this “‘turn of Field- ‘ng’s mind” toward democracy has, strangely enough, received scant attention from critics. In the eighteenth century, as has been seen, one of the common charges against him was that he was a dangerous ‘“‘leveller’”; yet at the time of the French Revolution his reiterated defense of the rights of man seems tr hay Nef with n satahle recooniftior he nar Ean tO lla\ mct WV no not ie recognition n the part of God- at low far the ethical notions of the revolu- ding was excellently his readers to place over against Fielding’s detestation of the ‘“‘sophistical hypo- crite” Square t idmiration of Bage for such “‘philos phical heroes” as Hermsprong. ° Bage himself acknowledged Field- ine’s standing as one of the foremost novelists;*** but he took little interest in the great man’s efforts in the way of social reform. It is evident that Fielding did not go far enough for the radicals; but Coleridge, Hazlitt, Southey, and Hunt, as well as Byron, did realize that he was a supreme “lover of liberty,” th h their recognition of this fact never took a Torm which aroused much interest. It is a noteworthy fact that the realistic Fielding, who in so many words declared war against the marvellous, stood higher with the writers of poetry during the heyday of ro- mance and romanticism than at any previous period. No doubt the most enthusiastic of all were Coleridge, Byron, Southey, and Leigh Hunt; but few if any of the other poets of note seem to have been antagonistic, nor were they, as a rule, di- 1 verted from their appreciation of Fielding by the sentimen- Lae OT ott >? V, 465 (“Detached Thoughts,” No. 116). novelists he men-VAP RE ie © DEATH OF SC Oise a5 tality of Richardson or by the vogue of Scott. A more detailed account is now in order. In the diary of Byron’s friend Tom Moore there is praise of Fielding—not unmixed, to be sure but discriminating. During the winter evenings of 1818 Moore and his wife read Joseph Andrews and The Vicar of W ake field. Of Goldsmith’s idyll he writes, ““What a gem it is! we both enjoyed it so much more than ‘Joseph An- drews!’”**° He had forgotten, he says, “how gratuitously gross many of the scenes” of the latter novel were;*** yet dur- ing the perusal he exclaims, ““How well Fielding knew human nature when he made the poor frail Betty such a ready and 99127 good-natured creature | Some time later he recorded his opinion of Jonathan Wild. It is “‘a difficult matter,” he says, vpaan tigen eae: Te pewesarecabacanceesstbtereserentty o f nad pe i f 7 I ¥ * rE ry i : “4 ey si Pha ret 4B Ff = sh fh rata SiH Bi et id it eS a a ae + to “sustain an irony through a whole book, and even here it Prete > fails very often: but the humour and the satire are admirable the dissertation on “hats; and the parties in prison standing up for the liberties of Newgate, all excellent in their way.’*** In the fall of 1824 he read Fielding’s Journey to the Next World and was “highly amused,” few things, he declares, being “so good as the first half of it.”’*° The character of Parson Adams was a favorite with Moore. Several months after the reading of Joseph Andrews, he speaks of finding the poet Bowles “in the bar of the White Hart, dictating to a waiter : ‘s 330 ao RT vA his ideas of the true oe in poetry.” “Never,” says _ 99180 Moore, “‘was there such a eee Adams since the real one. Wordsworth , looking back upon his boyhood recalls with - A c nS . “ 931381 . z pleasure the Foie of ‘fall Fielding’s works. It is true that the “‘week before he took his degree” at Cambridge “he passed 125 Memoirs ; of Thomas Moore, edited by Russell, London, 853, II, 217 (November 16, 1818). Loads ul 203 (October 26, 1818). AIST ban 2 208 (November 1, 1818). 128 Thid., Il, 267-268 (February “2nd to gth’). 129 Thid.. IV, 250 (October 31, 1824). 130 Thjd., Il, 280-281 (March 20, 1819). 131 Vemoirs of William Wordsworth, by Christopher Wordsworth, Boston, 1851, I, 9-10.os ws ——E — Eat hedreddevut-te sok pishemniesdantsaeenea reine animaweeental Gita s> wwiete lesen MiG, pas-eebd Motesnes eyes alah so aa . : Sete Ge t=" “tated 4 . m- en ta ag ‘* a oe nn 354 FIELDING THE NOVELIST his time in reading Clarissa Harlowe” ;**” also, that in his fa- mous preface to the Lyrical Ballads he asserted that a “‘repe- rusal of the distressful parts” of Clarissa is undertaken with “reluctance”; !** but he was enough of a lover of Fielding to incur the wrath of De Quincey, who sharply reprimanded him for reading and remembering “with extreme delight” an au- ¢ 93134 thor “‘so disgusting. Shelley, we are told, read Fielding’s novels while at Sion House “without finding them interesting”;**° and in his let- ters there seems to be a dearth of reference to the novelist. But he found Richardson positively tiresome—as might have been expected, it was Mrs. Radcliffe in whom he particularly delighted. Keats, on the other hand, enjoyed Fielding’s novels, though he implies in one of his letters that they seem to him somewhat antiquated. ““With what sensation do you read Fielding?” he asks, “‘and do not Hogarth’s pictures seem an old thing to you?” But in another letter (January 5, 1818) he tells his brothers that “‘the grand parts of Scott are within the reach of more minds than the finest humours” in Hum- phry Clinker; in fact, the Tom Jones gives him “more pleasure than the whole novel of “The An- ‘ ‘non-sequitur” joke in Fielding’s , which he calls “that fine thing of the Sargeant,” tiquary.’ Pat In Landor, there is a famous passage at arms in the ‘‘Tm- - “ ° >) ne © rT. aginary Conversation” between Johnson and Horne Tooke: Tooxe. I would request you to exert your authority in repressing the term our hero. These worthy people [the authors of “novels and romances” | seem utterly unaware that the expression turns their 132 Memoirs of William Wordsworth, I, 48. 183 This was not, after all, an unmixed compliment; in Shakespeare, he said, “pathetic” scenes are “never” carried “beyond the bounds of pleasure.”—Lyrical Ballads, *8* De Quincey’s Literary Reminiscences, Boston, 1854, II, 252. *8° Adolf Droop’s Belesenheit P. B. Shelley's, Weimar, 1906, p. 61. 136 P second ed., London, 1800, I, xxxi. oetry and Prose, edited by Forman, London, 1890, pp. 115, 80 note, 81 mote. Keats has forgotten whether the joke “is Fielding’s or Smollet’s.”“WAVERLEY” TO DEATH OF SCOTT 355 narrative into ridicule. Even on light and ludicrous subjects, it de- stroys that illusion which the mind creates to itself in fiction; and I have often wished it away when I have found it in Tom Jones. While we are interested in a story we wish to see nothing of the author or of ourselves. Jounson. I detest, let me tell you, your difficulties and excep- tions. . . . [Fielding’s novel is afterwards mentioned again. | Tooke. The Irishman in Fielding’s Tom Jones says, “He bate me.” Jounson. What we hear from an Irishman we are not overfond of repeating.*** Landor regarded Richardson as a “great inventor’ and a mas- ter of pathos; but he was apparently much attached to the au- thor of Tom Jones, of whom (according to John Forster) he delighted to tell an anecdote related to him by ‘Doctor Har- rington of Oceana’s family”—of a dinner at Ralph Allen’s at which Fielding, in an aside, ridiculed the pompousness and sycophancy of Warburton. “I doubt,” remarks Landor, “whether the double genitive case was ever so justly employed.”*** OTHER WRITERS ° Among other men of letters, poetical or otherwise, we should mention that great admirer of Fielding, James Smith. “The droll anecdote,” the “shrewd remark,” the “trait of humour from Fielding,”. writes his brother Horace, “all seemed to come as they were wanted.”**® Naturally enough James Smith was displeased with Mrs. Barbauld’s treatment of Richardson’s rival. His own assessment of the comparative excellence of the two novelists may be inferred from the fol- lowing remark: “Mrs. Barbauld promotes Richardson, without any remorse, over the head of poor Fielding; and Mr. Hayley would fain make his mole-hill Cowper over-top Mount Mil- 137 Landor’s Imaginary Conversations, second ed., London, 1826, II, 222, 260. 138 John Forster’s Walter Savage Landor, Boston, 1869, pp. 19-20. 139 Beavan, A. H., James and Horace Smith, London, 1899, p. 186. eee eee on Pt -*< “i D eT ee Sars peye ie ee os bet aie tehees ape hee cbeetehbenineds cha amas + ee See eee eee em MMe ye + icteeteiecteneebeneentieateal meg Te 4 aanree: ra) Sr a) $ | | a3 1 ot a Pra 4 a Pei 1 Be a i ra aH FI eer ee eet yaa ae parr : oan pravaeepeerterttar een lndesSOT aS ese a | is tae FIELDING THE NOVELIST ton.”'*° Of more importance than James Smith in the history of fiction, however, is that long since forgotten (but then very popular) brother humorist, Pierce Egan, who was, in a way, inner of Dickens. At the outset of the extraordinary adventures of Jerry Hawthorn and Corinthian Tom, Field- ing is invoked as a “‘true delineator of HUMAN NATURE.” Though another Squire Western, declares Egan, is perhaps “not to be met with in the walks of the present day,” “let me but produce some similarity towards the double of a TOM JONES and the highest pinnacle of my ambition 1s Whether the escapades of Corinthian Tom owe anything to the earlier Tom need not be discussed here; but it is clear that more than one young gentleman of the period was eager to present a modern version of Fielding’s celebrated story. T. L. Beddoes, for example, the future poet and dramatist, while at Charterhouse (1817-1818), according to a former school- mate of his, attempted a novel, never printed, which was ““just such an imitation of Fielding’s wildest flights, as a clever Ep an eea o gee ke ye as) eee. 4] - SCNOOLDOY Mm CE Wake. With. tne coarseness, little ot the j i ‘ ] 93142 WIT l nol L SUL EL I [ ‘ i nal Other youthful aspirants to literary fame, stimulated by the vogue of the romances of Scott, exerted their maiden pens in fiction, particularly in defenses of the The following story, which is to be found in Trevelyan, is told of young Tom Macaulay’s anonymous contribution to The Christian Observer, a periodical edited by his father, Letorting to the slanderous attack on nov- Is by a contributor (who signed himself “‘A. A.’),*** this vusiastic boy exclaims: ‘“The man who rises unaffected and unimproved f _ ~~ ~~ picture of the fidelity, simplicity, and virtue of Joseph Andrews and his Fanny, and the parental A 149 The London Review, I, 31 (February, 1809). ierce Egan’s Life in London, London, 1821, Invocation. 142 Poems of T. L. Beddoes, London, 18<51, I, cxxxii (letter from ©. Di Bevan, July 26, 1851). 143 Was it Archibald Alison? ——— en eet ener Co oet ne aes ete eat ow ete tyes whit, ys jew Moieemes reves ais Acre 5 et ld a | - a” be tors ‘ pigtecatatareretaere eke — SW REE ee Or DEATH OR SCOT yes S0i/ solicitude of Parson Adams, must possess a head and a heart of diet ba toler e eee waa re ttre ae srerwenteras od re stone.” [he storm of protest among the readers of The Chris- ¥ D ete PE We eee Tees re Se OL rere ye santana tian Observer was so great, writes Trevelyan, that one of the “scandalized contributors” informed “the public that he had committed the obnoxious number to the flames, and should thenceforward cease to take in the magazine.”*** To use the words of Professor Cross, ““Before the tempest could be stilled, AX a ee Py Er eet rk yy Zachary Macaulay had to explain that the article, as abhorrent to himself as to his readers, was sent in by an anonymous con- oe tributor and inadvertently printed. “Tom confessed to the sub- A ee oe ee’ terfuge, but could not be brought to alter his opinion of Field- g : ing, praise of whom had more than all else raised the storm oe a aS A st ,-&% ri LL tet fis me i a ie hh f b o ; which threatened to overwhelm his father’s periodical.’”’ OE Macaulay we shall have more to say farther on: Richardsonian eer as he was, he was not one to disparage Fielding; his early ad- miration for the novelist never deserted him. *“There was no society in London so agreeable,” according to Trevelyan, “that Macaulay would have preferred it at breakfast or at dinner to the company of Sterne, or Fielding, or Horace Walpole, or Boswell.’”’ oS Young Beddoes and young Macaulay were not alone in their admiration for Fielding; according to a vociferous de- nunciation of “romances of every description,’ which forms a part of William Cobbett’s Advice to Young Men, Field- ing’s masterpiece was the arch-offender not only in viciousness but in popularity. Every girl “addicted to the reading of novels sighs to be a SOPHIA WESTERN,” he complains, and “every boy a TOM JONES.’? “What girl,” he asks, “is not in love with that w/d youth, and what boy does not find a justification for his wildness? What can be more pernicious than the teachings of this celebrated romance’? Here are two —— rs eT om me te ee ee rd young men put before us, both sons of the same mother; the 7* Trevelyan’s Life and Letters of Macaulay, New York, 1876, I, 68. For Macaulay’s article see The Christian Observer, XV (1816), 785. 145 Cross’s Fielding, UI, 175. 146 Trevelyan’s Life and Letters of Macaulay, Il, 394. ) ee a a ee ee ne358 FIELDING THE NOVELIST one a bastard (and by a parson too), the other a legitimate child; the former wild, disobedient, and squandering; the lat- ter steady, sober, obedient, and frugal; the former everything that is frank and generous in his nature, the latter a greedy hypocrite; the former rewarded with the most beautiful and virtuous of women and a double estate, the latter punished by being made an outcast. How is it possible for young people to read such a book, and to look upon orderliness, sobriety, obedi- ence, and frugality, as virtues??*** Less rabid than Cobbett was young Richard Whately, the future archbishop. “Fielding’s novels ” he writes (in his well-known defense of Jane Austen, 1821), ~~ “display great knowledge of mankind; the characters are well preserved; the persons introduced all act as one would naturally expect they should, in the circumstances in which they are placed; but these circumstances are such as it is incalculably improbable should ever exist: several of the events, taken singly, are much against the chances of probability; but the combination of the whole in a connected series, is next to impossible.| Even the romances which admit a mixture of supernatural agency, are not more unfit to prepare men for real life, than such novels as these; since one might just as reasonably calculate on the intervention of a fairy [Was Whately thinking of Lady Mary’s criticism? ], as on the train of lucky chances which combine first to involve Tom Jones in his difficulties, and afterwards to extricate him.” Whately suggests that perhaps “the supernatural fable is of the two not only . . the less mischievous in its moral effects, but also the more correct kind of composition in point of taste.’ The last statement here 1s worth observing: that the “supernatural fable’; z.e., romance, we C eee Dc" . a: : : is ‘more correct” in point of “taste”? than realism—unless, in- y. pee deed, that realism should be of the quiet, vicarage type. In one ) 147 Cobbett, W., Advice to Young Men, London, 1829, paragraph als 148 Whately, R., Miscellaneous Lectures and Reviews, London, 186t. This review appeared in the Quarterly, January, 1821, XXIV, 356. Sassen ete a slopes ne neste teem eae ate tyanys sha ,pas-e ed eipered sesee nin’4 i e Pree - Si beta rhe m0 oe a Col eetedt deen eae Cerna baad AVERT hO DEATH OF SCOlnIs 256 of his private letters, Whately acknowledges that he has ‘“‘al- ways defended” the Waverley Novels.**® Cobbett had complained that T’om Jones was popular, and ae " Fi eT nat Tere nal iTaet-tiph phtebohataenah baebtenie Tee ee ee i atebehiaehemics an betnheteied Lins beeen Whately had inferred it; but another disparager of Fielding, the novelist Miss Ferrier, testified to the contrary, though she admitted the great vogue of the book in the past. Oddly enough, re sae See eee considering her own predilection for rather broad humor, she makes one of her characters attack Fielding’s books as perni- cious; and, as Professor Saintsbury has pointed out, “‘Not only the context, but many other passages, prove that this was her own opinion.”*°® ‘The remark in question occurs in The In- heritance (1824), in which, during the course of a jeremiad against “‘licentious”’ fiction, the novels of Fielding and Smol- lett were described as “‘noxious exhalations” that were already “passing away.” Nevertheless, in her Marriage (1818), six years before, two huge cats which are intended to create con- siderable laughter (by their inopportune presence in a lady’s bed-chamber) are named respectively “Gil Blas” and ““Tom Jones.”*°* Miss Ferrier’s attack was, of course, by no means uncommon. In that forgotten book The Authoress, a character ‘ i * M 7 rs ri 4] es | ani Pes “2% Pt a ti a eH a a : a se 7 7) Pa) Ate Lo TH vy | rey called Fanny defends her passion for sentimental trash by ask- ing, ““Have I not seen my father read, and with great pleasure, the works of Fielding, Smollett, and such kind of authors? But even that lover of Richardson, Miss Mitford, acknowl- edged Fielding’s excellence when she said that Walter Scott brought his characters before our eyes “‘like the portraits of 99153 39152 ey ee ae een ys et ee rey yaar Ten re Fielding and Cervantes. As will presently be seen, the passage in Miss Ferrier’s novel 149 Tife . . . of Richard Whately, by E. J. Whately, London, 1866, I, 37. ; 180 The Inheritance, Edinburgh, 1824, II, 116-118; also Saints- bury’s The Peace of the Augustans, London, 1916, p. 114 note. er are eer ee age pore een ee eshe lta) Hem ln Le ET EONENEN IR Oe Es & 191 Miss Ferrier’s Marriage, ch. xv. 152 The Authoress, by the “author of ‘Rachel,’” London, 1819, p. Mis 153 See her letter to Sir William Elford, October 31, 1814.—A. G. K. L’Estrange, The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, New York, 1870, e225. rt. bn Bt vena ie eyo pre = eennenenee Drache aon ae ee % erate ere Tae a260 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Z- was prophetic of the change that was already in the air; for the time being, however, the fictional miasma of which her clerzyman complained was not vanishing so fast as he would Charles Butler, the eminent English jurist who completed the edition of Coke upon Littelton, declared have us believe. ‘n his Reminiscences (1822) that “the Amelia of Fielding” was “the perfection of female excellence”; *°* and John Hook- ham Frere, the diplomatist and translator, was still sure enough of a Fielding audience to use the following analogy: A ; ] . anr \ f | 1 to our mind; 4 } j J CAC I Lee I W 10 ld rever 1KK 5 William Gifford. savagely attacking in the Ouarterly ( for January, 1818) Hazlitt’s “Character” of “Hamlet,” makes reference to Partridge?®® at the play; and in a speech Ise f ence use of Commons (March 2, 1819), Sir James Mack- at the H intosh. devoted as he was to Richardson, referred to Fielding as a “man deeply skilled in human nature.’’**” During the fol- lowing year, “Ephraim Hardcastle” (W. H. Pyne) sprinkled his ne and Walnuts (1820-1821) with references to Fielding, who, way, Is made to appear in person, con- versing with Roubiliac, taking off the vacuity of a man of ; 1¢] ~ ones - . . wealth, etc. Worthless as this hodgepodge is, it undoubtedly reflects the interest that was taken at this time in the novelist 54 ( harles Butler’s Re MINIS ences, fourth ed., London, 1824, p. 307. The date of the dedication is February 28, 1822. W ork of John Hookham Fre Tré, edited by WE: and Sir Quarterly Review, XVIII, 461. 157 TL. . ye , f 7. 7 The Miscellaneous Works of Mackintosh, London, 1846, 158 liaien Eases : ' - . ~ Wine and Walnuts, secohd ed., London, 1824, I, 73, 74, 78, 82- Ww UJ my om ' 97) 108, 109, 119, 125-127, 230, 233, 271, 2723 II, 68, 156, 27 viously appeared in parts in The Literary Gazette, 1820-1821. “ee > a ome Seapets bed “ree Cs einiehhamet bettie rca ae eet Ae esNUM VEMER ae hODEALTH OR SCO Bon Henry Fielding; for Pyne was a good judge of the popular taste. So also, across the Channel, was Edouard Mennechet, whose one-act comedy, “Fielding,” was produced at the Théatre Francais on January 8, 1823.°°° The status of the author of Tom Jones may be seen again in the attitude of young Thomas Carlyle, who had not as yet attained any great reputation. As we shall observe later, Fielding was never a favorite with Carlyle; but in the early days, Tom Jones (to use the words of a recent writer) “seems to have stood to him as the highest type of what he calls ‘our common English no- tion of the Novel.’”*°? Wilhelm Meister, he thinks, “‘has less relation to Fielding’s Tom Jones than to Spenser’s Faéry Queen” ;*** and the field of the novel he says (in his preface to German Romance, 1827), is a “free arena” for all “sorts and degrees of talent,” and may be “worked in equally by a 9162 Henry Fielding and a Doctor Polydore. In the celebrated ‘‘Noctes Ambrosianae,” to which Maginn contributed, not so many references to Fielding occur as might be expected; and none of the allusions that follow are from those “‘Noctes” which, according to Professor Ferrier, were en- tirely written by Wilson. But William Maginn, one of the chief contributors to the series, was a confessed admirer of Fielding, who, to his mind, was the greatest master of plot of all the “first-rate novelists.”’*°* Here are several interesting passages taken from numbers for which Wilson was not solely responsible. In May, 1822, North is made to ask, “Is it pos- sible that you have need for ME to tell you all the old stories about . Fielding? How he kept the Thames on fire with his farces and novels, and roasted all his brother justices to cinders?” To which Tickler answers, ‘““Why, you know, all 159 «Fielding, Comédie en un Acte et en Vers,” Paris, 1823. 160 Roe, F. W., Thomas Carlyle as a Critic of Literature, New York, I910, p. 87. 161 Carlyle’s Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, London (Chapman and Hall), 1869, 1, 272. Ome DS a enti 163 Maginn’s Miscellanies, London, 1885, I, 190. ) noes - res Ta er cll etln me eT a es Fee Se eT aera oe ~ Er " ee SESS ery Lar tee Tare ayaa os a. htt ret: Pei et re 4 th: a] a's) +s e4 iS ee! p dy me ae oe ee es Seer ts salad ye eet te ee eeSitieczserasivsce 5 td 362 FIELDING THE NOVELIST the old novelists dealt in nothing but personalities.”*®* In March, 1823, a scene in a book that is being discussed is char- acterized as ‘‘worse than Sophy Western and Mrs. Honour about Tom Jones’s broken arm. >In June, 1824, Tickler asks, ‘“Who the devil has ever even heard the name of the five- d>1¢ hundredth part of the trashy productions which flowed from the pens of Fielding and Smollett The p.ays of the Justice are all pretty well forgotten, I suppose; and what signifies this to the Student of Commodore Trunnion, Parson Trulliber?”*°* In August, 1831, and in October, 1832, there are also references to Parson Trullibe:, interest in whom had been revived by the recent illustrations of Cruik- shank.1®? The following bit of dialogue, hovvever (July, 1834), which indicates a certain amount of respect for Field- ing’s position as a novelist, was by Wilson. Tickler and the Shepherd are discussing Marryat’s Peter Simple SHEPHERD. Peter Simple in his ain way’s as gude’s Parson Adams. Ticker. Parson Adams! SHEPHERD. Aye, just Parson Adams. He [ Marryat] that im- gined Peter Simple’s a ‘“‘Sea-Fieldin In the “‘Noctes” for September, 1831, “Christopher North” is made to say that “Even aes Harlowe has sunk under the weight of her eight volumes’’;**” but no such assertion did that literary arbiter ever make in regard to Tom Jones. The state of affairs had changed very greatly since 1797— when The Encyclopaedia Britannica subordinated 1 Fielding to Richardson—as a glance at the reference books of this period will show. Though some of the accounts’’® of Fielding are too 164 Blackwood’s Magazine 165 Tid. XIII, 373 (No. VII). 166 [hid XV, 711 (No. XV). 167 Tbid.. XXX, 403 (No. LVII); and XXXII, 718 (No. EXIT): 168 [hid. XXXVI, 123 (No. LXV). 169 1bid. XXX, 533 (No. LVIII). 170 For example, Abraham Rees’s The Cyclopaedia, Vol. XIV, “Fielding.” SOM 61. NO} ODL of the ‘‘Noctes.’ 3 I MIS en ee pa RR el +o’ sete ot otehy' wap atv Wieayl lay a joo pbvaciormen releynakes:WH VERE Ean DEATH OF SGOssie = 262 often defaced by the slurs of Aikin, Watson, and other calum- niators, we frequently come upon such passages as the follow- ing. In The Beauties of England and Wales (1816) by J. Norris Brewer, the “inimitable author of Tom Jones” is characterized as “the Cervantes of England.’ Quoting the splendid opening of the Voyage to Lisbon—a passage which was to be started on a more prosperous career by Walter Scott’s inclusion of it in his biographical sketch of the novelist not long afterwards—the compiler pays a just tribute to that “for- titude” which the stricken Fielding displayed “during the last mournful year of his life.”*’* Ten years later the Rev. Rich- ard Warner, in his History of the Abbey of Glastonbury could characterize Fielding—even in the midst of the vogue of Scott—as ‘‘a writer, whose keen but playful wit; penetrating insight into human nature; quick perception, and accurate de- lineation of characteristic manners; happy invention of inci- dent; and lively mode of narrative, have placed him at the 99172 head of English novelists. From what has been said in this chapter it is apparent that Richardson was aging much faster than Fielding, who, even by the unenthusiastic, was usually admitted to be superior as a constructive artist. In 1829 ‘“‘Christopher North” himself went so far as to speak of “‘that good old proser Richardson,” as “‘a sort of idiot, who had a strange insight into some parts of hu- man nature, and a tolerable acquaintance with most parts of speech.” Richardson, he says, “‘set the public a-reading, and Fielding and Smollett shoved her on.”’*** As we look back over this period and consider the attitude of Coleridge, Scott, Byron, and Leigh Hunt toward Richardson and toward Fielding 171 J. Norris Brewer’s “Middlesex,” in The Beauties of England and Wales, London, 1816, X (Part IV), 339, 424. 172 Warner, R., An History of the Abbey of . . . Glastonbury, Bath, 1826, p. lxx. 173 Critical and Miscellaneous Essays, by “Christopher North,” Philadelphia, I, 74. For the retort to Wordsworth, see I, 227. , 0 . Toad ary. ere et SL ae re ee ee ee eelTiedt fo) a ee ee eee Ears ree tts hineieestaa eee 7 Hrd Shh tse heap yepegldeipemnpreresan® ee | a rnebe te \ ! ie iF | FIELDING THE NOVELIST we cannot help observing the change that, by 1830, had come relative positions of the two writers. Richardson, ld a far higher place than we accord him now, but his work was growing antiquated; the m ,dern novel—more ‘no. humorous, natural—was definitely mmitted, after the success of Vd rley, to the form (if not Moreover, during this period, the formal prose style of Richardson. concerning which there had always been more or less adve mment, was held in less esteem than ever before, t of Fielding was somewhat more highly regarded. In tl f Lamb and Hunt th ld standards of formality RAds and el 7 being abandoned; Hazlitt was the only one fe tl reat critics of the time who attacked Fielding as a styl- st. 1a ed attention to Fielding’s essays helped to bring ’ 1 - ‘ ] . ] saner view than that of Woawin, Anderson, and others. FIELDING ty - original. and his humour (different \DDISON, vet excellent in its kind) 1s so copi- 1 undimin- ished force. He has had no successful imitators,”*** And John Stuart Mill, as we learn from his Autobiography, endeav- red—<“‘about the end of 1824, or the beginning of 1825”— to improve his own style by the ~ ssiduous reading” of Field- ing, who, he says, combines “‘én a remarkable degree ease with P . Wisdom, too, was now more frequently attributed to Field- ine. To the testimony of Coleridge and others should be added } { r 4 T = eve . . «< ~ . . . that of T. L. Peacock, who, in his ‘““Essay on I ashionable Lit- L < . eratur ? Ins) te that to he lactino ’ | 1 1 ~Oontal CSe ial LALULY, Lid LS | tL to De lasting a nove must contain essentia awa lowe a : oor ~ d ” "11 «¢ . wisgom)s I0ol! mere amusement will certainly not pass to posterity.” Scott he commends for having given “great and ee aay A Tw" <- + ) . oetene ig valuable information” concerning the manners of the past; " . ] x7 r1taAr wx3h Ie - 5 “ = ce . 2 but the writers who have, in his phrase, “‘led fancy against ‘halmers’s British Essaytsts, London, 1802, VI, xxxv. 175 : yee } y , lutobtic grat yy Ni WW Y ork, 1874, De 127s“WAVEREEIC TO DEATH OF SCOTT 365 opinion with a success that no other names can parallel’’ are “Cervantes, Rabelais, Swift, Voltaire, [and] Fielding.’’2” And a third item in the higher appreciation of Fielding dur- ing this period was, as we have seen, a recognition on the part of a few notable writers of the novelist’s democratic spirit. Byron’s excellent comment has already been given; Coleridge regarded Fielding as a “lover of liberty”; so too, we may in- fer, did Southey, who transcribed approvingly Brooke’s com- ment to the effect that Richardson “always gives the full value to title and fortune”;*'’ while Hunt jubilantly apostrophized Fielding as ““Thou, whom the great Richardson, less in that matter (and some others). than thyself, did accuse of vulgarity, because thou didst discern natural gentility in a footman, and yet wast not to be taken in by the airs of Pamela and my Lady G.’*” Thus Fielding’s style, wisdom, and democratic spirit—as well as his plot-shaping, character-building, and general veri- similitude—were affectionately dwelt upon during the very years when the “Scotch Novels” were still a literary phenome- non. The oditer dicta of Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Southey, Hunt, Byron, and of others noted in this chapter became, as time went on, golden phrases in Fielding’s book of fame. And yet surprisingly little was written about him by any one of them; not a single entire essay by any critic of note (men- tioned in this chapter), except Scott, seems to have been pro- duced. Worse still, outside of the great group of critics, Field- ing was frequently thought to be, if not an immoral writer, at least an inelegant one; and the genre of realism—ain the opinion of Jeffrey, Lockhart, and Wilson—was inferior to that of romantic idealism. Though the reputation of Richard- son was more irreparably damaged than Fielding’s by the 176 Van Doren, C., The Life of Thomas Love Peacock, London, I911, pp. 135-136. 177 Southey’s Common-Place Book, edited by Warter, fourth series, London, 1851, p. 313. Brooke’s comment is in Juliet Grenville. 178 The Companion, London, 1828, p. 158 (No. XII, March 26, 1828). igus cates (iboats are eres 1 nt See Oa iain tt ee eee heen a Po oe 4 ea eer anon <4 ere babel om eied terion, tt oe « eee Aegean | es Reinet tee ee Oe nae ene Peer eg tye ey ee eres Lan Sb thr 4 | rr) —— q me Py 7 = if! so rare if a] at eh “ei: 4 nf Fh 2] Ae et te raeot te Lees FY 366 FIELDING THE NOVELIST popularity of Scott, the author of Tom Jones was by the be- ginning of the third decade already experiencing that “falling off? to which Hazlitt referred in 1829. It was commonly made a matter of rejoicing that Scott had not only enlarged the cope of prose fiction but that he had refined its subject- .’ wrote the historian matter. “Scott’s greatest glory Prescott, in 1832, “arises from the superior dignity to which he has raised the novel, not by its historic, but its moral char- acter, so that, instead of being obliged, as with Fielding’s and Smollett’s, to devour it, like Sancho Panza’s cheese-cakes, in a corner as it were, it is now made to furnish a pure and delec- table repast for all the members of the assembled family.”*” And when we call to mind the increasing audience of women, the rapidly expanding number of country readers, and the movement toward outward refinement which hz ad spread over the manners of England by 1830, we cannot gainsay the truth of Prescott’s statement. In the opinion of the greater critics, however, along with the increasing refinement of manners there was developing what Hazlitt called, as we have quoted the passage, a “censeless fastidiousness more owing to an affectation of gentility than to a disgust of vice. = 4X OU are asked if you like Fielding,’ he writes (in 1828), “as 1h Je were a statuteable offence.’* To Coleridge, as to Hazlitt, this growing affectation was nothing less than ‘“‘cant””; and so it was, likewise, to Charles Lamb, who in 1829 excl: aimed in a letter to Barry Cornwall—with as much seriousness as hu- mor—‘“‘Oh B. C.! my whole heart is faint, and my whole head sick at this damn’d canting unmasculine age! 28 179 Prescott, W. H., in The North American Review, XXXV, 188- 189 (July, 1832). 180 Waller and Glover Hazlitt, XII, 37 NT PUG OGY Ie 182 The Letters of Charles Lamb, edited by Ainger, London and New York, 1888, II, 219. In the opinion of Canon Ainger, L Lamb “might have foreseen certain aesthetic developments of seventy years later when he warned men, in his Essay on Hogarth, against ‘that dis- “he gust at common life which an unrestricted passion for ideal forms re AS > Wi ste tyes pe alps popes dwineent Pe besannt “ yr #tetedele = r ee pa A eee y.AV EREET2OhO DEATH OF SCOTIe 267 The fact that in 1830 (after so many years!) a marble sar- cophagus with eloquent Latin inscriptions was erected in the cemetery of Os Cyprestes testifies to the widening recognition and excellent praise of Fielding which have been recorded in this chapter; but the British parson’s inability (in view of the stories, old and new) to refrain from saying in the marble, “Non quin tpse subinde irretiretur evitandis” (“‘not but that he was sometimes caught in the net which folly spreads”***)— was an ominous forecast of the trouble in store for the novelist in the decades to follow. Our final impression of the period 1814-1832, however, should not be that of the “falling-off” in Fielding’s reading public. Rather we should think of the delight which the great masters experienced in the Father of the English Novel: of Leigh Hunt’s “‘deathless generations”; of Hazlitt’s “spirit of obligation” to one whose name had “thrown a light upon hu- manity”; of Charles Lamb’s “cordial, hearty laugh,” and the “thousand thumbs” that had turned the leaves of Tom Jones; and of Coleridge’s ““How charming, how wholesome Fielding always is!”” Not for many a day was there again generally ex- perienced in literary circles such joy in Fielding as when Leigh Hunt exclaimed, “Oh, to wear out one of the celestial lives of a triple century’s duration, and exquisitely to grow old, in reciprocating dinners . . . with the immortals of old books! Will Fielding ‘leave his card’ in the next world? . . . and Walter Scott (for he will be there to. . .)?”*** and beauties is in danger of producing.’”—Ainger’s Introduction to Poems Plays and Miscellaneous Essays of Charles Lamb, New York, 1885, p. xii. 183 For a full account of the inscription, see Cross’s Fielding, III, 68-70. 184 The Companion, No. XIII, pp. 161-164 (April 2, 1828). ery ~~ babel eats pe ayes oo eer Seal atebetntienaah neat Oe Ln ry se em Tete eee Danette enten eetere nes Tred cote crete ee = t 7 i et ai Bik res a} “el Bs a iy] a ) ad a ree | 23 ere ee oe Ree BB eh Sey to SR ea rT as eyes hee a - mae ehnan lanes eek armey onan peeenee ornate tseras SR. on ron ree err Re eer anal St Taner ee Tee ee a eee Sen ves a re > A shePetes t sitet She teh Sai) CHAPTER XIII The Victorian Age Part I Before Thackeray’s “Humourists” Y 1835, Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, Scott, and Byron had passed away, and rae men, other manners, were coming to the fore in English literature. As we turn to the new generation—of Carlyle, Ruskin, Newman, Jen- nyson, Browning, Fitzgerald, Dickens, Thackeray, Lytton, and Charlotte Bronté—we feel very keenly that change in at- mosphere which was heralded by the British chaplain. In the first place, the commendable desire for greater outward refine- ment, which had been gathering strer igth ever since the end of the eighteenth century, was now passing over into that “‘sense- less fastidiousness,.” that “affectation of gentility” of which Hazlitt, Lamb, and Coleridge complained. Moreover, largely owing to the vogue of Scott, the new standard of excellence, which demanded an idealistic rendering rather than a realistic one, was exceedingly popular and persistent. And, finally, the successive splendid triumphs of Dickens, of Thackeray, and (somewhat later) of George Eliot, so engaged the minds and hearts of the reading public that all the eighteenth -century novelists (save, perhaps, Goldsmith) ceased by degrees to be generally read except by those inclined to literature. In conse- quence, the reputation of Henry Fielding as a Novelist during the entire Victorian Age was not what it h ad been in the fore- part of the century. Not of course that praise of him suddenly ceased; for excellent criticisms, here and there, are scattered through the books and periodicals of these decades, particularly dicta by the writers of fiction, among whom was Fielding’s greatest disciple, Thackeray. But as a rule the celebrated liter- ary men of the Victorian Age did not regard his works as did aan ge et ere en a ne sdndiieniin Daa eae et ar aes Se ee ee Bee. . ‘ : Spee ae “ snea 4 co a 4 Tr ae A *y* ee . = bh ee at ee Lb ay es Sepp BEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 369 their famous predecessors: “I’ennyson, Browning, Fitzgerald, Pa eee S aiebetaaiedae meee - Rossetti, and Morris, for example, had no such opinion of rast oP ya Sirians pontat! eA Tl sarin biiebetcnh anche ten aceemtentnmeined Lamia them as had Coleridge, Scott, and Byron; Carlyle, Ruskin, Arnold, and Pater did not value the novelist as Lamb, Haz- litt, Leigh Hunt, and Southey valued him. Nor was this indif- rey ference or actual disparagement confined to Fielding. In their enthusiasm for what was considered a vastly superior refine- ment as well as for what were regarded as the “sublimities,” men of letters were too prone to look down upon the eight- eenth century as a period unfortunately uninspired. Notable exceptions (which will be spoken of later) only prove the rule. For such leaders of thought as Carlyle and Ruskin to dismiss the entire eighteenth century as an age of “simulacra”’ and to deny to Fielding in particular the possession of imagination, a lack of perspective existed, which, sooner or later, demanded correction at the hands of more careful if less rhapsodical investigators. It was during the last two or three decades of the nineteenth century that the reaction began to be distinctly palpable. Due Ps c A ‘ay. eerere ee eee ee ee ee a PRE Fang) ys ter th hy er to the efforts of the critics of a generation that is only now passing away—of such men, say, as Dobson, Henley, Gosse, and Saintsbury—Fielding’s reputation as Man and Author, re- ear Tyr BI leased somewhat from Victorian misinterpretation, took, be- i err fore the century was out, a great turn for the better. ‘he busi- ey ae de May Ln M he excels him in equal of Cervantes in “comic romance,’ “variety” of “power”; but “we have only to compare” the author of Don Quixote with Fielding “‘to judge of his vast superiority.”** In the Forties, as Frederic Harrison truly says, Scott enjoyed a veritable “Shakespearean dominion.”?” Against the tendency to compare Fielding unfavorably with Scott, there were, to be sure, occasional dissenting voices. “I can only believe, when I read Fielding,” declared Macready, February 26, 1837, “that persons speak in utter ignorance of his wit, humour, profound thought, satire, and truth of char- acter when they set Scott above him, or even compare the two writers.”** Some years before, he had recorded in his diary™* (July 19, 1834), “While waiting for Calcraft, took up Field- ing’s Amelia, and was pleased with much of the story, but more with the happy maxims and excellent counsel with which 10 Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics, Boston, 1891, p. 14; see also W. Ward’s Life of John Henry Newman, London, 1912, II, 355. 11 Henry Hallam’s Introduction to the Literature of Europe, fourth ed., London, 1854, III, 160. Fielding does share with Scott, however, the honor of being “the best” of the great Spaniard’s “successors.” ‘2 Harrison, Frederic, Autobiographic Memoirs, London, 1911, I, arn 18 Macready’s Reminiscences, edited by F. Pollock, New York, 1875, Pp. 410. 14 The Diaries of . . . Macready, New York, 1912, I, 166, 177; II, 256. re os aT er 9b eh ened” oe X, a er hae eee ets er eran ee re eee etree viypewe sate c baka e TE bekereserenetetatsene See ee eT ers ~Fpd “ae eee Ct trad are oe / at ii a if ay a i! a rt eer a2 5 ar ao ar > . eee ae ee se bee ete Sede tet ys remem pteeenwn tees:iran Ste tysers alk gn sop ewdespernt ry redeial . gi y ee ae os 374 FIELDING THE NOVELIST ‘t abounds.” On September 5, 1834, we find him reading “some chapters of Tom Jones”; and on January 28, 1844, while traveling in America, “Fielding’s pleasant Joseph An- drews? was his “inside companion.” Despite admirers like Macready, however, the feeling that the works of Scott be- longed t to a higher genre than those of Fielding was very common for a long while to come. Perhaps the best statement of the less praiseworthy results which followed the perusal of romantic nov els was voiced by George Borrow. In his judgment the reading of such fiction did not bring about at all that ° “elevation of soul” which New- man desired, especially among the middle classes. “Their chief characteristic,” said Borrow’s Man in Black, “is a rage for grandeur and gentility. Everything that’s lofty meets their unqualified approbation; whilst everything humble, or, as they call it, ‘low,’ is scouted by them. They begin to have a vague idea that the religion which they have hitherto pro- fessed is low; at any rate that it is not the religion of the mighty ones of the earth nor was used by the grand per- sonages of whom they have read in their novels and romances, their Ivanhoes, their Marmions, and their Ladies of the Lake.” “Do you think that the writings of Scott have had any in- fluence in modifying their religious opinions?” “Most certainly I do,” said the Man in Black. “The writ- ings of that man have made them greater fools than they were before. All their conversation now is about gallant knights, princesses, and cavaliers, with which his pages are ae all of whom were Papists, or very High Church, which 1 nearly the same thing.’*® Though this passage has been ee jected to as anti-Catholic propaganda, its general truth as a picture of the affectation of gentility into which the refine- ment of manners was passing can hardly be denied. A notion of the esteem in which Borrow held Scott’s great PACHREESD may be inferred from his assertion that though the Jews “‘may have Rambams in plenty,” they have “never a 15 Borrow’s Lavengro, ch. xciv.BEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 375 °° He especially admired Amelia Fielding nor a Shakespeare. and tells us that when he was in Lisbon he kissed the “cold tomb” of its author, “the most singular genius” which Eng- land had “ever produced.” To Borrow the growing neglect and disparagement of Fielding seemed exceedingly unjust; he lamented (1843) the fact that it had “long been the fashion” to “abuse” the novels “in public” while reading them “in secret.’ We need not turn over many books of the day in order to find examples of the abuse of which Borrow complains. One “char- “cant and illiberality”—which acteristic specimen” of this was pointed out by Lawrence** in 1855—is a passage in the Memoirs of Lyttelton, by the Rev. Robert Phillimore. “Tom Jones,” says this clergyman, is “now” (1845) “often unread by men, and scarcely ever read by women; though its merits have saved it from the oblivion to which unredeemed inde- cency has consigned Amelia.”*® Phillimore professed to be shocked by Fielding’s works; but, like many another, he was mainly influenced by the stories regarding Fielding’s life. ‘The old scandalous anecdotes about the novelist’s “dissolute” career (augmented by the exertions of Aikin, Mrs. Barbauld, Wat- son, and Scott) were now increasingly emphasized; and what he was thought to be as a man colored more and more the popular notion of him as a writer. Besides, not long before Phillimore’s Lyttelton appeared, additional gossip concerning Fielding’s life had been furnished by Lady Mary’s grand- daughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, in an introductory memoir to Lord Wharncliffe’s edition of the Montagu Letters (1837). In justice to Lady Stuart it must be admitted that she sin- cerely admired Fielding’s great novel. “Mrs. S.[cott] and I,” she wrote (August 3, 1831), “have been quite alone these . days, and are not at all tired of one another, nor of a 16 Tavengro, ch. xxvi. 17 The Bible in Spain, fourth ed., London, 1843, I, 8 (ch. i). 18 F. Lawrence’s Life of Fielding, London, 1855, p. 259 note. 19 Phillimore, Robert, Memoirs . . . of Lyttelton, London, 1845, I, 342. oe err er LT aera at eer i Rr) hal 2} ay 3 b : — ee ee ne al 7 ert ery are perv rere error ed 8 pe tee wet bmg Sm es ah peepee’aie — —e mate rie te er eowhn ened ma pgnide oh Ey pwiitnepnine epee tee pode tAdeaiahhdaees dete Oe een en Pe 376 FIELDING THE NOVELIST wicked book we have been reading (TOM JONES if you won’t tell). Neither of us had read it for a great while, and, oh, what good reading it is! No modern stuff can possibly do after it.’ Ten years before (March 23, 1821), she had said of a certain occurrence that it was ‘‘a scene worthy of Field- ing,” and had added that no “one living author” could “‘do it justice.” Again (August, 1631), she refers to J'om Jones as a book in which ‘every word tells and my famous talent for skipping can have no employment.” And during the following year (January, 1832), she thus contrasts the “morality” of Tom Jones with that of Mme. Roland’s Memoirs, a book which young ladies who “‘would not have been allowed to open Tom Jones” were “taught to read and admire.” ‘“‘Field- ing,” she writes, “certainly” does describe “Pamour physique between Tom and Molly Seagrim, but I daresay would as soon have given Sophia an inclination to commit murder as hinted that she ever had Madame Roland’s sensations, or even that Tom had them towards her. Their passion he studied to refine and ennoble.’’*° Now all this is excellent enough; but when, a few years later, this granddaughter of Lady Mary appeared in print she found it impossible to keep from embroidering upon the family tradition regarding the novelist’s poverty and improvidence. Therefore she wrote of the Fielding ménage: ‘They “led no happy life, for they were almost always miserably poor, and seldom in a state of quiet and safety. All the world knows pounds, nothing could keep him from lavishing it idly, or make him think of to-morrow. Sometimes they were living in decent lodgings with tolerable comfort; sometimes in a wretched garret without necessaries; not to speak of the spunging-houses and hiding-places where he was occasionally to be found.”** What a picture! It need only be said that mod- 20 Letters of Lady Louisa Stuart to Miss Louisa Clinton, edited by J. A. Home, Edinburgh, first series, 1901; second series, 1903; [11] 289; [I] 140; [II] 293, 327. 21 Letters, London, n.d. [1861], I, 106.BEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 377 ern investigation®” fails to support the notion of so dire an indigence. : Long before Lady Stuart composed this sketch, the practice of drawing lurid pictures of Fielding the Profligate had vir- tually become an established custom. As Scott and Dickens and Thackeray successively absorbed the attention of the readers of the day and as T’om Jones became a book for the few rather than the many, its author, even of old a legendary figure, was now to the fastidious Early Victorians a favorite subject for literary moralists and graphic paragraphers. Space forbids a detailed account of the various exercises of fancy which ap- peared during the twenty years before Thackeray’s Humour- ists; but the following examples may be considered as typical. To add a vivid touch to his Life and Genius of Samuel Foote, “Jon Bee” (John Badcock) built out a far-fetched parallel be- tween the career of the dramatist and that of the novelist. Following Murphy’s story, Badcock speaks of that “silly ex- travagance”’ of setting up “a carriage, with its attendant equi- page,” which, he alleges, brought ruin upon both Fielding and Foote. “Both Foote and Fielding,” he continues, “pursued the law until the law pursued them, and gave it up for the drama.” Finally, to make sure that his readers have got the point of it all, he says, both “‘were free livers—libertines—men of the world—des bons vivans.”** Any comment upon a com- parison between Fielding and Foote would be superfluous. Another writer, assuming that there was plenty of liquor in the university town of Leyden and assuming also that Fielding was as debauched a character as previous writers had made him out, announces the interesting discovery that in that very town he commenced his “‘course of deep dissipation.” A further dis- covery he makes is that, “‘notwithstanding the bitterness” with which Fielding “‘has satirized that vice in others, he sometimes made talent worship rank, and was compelled to barter his natural independence for ‘victuals.’ ”” And then, having 22 Cross’s Fielding, II], 270-273. 23 “An Essay on the Life and Genius” of Samuel Foote, in Works, London, 1830, I, lxxxiii-lxxxiv (Preface dated January 30, 1830). De me et et Oe Oe EOS tn hepibehinetetein nae eee reste: reread pein bees yt et rere tre ares + Io Ange Le? | ei ae be A | 7 H : 4 i, ; Mane ‘ad: bat fy ret a $e sin eeeegehe Cree ret eh berg 4 ~~ re es od $5 tay pnt eee oa Re ae a pee . rate ee ee ere nent See nee eee Le kote bees . ee errs -Chen teen By at ETT ent tee ee re el Pbtetnehiaeetein re en ee ies eed as ee ee Vs 378 FIELDING THE NOVELIST brought the author to the depths of despicableness, he says of his books that Jonathan Wild is a “tissue of blackguardisms,” that Joseph Andrews verges on ‘“tiresomeness,” that in Amelia it “is easy to perceive” a “decaying mind,” and that in his heroines he . is degraded the “female character.” All this con- stituted a part of the Lives of Eminent and Illustrious Eng- lishmen by George Cunningham—one of Oe gc reference books?* of the Mid-Century. Thus the “taint” which was found in Fielding’s mind by Mrs. Barbauld, Aikin, and Scott was now becoming a contagion. Three years after Lady Louisa Stuart had elaborated the picture of her eighteenth- century kinsman skulking from garret to garret, the first extended biographical account of the novelist since Scott’s brief narrative (1821) made its appear- ance, prefixed to the thick one- -volume edition of the Works. This edition (1840), by the compiler and translator ‘Thomas Roscoe, was reviewed in the Times, as it chanced, by young W. M. Thackeray (of whose attitude toward Fielding a full account will be given presently); but none of the chief maga- zines—the Edinburgh, the Quarterly, Blackwood’s, or the W estminster—paid any attention to Roscoe’s efforts. Appar- ently neither the editor nor his subject was of sufficient interest to call forth a notice. Roscoe, to be sure, made no attempt at biographical correctness, while his criticism of the novels was almost entirely confined to excerpts from Murphy, Beattie, Chalmers, Aikin, and Byron; still this hastily prepared edition, it must be remembered, was the Fielding which chiefly sup- plied the Mid-Victorians for nearly a generation thereafter. Nine years before, in a short Memoir (for the 1831 Tom Jones illustrated ee Cruikshank”® ’), Roscoe had defended Fielding by comparing him with Smollett. If, he says, Field- ing ‘sometimes drew scenes which a delicate mind would not willingly contemplate,” it was not done “as Smollett did Ge Lives of Eminent and Illustrious Englishmen, Glasgow, 1837, Vi 25 The History of Tom Jones, London, 1831, I, xix. The Cruik- shank Joseph Andrews and Amelia followed in 1832.rT] eet ta tings cre aes i ; : re | a Pee a] a Saves — ~— Com SSO CON 44 ai* Y wrt Crrvucs hand ox tt L770 We ELE: Yur She ws LS Lacbtle Book IV, Chapter VIII) (Tom Jones, pal ek G8 a ee prot PS Oe fre 4 Peee eer! eee a Ee See ees er ssae ye © heleheat amen ty: ed SPet rate in tene* legal H : i 1 reer ee iar See eee riPO ta etn wpe reais BEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 379 that he might “‘amuse and flatter” the “corrupt” and “‘sen- ee Tbe Se —. . eS =e pt ode) rine etaett pehvabones es sual,” but that he might “warn the inexperienced.” And it is clear enough that in his edition of 1840 Roscoe intended to deal handsomely with the novelist. Commencing with a Mur- phyesque exordium in which he ranks his author with Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, and Swift as one of the “great teachers and censors of the world,” and challenging for him “higher honours than have hitherto been assigned,” he praises Fielding as a great investigator, satirist, and artist; denounces at ae " we a ne’. z A bet those who have disparaged him; and yet, comparing him with Burns, plays up the old stories of Fielding’s extravagance and Th My Oe nent dissipation; accepts, on the authority of Richardson’s insinua- so Samet tion, the idea that Fielding is Booth; and—unwittingly per- haps—elaborates the greatness-dissoluteness paradox which a ee Seat ee ee eee ‘Thackeray was to make popular a decade later. Roscoe did not join Scott in looking upon the Walpole anecdote as “‘humiliat- eer a er =| by pat Acad ing”; to him this attack on Fielding was dictated “‘by the meanest motives of malice.’’ Nor did he uphold Richardson, o whose “long wearisome, thrice-elaborated productions” sleep * 7] re: ‘ re if a it an i So “undisturbed upon their shelves”; it is “less amusing than re- volting,” he says, “‘to observe how eagerly Richardson and his correspondents” kept up “their envious and malignant attacks.” Roscoe, in short, would be Fielding’s champion, defending ar “Au on ey se OT ede et ere him against the “poisoned shafts of surviving malice.’ More- 7. over, he prides himself on his exploitation of Fielding’s poetry, which he truly says has been “‘studiously underrated” by pre- ceding biographers; and he calls attention to the “deep wisdom which pervades” all of Fielding’s works, and to “his uncom- promising magnanimous exposure of the vices and errors of the great.”’® Yet we rise from the perusal of Roscoe’s turgid sentences wondering how such great and thoughtful books could have been written by so dissolute a man. Anyone who sees in Fielding a second Burns is obviously no safe guide. _ At a time when a book so innocuous to modern eyes as Char- lotte Bronté’s Jane Eyre was assailed by reviewers as flagrantly 26 The Works of Henry Fielding, London and Glasgow, 1840, pp. V-XXV.380 FIELDING THE NOVELIST “immoral” and “‘irreligious,” and when even a hardened edi- tor like Lockhart could refer to its author as a “‘brazen miss,” it is not strange that fancy portraits of a debauched Fielding were much in demand, and that even a well-intentioned com- piler like Roscoe should have been led astray. In the age of Scott, Fielding’s detractors had been overpowered by the praise of the majority of the competent—Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and others; in the generation which followed, many of the most prominent men of letters were either indifferent to the novelist or openly inimical. This “fastidious” prejudice, as it was termed by Hazlitt, was keenly felt by the three chief fiction-writets of the period—Bulwer, Dickens, and Thack- eray—each of whom voiced a protest against it. Here, for instance, is the condition of affairs in 1832 as presented by Bulwer, who was then the most popular writer of the day: “How little fiction can do towards altering the national dis- position, we may see by the small effect produced on us by the true moral of our greatest and most popular novel, “Tom Jones.’ It was this one-side-edness of morality—this undue love of the decorous hypocrisies, and this exaggerated resentment against the erring sincerities of mankind, which Fielding, a more deep, accurate, and scientific moralist than is generally supposed, sought to expose and correct when he contrasted the characters of Blifil and Jones. Nothing can more clearly prove our ignorance of real morals, than the fact that no one appre- ciated this high moral purpose in our author. The world of writers fell upon him with the commonplaces of the very hypocrisy he was satirizing;—-forgot the service he rendered to virtue in unmasking its counterfeit in Blifil—charged him with all the excesses of his hero; and, because he had embodied morality as a philosopher, condemned him for being immoral. Even now his greatest merit is not acknowledged, nor his in- decorums forgiven for the sake of their object; and the herd of critics would conceive it a monstrous paradox in him who asserted and undertook to prove that Fielding was a far more profound and noble moralist than Addison. Nay, if Blifil and Jones were living characters, who does not feel that the Sst See eal etneneseenie tel eee oe aereteeh aeienion Cd pilD ete ie Pal _s te ngrtrWatblyee;a elas. sopewb kes oe weadbees&.¥ poet Peres nin a1 ne ee .1 BEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 381 world would visit Blifil as a most praiseworthy man, and cut Jones as an incorrigible scapegrace?”? Bulwer ends with the following excellent observation, “It is the misfortune of our social system that we have been taught so exclusive a regard for the domestic moralities.”*’ In a period when the Bowd- lerizers were busy with their abhorred shears this protest was unheeded. Dickens, whose Oliver Twist (1837-1838 )—intended as a direct answer to the Jack Sheppard school of fiction—was attacked as “low,” began his well-known prefatorial defense of the book (third edition, 1841) with the following quota- tion from Fielding: “Some of the author’s friends cried, “Lookee, gentlemen, the man is a villain; but it is Nature for all that’; and the young critics of the age, the clerks, appren- tices, etc., called it low, and fell a-groaning.” “It is wonder- ful,” continues Dickens, “how Virtue turns from dirty stock- ings; and how Vice, married to ribbons and a little gay attire, changes her name, as wedded ladies do, and becomes Romance. I am not aware of any writer in our language having a respect for himself, or held in any respect by his posterity, who ever has descended to the taste of the fastidious classes. On the other hand, if I look for examples, and for precedents, I find them in the noblest range of English litera- ture. Fielding, De Foe, Goldsmith, Smollett, Richardson all these for wise purposes, and especially the two first, brought upon the scene the very scum and refuse of the land . . . and yet, if I turn back against them every one, each in his turn, by the insects of the I find the same reproach levelled hour, who raised their little hum, and died, and were forgot- ten.” And later, in the preface to the “first cheap edition” of Oliver Twist, March, 1850, replying to his adverse critics, Dickens ironically says that “when Fielding described New- gate, the prison immediately ceased to exist.” With Dickens’s attitude toward the inconsistent fastidious- ness of the age, young Thackeray (then, at least) was in per- 27 “Of English Notions of Morality,” in The New Monthly Maga- zime, 1832. STL TE rr oer’ bye 04 eh. ae hme Te ° Mat Cy rer a9 cor ‘ - _ r* _ wa re ie a wir; yur ie Ee raha ee ee oe bi akga meth Be OPE My ire tad coal ve me I ‘A +5 ee Hs “f as ash Sah; 1 ‘ei ae i 7s or eed ey rae ebeemeh aha aeek eas OR Ee Aa ee ee Bes oo Pera Se ere eee. 382 FIELDING THE NOVELIST fect accord. In his review of Roscoe’s Fielding (September 2, 1840), he says, “Many a squeamish lady of our time would fling down one of” Fielding’s novels “with horror, but would go through every page of Mr. Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard with perfect comfort to herself.” “Ainsworth,” continued Thack- eray, ‘dared not paint his hero as the scoundrel he knew him to be; he must keep his brutalities in the background, else the public morals will be outraged, and so he produces a book quite absurd and unreal, and infinitely more immoral than anything Fielding ever wrote. Jack Sheppard is immoral actually be- 322 cause it is decorous.””~ That Fielding was lacking in imagination, that his novels were immoral, and that both the lack of imagination and the lack of morality were due to the viciousness of his life—such were the tares which, drawing common sustenance from the atmosphere of affected gentility, were prospering in the early Victorian mind. Even the best efforts of certain toilers in the garden could not keep them down. In the manuals of litera- ture most popular in this period, we find the prevalent view of Fielding very clearly reflected. Three of the most widely read “authorities” of the time were Chambers’s Cyclopedia of English Literature (1844), Craik’s History of Literature (1845), and Shaw’s Outlines of English Literature (1847). Of these handbooks the one most touched by a critical spirit is Craik’s History; and yet the excellent Professor Craik tells us that Fielding presents ‘“‘merely what we should have seen as lookers on”; and that if “‘we want to know anything more” of his characters than this, “we must find it out for ourselves.” “Even Fielding,” he goes on to say, “with all his wit, or at least pregnancy of thought and style—for the quality in his writings to which we allude appears to be the result rather of elaboration than of instinctive perception—would probably have left us nothing much worth preserving in the proper form of a novel, if he had not had his diversified practical knowl- edge of society to draw upon, and especially his extensive and 28 The Times, September 2, 1840.ere Yi ee _— rperhnardin a a an tA beh ot eet as Cerse its eetbetingep te BEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 382 eens SE ann Por Pte. intimate acquaintance with the lower orders of all classes, in painting whom he is always greatest and most at home.’”° LC Shaw, drawing—in his Outlines of English Literature (1847 )—a darker picture, speaks of Fielding’s “easy laxity of morals,” which “held as venial any trespasses on propriety ra Pe eT RS era ‘aherabradiess tee l nen abenienbeneeeinen Linen el a yeaa so long as they were accompanied and excused by a generosity and manly liberality of feeling.” This leads him to the amaz- ing conclusion that “such a person,” who “must have looked upon” Richardson’s ‘“‘citizen-like inculcation of strict mor- ality” as “fair game,” may “be charged, and justly, with a cae Ce ee eens very low standard of moral rectitude and virtue.” Apparently with Scott in mind, he finds that Smollett, ‘not less rich and >) —oy are) =, otyteae popes < inventive,” was “capable of disputing the crown of supremacy with Fielding himself”; and that “Fathom is far superior in interest” to Fielding’s Jonathan. On the other hand, there is Richardson, who, though no “longer very generally read,” a ene Sepa Ohi tote ene eee eae is a “great, profound, creative, and, above all, truly original genius, devoting a powerful and active intellect to the holy cause of virtue and honour’—a “bright ornament to human nature, and a prime glory of his country’s literature.”*° And here is the comparison between Fielding and Richard- son given in Chambers’s Cyclopedia of English Literature i at (1844). Richardson was “a pious, respectable man,” who e¢ ¢ rtf eT ra “fF as aah 433} way ee Pea a i *t ra y, Hl i ‘t Bi ; ,s 7 , a2) 5 St ete te’ pens) made the passions move at the command of virtue,’ ” and whose Clarissa is “‘one of the brightest triumphs of the whole ” Fielding, we are told, is range of imaginative literature. lacking in “‘pathos and sentiment,” and in the “higher cast of thought”; his works, though humorous, are deficient in the “Imaginative faculty” and they are “‘not allied to virtue.” He was “a thoughtless man of fashion—a rake who had dissipated ee ron his fortune, and passed from high to low without dignity or respect; and who had commenced author without any higher 29 Craik, G. L., Sketches of the History of Literature . . . in Eng- land, London, 1845, V, 157-158. 30 Shaw, T. B., Outlines of English Literature, London, 1849, pp. 319, 321, 323, 324, 327) 315, 317 (Preface dated “Aug. 10, 18477). er er a ae . 44s ee ee er eeto be [esr e Peres es ened tetera SE pre petal ee as ~ Sateen ene eer ? Ps FIELDING THE NOVELIST 354 motive than to make money, and confer amusement.”’* ‘Think of the thousands, young and old, who, turning to this “au- thority” on English literature, were thus instructed for years to come concerning the dissolute and merely humorous Field- ing! The significant fact is that this opinion of the author was not confined to the compilers of text-books. Such influential prose writers as Carlyle, Ruskin, and De Quincey held him ‘n low esteem, and even Macaulay, despite his admiration, considered Fielding’s work inferior—as regards both wisdom and morality—to that of his beloved Richardson. Back in 1823, Carlyle, while busy with German fiction, had written his brother, “Have you read Fielding’s novels? ‘They are genuine things; though if you were not a decent fellow, I should pause before recommending them, their morality is so loose.”*? But if it really was the morality of Fielding’s work to which Carlyle objected, how could he stomach either Smol- lett or Sterne? In his Lectures on Literature®** he found room for Sterne but not for Fielding; in his Friedrich he went out of his way to compliment Smollett. “Excellent Tobias,” he exclaims, “courage, my brave young Tobias; ia Ou will do your errand in some measure.”’** Moreover, according to Allingham, he warmly Smollett’s ‘‘pathos.”’*° Though, as we have seen, the youthful Carlyle in an early ) praised ? cc reference or two paid his respects to Fielding’s position as a novelist, he seems never to have liked him. Francis Espinasse writes—to quote the rest of the passage previously referred to 81 Chambers, R., Cyclopedia of English Literature, Edinburgh, II (1844), 161-163. See also Chambers’s History of English Literature, Hartford, 1837 (first ed., 1835)—according to the compiler the “only” work of the sort in existence—in which we are told that Fielding’s “createst fault is his imperfect and incorrect morality.” 82 Carlyle’s Early Letters, edited by Norton, London, 1886, p. 293. 88 Lectures on the History of Literature (April to July, 183 8), edited by J. R. Green, New York, 1892. 84 Carlyle’s History of Friedrich the Second, New York, 1862, III, 299 (ch. xii). 85 Allingham’s Diary, London, 1907, p. 212.BEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 285 © ar ah aptehiberetionet ae eer abba tte oral —*I never heard Carlyle speak of . . . Fielding. . . . But he called the day on which he first read Roderick Random aed y one of the sunniest of his life(!), and a good biography of Aah ivvae, aeons Smollett, he thought, was among the few things of the kind which then remained to be done.’’*® Presumably Carlyle was 6) @ténnne in 24 a +m Seid baheentabhee tee ober head ree biased in part by what he conceived to have been Fielding’s life. He was, no doubt, impressed by the old slanders; for when he gave a copy of Bampfylde-Moore Carew to Norton he regretted that it was not an edition which contained the part (the scandalous part) about Fielding.*’ But one of the main reasons that he failed to appreciate the novelist is to be inferred from a passage in his review of Croker’s Boswell,** in which, during his disparagement of fiction as a genus, he says, ‘“Thus, here and there, a Tom Jones, a Meister, a Crusoe, will yield no little solacement to the minds of men; though .? Farther on he still immeasurably less than a Reality would writes, “‘[Man’s] highest spiritual endowment [is] that of revealing Poetic Beauty.” By “Poetic Beauty” Carlyle seems to mean idealistic or mystical beauty; the realism of Fielding was not to Carlyle a “Reality” at all. Had he only seen fit to include Fielding among his “heroes,” what a tremendous dif- ¥ i . Fh ? 4 Pate rot a rr es ference eventually this inclusion would have made! Ruskin, not yet old enough to be influential as a writer, had already made up his mind about Fielding and about Richard- son as well; to him, also, Fielding was lacking in morality and in imagination. An out-and-out Richardsonian, Ruskin, as a young man of twenty-two, wrote of Sir Charles Grandison: “At present I feel disposed to place this work above all other works of fiction I know. It is very, very grand; and has, I think, a greater practical effect on me for good than anything 86 Espinasse, Francis, Literary Recollections, New York, 1893, Pp. 227. The exclamation point is in the text. To Carlyle the scene of Humphry Clinker at the smithy was unsurpassed “by Dante or anyone else.”,—D. A. Wilson, Carlyle till Marriage, London, 1923, p. 66. 37 Letters of . . . Norton, Boston and New York, 1913, I, 494. 88 Fraser’s Magazine, April, 1832. tn ne ee 2 TTT ° 5 See thet pared a ohhelenehidebaintee bo eater aad =: : ee Se ue aa ou pty? F . | a4 ) y . fe . 386 FIELDING THE NOVELIST I ever read in my life.”*® In his thirties he said, ““Of fiction, read Sir Charles Grandison, Scott’s novels, Miss Edge- worth’s”;*° and later, “In Romance, I am again divided be- tween Sir Charles Grandison and Don Quixote.” When he was sixty, he spoke of Richardson as “the greatest of our Eng- lish moral story-tellers” ;** and in his eightieth year he referred to “the deep admiration I still feel for Richardson.”** Very different was his attitude toward Richardson’s rival, “I can- not, for the life of me, understand the feelings of men of magnificent wit and intellect, like Smollett and Fielding,” wrote young Ruskin to a “College Friend” in 1840, “when I see them gloating over and licking their chops over nastiness, like hungry dogs over ordure; founding one half of the laugh- able matter of their volumes in innuendoes of abomination. Not that I think, as many people do, they are bad books; for I don’t think these pieces of open filth are in reality injurious to the mind, or, at least as injurious as corrupt sentiment and disguised immorality, such as you get some times in Bulwer, and men of his school. But I cannot understand the taste. I can’t imagine why men who have real wit at their command should per fume it as they do: De Quincey, likewise, regarded the great realist as a writer of low aims. On one occasion he stigmatizes Fielding as a “deliberate falsehood-monger,” who, being too indolent to master “‘a real living idiom,” put in the mouth of his Squire a “childish and fantastic babble” and thus “commenced the practice of systematically traducing” our “‘country gentle- men.”*> And again he exclaims, ‘(How coarse are the ideals of Fielding!—his odious Squire Western, his odious Tom 29 The Works of John Ruskin, edited by Cook and Wedderburn, London and New York, 1907, XXXV, 308. *9 Tbsd., XV, 227. 41 Tbid., XXXVI, 193. aa lid; XOX, 26k. 8 [bid.. KXXV, 542. ea los lar 8. 49 The Collected Writings of De Quincey, edited by Masson, Edin- burgh, 1889, I, 343, 344.BEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 387 Jones!”’** To arraign Fielding for coarseness of ideals because he chose to describe a Squire Western seems a strange proceed- ing; but this attitude of De Quincey and others toward real- ism was a definite point of view which must be understood and reckoned with. Measured by the standards of romantic ele- gance, the author of Tom Jones was of course found wanting." Then there was Macaulay, who, defender as he was of Fielding, always regarded Richardson as more moral and more profound. Looking again at the article which he sent as a boy to The Christian Observer, we notice that even then, despite his commendation of Joseph Andrews, Fanny, and Parson Adams, he classed the novels of Fielding not with those which like Richardson’s were exempt “from blame” but with those which were “more obnoxious to censure than most others.”** Waverley, at that time, he placed in the “harmless and enter- taining” class; and as the Scotch Novels continued to appear, his love for Scott, rising to a great height, became the inspira- tion for his essay on “‘History” (1828) and, in part, for his own historical method. Even from the beginning (and during the rest of his career), Fielding, highly as he regarded him, was subordinated in Macaulay’s affection to Richardson and to Scott as well. In 1841 (February 5) when he delivered his famous speech on the copyright, he was not sure enough of Fielding’s reputation to use him as evidence in court; of Richardson’s, however, he was absolutely certain. “Most of us . . .” he asserted, ‘Shave known persons who, very erro- neously as I think, but from the best motives, would not ; Se : : choose to reprint Fielding’s novels, or Gibbon'’s . . . Decline 46 The North British Review, May, 1848 (article on Forster’s Gold- smith) . 47 De Quincey, however, criticizes Richardson for his “servile” atti- tude toward a “fine gentleman” and for his adoration of Lovelace. The Posthumous Works of . . . De Quincey, edited by Japp, London 1891, I, 114. 48 The Christian Observer, American ed., XV, 785 (December, 1816). rer Hr a - os Dndiptieg otha darth rns eres Larne aaa wai tommencentiee 7 Seek be ay pee rs Pee Pig re a ei eas #4! a3 ety ae 3) aes ee! ] a ea , oe FI ae ty i i arses me cdc rahe om wy a ee ~ s RK bm ee tee ue hetteth-nteabiset ete “as vine 4 ‘ = | erty ere 0 — ee eet ne ae388 FIELDING THE NOVELIST and Fall. Some gentlemen may perhaps be of opinion, that it would be as well if Tom Jones and Gibbon’s History were never reprinted. I will not, then, dwell on these or simi- lar cases. I will take cases respecting which it is not likely that there will be any difference of opinion here... . . Take Rich- ardson’s novels No writings have done more to raise the fame of English genius in foreign countries. No writings are more deeply pathetic. No writings, those of Shakespeare ex- cepted, show more profound knowledge of the human heart. As to their moral tendency, I can cite the most respectable testimony. Dr. Johnson describes Richardson as one who had taught the passions to move at the command of virtue.’*® Can it be, we are inclined to ask, that a man of Macaulay’s acquaintance with the world could really believe that Richard- son’s novels show ‘‘more profound knowledge of the human heart” than Fielding’s, or was he merely exploiting Richardson for the purposes of his brief? There is every reason to think that Macaulay meant every word he said concerning Richard- son not only as a moralist but as an artist. It is true that he did not disparage Fielding. ‘Though he dwelt upon the popular 50 idea of the novelist’s extreme poverty,’ he meant no harm. He censured Johnson for being “grossly unjust” to Fielding and for failing to recognize him as one of the “great originals” ; he frequently referred to him in his essays’ and was fond of reading®® aloud from his works; yet according to Trevelyan Clarissa was his “favorite romance,” and on reading that novel again he wrote in his diary, April 15, 1850, “I nearly cried : ae 295: . ° age of aes my eyes out.”°* In view of the evidence, it is clear that 49 Macaulay’s Works, edited by Lady Trevelyan, New York, 1866, VIII, 204-205. 5° Review of Croker’s edition of Boswell’s Johnson, September, 1831. °l Review of Mme. D’Arblay’s Diary, January, 1843. 52 See, among other references, his review of The Life and Writings of Addison, July, 1843. 63 J. C. Morison’s Macaulay, New York, 1894, p. 172. °* Trevelyan’s Life, New York, 1876, II, 237. See also Thackeray’s “Nil Nisi Bonum.” Aetaierhicenesel i enp-9 eR Meiereeb ratatalat “ee = Pe ie Se reteuehe | i tBEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 389 Macaulay actually believed—as they did in the eighteenth century—that Pamela,-Clarissa, and Grandison ranked next to the plays of Shakespeare in “profound knowledge of the human heart’; and it is equally clear that no such opinion was ever entertained by him regarding T’om Jones. As we pause for a moment at this stage in our history, we can hardly fail to notice the change in attitude toward Field- ing which was taking place during the ’Thirties and the ’For- ties: we miss the enthusiasm of Lamb and Hazlitt and Cole- ridge and Leigh Hunt. This does not mean, of course, that laudation of the novelist suddenly ceased—even Ruskin ad- mits that in this period Fielding’s “name” was “‘of repute” ; but the number of persons competent in literature who put on record a cordial appreciation of his works was becoming palpably fewer; and even those who praised him found it more often necessary to assume the attitude of defense. Across the Channel, regret at the growing neglect of Fielding was voiced by Stendhal, who stoutly declared that Tom Jones was “to other novels what the Iliad is among the epics.” In Eng- land, on the contrary, Thomas Hood protested against the statement (frequently made during the heated discussion of the Copyright Bill) that the great prose-epic was becoming “antiquated.” ““There is one Fielding,” he rejoined in his ” “whose last novel was published “Copyright and Copywrong, a century ago, and, consequently, has been common spoil for some forescore years. Will any one be bold enough to say, that a revived copyright of “Iom Jones’ would be valueless in the market?”’°® To an ultra-religious woman who pestered him with doctrinal tracts Hood replied: “Madam, . _ Perhaps I have to congratulate myself,” as Joseph Andrews did “on the preservation of his virtue from that amorous widow, Lady Booby! But whatever impropriety you intended to commit has been providentially frustrated.”°’ To his mind, the hue and °° Mémoires dun Touriste par de Stendhal, Paris, 1877. 56 The Works of Thomas Hood, edited by his son and daughter, London, 1872, VIII, 26s. 57 Walter Jerrold’s Thomas Hood, New York, 1909, pp. 403, 350. ~~ Co. oer Paetaubsheretetensat ne chenrs oo rs eae s : asi Se ear Benen rent Lene, a ‘ r ‘ 5 , bs hee ao) oe Awe ne = ra ve390 FIELDING THE NOVELIST cry against Fielding as an immoral writer was nothing less than absurd. And he made so bold as to tell the ultra-religious woman that the reason her ‘“‘faction” decried literature was that “all the most celebrated authors, the wisest, and most learned in the ways of mankind” had “concurred in denounc- ing,” as Fielding did, “sanctimonious folly and knavery of every description.”** Among those who defended Fielding most valiantly in the magazines was G. H. Lewes. Ever and again the old charge was repeated that the author of Tom Jones was inferior to the author of the Waverley Novels. Scott “lives more in the upper, and yet as much in the lower air, as Fielding,”*? wrote Allan Cunningham; and the statement was a commonplace of criticism. This assertion seemed to Lewes so unjust that in the December number (1847) of Fraser’s Magazine he made it his business to refute it. “Scott,” he writes, “‘has greater in- vention, more varied powers, a more poetical and pictorial imagination; but although his delineation of character is gen- erally true, as far as it goes, it is never deep; and his defi- ciencies are singularly apparent, when, as in St. Ronan’s Well, he ventures into the perilous sphere of contemporary life.” By a famous pronouncement in, this article Lewes scandalized Charlotte Bronté when he remarked that he would rather have “written Pride and Prejudice, or Tom Jones, than any of the Waverley Novels.” Defying popular opinion he bravely de- clared that ‘‘Fielding and Miss Austen” were “the greatest novelists in our language.””” Though Fielding’s popularity was dimmed by the vogue of Scott, it was not, particularly in the magazines, extinguished by it. Other reviewers. beside Lewes were not unfriendly to him, though there are fewer references to his works than might be imagined. Take, for example, The Westminster Review, which seems to have been especially well disposed. In 58 Walter Jerrold’s Thomas Hood, p. 404. 59 Biographical and Critical History of the British Literature, Paris, 1834, p. 150. 60 Fraser’s Magazine, XXXVI, 687. ‘ } 7 Bs J f A ta is Ng ie ae rs on ao s ah i ee ; : | rl ie tt) ea! 33 Vd oo @ “2BEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 391 January, 1832, a reference®’ is made to “Fielding, who so thoroughly knew the heart in all its corruptions”; and in April, the reviewer speaks of the main novelists as Le Sage, Fielding, and Scott. In one of the articles of 1835 the state- ment occurs that, great as he is, Scott could never have “achieved that immortal contrast, so consummately moral, of Blifil and Jones.”®* In Leigh Hunt’s review of the 1837 edi- tion of Lady Mary’s letters, her ladyship’s condescension in her treatment of her cousin is remarked upon; and in an article on Mitford’s Gray during the same year Bulwer was one of the first to complain of the poet’s mistreatment of Joseph Andrews. Gray, he says, “evidently rates that wonderful fiction very little above the run of novels, and hurries away with compla- cent preference to Marivaux and Crébillon.”” By the Edinburgh and the Quarterly Fielding was less fre- quently mentioned; but an examination of these and other magazines of the period shows clearly enough that though public librarians and clergymen (whose charge it is to look after public morals) were putting the ban on Fielding’s novels, these novels were still employed by reviewers as standards by which to test, as they appeared, new experiments in fiction. Thus the once famous D. M. Moir (‘“‘Delta”) and Nassau Senior use Fielding as a touchstone on which to try, respectively, the picture of urban life presented by Theodore Hook, and the “intellectual” theory of fiction of Bulwer.®* In the opinion of Senior (as in that of Lewes) Tom Jones and Persuasion are among those “tales to which the rules of art have been most carefully and most successfully applied.” Of particular interest are the early reviews of the works of Dickens and Thackeray; it is not true, as has sometimes 61 The Westminster Review, XVI, 217. 62 Thid., XXX, 479. 63 Tbid., XXVII, 12 (July, 1837). Reprinted in Lytton’s Miscellane- ous Prose Works, New York, 1868, I, 138. 8* See D. M. Moir’s Sketches, p. 3583 and Senior’s Essays on Fiction, London, 1864, p. 238. 8° Senior’s Essays, p. 239. ret es a) bie ee se lee: — ar _ TL eT Eo es bey tt ae tener neers “ Peer ars behite beeen toe ieee Oe ee erent nnn a end a ~'e at at thi Bs i) $ hs Pr a y ‘i aa a hs pe :/ eal 75) ed i. ieoa ta Se HO be ed and Piteewee epee ie ree oe a ae P aoe bide dee a en ee 392 FIELDING THE NOVELIST been assumed, that Fielding was forgotten before their time— witness the Edinburgh and Quarterly notices concerning Pick- wick. “Of Fielding’s intuitive perception of the springs of action, and skill in the construction of the prose epic pit wrote Croker® in the Quarterly (1837), “or Smollett’s dash and rich poetic imagination—he [Dickens] has none.” The Edinburgh has this to say (October, 1838): “We think [ Dickens | the truest and most spirited delineator of English life, amongst the middle and lower classes, since the days of Smollett and Fielding.”®" And during the following year the Quarterly,°° making war on the “so-called fashionable novelists? declared that there was “more strength in half a page of Fielding than in a whole ship-load of the diluted, maudlin” fiction of the day. Even as early as The Great Hoggarty Diamond the re- semblance between Thackeray and Fielding drew forth the following comment from John Sterling, who wrote (Decem- ber 11, 1841): “What is there better in Fielding or Gold- smith? There is more truth and nature in one of these papers than in all” Dickens’s novels “together.”’ Carlyle’s note on this passage runs: “Thackeray, always a close friend of the Sterling house, will observe that this is dated 1841, not 1851, and have his own reflections on the matter!” After Vanity Fair appeared and the resemblance between Thackeray and Fielding had become a critical commonplace, allusions to the elder writer grew much more frequent. Vanity Fair, de- clared Whipple, in The North American Review, is an “at- tempt, somewhat after the manner of Fielding, to represent the world as it is, especially the selfish, heartless, and cunning portion” of it. “The author has Fielding’s cosy manner of talking to his readers in the pauses of his narrative, and, like Fielding, takes his personages mostly from ordinary life.”™ 68 The Quarterly Review, LIX, 484. 87 The Edinburgh Review, LXVIII, 76. 68 The Quarterly Review, LXIV, 349. 88 Carlyle’s The Life of John Sterling, London, 1851, p. 287. 70 The North American Review, LXVII, 368 (October, 1848).BEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 393 In England, the most notable of the reviews of Thackeray was Abraham Hayward’s account of Vanity Fair in the Edin- burgh, January, 1848, in which a “partial resemblance” was discovered between the two Amelias, Captain Osborn and Captain Booth, and Sir Pitt Crawley and Squire Western.” Rather among the novelists themselves, however, than among the reviewers do we find the more genuine and con- sistent enthusiasm for Fielding. There were, of course, nota- ble exceptions. Perhaps his most violent enemy was Charlotte Bronté, of whom more will be said later. And Anthony ‘Trol- lope (who before the end of his career learned to value Field- ing) very “early in his Post Office days” came “‘to the conclu- sion that Pride and Prejudice pleased him better than any rb). c other fiction he had ever read’’; that it was not great a work as Ivanhoe,” but that it was “immeasurably above Tom Jones.’ Charles Kingsley, some years afterwards, spoke of writing a “‘story about the Methodists, and the fury of the Squire Westerns and Parson Trullibers against them.”’* So much for the complainers. As we turn now to Fielding’s admirers in the department of prose narrative we need not dwell upon forgotten names. No one, for example, thought more of the author of Tom Jones than ‘‘Plumer” Ward, once of repute, who went so far as to call a book of his, Fielding; or Society (1838)—-saying in the dedication, “Fielding was, you know, a great observer of mankind, and penetrated the ‘perhaps so inmost recesses of the heart almost as shrewdly as his name- sake.”"* We may spend our time in the company of the three most popular novelists of the day—Bulwer, Dickens, and Thackeray—whose obiter dicta should now be recorded in some detail. Bulwer, who—despite certain borrowings—was never a 71 The Edinburgh Review, LXXXVII, 63. 72 Escott, T. H. S., Anthony Trollope, London and New York, 1913, p. 25; also Autobiography, second ed., Edinburgh and London, 1883, I, 55. 73 Kingsley, C., Letters and Memories, London, 1901, I, 187. 74 Ward, R. P., Fielding; or Society, Philadelphia, 1838, p. vil. oe eat. Se een aia eae niet peta tptieees en eee tthe oe ARUDR ence ee eee > fs | 2) Pat pt aif at! a ey th Hh et ny a ait ay Th m ‘ “ft Pie | or a e1 a o ie ae a ig C ei 7 = H ae wey pti ee a a fr er ae iaspeninge weerpeyehewtpaans eres ee arr ery eras‘Lele 2 s7er Stale 394 FIELDING THE NOVELIST disciple of Fielding’s, wrote frequently and at length (though not always consistently) about his art. In a later period, while following Sterne in his Caxtons, he highly commended Rich- ardson as well; but in his earlier years he was particularly cordial in his appreciation of Fielding. It is significant that in his “In Memoriam” on Scott (1832), not Richardson or Sterne or Smollett, but Fielding was chosen for purposes of compari- son. “Fielding, Le Sage, and Cervantes,” he declares, “‘are the only three writers, since the world began, with whom, as a novelist,” he can be mentioned.*® In his review of Lockhart’s Scott (1838) he writes: “In Novels Fielding certainly ex- celled him [Scott] in some very high attributes, and Tom Jones is better than the Antiquary. But in romance, Scott stands [supreme]. » “Fielding and Cervantes alone rival Scott in the breadth and depth of his humour; and the first seldom exhibits equal delicacy in the vein.”** For Fielding as a constructive artist, however, Bulwer has the highest praise. “Tn the greatest works of Fielding,” he writes, “‘a very obtuse critic may perceive that the author sat down to write in order to embody a design previously formed. The perception of moral truths urged him to the composition of his fictions.” “In ‘Jonathan Wild,’ ” he continues, by way of illustration, “the finest prose satire in the English language, Fielding, be- fore he set pen to paper, had resolved to tear the mask from false greatness. In his conception of the characters and his- tories of Blifil and Jones, he was bent on dethroning that popu- lar idol—false virtue. The scorn of hypocrisy in all grades, all places, was the intellectual passion of Fielding, and his masterpieces are the results of his intense convictions. That many incidents never contemplated would suggest them|[selves | as he proceeded—that the technical plan of events might de- viate and vary, according as he saw new modes of enforcing his aims, is unquestionable. But still Fielding always com- menced with a plan—with a conception—with a moral end, " The New Monthly Magazine, October, 1832, pp. 302-304. 78 See “Art in Fiction,” in The Monthly Chronicle, care Nn Ce ptt ay See ate eae a} ohel Poteet w ——— men soesWl sincere re esee eee ee ere nasBEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 395 to be achieved by definite agencies, and through the medium of certain characters preformed in his mind.” In one of his let- ters, presumably thinking of Coleridge, Bulwer says that the CEdipus Tyrannus, The Bride of Lammermoor, and Tom Jones are “three masterpieces in narrative which can never be too much studied.” Still, though expressing the highest admiration for Field- ing’s constructive power, Bulwer regarded the “imaginative” portrayal of character as superior to what he calls the “actual.” “Let us take a work—the greatest the world possesses in those Schools [7.e., the ‘lower Schools of Art”], and in which the flesh-and-blood vitality of the characters is especially marked —I mean, Tom Jones—and compare it with Hamlet. The chief characters in Tom Jones are all plain, visible, eating, drinking, and walking beings; those in Hamlet are shadowy, solemn, and mysterious. . . . But who shall say that the characters in Tom Jones are better drawn than those in Ham- let—or that there is greater skill necessary in the highest walk of the Actual School, than in that of the Imaginative?” It is true that Bulwer professed to have received hints from Fielding even in characterization; his own “Mr. Fielden,” he says, in his Lucretia (1846) “‘is a composite, to which the Vicar of Wakefield and Parson Adams have contributed the materials.” But he never succeeded in producing that prose- fiction Hamlet which was to be as real as Tom Jones. As regards Dickens, reminiscences of Fielding in Pickwick Papers were, as we have seen, detected immediately; for did not the author say in chapter viii, “Fielding tells us that man is fire, and woman tow, and the Prince of Darkness sets a light to em?” George Borrow, who delighted not only in Pickwick but in Oliver Twist, welcomed young Dickens as “a second 7 See the New York Sun, March 25, 1908. 78 The New Monthly Magazine, XXXV, 405, 406, 407. 79 For other references to Fielding, see preface to Pelham, edition of 1840; preface to The Disowned (1835); and the “Tomlinsoniana” of Paul Clifford. nanan gears eae aeed FY ey es plea beth pane ee etn teen eee Sans Pat af] a at ney rea ed Bi te3 2 ea ed i B 3 a * ea + i] PS Pe, ein oe robe etre teeteretet tena eet tet tepet a Senet reat + rare ! H ah ti 8 aa EF H peer o Manta ~~ a 448th WGA 50, =, «ensue macaeiene ns SaladelyereyreSsuypennranieocamen noccme eat ei i er are re ae onan ph ons qn yee ee eee tbe lite sf. a“ povenrene eee ers ae bet ee este rie erenet ent plete hyn gs ene nen eee ie eR, te re ne DN Paes a. Ae a ieteeerat estes eae ted sind ar parted Sos ~ Rawr CR pee nT : sioner asim de Lae ee FIELDING THE NO VELIST ld have built and carried all the structure in his 402 author cou brain” before “he began to put it to paper.” And as early as 1840 Thackeray had fallen in love with that “exquisite per- formance,” Amelia—the “most beautiful and delicious de- scription of a character that is to be found in any writer, not excepting Shakespeare.” So much for the praise of Fielding, though many another glowing sentence might well be tran- scribed; now for the blame, which, after the Early Victorian fashion, was lavishly mingled with the praise. Concerning the Walpole story, Thackeray tells us (perhaps thinking of Haz- litt, of whom he had written previously), that “it is that vul- gar, dirty cloth that shocks the world so much, and that horrid low company—not the mutton”; yet in a sentence or two be- fore, fearing “very much” that Fielding “did even worse in the course of his hard life than what Walpole has described of him,” he exclaims, “(Great were his errors, doubtless, and low his tastes.”” He quarrels with Scott for speaking “rather slightingly” of Amelia; but he follows his lead in attributing many of the “errors” of Fielding and his “works” to the school in which “the poor fellow” was bred. And again he pictures for us “young Harry Fielding,” ready “for a row, or a bottle, or what else you please,”—“a young fellow upon town with very loose morals indeed,” who “never seems to have thought of much beyond the pleasure of living and being jolly.”\ Though “his heart was pure,” he “led a sad, riotous life, and mixed with many a bad woman in his time.” Then there is the “wet cloth” (Thackeray, desiring to be more graphic, subsequently changed it to a “wet towel”) with which Fielding’s head is furnished after a “supper party,” and by means of which the “poor fellow” was enabled to “read as stoutly as the soberest man in either of the Temples.”**” All these things are here; for Thackeray, who liked to write ae without jumping up every moment to consult somebody,”*”* 102 The Times, September 2, 1840. 103 As he told Bayard Taylor.—Atlantic Monthly, XIII, 378. Ke: ferred to by Dickson, The North American Review, CXCVII, p. 531:BEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 403 willingly accepted all the worst traditions of the man in whose works he now became—to his ultimate profit and success— profoundly interested. Here we have the two views of Fielding which battled for the mastery in the anonymous Times article of 1840—before Thackeray had written Vanity Fair and had thereby divided the known literary world with his rival, Dickens. Eleven years later, when he delivered his lectures on the “Humourists” at Willis’s Rooms, his prestige was so great and his eloquence so concretely overpowering that whatever he might choose to say of Henry Fielding took precedence over every other account of him that had ever been given. Consequently the great ques- tion of the years 1840-1851, as we see it in retrospect, was, Which would prevail in Thackeray’s mind, Fielding the Prodigal or Fielding the Supreme Artist? Meanwhile the old stories continued to flourish, though the author of Tom Jones had his admirers and defenders. Hartley Coleridge, sharing his father’s enthusiasm for Fielding, as- serted that Shakespeare never, and Fielding “very seldom” falls “into a passion with his bad characters”?°*—a remark which (incorporated in Roscoe’s essay ) Thackeray probably had in mind in one of the dicta we have just quoted. John Forster in his Life of Goldsmith referred to Johnson’s clock-work comparison as the “most astounding” of all the Doctor’s “heresies” ;*°° and though afterwards he thought that Field- ing’s characters (like those of Dickens) sometimes remained mere types, he stoutly defended him as a moralist. Novelists long since forgotten—as for example, W. Y. Browne, in The Village Tale*°°—occasionally turned Fielding to account in their productions; and Schlosser, whose History of the Eight- eenth Century (translated by Davison) was reviewed in the *°* Hartley Coleridge’s The Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford, London and New York, new ed., 1869, p. xliv. 105 John Forster’s Life . . . of . Goldsmith, second ed., Lon- don, 1854, II, 19 note. 70° Browne, W. Y., The Village Tale, London, 1850, Preface. See also his Fun, Poetry, and Pathos, London, 1850, p. 254. ~~ =o ee vine vA, tee! ae ee path et eae eee eh Dah bd ow seeernrnasnabatel, ae epee enn keene errr os ae Pe Th ie i eer et Goel arta i wi shoh Aun ere ele eT PoreaE A ee ed ae : Sit ed cepeenaaes ba ene nes Pinan hide atin COT ers ‘ he 3 a 404 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Westminster’ for September, 1845, definitely awarded the palm to Fielding, whose popularity in Germany was much de- layed, he said, by the sentimental craze for which Richardson was responsible. These are a few of the pro-Fielding docu- ments which may have passed under Thackeray’s eyes during this period; yet he probably saw more frequently such refer- ences to Fielding the Libertine and Vulgarian as were tran- scribed earlier in this chapter. And, as time went on, his vanity was no doubt tickled by the prayer of thankfulness heard re- peatedly that his own works, which so much resembled Field- ing’s, were free from that writer’s impurities. One allusion which certainly did not escape him was the celebrated outburst on the part of Miss Charlotte Bronté in the second edition of Jane Eyre. Disgusted by the Fielding-Thackeray comparisons which followed the publication of Vanity Fair, she exclaimed: “They say he is like Fielding: they talk of his wit, humour, comic powers. He resembles Fielding as an eagle does a vul- ture: Fielding could stoop on carrion, but Thackeray never does.”?°® One can imagine her horror when, sometime later, a Quarterly reviewer made a comparison between her own Rochester and Fielding’s Squire Western!*°® Did her “eagle” smile when he read it? Turning the pages of Blackwood’s a few months before, Thackeray may have nodded assent when he read (in the dialogue between Aquilius and the Curate) of Fielding’s ‘‘admirable English”; for he once made the re- mark that his own English would have been better had he read Fielding before he was ten. Did he agree with the critic when, farther along, he speaks of the author’s lack of “high principle and personal dignity?”**® But a really important article that presumably came to his attention was one by E. P. Whipple 107 The Westminster Review, XLIV, 100-102. See Davison’s trans- lation of Schlosser’s History of the Eighteenth Century, London, 1844, II, 59-60. 108 Preface to second ed., December 21, 1847. 109 The Quarterly Review, LXXXIV, 164. The famous article by Miss Rigby. 110 Blackwood’s Magazine, LXIV, 466, 469 (October, 1848). rer niet She ee eee a ae . is ; v7 . r . bh A uv + FY; : +) Sa Hr a ) re ee! ie af a a a A a iH Lea + } ty af ry Sem ino ete ea Oe ty hete ie LOS 4 Fee eT Ss Se. 406 FIELDING THE NOVELIST against the fame” of Fielding, “and voted him ‘a dull dog, sir a low fellow,’ yet somehow Harry Fielding has sur- vived and Parson Adams is at this minute as real a char- acter, as much loved by us as the old doctor himself.”*** And in June, 1845, he said of “Her Majesty’s Bal Poudre”: “If WILL HOGARTH and HARRY FIELDING could . witness the scene Good Lord! what a satire they could make between them!”2** In the Fraser's for April, 1846, oddly enough, he professes to discover Fielding’s hand in the children’s book T'om Hickathrift, the style of which, he says, is “very like that of the author of Joseph Andrews” ; for “If any body but Harry Fielding can write of a battle in this way, it is a pity we have not more” of the productions “of the author.”** In January, 1847, he observes that ““The works of the real humourist,” such as Cervantes, Shakespeare, or “dear Harry Fielding,” have always, for their “best char- acteristic,” Love—the “Amor and Crown” of Chaucer’s pri- oress;12® and, during the same year, the study of the novels of his favorite “humourist” came to fruition in the opening num- bers of Vanity Fair, which, according to Mr. Dickson, owes to Fielding a great measure of its success. In 1848, ‘Thackeray again turned his attention to his beloved Amelia, though he made, at the same time, some uncomplimentary remarks about her literary father. “I have just got two new novels from the library by Mr. Fielding,” runs his letter to Mrs. Brookfield: “the one is Amelia, the most delightful portrait of a woman that surely ever was painted; the other is Joseph Andrews, which gives me no particular pleasure, for it is both coarse and careless, and the author makes an absurd brag of his two- penny learning.”**” In a speech delivered in 1849, Thackeray declared that “four friends Parson Adams and Dr. Primrose 113 Fraser’s Magazine, XXIX, 168. 114 See Punch for June 7, 1845; and M. H. Spielmann’s Hitherto Unidentified Contributions, New York and London, 1900, p. 137-138. 118 Fraser's Magazine, XXXIII, 497, 499. 118 Thed., XXXV, 125. 117 Scribner's Magazine, 1, 396 (April, 1887). ones — ler ce oat eee ees ’ Par ae ale ee 2 a a irBEFORE THACKERAY’S “HUMOURISTS” 407 are characters as authentic as Dr. Sacheverell or Dr. War- burton.”**® Finally, in the preface to Vol. II of Pendennis (November 26, 1850), appeared that famous passage which readsx“Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN. We must drape him, and give him a certain conventional simper.”? Seven months later to a day, Thackeray was to deliver his celebrated lecture on Fielding. What would he say of the man whose works had become so much a part of his life and thought? Would he change the estimate he made in 1840? 118 Blanchard Jerrold’s The Best of all Good Company, first series, Boston, 1878, p. 173- Ree Sy Ty - ~ Ree ee ay rs ra ef Seta rt een G oy ees plant tates Seep terns oA hot ee Peter eates Per ee er ro ere Orr wenn, rts See Aeeacwenceeupue.s. ae a henge a ‘ i ‘ A fh 4 if 2 i rt | ‘ a} a) a af 35 ch ay Rl 4 Paty ko th 2 a i $3: ai] * + f — biota st ee + i s “ee eee eee ne ber, ae Ty ee ee re See ne ee ee pabere ae eee deg athe Aen eet ee ee ed CHAPTER XIV fr y y « 7 7 The Victorian Age Part II Thackeray and His Influence 1851-1871 T was a great occasion, that 26th of June, 1851, when literary London rolled up before Willis’s Rooms to hear the brilliant author of Vanity Fair and Pendennis assess the life and works of that eighteenth-century novelist whose art, as the audience knew, he had taken as his model. At least it was a great day for William Thackeray; for Fielding it afterwards proved to be, on several counts, one of the worst of all the many evil days in that unfortunate man’s ill-starred career. Mingled with the most eloquent eulogy that had ever been pronounced upon Fielding, was the most damaging oblo- quy,—delivered, to use the words of a recent critic, in a tone of “sorrowful patronage.” The course was gotten up merely. to provide a competence for his daughters; and there would be no harm, the lecturer thought, in deepening the lights and shadows of the portraits of his Humourists. Moreover, from past experience, he knew the audience that he must cater to. Had he not said in Pendennis, the previous winter, “Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art”? Would not his hearers be shocked if he gave them unmixed praise of the man about whose name so much scandal had collected? And surely here, if ever, was a chance for graphic presentation. Since the obscure Times review (even before) hardly a year had passed that Thackeray had not in the form of allusion experimented with thumb-nail sketches of that interesting Artist-Prodigal. Whipple had been admittedly perplexed by the circumstance could exhibit a “mind” of such depth and range and penetration; an art so intricate, sustained, and beautiful. Thackeray, strange to say, that the works of so “‘confirmed a ‘rowdy’ ” 7 éTHACKERAY AND HIS INFLUENCE 409 never seems to have been troubled by the paradox, though as an anonymous reviewer in 1840 he had been much more solici- tous to defend Fielding than he was as a star lecturer in 1851. It is instructive to put the review and the lecture side by side— and that will be done presently. But first we should turn to one of those passages in the Humourists which no lover of Fielding can read without a glow of pleasure: “What a wonderful art! what an admirable gift of nature was it by which the author of these tales was endowed, and which enabled him to fix our interest, to awaken our sympathy, to seize upon our credulity, so that we believe in his people— speculate gravely upon their faults or their excellences what a genius! what a vigour! what a bright-eyed intelligence and observation! what a wholesome hatred for meanness and knavery! what a vast sympathy! what a cheerfulness! what a manly relish of life! what a love of human kind! what a poet is here!—watching, meditating, brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind him! What generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly! What scholars he has formed and accustomed to the exercise of thoughtful humour and the manly play of wit! What a courage he had! What a dauntless and constant cheerfulness of intellect, that burned bright and steady through all the storms of his life, and never deserted its last wreck! It is won- derful to think of the pains and misery which the man suffered; the pressure of want, illness, remorse which he endured; and that the writer was neither malignant nor mel- ancholy, his view of truth never warped, and his generous human kindness never surrendered.” Was ever novelist so praised before? Then there is that golden paragraph on Fielding’s character a passage so eloquent that, like the famous praise of Gibbon, it has arrested the attention of everyone whose eye has fallen upon it: ‘‘Wine-stained* as you see him, and worn by care and dissipation, that man retains some of the most precious and 1From the first edition, London, 1853. ‘‘Wine-stained” afterwards became simply “Stained.” wihcsislicbretendeont eaeitete sone arte a err palin, bat py ee een Teen oy ipagepece SS Ur erases , iat Semin a ee Se ay an 16ST =a rt) baht erectile hs eer er pale ere eet ne bee ee ee Sere ee bee eee prt" of Ni eee tna ee ee earns a to ~ bokhnbhiaee eet MEME eed itbant ees; = in fe eee ee rt ; 4 ae! a Hi pe} S| Sy ee ea) i < oven ae 7h) red ©. ¢ er h oy S ry <3) ceca]plete grecrisze sce Th Lak LO ee Fee So 410 FIELDING THE NOVELIST splendid human qualities and endowments. He has an admi- rable natural love of truth, the keenest instinctive antipathy to hypocrisy, the happiest satirical gift of laughing it to scorn. His wit is wonderfully wise and detective; it flashes upon a rogue and lightens up a rascal like a policeman’s lantern. He is one of the manliest and kindliest of human beings: in the midst of all his imperfections, he respects female innocence and infantine tenderness, as you would suppose such a great- hearted, courageous soul would respect and care for them. He could not be so brave, generous, and truth-telling as he 1s, were he not infinitely merciful, pitiful, and tender. He will give any man his purse—he can’t help kindness and profusion. He may have low tastes, but not a mean mind; he admires with all his heart good and virtuous men, stoops to no flattery, bears no rancour, iF sdains all disloyal arts, does his public duty up- rightly, is fondly loved by his family, and dies at his work.” But the Fi elding who appeared in these two splendid pas- borne down and sages was—in the popular mind at least he picture of Fielding overwhelmed by that the Prodigal—which was by far the dominant presentment of the novelist throughout the lecture. Letting his fancy have free rein, Thackeray worked over the review he had written eleven years before, altering it here and there, and at times coloring it more richly to please his Mid-Victorian audience. In 1840, he could say, anonymously, “Let us, then, not accuse Fielding of immorality. Fielc ling’s men and Hogarth’s are Dickens’s and Cruikshank’s, drawn with ten times more skill and force, only the latter dare not talk” of what “the elder discussed honestly.” ‘‘Here lies the chief immorality of Fielding, as we take it.” In 1851, “I can’t say but that I think that the great humourist’s moral sense was blunted” by his life, and that here, in Art and Ethics, there is a great error.” In 1840, ““Tom Jones sins, and his faults are described with a curious accuracy, but then ee the repentance and that surely is moral and touching.” In 1851, ‘““He would 2 This he took from Scott, who, in turn, got it from Mrs. Barbauld and John Aikin. Parra ed a EE FORE apo ee et PN re hd we ee sr ee ne ers shite athe ne er ee pW) oat aren Fe ez) i wprtee FaTHACKERAY AND-HIS INFLUENCE 11 not rob a church, but that is all.” “I am angry with” that “odious broad-backed Mr. Jones,” with his “‘flawed reputa- tion”; he “‘can’t pay his landlady, and is obliged to let his hon- our out to hire”; and “is not half punished enough before the great prize of fortune and love falls to his share.” In 1840, “Vice is never to be mistaken for virtue in Fielding’s honest downright books; it goes by its name, and invariably gets its punishment’; there are “no flashy excuses like those which Sheridan puts forward” for “those brilliant blackguards who are the chief characters of his comedies.” In 1851, “A pretty * whether Jones or Blifil, Charles or Joseph Surface is “the worst member of society,” and “‘the most deserving of censure.” long argument may be debated, as to’ 5 ) Now when anyone is in doubt as to which is really the worse member of society, Jones or Blifil, he strikes not only at the thesis of Tom Jones, but at one of the fundamental notions of the science of ethics. The mediaeval Dante* would have classified Jones and Blifil in a moment; by him the circle of malignant hypocrisy was placed far below that of the follies , of youth. But we need not pursue here the question of the rela- tive gravity of human sins; the fact is that in 1840 Thackeray accepted Fielding’s thesis and that in 1851 he repudiated it. If Thackeray could have stopped with a misinterpretation of the ethics of Fielding’s greatest novel, matters would not have been so bad. But he was not content to stop there; the argu- mentum ad hominem was strong in him. Why should Field- ing make so great an error? The answer was obvious: “‘the great humourist’s moral sense was blunted by his life.” As we have seen, the idea of a dissolute Fielding had flourished in the Early-Victorian mind. To his lecture Thackeray brought no research_and, indeed, very little reflection; he simply played up by means of concrete visualizing the prevailing ideas. For his portrait of Fielding the Man the old stories of the mali- cious Walpole and of the sneering Lady Mary furnished the colors. In 1840, Thackeray had repudiated Walpole: it was 8 As Professor Raleigh points out, in The English Novel, London, 1894, p. 175. ee - o--—e fb aprha te et * Y kt $ : 7 a - A Fr ne) 4 eat I ot od tl a i} i fy rt a A A 4” NY H ; ww serertwonseedbinnetenst® ~ A ee: ree 4 SS ee ee eee enete ets (Ae tS ee Leet: FIELDING THE NOVELIST 412 “Jittle Walpole, with his thin shanks and weak stomach,” sniggering with “his countesses”; in 1851, it was, “‘as Walpole tells us only too truly,” as Walpole “quite honestly” says. Much as he praised Fielding’s “wise and detective” wit, which “flashes upon a rogue” like ‘“‘a policeman’s lantern,” “Thack- eray could not get Walpole’s story out of his mind; in con- firmation of it was that ugly Lady Bellaston incident—F ield- ing, therefore, was guilty of “low tastes.” Nor could he get free from Lady Mary’s story of Fielding’s improvidence and dissipation. He assumed that Fielding was “himself the hero of his books”: he was “‘wild Tom Jones”; he was “wild Cap- tain Booth.” ‘“‘Amelia,” he wrote, “ple ads for her reckless kindly old father, Harry Fielding.” He, too, will plead for him, but he “cannot offer or hope to make a hero” of him. How Thackeray manipulated his materials for the purposes of a eee lecture is obvious enough in other sections of his address. He makes a great point, for instance, of Fielding’s choice of “heroes.” “If that theory be—and I have no doubt it is—the right and safe one, that human nature is always pleased with the spectacle of innocence rescued by fidelity, purity, and courage; I suppose that of the heroes of Fielding’s three novels, we should like honest Joseph Andrews the best, and Captain Booth the second, and Tom Jones the third.” Farther along in the lecture, we find a clearer statement of the matter. “If it is right,” says Thackeray, “to have a hero, whom we may admire, let us take care that he is admi- rable.” Applying this standard to Fielding’s novels, Thackeray finds Joseph entirely admirable, and therefore to be admired most; Booth, not very admirable, indeed, but saved by his re- pentance; Tom Jones, not admirable at all, his “claim to heroic rank” being utterly “‘untenable.” Did Thackeray be- lieve in his hero standard, or was it only an artistic device? As the result of the application of this scheme, Fielding’s earliest novel, according to the Thackeray of 1851, should occupy the first place in public favor. “‘Joseph Andrews,” runs the lec- ture, “though he wears Lady Booby’s cast-off livery, is, I think, to the full as polite as Tom Jones in his fustian-suit, or Cap- renee ncatnedreumteracaheaaee Eo hier a Sete neers shot ecyadln.s-soowetdies ee Ie aren - Something may be said, to be sure, in justification of Miss Bronté’s alarm; for the bibulous creature that Thackeray discoursed about was, in his fondness for liquor, almost an- other Branwell Bronté. But even before this letter to Mrs. Gaskell, Miss Bronté had discovered other dangerous propensi- ties in Fielding and had sought the counsel of her editor, George Smith. “Mr. Thackeray’s worship of his . . . false god of a Fielding,” she writes, “is a thing I greatly desire to > consider deliberately.” “In the cynical prominence of the under-jaw, one reads the man. It was the stamp of one who would never see his neighbours (especially his women neigh- bours) as they are, but as they might be under the worst cir- cumstances.”*® When Charlotte Bronté, in that celebrated “disputation” about Fielding, spoke ‘“‘her mind out,’ she seemed to Thackeray like ‘“‘an austere little Joan of Arc marching in upon us, and rebuking our easy morals.””** Had Miss Bronté read her Fielding more carefully, she would have had less cause for alarm. Obviously her notion of ‘Tom Jones was derived not so much from the novel itself as from the lecture; and how different Thackeray’s hero was from Fielding’s, Mr. Dickson and Professor Cross have 2° Shorter, C., The Brontés, Il, 325-326. 26 Mrs. Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Bronté, edited by Shorter, Lon- don, 1900, p. 565 note. 27 Thackeray’s “The Last Sketch,” in The Cornhill Magazine, I, 486-487 (April, 1860). a pe caer bee. anon ed Cee te Saar baleur ieltrietenteeinn etiam orn eeee eS eset ae Se ae : a os re arse rite at heed eee etn ee *THACKERAY AND HIS INFLUENCE 421 shown.** Thackeray laments Tom’s “fondness for drink and play’; yet only in his joy at Allworthy’s recovery did he go beyond the bounds in the matter of wine; and no “‘fond- ness” for drink is recorded of him at any time. Nor did he gamble. It was Booth who lost his money at cards; or, to come nearer home, Thackeray himself, who, as Professor Cross has pointed out, “dissipated a fortune of £20,000, the last rem- nant of which, some £1,500, was transferred to the pocket of a gambler at Spa.” Tom, as Thackeray depicted him, bore little resemblance to the one Fielding created. He was not a strapping, “‘broad-backed” fellow with “large calves,” but a strongly-built young man of medium size. As a writer at the beginning of the century has said—Robert Bisset, whom we have previously quoted—“Tom Jones was overtopt” by the six-foot man. Nor was Sophia’s “‘drawing-room”’—so far as we can learn from Fielding—ever “tainted” by that “young gentleman’s tobacco pipe”;** for neither there nor anywhere else did his creator represent him as smoking. When Thack- eray put on the finishing stroke by declaring that the Tom Jones” he had thus fabricated was Fielding himself, no “wild wonder Miss Bronté, on studying the portrait of the novelist, discovered in certain lineaments a vast propensity for evil. As we have observed, Thackeray was not the first to mis- represent Fielding and his “‘heroes.”” Among the Mid-Victori- ans the procedure had become a fad. Only a few years before ‘Thackeray’s lecture, The British Quarterly Review (1845) had characterized Tom Jones as a “gambler” and a “drunk- ard,” and—oblivious of that hero’s talk with Young Night- ingale—had stigmatized him as “‘the unprincipled seducer of wives and virgins.”°° We cannot be surprised, therefore, to find that Thackeray’s Tom Jones and Thackeray’s Fielding— in many respects, one and the same person—were received with an applause that was practically unanimous. If the portrait he 28 The North American Review, CXCVII, 522-537; and Cross’s Fielding, Ill, 218-225. 2® Cross, III, 224. 80 The British Quarterly Review, Il, 532. are — TE Faia x LS ene erento er ie en ener eset Sie Seat ahi ae - a1 reer — 4 ee ee ee - aaa a PY et a is ae se ee » areas free el pe a ed pee 2 Png ror bine a en =4Ads Vi bibeeneaath ees Pwr a oer eee ee Sh een ee ses tteir ~ = “ rs >: . ti #3 rr f Fi 4 sy a Patt “eh St a 4 a - oe cas 4 Hg ag +h hi ‘? ry BanteTESTS TLS Ste LS2 Fi tt bal Le eee rs ee ae eee FIELDING THE NOVELIST 422 painted was at all at fault, it was because it was too flattering. Nassau Senior in the Edinburgh—entirely without suspicion— found it a delight “to read Mr. Thackeray’s bold and cordial and discriminating praise of this great, but, we fear, somewhat neglected artist.”°* Lawrence, Fielding’s biographer, who should have known better, considers that Mr. Thackeray, “with a thorough appreciation of the excellences of the man, and with a large compassion for his errors,” has given an “exquisite portraiture.”** The North British Review (1855) quotes Thackeray’s “I cannot hope to make a hero of Harry Fielding” with entire approbation.** William C. Roscoe (1856), a pro- fessed champion of Fielding, who wrote a special article on Thackeray’s misrepresentation of Swift, declares that ‘Thack- eray has made of Fielding his “beau ideal,”** Jeaffreson (1858)* is ‘‘very deeply indebted” to Mr, Thackeray ‘for instruction.’ Masson, in his British Novelists (1859), expands Thackeray’s “claret stains” into “club-dinners and claret,” and ee with his female companions. And a certain Robert Demans, in Prose Writers of Great Britain (1860), improving on a pas- sage in Thackeray, believes that the “frequent occurrence of shows us a Fielding “roughing it never so man fully scenes of the grossest licentiousness” in Fielding’s works was due to the author’s own “profligate and dissolute life.’ tas ‘ >) not too much to say that Thackeray’s ‘“‘no hero” picture of Fielding went practically unchallenged by his contemporaries; the only quarrel they had with him was that he was too lenient. Since criticism was in such a state that even before the Humourists appeared Fielding could be characterized as a “rowdy,” it is not to be wondered at that after the powerful Thackeray had given his sanction to such exercises of the fancy, lesser writers, scorning all restraints, indulged in unbe- 81 The Edinburgh Review, XCIX, 243 (January, 1854). 32 Life of Henry Fielding, p. 357. 83 The North British Review, XXIV, 216. 84 Roscoe, W. C., Poems and Essays, London, 1860, II, 275. 35 Jeaffreson, J. C., Novels and Novelists, London, 1858, I, 105. 88 The British Novelists, 1859, pp. 103-104. Senhenen aera es efon SEC ote ~ ~ eebitcta seine ee en Mn ie aw ese —sTHACKERAY AND HIS INFLUENCE 423 lievable orgies of the imagination. As time went on, the condi- tion of affairs grew worse rather than better; but in the follow- ing “Literary Portrait” by George Gilfillan—Presbyterian preacher, literary man of all work, and critic of no small prominence in those days—the coloring may be regarded as sufficiently vivid. Far as Thackeray was pleased to venture in his strictures on Tom Jones, the rhapsodical Gilfillan so com- pletely outdistanced him as to declare that he had overrated the book “amazingly.” Partly from a “depraved taste,” partly from “carelessness,” according to this reverend gentleman, — Q Fielding—a “sad scamp” even “‘for that age” —simply “‘trans- ferred his own character to his novels”; so “polluted” had his mind become that he desired to make his readers “‘as wicked and miserable” as himself. For a peroration to his sermon Gil- fillan prognosticates that Joseph Andrews will “alone” sur- vive to preserve Fielding’s name; for Amelia, less corrupt than its great predecessor, is ‘“‘coarse,”’ “poor,”’ and “tedious”; while Tom Jones itself, though a piece “of admirable art,” is like a “palace built of dung.”*’ This “Portrait” of Fielding must have given great pleasure to Ruskin (if not also to Car- lyle). Ruskin, who in 1840, as we have seen, conceived of the author of Tom Jones as a “hungry dog” licking his chops over “ordure,” went so far in 1873 as to deny the novelist the power of character-drawing because of an alleged ‘‘fimetic’’*® or dunghill taint. Objectors to the morality of Fielding’s works have never been lacking; but it was reserved for the Mid- Victorians to compare Tom Jones to a dunghill. There is, however, another side to the story of Thackeray’s influence on Fielding’s fame, some details of which are now in order. For several years before those eloquent passages in the Humourists became, in the published volume (1853), common property, their distinguished author had been charac- terized by the reviewers as a follower in Fielding’s art; and by 87 Gilfillan, George, A Third Gallery of Portraits, Edinburgh and London, 1854, pp. 274-275. 88 Ruskin’s Works, Cook and Wedderburn edition, London, XXVII, 630. “4 ee Ey is ere en in “aie Ayo fe ke Rast 29S be Sa ae bi ee MOC inkad® , ~) ai abnaein:~1 selene Aactaviyyeen see sabaketiees ; ae 2945- vee , ? df] 1 bat! ei zt ai} ot a a4 Pia et ss Te rf] ce : Hy At H i $y 7] Oe Tyr rt Pt he ee eee pe ee ee a(t 48h amh@ p> anhtiys OOM apps ge Se nas ahasmay asarsoueanOerenteeneg eps iy poeyreepaexake sak yone, t 44 Pere err an ery me Tees lee eee hath teeeee eee Sree rene nel Oe te tere Serena brent arr 4 eo ithe Seek Paeet een atedSee al a yes Se ne — eS oanry ton Be, ate tpeeraebiens 424 FIELDING THE NOVELIST his famous dictum in the foreword to the second volume of Pendennis (1850) he was felt to have made a public acknowl- edgment of the relationship. From the publication of the Humourists until the end of his career he kept to the fore, in various ways, the fact that he was the disciple of Henry Field- ing the Novelist as well as the Apologist for Henry Fielding the Roué. Consequently his influence was strongly operative in stimulating interest in the works of his literary father; and his golden praise of his master’s art—echoed far down the cen- «c ? mans ac- tury—was a considerable item in swelling the count.” Look where we may in the reviews we find such pas- sages as the following, in which the names of master and pupil appear side by side. “There are, as it seems to us,:’ wrote J. F. Kirk,® in The North American Review, “but three English novelists,—Fielding, Jane Austen, and Thackeray,— who both reveal the springs of action, and exhibit its outward aspects and local peculiarities; whose characters are types of classes, and in whose works we find reflected various phases of human nature as well as of English life.” Kirk has “‘no hesita- tion in putting Fielding at the head” of the list. Thackeray and Fielding, declared The North British Review, two years later, are “the two greatest painters of human nature, as it actually is, that we have ever had, Shakespeare alone excepted ’ novels “higher we should hesitate before we placed any’ than ‘Amelia’ and ‘Esmond.’ ”*° The Edinburgh, reviewing Thackeray’s Virginians, has this to say: “There is one point in which Fielding is a model for all times, and in which Mr. ‘Thackeray is his worthy disciple, and we venture to think, per- fectly his equal. That point is, style and beauty of composition. You may open any page of Fielding at random, and read it with pleasure, without reference to the story or context, merely as a piece of exquisite writing. The same may be said of Mr. Thackeray.” Any novelist who wishes “to please greatly and live long,” should study Fielding’s “art in narra- 88 The North American Review, LXXVII, 200 (July, 1853). 40 The Noy yoann . Ww 7 The North British Review, XXIV, 201 (November, 1855). 41ers ory: ee ale at ; : is The Edinburgh Review, CX, 452 (October, 1859).THACKERAY AND HIS INFLUENCE 425 tive, description, and dialogue, and those beautiful miniature essays, perfect in form as crystals, in which the sentiment of his novels is here and there condensed.” Few, of course, of the articles were so favorable to Fielding as these just cited; but in those days a discussion of Thackeray very frequently involved a comparison between him and the man whom he had chosen as his model. Another service which Thackeray performed for Fielding is one which has received, perhaps, comparatively little atten- tion—his insistence upon the superiority of the works of his favorite author over those of Smollett and Richardson. As a matter of fact, neither of Fielding’s celebrated contemporaries was esteemed by the Mid-Victorians as he had been in the days of Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt. The popularity of Smollett, to begin with, which had previously been considerable—when he numbered so many followers—had been greatly damaged by his imitator, Dickens. “Smollett and Fielding,” wrote Jeaf- freson in 1858, “have always been in vague criticism placed side by side, and held to resemble each other. It would how- ever be difficult to say in what this similitude consists. Fielding with all the other merits [which the writer enumer- ates| had the gentleness of a truly great nature.” And a Quarterly reviewer during the same year declares that Smol- lett has “now been surpassed in richness of humour by Mr. Dickens, who in this particular has never had an equal.” “The superiority, as regards literary art,” he continues, 1s ““indubi- tably Fielding’s. His, as Mr. Thackeray says, is the ‘greater hand, the hand at once of more vigorous sinew and of finer tact and cunning. In style, too, Fielding is the more classical, clear, and finished.”** As early as 1840 Thackeray had made up his mind about Smollett; for in his Paris Sketch Book he stated that Roderick Random was “inferior” to Pickwick, while Tom Jones was “immeasurably superior.” And in his 42 Jeaffreson, J. C., Novels and Novelists, London, 1858, I, 165, 169. 43 The Quarterly Review, CIII, 105 note, 96 (January, 1858). 44 “On Some French Fashionable Novels,” in The Paris Sketch Book, second ed., London, 1840, I, 173. ais eben Se eater tee eae he rip ; eaters: Aieiad Riniwieninn "i . Pdrenws. Pek bene ST ers <7 PPOItn ih, acedn wy pail Pe 5 a ee ~$hGe(h) Qh unre, Peri bitee need ite ee ers aT al Tr we ee “ Salat Setar et et ee ee yer , i ps 1] A te 4 1 it} ph ra H +e) tal Ad Ti a + Bf + ts Ff * Hy ra H eth rae . | st) rt ere er a eee ones Pre ti on rN ip a ee eS es ee eae Se eet ee enedeet va a Se ae iia iche eal be Seed et ee 426 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Humourists, though praising Himphry Clinker, he declared, probably with Scott in mind, that Smollett “did not invent much.” Though Smollett and Fielding were still placed “‘side by side” for a long while after Thackeray’s lecture, it is clear that the difference in stature between them was growing more apparent. Gilfillan the Scot was in the minority when he pro- tested against Thackeray’s treatment of his countryman. As for Richardson, there is ample evidence that Thack- eray’s disparagement of him touched a responsive chord in popular opinion. ‘This does not mean that Richardson lacked defenders—particularly among the writers of text-books. And occasionally in the periodicals we come across such a passage as the following, which appeared in The Westminster Review for October, 1853. ““We may doubt” Richardson’s judgment “In unveiling scenes of vice which the pure need never wit- ness in real life,” says the writer, “‘but never are these scenes made to pander to the evil passions of human nature.” And of Fielding: ‘““What an impression his novels leave of low senti- ment, coarse habits, and the prevalence of gross vice every- where. No great author of our time, least of all Mr. Thackeray, could write like either Fielding or Smollett; and the work would not be tolerated were it attempted.” Fielding’s Amelia, asserted this critic, ‘loves her husband rather better than she did before on discovering his infidelity.”*® But despite a certain number of articles of this sort, the drift against Richardson is clearly visible. “Richardson,” declared The North British Review (November, 1855), “saw nothing” in Lom Jones “but vulgarity and immorality”; and, “in the meantime,” Fielding’s “books have been translated into almost every European language.” The Athenaeum announced (No- vember 10, 1855) that ‘For our own parts, we infinitely prefer charming Sophy Western to Clarissa.” “But few,” observed the Rev. Whitwell Elwin in The Quarterly Review (Decem- ber, 1855), “now wipe away the dust which has gathered” upon Richardson’s “voluminous stories, or else, repelled by the 45 yee yo Woes e eS ° The Westminster Review, LX, 355, 356.THACKERAY AND HIS INFLUENCE 427 tedious trivialities and mawkish prosings” they ‘‘prematurely close the book.” “We rightly think Richardson’s Pamela, un- fit reading,” said William C. Roscoe (January, 1856), ‘‘on account of its prurient minute details”; but, “Iago and Blifil leave no stain on the mind.”** How times had changed since the days of Mrs. Barbauld is indicated by a remark made by Jeaffreson in his Novels and Novelists (1858): ‘“The enthusi- astic homage rendered to Richardson, if we do not use all his- torical aids . . . is altogether incomprehensible.’** While ‘Thackeray was restricted by the plan of his Huwmourists from giving any detailed examination of Richardson’s novels, his reference to them as “endless volumes of sentimental twad- dle,” and to their author as “a mollcoddle and a milksop” who had a “sickening antipathy for Harry Fielding” was indubi- tably effectual. The old Richardson-Fielding antithesis at which Scott struck a blow in 1821, very often, after the Humourists, gave place to the much more sensible Thackeray- Fielding analogy. Another good office which Thackeray performed for Field- ing was his “‘discovery” of Amelia. This unfortunate novel, which was, for the most part, neglected during the author’s own century, and which was underrated even in the days of Coleridge and Lamb, was, because of its heroine, Thackeray’s acknowledged favorite. We have already recorded some of the dicta concerning Amelia herself: in the Tvmes review (1840) he had spoken of Fielding’s description of her as the “most beautiful and delicious” that “is to be found in any writer, not excepting Shakespeare.” No previous man of letters of Thackeray’s standing, had, so far as is known, ever said quite this. In the well-known note to Mrs. Brookfield in 1848, from which we just now quoted, he asserted that Amelia was “the most delightful portrait of a woman that surely ever was painted.”** Finally, in bis lecture (1851), his enthusiasm 46 Roscoe, W. C., Poems and Essays, London, 1860, II, 301, 302. 47 Novels and Novelists, 1, 136. 48 Mrs. Brookfield wrote (October 17, 1850) to her husband, “Mr. T. told me you had said I was like Fielding’s Amelia, which he said . a oe mI eee! rhe er] eters eer Pe Rr ae oy en moon TEM Soins surelis > angen meds ee a oso geerns ton RUD Tene een PHS mise ae je a ate ee lta ee ee - a otras aietietla ore. Te eee Pe ne Fs By ‘ H ; h H | oS PB ra aa) +) H a aa “ 7 4 Af ry 3 i t 4 H H eer SO eteheteteisishichheah herent Ab stra ay ae + ov teteenaey —sa tawawpbeprenenk matvsetepabeheahitamnan SES tt shee et od terest oe ete peiirmee om een eT es SS BOR rade ae Br {@ ia a : aM lr ee rs 428 FIELDING THE NOVELIST found more complete expression in the following passage: “To have invented that character is not only a triumph of art, but it is a good action. They say it was in his own home that Fielding knew her and loved her: and from his own wife that he drew the most charming character in English fiction. Fiction! why fiction? why not history? I know Amelia just as well as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.” The propulsive force of this criticism can easily be imagined; never since Thackeray’s day has Amelia receded to that despised position which she occupied in the mind of Mrs. Barbauld, the blue- stocking, who, declaring that Fielding sought to degrade his female characters, refused her admittance to her British Nov- elists (1810). Thackeray’s service in bringing this delightful woman into greater prominence should not be minimized; for to know the real Fielding one must know Amelia. In a number of ways, then, Thackeray’s influence upon the fame of Fielding was undeniably for good; and it is only fair to remark that in the lurid accounts of Fielding the Profligate which followed the publication of Thackeray’s lecture there was—to use the words of one of the elder novelist’s defamers —“a considerable admixture of nobler matter.” Particularly was this the case when the reviews appeared of Frederick Law- rence’s Life of Fielding in 1855, a book which now demands our attention. The author of this work was a young barrister who for several years had been employed as a compiler in the British Museum. In view of his training and his desire for accuracy, this biography should have marked a ‘turning-point in the History of Henry Fielding; and at least the writer had good intentions. It was he who first reviewed to some pur- pose Arthur Murphy’s sketchy and inaccurate account of Fielding’s life, making a number of much needed corrections; moreover, with the professed intention of rescuing Fielding’s fame from its assailants, early and late, he did battle with the Richardsonians of old and with detractors like Phillimore was a great compliment, but he added, ‘I said I did not think you had her strength of character. ”—Mrs. Brookfield and her Circle, London, 1905, Il, 324.THACKERAY AND HIS INFLUENCE 429 of his own age. But, following the custom, Lawrence began— and ended—with the conviction that the life of Fielding might serve as a horrible example to the weak and the profli- gate—a rather unfortunate point of view for a seeker after truth! In his preface he anounced that “‘many instructive les- sons may be drawn”’ from the “‘chequered and wayward life” of this man; and at the end of the book, after collecting many interesting facts, he had made so little use of them that the best he could do in the way of a general conclusion was, as we have seen, to send his readers to the “exquisite portraiture” by Thackeray. In view of this recommendation, the biog- rapher’s correction of a detail, here and there, could produce little result until someone should appear to supply the proper interpretation of Fielding’s career as a whole. Neither in the original papers (in Sharpe’s London Magazine**’) nor in the completed work does the author betray any animus against the novelist; he quotes with obvious pleasure the passages in which Scott and Coleridge defend the ethics of Tom Jones, and he adds to these dicta the following excellent observation of his own: “The Blifils of the world are not so easily brought to account as the Joneses. Surrounded by a halo of respectability they generally succeed in deceiving all but the most shrewd observers. He does good service to society who brings them down from their high estate, exposing their windings, turnings, and shufflings, and holding them up to public aver- sion and contempt.”°° But all this counted for little in a biog- raphy which was admittedly written to present for the edifica- tion of the public the delinquencies of its subject. Lawrence was, furthermore, not only inaccurate but more frequently ill-governed. Whitwell Elwin (who did some inventing on his own account) quoted, in his review for the Quarterly, the passage in which Lawrence pictures the first Mrs. Fielding as egging her husband on to even greater folly at East Stour, and remarked, very justly, ““As far as we are aware, Mr. 49 The five parts appeared in Vol. IV, new series, February, March, April, May, and June, 1854. 50 Lawrence’s Life of Fielding, p. 260. Mo ee a ee Ee ee prune ~ = Sshiiebteteeiiedsethanenien ~.¥ ogent owes Hy r FR rie Ft i Bs re! a ae Se ae ne Seat ay eee 4 Ian ween bad Bt ae en ateFIELDING THE NOVELIST 430 Lawrence has no warrant for this censorious description of the conduct of Mrs. Fielding.” Then there was the rascally invention that Fielding, driven to extremities, had been a puppet-showman at Bartholomew Fair—a legend which—1in- nocently enough—grew to terrific proportions under the hands of Professor Henry Morley. And although the baseless fabric of this dream was dissipated by the discovery of the real show- man, Timothy Fielding, much more than a rack was left behind. But the worst thing which Lawrence did was to elabo- rate the picture of a remorseful Fielding, whose Amelia was actually written as a penitential offering. It is only fair to say that Lawrence was merely expanding what Thackeray (and some previous writers) had already more than once sug- gested; but, in this instance, the biographer improved upon the lecturer. Thus the idea of a spendthrift, ‘ eee iad, poten Se eet sabtehseinedauhn ent Lene - 4 a ae bea eee * 5 re epee trt ees ha eee 9 t) Artem -n ee 4 eres io Uae et ree eer rs a " a * ‘ Pe 7 ie 3 rh a “a Tt ‘ oH a i ts he Fi rs fi Pn rea: oF ea ei . ah: it) & bre ey: i 5 ae ee oe Piers ea ee ey ah ete Fart a a ere adel eel hie ol ced ele eh he tk eee el tae eee eS rey brennrend oer tenes ~ ee ret ee Ne Liaet phi anes pret APL Se See TN y Pre pres tint Ls ae yyee ene a a ce 7 eee eee eee sett - ad Steer weave 8-88 lB site ie =e: et ee NES 432 FIELDING THE NOVELIST gerated and frequently shorn of its eloquent praise, found a place thenceforward in publications of all descriptions, only a sample of which can here be given. If we turn to the Hand- book of Biography (1854) we find in the article by William Spalding, professor of logic at the University of St. Andrews, that Fielding was a “careless,” “extravagant,” “good-hearted and improvident man of pleasure,” whose work as a magistrate “undoubtedly helped to degrade” both his “character and his feelings.”°> The worthy Allibone, whose Critical Dictionary of English Literature began its prosperous career in 1854, pro- ceeds as follows: ‘‘How deeply is it to be lamented, that, lacking a high sense of moral responsibility, he [Fielding] delighted chiefly in painting the least refined, least elevated characteristics of his species, and permitted himself to stimu- late the passions to the excesses of vice, instead of causing those ‘passions to move at the command of virtue!’ ” Quarreling with both Coleridge and Thackeray, Allibone says of the lat- ter, “We have often listened with pleasure . . . to Mr. Thackeray’s moral reflections upon the Lives and Works of the departed great, but we soon found that the summing up of the learned judge leaned not always ‘to virtue’s side’; and if the literary offender happened to be a three-bottle man, we entertained no apprehensions for his safety.”°* During the same year, James Hannay, to whom had been entrusted the annotation of the Humourists, seems to have gone even farther than Thackeray himself in imagining a drunken Tom Jones, though he professes his fondness for Fielding, who is, in his opinion, Thackeray’s entire prototype. In one of his lectures on “Satire and Satirists” (1854), Hannay bids us form a pic- ture of the drunken Churchill as a boy “by imagining a Tom Jones with an infusion of Dryden in him.” Churchill’s moral code, says Hannay (who may have recalled Roscoe’s parallel) 55 Spalding, William, Handbook of Biography, London, 1863 (the preface to the first edition is dated May 10, 1854). See also his History of English Literature. 56 Allibone, S. A., A Critical Dictionary of English Literature, Philadelphia and London, 1859 (copyright, 1854), I, $92.THACKERAY AND HIS INFLUENCE 433 was the one “exemplified” by Fielding’s Tom Jones and by Robert Burns,—“the doctrine, namely, that if you are a good- hearted fellow and hate humbug, you may set the respectable 2957 moralities at defiance.”°" Unless we turn back to Thackeray’s lecture it is difficult to understand how Fielding’s Tom could have been confused with the bibulous Churchill. Then there was Hugh Miller, who, in his essay on “Our Novel Litera- ture” in 1956, declared that Fielding, “like his hero, was_a sad scapegrace,” though “curiously enough,” he had a “re- spect” for “what he deemed religion.”°* With David Masson, whose British Novelists (1859) was regarded in its own day as a standard work on the subject, Thackeray’s “‘claret stains,” as we have seen, were expanded into “‘club-dinners and claret”’ and Fielding himself was a “laughing young scapegrace.” Disagreeing with Coleridge, the learned Scottish biographer (who may have joked “wi’ deeficulty” ) insists that Fielding is a mere “humourist,” and—accepting and expanding Johnson’s dictum—warmly commends Richardson, whose novels, unlike those of the “‘superficial” Fielding, “stir the mind power- fully.”°? In J. C. Jeaffreson’s Novels and Novelists (1858), Thackeray’s view of Fielding was elaborated into an hysterical mixture of praise and blame. Quoting Coleridge, he believes there “are not many people now” (1858) “who would men- tion Fielding as an immoral writer”; yet he repudiates Joseph Andrews as begun in “an insolence of mirth” which no one would “hesitate” to ‘‘call immoral.” He takes issue with John- son, Richardson, and Walpole, and asks why a “Jack Ketch ignominy” should attach to one who was only performing his duty as an “executioner”; but in the same article he speaks of Fielding as “‘tainted” with the “grossness of his tavern-haunt- ing age”; and, identifying the novelist with Booth, goes on to tell us, in the vein of Thackeray, how Amelia’s nobleness had 57 Satire and Satirists, London, 1854, Lecture IV, p. 191. 88 Miller’s Essays, third ed., Edinburgh, 1869, pp. 467, 468. See also The Witness, August 18, 1840. 59 Masson’s British Novelists and their Styles, Cambridge and Lon- don, 1859, pp. 104, 101, 117, 118, 121, 136. at porte ae nit eLtpehenypeers-ecabanatecesshs rl eee rt es ee Py ay i 4 Prk holt ee path STEN ott me epee te ae babe ei hae, - a seopwenecesstasab arate Sis png) upd SLI tee eee rb a at) mt 4 ih eal Bi 44 aati ty ead ably ee ee ee en ern oud or iat ere “a nt i Sr een eee ae me “= ee ae ee ean pa nal el 8 seySet TTL Pte Le te Croseisfelisss 434 FIELDING THE NOVELIST “eae anes ca ee “always made him repent” of his “own sad errings” and ask her “forgiveness with manly tears”; and how, as the contrite stole “Sdown”’ his 960 Fielding wrote about her, “the drops’ “cheeks” as his pen went “faster and faster Thus, after Lawrence had added his confirmation to the dicta of Thackeray, the sinister influence of the old stories continued to grow from year to year in books and periodicals. At the same time, however, the widespread interest in Field- ing’s works drew forth many an excellent criticism. Among those whose attention was attracted by the discussion was Fitz- james Stephen. In one of his Cambridge Essays (1855), he writes: “In what does the superiority of Fielding over Mr. Dickens consist? Is it not in the fact that Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews are bona fide histories of those persons; whilst Nicholas Nickleby and Oliver Twist are a series of sketches, of all sorts of things and people, united by various grotesque incidents, and interspersed with projects for setting the world to rights?”’®* Another admirer of Fielding was M. Davenport Hill, the celebrated authority on English criminal law. After reading Elwin’s article in The Quarterly Review, he wrote (January, 1856): “I heartily concur in your views both as to the excellences and defects of Fielding. He never runs into caricature, although he sometimes advances to its very edge, as in the lamentations of Parson Adams at the absence of his sermon on Vanity.” This scene, as Hill acutely observes, is “delayed until the reader has become so well acquainted with the character of Adams as to feel that the extrava- gance is within the bounds of nature.” In his judgment Fielding is “superior” to Smollett not only in “absence of caricature” but also in that “hearty good-nature which beams through” his works. The Voyage to Lisbon, he says, is a “per- fect model of writing”: ‘Every line is worth a king’s ran- som.” Hill was one of the earliest to point out “that intense love of children’”—the power of doing justice to whom is a 69 Novels and Novelists, I, 91-117. aes a < Rare ect i 5 + «The Relation of Novels to Life,” in Cambridge Essays, London, 1855, p. 149.THACKERAY AND HIS INFLUENCE 435 “touchstone of genius’—exhibited by Fielding in such scenes as the one in which “‘Adams’s lesson on fortitude is interrupted by the news that his little son is drowned.” Particularly important, as coming from so high an authority, is the follow- ing passage from another letter, dated March 27, 1856: ‘There are but two writers in our language” who ever refer to “law without showing their ignorance on the subject. These are Shakespeare and Fielding. Walter Scott, a lawyer by pro- °° “This statement, which fession and by office, is no exception. appeared as a footnote in a book published nearly half a cen- tury later, exerted, of course, no influence in its own day; and almost equally obscure was an excellent obiter dictum by the historian and essayist J. A. Froude—an observation, by the way, which may have been inspired by a sentence in The Eng- lish Humourists.} According to Thackeray, the question was still pending as to Which was the “‘worst member of society,” Jones or Blifil. As if directly challenging this statement, Froude casually remarked in Fraser's Magazine (February, 1857): “Fielding had no occasion to make Blifil, behind his decent coat, a traitor and a hypocrite. It would have been enough to have coloured him in and out alike in the steady hues of selfishness, afraid of offending the upper powers as he was of offending Allworthy,—not from any love for what was good, but solely because it would be imprudent. Such a Blifil would have answered the novelist’s purpose—he would still have been a worse man in the estimation of some of us than Tom Jones. Thus, occasionally;someone would speak his mind out; but in general Thackeray had things all his own way. Nothing could show this more clearly than the circumstance that the admirable papers on Fielding in Fraser’s Magazine (1858) by Thomas Keightley made so little impression upon the Field- ing legend. For a quarter, of a century—that ls, until Dobson’s 3364 62 The Recorder of Birmingham By his Daughters Rosamond and Florence Davenport-Hill, London, 1878, pp. 299, 300. 83 Some XVIII Century Men of Letters, Il, 100 note. 64 Fraser's Magazine, LV, 128. . > a ~ wf on byt) one atiek ieee ee ee aa Send ee bebe eves ’ * Pte t a ms — OE paper at peek neh ibesenetion La cecal an es errr te et beettytedbaneeten : ag Ie ies r De ol eee ee EE tb el be a | Pleiieh toes bette teenie ta aD ar Steeles ree Sabie eeeeienl Se. ee pam lad ey eeepenrheNimegns ene - wa ee ee ee ee ae ae eet athe treed Pee rae re er yen ered ee treeSteen aaa Te See eepchitees dete te es ne ene ee, 436 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Fielding in 1883—they were practically disregarded; not until 1907, when Mr. Dickson reprinted them, did they appear in book form.®* In these articles,°° Lawrence’s biography was given a much-needed overhauling by a competent hand. “Tets understood,” wrote Mr. Dickson in the preface to his reprint, “that Mr. Keightley used in this review material he had gath- ered for a life of Fielding, a project which the appearance of Lawrence’s book caused him to abandon.” To be sure, Law- rence had collected a certain number of facts, but in the face of Thackeray’s vivid imaginings he seems to have been power- less to interpret them correctly. To this task Keightley now applied himself ; it was a labor of love, for, as he confessed in another place, Tom Jones had been his “favourite novel” from “boyhood.”*’ Keightley said of Lawrence: “He fails to make the due use of his materials; he does not always see what was, as it were, before his eyes, he fails to draw inferences, or draws erroneous ones. My object, then, is to do what he has left undone; from his materials and references to make correct statements, and deduce just, or at least probable, con- clusions, and if possible to represent Henry Fielding as he really was.’ An account of the specific contributions made by this excellent investigator may be appropriately deferred until another chapter; for, hidden away as they were in the pages of Fraser’s Magazine, no one seems to have paid any attention to them in the period we are now considering. wild Tom Jones” whom Keightley notwithstanding, that “ Colonel Newcome would not countenance continued on both sides of the water to run his course. Consult, for example, Harper's Magazine for August, 1859, and read the “Easy °° The Life and Writings of Henry Fielding . . . by Thomas Keightley, edited by F. S. Dickson, Cleveland, 1907. °° Fraser's Magazine, Vol. LVII (1858): pp. 1-13 (January); pp. 205-217 (February) ; pp. 762-763 (June). °" “Tom Jones: my favourite novel from my boyhood, which is worth all the sensation-novels that have been or ever will be written Like Mr. Thackeray, I love ‘the old masters.’ »—Keightley, T., in Notes and Queries, third series, III, 424 (May 30, 1863).THACKERAY AND HIS INFLUENCE 437 Chair” article. “What kind of gentleman is Tom Jones” or “Captain Booth!”? Are Amelia and Sophia “specimens of the finest” character “among women in the last century?” “Is “Tom Jones,’ in any sense, a healthier or more manly history than “The Newcomes?’” Fielding himself, says the editor, ‘‘was a great, lusty, loose, rollicking” fellow who had ‘“‘won- derful perception”—where “he saw at all”; who “hated hum- bug”—where “‘he could see humbug.” Apparently some, at least, of the readers of the “Easy Chair” must have remon- strated, for in the following February, the editor, George William Curtis, by the way, tried to make amends for the severity of the previous article.®’ “Certainly no young man nor young woman can now be advised to read ‘Amelia’ or “om Jones,’ ” he writes, “but neither can they to read any of Rich- ardson’s stories, who does not suffer under the ban of impro- priety; and certainly Fielding is a thousand-fold preferable to most of the French novels” which it is now the “‘fashion to read.”” We call Fielding “chard names, but there are great witnesses for him’ —Gibbon, Coleridge, Thackeray, and Lady Mary—even ““Talfourd, who was sure to be morally alarmed upon the smallest occasion.” “Fielding is coarse, but not im- moral.” He “never sins against the noble sentiments and hu- mane instincts.” His “cheerful, robust, sensible mind stood between the supercilious Cavalier and the sanctimonious Puri- tan. Beyond doubt he called Richardson ‘Sammy,’ and dashed off his parody of Pamela with infinite gusto. For that very reason forgive and respect this sinewy genius which fought against extremes . . . remembering the sympathy, the charity, the sweet wit, the affluent imagination, the good sense, and the human heart, let us leave Fielding lying there by Chaucer, and plant rosemary for remembrance upon his grave.’ Contradic- tory accounts like these in the same periodical—the logical represent the kind of consequence of Thackeray’s Lecture writing most in vogue at this time; still, in the majority of the reviews, as we have observed, Fielding was allowed superiority 68 Harper's Magazine, XIX, 414. SON beds. XOX AN ATAS me ae ee ee bg ere 5 ba SOTA ce eretereeeedaiglacat ite ae w Ane Tt ptr pn sr ow ert Sel ae Sty et tae aaiebed sewesttethoteucentupies UES mer oom farts al | peeps Pw date yi a H a f 34 Hf rf } $ nm A ren if i $i} be i} ay at it a ee ores ees ee ee ee ees a oe ere438 FIELDING THE NOVELIST as a constructive artist. In Blackwood’s Magazine for March, 1860, however, even this leaf of the laurel was denied him. The article in question may be characterized as one of the most root-and-branch denunciations of Fielding and all his works in which any Mid-Victorian periodical of high standing had yet indulged. The writer attacks in general the “nonsense which is current” about Fielding’s greatness, and in particular calls Thackeray to account for his over-praise. “We find it impossible,” runs the review, “to ascribe a profound knowledge of human nature to one so utterly without seriousness [as Fielding], so ludicrously incompetent to portray any of the deeper emotional and intellectual forms of life.” “It is diffi- cult to suppose him [Thackeray ] serious in attributing poetical and philosophical genius to the author of Tom Jones; difficult to imagine what can be meant by the ‘truths’ that writer has left.”” The reviewer challenges Thackeray to take down Tom Jones and “look into it for the evidence of poetry, sympathy, and insight.” Fielding’s humor was only a “cheap humour”— its main staple being, if you please, a “bloody nose” or “the discovery of two persons breaking the seventh command- ment”; while the much-vaunted “‘construction” of J'om Jones we “have proved” not to exist. In short, “we must burn our pens, and abdicate the judgment-seat altogether, if we are to pronounce” Fielding to be “‘a great artist, or a great painter Thackeray himself—for his reputation 1370 of human nature. replied as follows in a ‘“Rounda- as a critic had been attacked bout Paper”: ““Why, did not a wiseacre in Blackwood’s Maga- zine lately fall foul of Tom Jones? O hypercritic! So, to be sure, did good old Mr. Richardson, who could write novels himself—but you, and I, and Mr. Gibbon, my dear sir, agree in giving our respect, and wonder, and admiration, to the brave old master.’”’™ And so the sixth decade of the century dawned inauspi- ciously for Henry Fielding; Keightley’s articles in Fraser’s Magazine had as yet utterly failed in their mission. As always, rssepeensakcnehiamaae prammaciaen ncotieel | eer Pye”. Pcmetrte he 10 Blackwood’s Magazine, LXXXVII, 331-341. 1 The Cornhill Magazine, Il, 124 (July, 1860). etienetieee ied ee MOR tects ee ae wane ea i } “| ; te a onTHACKERAY AND HIS INFLUENCE 439 Fielding was not without defenders; but very few of them, comparatively, were among the most prominent men of letters of the time. It is only necessary to look back to the days of Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Byron to observe the change that had taken place. Nothing—at least nothing that has been recorded in literary history—has come to us from Browning, who, on making the acquaintance of Balzac in the ’Forties, “bade the completest adieu”’* to English fiction. Tennyson, as we infer from Fitzgerald, was a Richardsonian: “TI like,” said he, “those great still books,’* but of Fielding there is never a word.’* And Fitzgerald himself—though once or twice an expression of approval escaped him regarding Field- ing—was so thoroughly a Richardsonian that he projected an abridgment of Clarissa. The statement has been made that Fitzgerald was a great admirer of Fielding; but the author of Tom Jones was not, in the long run, a prime favorite with him. In 1867, in a letter to Pollock, he says, “I have been reading Thackeray’s Novels a third time: I am sure that Field- ing is common and coarse work in Comparison.” By 1879 he had found even Thackeray “too melancholy and saturnine”’ for one who was “‘old enough to prefer the sunny side of the wall.” And in 1881, two years before his death, the inter- preter of the romantic and sentimental Omar was more firmly convinced than ever that ‘““Miss Austen, George Eliot and Co. have not yet quite extinguished” Sir Walter.’° Matthew Ar- 72 The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, 1899, U, 107 (April 27, 1846). 73 See Alfred Lord Tennyson, by his son, London, 1898, II, 372; also Fitzgerald’s Letters to Fanny Kemble (London, 1895, p. 138) in which the phrase reads, “large, s#z//, Books.” 74 Jane Austen was much more to Tennyson’s liking. “Alfred spoke of Jane Austen, as James Spedding does, as next to Shakespeare!” Autobiography of Henry Taylor, London, 1885, II, 193. Scott he re- garded as “the most chivalrous figure of this century, and the author of the widest range since Shakespeare.”—Alfred Lord Tennyson, II, 371. 75 More Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, London, 1902, pp. 84, 216, 259. On a lovely day in May, 1841, he mentions as one of the causes Para 5 ~ a Eee ead peer erent “ riaee, bess bos PM ¥ at tran ty ipeiebheth bees aenede en Le avers peer rare eres re aoe on et ae SINT te te we nan ph om eewenewnbipdet yen. a . Fi : 3 Pr a) be 3 , a Fr i Fr oF i bs H aa rt el ta iM ere neg tres etre are rs et ee han ton bee leaiee ee tea NE Ts oe tty ee erry ren. nee teeterSee eT aT ash Lee eae eC eat eee Stat 440 FIELDING THE NOVELIST nold, now coming into prominence, who could write at length about Tolstoi, has left us no essay or celebrated dictum on Fielding; nor do we find any mention of his works in those lists of books which, from year to year, Arnold set himself to read. Sterne, presumably, was more to his taste. Of Carlyle and Ruskin we have already spoken. For the most enthusiastic comments on Fielding we must look lower rather than higher; as a matter of fact, comparatively few printed notices about him of any length are to be found during this period except those which occur in articles on other subjects. One of the themes which involved a certain amount of at- tention to Fielding was the popularity which, after Adam Bede (1859), was enjoyed by George Eliot. In 1861, accord- ing to The Westminster Revieu , the volumes of Fielding and Johnson were fast gathering dust on the library shelves,” while Lady Mary was no longer a household name. No doubt there is truth in this statement; for the eighteenth century was then, for the most part, either neglected or misinterpreted, and the day of the critical study of the novel by careful men of letters was still far in the distance. Even in the ’Sixties, how- ever, reviewers occasionally used the works of Fielding as a g, not always to their advantage, the new productions of George Eliot. The Quarterly Review for Octo- ber, 1860, was ill-natured enough, in an account of her work up to that time, to suggest that Fielding, Smollett, Goldsmith, criterion for judging and Scott were never guilty of making their readers “groan under their dullness.” And six years later Henry Lancaster, one of the best-known reviewers of the day, went so far as to say: ““We do not, of course, compare her with such master- pieces of art as T'om Jones, or with the easy grace of Miss Austen; she does not reach even to the careless coherence of of his contentment that he has “had Fielding to read, while smoking in the garden.”—Ibid., p. 14. And once when he tired of Jane Austen he wished that one of Fielding’s “Brutes” would “dash in upon the Gentility and swear a round Oath or two!”—Letters of Edward Fitz- gerald, London, 1907, II, 131. ‘6 The Westminster Review, LXXVII, 375. moshin seo ereenbas corbin pincaes: adhered ae ee ye? Pahsbede ter pe a htarierehierteiatie beenTHACKERAY AND HIS INFLUENCE 441 Scott”’“’—while as for “morality” the Lady Bellaston incident is less obnoxious than that of Hetty Sorrel. A more enthusiastic admirer of Fielding than Lancaster was that delightful writer with whom he at times collaborated —Dr. John Brown. “I have been reading for the first time these 36 years T’om Jones, with great interest,” writes the author of Rab and his Friends to Lady Airlie in 1864. “It’s a man’s book, coarse and rough, but full of human nature, sense and genius, the mere writing, the plot and the wit, per- fect. But we are all so changed now, for better and worse, that these books, like the dress and manners of their times, must become obsolete. Still, I hope Fielding will long remain a classic.””"* This hope he lived to see realized; and in 1882, the last year of his life, he exclaimed: “I was reading Tom Jones the other night, with great admiration and comfort. What manliness! what a style! the introductions delicious.””® To the testimony of Dr. John Brown should here be added that of another literary man, Charles Reade, who very early in his career became acquainted with Fielding’s novels. In a “mighty dull” vacation while at college he read Tom Jones, as well as some of the works of Smollett and Sterne. “One can’t,” he says, “pick up a ‘Peregrine Pickle’ and ‘Tom Jones’ every day in the week.”*° Of his Griffith Gaunt (1866), he wrote, “In this tale I have to deal, as an artist and a scholar, with the very period Henry Fielding has described—to the satisfaction of Prurient Prudes; a period in which manners and speech were somewhat blunter than now-a-days.’’** Three years before the publication of Griffith Gaunt, Thackeray had passed away, and comparisons between his work and that of the “brave old Master” were again in order. But when we contrast the articles at the close of Thackeray’s " The North British Review, XLV, 208, 223 (September, 1866). ‘8 Letters of Dr. John Brown, London, 1907, p. 179. 9 Thid., p. 276. 8° Coleman, John, Charles Reade as I Knew Him, London, 1903, Parsi 81 Reade, Charles, Readiana, London, 1883, p. 316. " z Lomage Fen et tt orn W
“I know no writer,” wrote William Forsyth in his Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century (1871), “more likely than Thack- eray to have given unqualified praise to “Tom Jones.’ But what does he say about Fielding’s hero? I am glad to quote the passage, for it shows Thackeray’s sound sense and right feeling.” Then follows the excerpt in which Thackeray was “angry with Jones,” etc. For his part, Forsyth is unable to read Coleridge’s celebrated defense “without amazement.” “We cannot but regret,” declares this critic, ““that the coarseness of the age, and his own natural instincts, led Fielding to choose for the hero of his novel a young libertine.”’*° Page after page, Forsyth goes on with his tirade—certainly few criticisms have borne a more prolific harvest than the derogatory parts of Thackeray’s eloquence. But the acme of misinterpretation was reserved for the brilliant Frenchman, H. A. Taine, whose History of English Literature was welcomed by The Westminster Review as un- rivaled for “trustworthiness of statement”!*’ Taine had looked into Murphy’s ‘‘Essay,”’ and had found in Lawrence’s 85 W. F. Collier’s History of English Literature, Edinburgh and New York, 1865, pp. 311, 314. 86 William Forsyth’s Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Cen- tury, London, 1871, 258-273. 87 The Westminster Review, LXXXI, 512 (April, 1864). a en hiadialee ee etaioiesh Tee Ee ioks t etintbae nee “ ba, bn ce el eee ns celeste pehiadtiaiatnanies ook eT TEE Tverd b tbe ~ ieee is pet Oe Nd ere bee he: er, ea 4 i Py f rer a i tf af peer es oe en 3A al Sy ag pay ars eg ye eee Se ee ree SS oer. + ee oe aa a eee eee tt eee a, #8 eee ener —. ae Cae ee Pearat Ser ahh Lape op tas fer pre yd we Las. rn LES oe —oe ee Tener reed ew les. 444 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Life the passage from Sir John Hawkins; but the authority upon which he leaned most heavily, it would seem, was no other than his contemporary, Thackeray, though—as Fielding was not to the Frenchman’s taste—he left out of his account the good parts of the celebrated lecture. Translated in 1871, Taine’s English Literature, because of its brilliancy of style and despite its gross caricature, became naturalized almost im- mediately. It is significant that the translator, undoubtedly with the author’s consent, incorporated as footnotes more or less of the material which had been assembled by the fanatical Forsyth, of whose work a few samples have just been given. After telling his readers that Richardson’s first novel is nothing less than a “‘flower,” and that Pamela herself is an “‘artless”’ child, the great Taine next attempts a portrait of Fielding. He is ‘‘a drinker,” “‘a roysterer,” “‘bespattered, but always jolly”; he is “‘careless, and has not even literary vanity”; with him “virtue is but an instinct,” the goodness of a horse or a dog; his works are an “abundant harvest” in which he has “forgot- ten the flowers,” a “rough wine,” which “wants nothing but “are only aware of the impetu- bouquet.” In reading him you osity of the senses, the upwelling of the blood.” Man, as Fielding conceives him, is “a good buffalo; and perhaps he_is the hero required” by a people which calls itself “John Bull.” It was not only Taine’s authority but his actual cleverness which gave tremendous force to this animated cartoon of his. “We will go along with Fielding,” he wrote, “smiling by the way, with a broken head and a bellyful.” Did not the suspicion dawn upon him that this brawler whom he thus accompanied was a master of irony? In the “rough wine” of Fielding’s adventures did he fail to detect the ‘‘bouquet” of a distinguished style? These are idle questions Taine had made up his mind that all Englishmen lacked the “exaltation ner- veuse” ; to carry out his picture of coarseness and brutality he victimized Fielding with many another.(/When the author of 88 Taine, H. A., History of English Literature, translated by Van Laun, 1871, Il, 176.THACKERAY AND HIS INFLUENCE 445 Jonathan Wild, whose irony, to adopt a figure of Walter Besant’s, was of the temper of Damascus steel, could be mis- taken for an “amiable buffalo” the time had come for a thorough and long-delayed correction of a very bad astigma- tism. ra i 4] a st + i + t b A Pedgtinthd hated we aeac tinier ia ete tert ee es oe neaec e Lees Fee ee sigs te GHAPTER XV The Victorian A ive Part III Beginning of the Reaction 1871-1882 HUS, as we have observed, the Dionysiac progress of the convivial Fielding was absolutely unimpeded by the efforts of the careful Keightley in 1858; more- over, as we shall see in the present chapter, which brings our history down to the time of Dobson (1883), this bibulous ras- cal, this ““Mohock” of Thackeray’s imagination, was still to play many a scurvy trick on the critics of the great novels. In the "Seventies, however, there are unmistakable signs of a quick- ening and deepening interest in the life and literature of the previous century; consequently we find, mingled with prepos- terous accounts of the man and his works, a number of excel- lent criticisms written by those who are somewhat unwilling to accept the Fielding legend in its entirety. To Thomas Keightley, the historian, rather than to any other man belongs the credit of being the earliest competent investigator who examined the myths that gathered about the author of Tom Jones. The results of these researches may properly be given in the words of Professor Cross: ‘‘Keightley was the first to cast doubt on the Fielding pedigree . . . and on the story of a fortune dissipated at East Stour, which has likewise been shown to be utterly false. A rough estimate which he made of Fielding’s probable income from his plays should have put to rest forever the tales of the young dramatist’s abject poverty and the anecdotes of his sponging upon his friends for a din- ner. He set in their correct light the remarks of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu about Fielding’s improvidence and the re- port which Horace Walpole circulated of Fielding’s debased associates while a justice of the peace. On the latter count, he En eam Crs pee al are Ne at Ce eran atvlpaepn dis seeeebeieloenouncoahe ~~ ars Se 448 FIELDING THE NOVELIST starting that iniquitous performance on a new and flourishing career. Certainly few authors have ever been more unfortu- nate than Fielding in the matter of editors: Murphy, Watson, Mrs. Barbauld, Mudford, Scott, Roscoe—and now, the un- known Browne, whose criticisms, despite much that was per- tinent and seasonable, were written in such an involved and tasteless style that nothing ever came of them. Finely gotten up as the edition was, no review of it appeared in the Edin- burgh, the Quarterly, Blackwood’s, the Westminster, or Fraser's Magazine. Yet the new editor’s intentions were most commendable. It was he who made the first notable protest against “Thackeray in which that writer was called by name—for even Keightley had taken pains to direct his artillery at Lawrence, and, in an- other place, had quoted the author of the Husmourtsts with approbation. Browne came out in the open. In answer to the charge that there was still a question as to which was the worse member of society—Jones or Blifil, he replied: “Surely, it is not presumptuous to say that this opinion of Thackeray’s is palpably groundless. Can revengeful malignity and sancti- monious hypocrisy be placed in the same category with unself- ish generosity; especially when that noble quality is exhibited in its various phases?” In regard to Thackeray’s characteriza- tion of Sophia as “a fond, foolish palpitating little creature,” he asks, “Is this the proper inference to draw from Sophia’s dialogue with Allworthy, where she emphatically tells him that she can never give her consent to the good man’s proposal of her marriage with Jones; and where we find that she is also deaf to the entreaty of Jones himself, the man she loves so dearly; even though his addresses were then sanctioned by her fond, but despotic father?” Of the attack on poor Tom himself Browne says, ““Though Jones was possessed of high animal spirits and manly courage, there is nothing in his con- duct and manners which sanctions the appropriateness” of Thackeray’s “disparaging epithets.” On the contrary, “his con- versations with Mr. Allworthy respecting Blifil evince the presence of the most generous and forgiving temper, as wella ‘i t 4 ote tf 7 fe LOD YS CL Bos C7a: ¢ OPP? Clll a LICCHIC Le VEG < ) < liz SOULS Ottis SCS bras’. _ eee eer eer pred or = fon THE STATUE COMES TO LIFE (Tom Jones, Book XIII, Chapter XT) ee ee Le oe ated stetet stem re Pa ere oie atta Oe asee a eS ee r a aw ee eee wears a nen het Dans seta ee any See ar ee OOS bi dete baal ee ee nee ee ; . , 5 iL : \ G reerBEGINNING OF THE REACTION 449 as a judgment at once ripe and benevolently considerate. Surely, a character, endowed with such high qualities, and so entirely unselfish, ought not to be thus deprecated and almost ignored, because of the immoral course into which such a character was, for a while, drawn by the allurements of womankind.” Not only did Browne champion Fielding against Thackeray but he devoted a good part of the preface to a vindication of him as a serious and exceptionally acute moralist. Fielding, he says, was possessed of a “talent of philosophic discrimination in regard to the instinctive motives of human conduct, which even a profound metaphysician might have cause to envy”; and he declares that “no one, unless blinded by angry preju- dice, can fail to discern that the spirit which actuated him as an author was an ardent wish to see his fellow-creatures, both high and low, honest, beneficent, and happy.”* Again, in a preface to the Miscellanies, which came out during the fol- lowing year (1872), Browne called attention to that demo- cratic spirit in Fielding which had previously been so little noticed. Io support his assertions he drew largely upon pas- sages in the author’s poetry, quoting, for example, from “True Greatness” the lines: To no profession, party, place confined, True greatness lies but in the noble mind; and from the poem on “Liberty” the exclamation: Curse on all laws which liberty subdue, And make the many wretched to the fez. In conclusion, he declares that “‘the spirit of true philosophy formed a copious ingredient of Fielding’s genius,” and that he possessed this spirit “‘because the rare perspicuousness of his intellect was illumined, in a superior measure by the senti- ments of justice and mercy.”* Long-winded and tedious as his 3 The Works of Henry Fielding, edited by James P. Browne, M.D., new ed., London, 1871, I, vil, ix. * Fielding’s Miscellanies and Poems, edited by J. P. Browne, M.D., London, 1872, pp. xiv, XV, Xvil. LPN a Ft okt p Ee ay aye Pelee ee 2 ori wei m a ee Perea eee ererens ee ers et eS oe yl Metis ee 4 ee ee aS LE SS Se PONE rey ee . Peet ree see +9 yey NS t ey rte ie weer Sr estar eee ee Spebiain tenets Lote eax en ea roe 7] rae A One 4 eh ee . ae % to i eM rot ely me Ut be teen At g® eee ee eee ee eee eee fs ee nr oe baled baat he tiedeted tind i be ine tenn ye eed One Teer nt bereS£ELbtzeegrirsres? tt te lLeeee eee ie s. 450 FIELDING THE NOVELIST introductions undoubtedly are, Browne should be commended not only for his fearless protest against the caricature of Tom Jones made popular by Thackeray but for his desire to build up a conception of Fielding himself from the novelist’s own works rather than from the malicious stories of his enemies. Even Lamb and Hazlitt and Coleridge, enthusiastic as they often were, did not care to entrench and support their views by an examination of Fielding’s development as a fiction- writer or by a consideration of his relation to the times in which he lived. Dr. Browne, then, an unknown Edinburgh physician, who from a chronological survey of the works was impressed by Fielding’s insistence upon the democratic idea and upon the true spirit of the Christian religion, looks dis- tinctly forward to the new era of scientific investigation. Two years later, another protest against Thackeray’s view was voiced by the popular essayist George Barnett Smith, whose Poets and Novelists’ has escaped oblivion so far as to find its way into ““Everyman’s Library.” Knowing nothing of Fielding’s life, Smith falls into a series of biographical ab- surdities which culminate in the assertion that the distressed author tried to borrow money even of Doctor Johnson! Nor has the essay very much critical value except in one particular —at a time when the Thackeray-Taine caricature was having its own way, Smith’s article was one of the few reactionary documents which had so far appeared. ‘To Thackeray he says, Fielding ‘“‘never intended to depict a perfect hero; he would have shuddered at the thought.” And against Taine’s charge of lack of refinement, he pointed out some of the flowers that the great Frenchman had ignored—the eloquence with which Sophia was ushered in; and, indeed, the character of Sophia herself, one of “the purest, sweetest, and most attrac- tive in literature.” Despite all strictures, Thackeray’s own admiration for Fielding’s art cannot be questioned; but the consequences of Se, ee ° The paper on Fielding originally appeared in Macmillan’s Maga- zime, XXX, 1-18 (May, 1874). heehee ee oS peter bn tal ee a) Se von trier a seeepihskeipenat raved at a ,BEGINNING OF THE REACTION 451 his misrepresentations of that writer and that writer’s “‘heroes”’ were nothing short of deplorable. If Fielding really was the - “creature” that Thackeray depicted, the popular inference was that his novels could be little better than the man who wrote them. The extent to which this fallacy was carried is now almost unbelievable. “I'wo characteristic specimens of this procedure may be given—one from the text-books, the other from the periodicals. On “heroes like Tom Jones,” says Henry Coppée, in his Manual of English Literature (1872), “our verdict may be best given in the words of Thackeray”: then follows the inevitable “I am angry” with Jones, etc., and after that the following assessment of the novel itself. The plot of Tom Jones is “rambling, without method: most of the scenes lie in the country or in obscure English towns; the meetings are as theatrical as stage encounters; the episodes are awk- wardly introduced, and disfigure the unity; the classical in- troductions and invocations are absurd. His heroes are men of generous impulses but dissolute lives, and his women are either vile, or the puppets of circumstance.” And this is what G. P. Lathrop, an American critic of no little repute in his own day, was able to write of Fielding in The Atlantic Monthly for June, 1874. How strong must have been the current idea of the novelist’s artistic imsouciance! Fielding, he declares, was “content to offer the results of . . . [his] observation in a crude, digressive form, somewhat lacking . . . in principle” ; and the main cause to which he attributes this ramshackle con- struction is, that the author wrote as much for his own amuse- ment as for that of the reader, ‘“‘chatting garrulously” when “the mood took him.” Surely garrulousness is the last term in the world to apply to the “literary providence” of Fielding! “These shortcomings,” continues this amazing article, “with- held from him the possibility of grouping his keen observations firmly about some centre of steady and assimilative thought. With Fielding, nothing crystallized, but all was put together in a somewhat hastily gathered bundle”; in Lathrop’s opinion, the creator of Tom Jones “hardly dreamed of that suggestive Shank een ee 4 weerecerecntnseiGeanes ry ~§0ROGS', Oh inane, abun Se eee ee ; ht bet. be Aaternencenttenmt note, ery ererrre = ee phypetesa eben ree ae A " a) rH ry 4 H ar) Fy a ie rf att F a FS i f i 77" a eerie Prete Ty ie eee Seth aa ee iene pees ee eeehiebnean a - ¥ A EPs Bo rn ib POE Pn bp etn reap *., eer Det teitit ates = * - oe per teerbd rn rt at ee eee Liecehetiieenmeene nits oe ohh 9 me td we ee eels ae yer er a - hint Si Re dpa eee ee ete | dare Pie nen ee rer Seer rere bedi ree Leena bee ensS7SeRieceessrir sre 452 FIELDING THE NOVELIST and deeply significant order of novel”® which was produced by George Eliot. It is gratifying to know that George Eliot herself had a higher regard for Fielding than the critic who eulogized her. Was she familiar with the list of books which her Auguste Comte, the positivist, recommended for the perusal of his fol- lowers? Very probably. And we may well believe that the famous Frenchman’s inclusion of Tom Jones in his “Posi- tivist Library® met with her approbation. To measure the change that was taking place in the general attitude toward Fielding during the new scientific era, it 1s illuminating to compare the attitude of George Eliot in the third quarter of the century with that of Jane Austen, Maria Edgeworth, and other women novelists who were writing in 1800. Not much has ever been said about her knowledge of Fielding’s works; in fact, the impression seems to prevail that Richardson was a greater favorite with her than his rival. Space is lacking for a detailed treatment of the matter; but the suggestion may be made that she was better acquainted with Fielding than has generally been supposed. According to Sir A. W. Ward, “beautiful, patient” Milly Barton in George Eliot’s earliest book, Scenes from Clerical Life, was “‘surely not called Amelia without intention” by “fa reader of both Fielding and Thackeray.”® Some years later, in The Mill on the Floss (1860), while making a Fieldingesque analysis of motive, she refers to “charming Sophia Western.” Finally, in Middle- march (1871), we have the following celebrated passage, which should be given entire. Looking back on the leisurely days of Fielding, she writes somewhat wistfully: ““A Great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, 6 The Atlantic Monthly, XXXIII, 686, 687. § Comte, Auguste, System of Positive Polity, London, 1877, IV, 483. The preface to the French edition is dated 1854. None of Rich- ardson’s novels found a place in Comte’s list. | 9“The Political and Social Novel,” in The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1917, XIII, 430, 430 note. Ee beara tal enresrenteeeaniabeaete toes eeLee are Sore % ee ee ‘ Cpbbbaeh anes On pb ep he ride =~ — etal 5 tates ores BEGINNING OF THE REACTION 453 Pinetree Se Ts and so to take his place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English. But Fielding lived when the days were longer Parr ar Pose — — rT Se ee ey i ea _ 7 FY BF ea | cet Pes) ° td a ' 2 when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings. We belated historians must not linger after his example; and if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as if delivered from a camp-stool in a parrot-house. I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.” By her recognition of Fielding as one of the “‘colossi” of English fiction and of the “lusty ease” of his “fine English,” George Eliot, because of her great vogue and authority, did much for the appreciation of Fielding’s style; James Russell Lowell re- membered the passage in his Taunton speech (1883), and before the century was out her glowing tribute became one of the commonplaces of criticism. It is a fact worth emphasizing that the popularity of George Eliot’s own novels furnished a new and better standard than the prevailing one for the criticism of those of Fielding. Since the days of Scott, there had been a feeling that the absolutely realistic portrayal of common types of character was lacking in imagination. Neither Dickens, nor, indeed, ‘Thackeray could view life entirely as it was—Dickens employing fantastic, and 4 os} oo Thackeray, sentimental (or at least over-emotional) lenses. By the reading public, therefore, from Scott to George Eliot, one of the most common charges made against the realistic von) aye P a Onn eres Rear ee a See og Ag a ma , . 4a) ete Dens ee ee Fielding was that though his picture of life was real it was the picture of very “low life.” Among the first to link George 10 Middlemarch, London, 1871, I, 250, 251. ear FIT LTS > drs rr ps ee te ee i ee ee ere eee end os — eee ee ee bene er Sui aan ay Tey454 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Eliot’s name with that of her great predecessor was the able French critic, F. Brunetiére, who, in his Roman Naturaliste, after complaining of the “dureté”? of the “petits naturalistes” of his own country, warmly commends the sympathetic realism of Fielding and George Eliot, which is “‘si indulgent, st com- patissant, si humain.””* Taught by George Eliot to sympathize with mixed types drawn from ordinary life, the readers of the ’Seventies were better able to appreciate the depiction of such types in Fielding. It is true the change came slowly. Rather with Meredith than with George Eliot, however, did the author of Tom Jones enjoy the greater spiritual kinship— a kinship which the writer of the essay On the Comic Spirit C0077) eloquently acknowledges in a well-known passage. “OQ for a breath of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Voltaire, Cer- vantes, Fielding, Moliére!” he exclaims, thinking presumably of the famous invocation in the Thirteenth Book of Tom Jones}? “These are spirits that, if you know them well, will come when you do call. You will find the very invocation of them act on you like a renovating air—the South-West coming off the sea, or a cry in the Alps.’ Very different this, from Carlyle’s talk of Fielding’s “loose” morals and lack of “re- ality,” or Ruskin’s picture of him as a hungry dog, licking his chops over “ordure.” Eventually—though with great difficulty —it obtained an audience; in the "Seventies we feel, at least, that a change is in the air—a “renovating”’ change. A recent writer on Meredith has said:** “To the novelist Richardson, too, a careful reader will find that Meredith, both in manner and matter (notably in The Egoist and in Richard Feverel), owes a good deal”; Mrs. Grandison in Richard Feverel recalls Sir Charles Grandison “by name”; and “nobody can doubt that Sir Willoughby Patterne, both in idea and oftener in expression, was modelled on Richardson’s 11 Brunetiére, F., Le Roman Naturaliste, Paris, 1892, p. 338. 12 “Come, thou that hast inspired thy Aristophanes, thy Lucian, thy Cervantes, thy Rabelais, thy Moliére."—Tom Jones, Book XIII, ch. 1. 13 Chisholm, Hugh, Encyclopaedia Britannica, eleventh ed., 1911, XVIII, 162 (“Meredith”).BEGINNING OF THE REACTION 455 creation.” To these instances we may add the praise of Sir Charles (see the final chapter of Evan Harrington) which is put in the mouth of the Countess de Saldar. But to speak of Meredith as a follower of Richardson is to accuse a satirist of imitating the thing he satirizes. The vacuously elegant ideal of the Countess de Saldar and the apotheosis of pride and sen- timentality as represented by Sir Willoughby are the very thing the author is trying to destroy; indeed, he himself takes pains to tell us that the “look of Fielding upon Richardson is essentially comic,” 7.e., informed by that “laughter of the mind” which Meredith strove always to attain. Making all allowances for his greater minuteness, we see that Meredith has far more (in fact a very real) kinship with the great iron- ist whose Jonathan Wild found a place in the youthful Rich- ard Feverel’s room. This kinship was so obvious that it became a stock topic of discussion. Henley, who was instrumental in exploiting Meredith, called attention™* to it more than once; one of the main characteristics of Fielding, he asserts, is ‘that abundant vein of pure intellectual comedy by the presence of which his work is exalted to a place not much inferior to that of such work as the “Tartuffe’ and the ‘Ecole des Femmes.’ ””*® For illustrations of his theory of comedy, Meredith draws freely upon Fielding. Jonathan Wild, he says, “presents a case” of the “peculiar distinction” between the comic (which gives rise to “thoughtful laughter”) and the Awmorous or the satiric, “when that man of eminent greatness remarks upon the unfairness of a trial in which the condemnation has been brought about by twelve men of the opposite party . . . it is immensely comic to hear a guilty villain protesting that his own ‘party’ should have a voice in the Law.””*® As a further *4So, also, did James Thomson (“B.V.”), who, though unduly im- pressed by the old stories, paid homage to the “swift, keen insight” of “great Fielding.”"—Cope’s Tobacco Plant, Il, 333-336. # 1° Henley, W. E., in The Athenaeum, November 4, 1882, p. 5933 in the Pall Mall Gazette, November 3, 1879, Henley said that Meredith had been “called ‘a kind of Foppington-Fielding.’ ” 16 “T may have dreamed this ,»” says Meredith (though need- lessly), “for on referring to ‘Jonathan Wild’ I do not find it.” ae ror us tart ta et on 5s er D ‘ sere! ore ope Nor tbe Sel re et ter ivabteneireieseietions Sars See peieteien nl ry - ro ea ere ~ — al ie ae a . bikes. ba eee er ie et i tite ead os tts liis ee eae, “ ‘ 4 ee aba Leeteel S . a eos tty ots bt a "$4: bs ta] Fy 7 - I oe if aol «Ff ati aT] a0 eto i at a 2%) io sh ad Ph 4 ee Oran iio -ttied Lame me eee Lee Ceri ere a~ay* PP ip ne es ae nee mato tk LAE Pee LEE FIELDING THE NOVELIST 456 instance of the comic, there is Booby, when poseRe h defends himself: ‘Your virtue! I shall never survive it!’ also the aside of Miss Matthews in her narrative to Booth: “ ‘But such are the friendships of > We are told, furthermore, that Fielding’s ““method of correcting” the “sentimental” Richardson is a “mixture of 1 the humorous”—Parson Adams being “a crea- “the exclamation of Lady women! the comic anc tion of humour.” Presumably from the time of Feverel (1859); when he exhibited “Briareus ceo angrily over the sea” and ‘“‘Hesper set in his rosy Garland,” to the time when he brought out his Essay on Comedy (1877), and, indeed, as long as he lived _ Meredith was not forgetful of the master of the comic-prose-epic. It must be admitted, of course, hat Meredith is a poet and that Fielding is not; the passages 1 Feverel in which are mingled romantic love and poetic baie for nature have no counterpart in Tom Jones. ‘There ‘s much more love of nature in Fielding’s works than he has usually been given credit for; but he lived before the days of poetical exploitations in prose fiction of the beauties of earth, air, and water. Again, Meredith is a phrase- -maker and Field- ing is not; eloquent Fielding can be at times and his works are sprinkled with wise sayings, but he was averse to conceits as a staple of expression. Yet, after all allowances—romantic, naturalistic, and “metaphysical” —have been made, the simi- larities'® between Meredith and Fielding are clear enough. Both authors were at war against pride and sentimentalism, against vanity and hypocrisy, against undemocratic ways of thinking; both took the point of view of comedy, following Moliére in regarding the comic as the spirit of intellectualized laughter and in believing that its high mission is to laugh men out of their follies; both incorporated in their books as an integral part of the structure the actual commentary on life 17“On the Idea of Comedy,” in The New Quarterly Magazine, VIII, 1-40 (1877). Delivered as a lecture, February 1, 1877. 18 Arthur Symons, who dwells upon this kinship, asserts that “the modern English novel begins” with Tom Jones, in which “the very soil is living.’—Dramatis Personae, Indianapolis [1923]; p: 52- aetna rine Sree hn read Home ee Seine Sa opp etecore Som FOR ‘3 e % \g t Pre eet PeeBEGINNING OF THE REACTION 457 of the essayist; and both intended that their novels should furnish wisdom as well as mere entertainment by illustrating a philosophy of life saner and more charitable than was to be found in the works of their immediate predecessors. Even when realism—as exemplified, say, by Middlemarch (1871 )—was coming into its own, a revival of romance was under way; as a matter of fact, the old heresy about the su- periority of Sir Walter over Fielding had never died out, appearing from time to time in high places as well as low. R. S. Mackenzie, for instance, asserts in his book on Scott (1871) that Fielding “may rank” as one of “the inventors of the English novel, though not of its higher class,—the his- torical” ;*° and in that once popular manual entitled Three Centuries of English Literature (1872), by C. D. Yonge, the statement is made that even Vanity Fair is “‘not indeed of the very highest class” of novel, “such as Ivanhoe,” but “rather of the school of Fielding.””? It was this inability to appreciate true realism which caused the sentimental Fitzger- ald to declare, in 1871, that Fielding’s characters were “‘com- mon and vulgar types; of Squires, Ostlers, Lady’s maids etc., very easily drawn” ;** and which inspired John Ruskin’s pro- nunciamento (1873 )—to which we have previously alluded— that no one who had the dunghill (“‘fimetic”) taint could properly create character, and that since Fielding had this taint, Squire Western could not compete with Addison’s Sir Roger, but was only “a type of the rude English squire”**— not a character at all! Still it is apparent, in spite of this attack upon Fielding in 1873 (and that more savage youthful on- slaught in 1840) that Ruskin, like many others mentioned in this history, was considerably troubled by certain excellences in a writer whom he constitutionally disliked. Protest as he 19 Mackenzie, R. S., Sir Walter Scott, Boston, 1871, p. 204. 20 Yonge, C. D., Three Centuries of English Literature, 1872, p. 631. 21 Fitzgerald, E., Letters, London, 1889, I, 335. 22 Ruskin’s Works, edited by Cook and Wedderburn, XXVII, 631 (letter 34, October, 1873). 4 : ‘ i ied : «be ch i ‘, a hy | a] re) 1 “7 a> rt eel “¢! st! B a et . re 74 Ao) i iy al } / H etl. Ln ear Stee oe ee ne ry eas De trek er ee pa kd) os So aot ot haem458 FIELDING THE NOVELIST might against Field ling’s lack of sublimity, there were times when, like Walpole and Dr. Johnson, he had a word of com- mendation. In 1875, while finding fault with Frith’s painting of Sophia Western, he asks, after explaining his objections in detail: ““But what is the use of painting from Fielding at all? Of all our classic authors, it is he who demands the reader’s attention most strictly; and what modern reader attends to anything?”?* Frith, by the way, who could not “agree with Dr. Johnson that Richardson is a greater w riter than Field- Q ce ing,” had taken great pains with his “little picture,” in which Tom shows Sophia “her own image in the glass as a pledge of his future constancy.”** During the same year Ruskin, waxing enthusiastic in “Fors Clavigera” over his conception of a pattern priest, writes (March, 1875): “I do not know if, in modern schools of literature, the name of Henry Fielding is ever mentioned; but I think it right . . . to refer my readers to one of the most beautiful types I know [ Par- son Adams| of the character of eae clergymen, (the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ not excepted).”*° And in 1877 he went so far as to speak of Fielding as a writer “whom Mr. Gale 292 and I agree in holding to be a truly moral novelist, and worth any quantity of modern ones since Scott’s hey who they may.””® For all that, however, Richardson, in his judg- ment, was not merely “the greatest of our English moral story-tellers,”*” but the only one in that (to him) barren eight- eenth century who—in the characters of Pamela, Clementina, and Clarissa—has given us examples of true romantic art.” Ruskin’s romantic friends the Pre-Raphaelites, naturally 9327 enough, were never entirely at the point of view of Fielding; “8 Ruskin’s Works, edited by Cook and Wedderburn, XIV, 279. 24W. P. Frith, R.A.. My Autobiography, New York, 1888, I, 306, 308. 2° Ruskin’s Works, edited by Cook and Wedderburn, XXVIII, 2 288. 26 Tbid., XXIX, 220, “Fors Clavigera,” letter 82. 27 Tbid., KXV, 355 (‘“Proserpina,” Vol. I, ch. xi). 28 Ibid., V, 373 oe “I ' Peete peer ie “tn ee eae ehtebe neha oe ot ee ee Mire tanaes eae ase _BEGINNING OF THE REACTION 459 of the group which included Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris, Swinburne alone seems to have had a very high opinion of the author of Tom Jones. It is true that in a letter (December 8, 1876) to Watts-Dunton, he says, “I am confident enough of your fellow-feeling with me on the scale of that great man.”’”® Of David Copper field, he wrote, ““The narrative is as coher- ent and harmonious as that of “Com Jones’; and to say this is to try it by the very highest and apparently the most unattain- able standard.” And in his well-known tribute to Dickens himself he touches upon that writer’s kinship with the older novelist most delightfully: Love sees thy spirit laugh and speak and shine With Shakespeare and the soft bright soul of Sterne And Fielding’s kindliest might and Goldsmith’s grace; Scarce one more loved or worthier love than thine.*° On the other hand, he “reaffirmed” his “‘conviction that even the glorious masterpiece of Fielding’s radiant and beneficent genius, if in some points superior [to David Copper field], is by no means superior in all. Tom is a far completer and more living type of gallant boyhood and generous young manhood than David; but even the lustre of Partridge is pallid and lunar beside the noontide glory of Micawber.” Obviously Swinburne never experienced the actual love for Fielding that he expressed for certain modern novelists; “Dickens, Walter Scott, and Jane Austen,” according to the editors of his Lez- ters, “stood first in his estimation.”** In his own Note on Charlotte Bronté (1877), he lists the “sovereign master- pieces” as those of Fielding, Thackeray, and Scott; but the “royal and imperial master” in the realm of fiction is unques- tionably Sir Walter. Neither from Rossetti nor Morris has a phrase appreciative of Fielding yet found a place in literary history. Rossetti, we 29 The Letters of Algernon Charles Swinburne, London, 1918, p. 132. 80 The Collected Poetical Works, London, 1917, V, 238. 81 The Letters of . . . Swinburne, p. 181. rs my aor yen he ae eee ON TO a a ee obtteb shiitake er be be ee be ea Pv berate eee ~ — ra i Py} LS : Pf if a i ; Ee Ag =F “ts460 FIELDING THE NOVELIST are told,®? had never “given any thought to fiction as an art” before those memorable nights at the lonely farm-house in the Vale of St. John, a year or so before the poet’s death, when Hall Caine, preparing for a course of lectures on fiction, read aloud Tom Jones, Clarissa, one or two of Smollett’s novels, and some of Scott’s. Rossetti’s ‘“‘intellect,’’ writes Caine, “played over” the pages “like a bright light’; but what he thought of Fielding we are not told. The attitude of William Morris may be inferred from the following circumstance. In the list of books which, after Lubbock’s famous lecture, Mor- ris drew up for William Stead, Defoe, even to Moll Flanders, was included; but there was no Fielding (and no Richardson, Smollett, or Sterne). To quote his daughter, Morris “disliked the brilliant eighteenth century classics in the lump.”** So much for the Pre-Raphaelites. We have now to speak of Stevenson, who, as a young enthusiast, was preparing to revolutionize English prose fiction by restoring to romance that prestige which it had enjoyed in the days of the Waverley Novels. It was in his essay on Victor Hugo in The Cornhill Magazine (1874) that he issued his manifesto, and explained in what respects the productions of Sir Walter were superior to those of Henry Fielding. But before taking up this matter in detail attention should be called to a document in which part of Stevenson’s argument was anticipated by that veteran littérateur and lover of Scott, Charles Cowden Clarke. In an article “On the Comic Writers of England” (1872), Clarke spoke of the “very meagre” descriptions of “scenery particu- larly of rural scenery” in Fielding’s novels, compared with those in the novels of Sir Walter, ““whose order of mind was absolutely panoramic.” Fielding, he thinks, was an able psy- chologist, who “‘busied himself solely with human nature’”’— its “principles, and general, intimate, and remote feelings”; S — OC Aes we . 4° and “rarely,” he says, “Shas anyone turned his studies to more 82 By Hall Caine; see My First Book . . . with an Introduction by Jerome K. Jerome, London, 1897, pp. 63-66. 88 The Collected Works of William Morris, London, etc., 1914, XXII, xxvi. a, ees G Sten a a ee tytn”. Mined hehe aieithleieha datine boa een oneBEGINNING OF THE REACTION 461 ample account than he.” But unlike Scott, who “‘was a true poet, Fielding had very little external imagination, and even less fancy; he never went out of the scenes in which he had been accustomed to move.’’** Stevenson, advancing the banner of romance, goes farther than Clarke. What he really tries to do in his essay on Victor Hugo (1874) is to put new life into the old tradition that the romantic novels of Hugo and Scott belong to a higher order than Tom Jones; by supplying a background of manners and customs as well as of landscape, these masters of fiction, he declares, have realized “for men a larger portion of life.” Though this statement is undoubtedly true, it does not neces- sarily follow, as he implies, that Scott’s novels are superior to Fielding’s; but having started out boldly on his career as a propagandist young Stevenson was unhampered. In his student days (1871-1872) according to Graham Balfour, he had ad- mitted the works of Fielding to his “Catalogus Librorum Carisstmorum” ;*° but there came a time when he found no place for them in his books for a chimney corner, when he de- clared that the author of Tom Jones could never have, been in love,** and when he fell foul of that chef duvre itself. In the essay on Victor Hugo, he had not yet arrived at such extremes. “‘When we compare the novels of Walter Scott,” he writes, “‘with those of the man of genius who preceded him and whom he delighted to honour as a master in the art—I mean Henry Fielding—we shall be somewhat puzzled, at the first moment, to explain the difference that there is between these two. Fielding has as much human science; has a far firmer hold upon the tiller of- his story; has a keen sense of character, which he draws (and Scott often does so too) in a rather abstract and academical manner; and finally, is quite as humorous and quite as good-humoured as the great Scotch- man. With all these points of resemblance between the men, 84 The Gentleman's Magazine, N. S., VIII, 558. 8° Balfour, Graham, The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson, New York, 1901, I, 117 note. 868 The Cornhill Magazine, XXXV, 215 (February, 1877). re viene ete Seri a a eee ee er erereay it me tk eee ee =eees a yr byt tired . ae See Penny a S os paar yeeaeere i ard my - cf si cha be re i rf) as at Bs fi iF rr peseeneuswimanes Td tal 4). 94 Akt d+ ohh + HeP eh, ayehe sake Oe eee et a eT es ee eee Sere ht i pa berets ete Senet hny pret eee e meee Se ent 5 Sete a wee ov re em - ~ors cae Secures Sepisiratetocuet ater rea ebel re = eet ete eee et eee ee Ca aoe anaes Peres Seneca el ted a paoineStee itl ised a tat eeee te FIELDING THE NOVELIST astonishing that their work should be so different”; and ‘marks a great enfranchisement. With Scott it 1S this difference ~ the Romantic movement, the movement of an extended curi- osity and an enfranchised imagination has begun.” Briefly, what Sir Walter did—in order to liberate the minds of men— was to supply background or setting. Fielding, “although he had recognised that the novel was nothing else than an epic in prose, wrote in the spirit not of the epic, but of the drama” he “‘remained ignorant of certain capabiiaes which the novel possesses over the dr ‘ama’; his world was “‘a world of exclu- sively human interest. As for landscape he was content to un- derline stage directions, as it might be done in a play-book: Tom and Molly retire into a practicable wood. As for nation- ality and public sentiment it is curious enough to think that Tom Jones is laid in the year forty -five, and that the only use he makes of the rebellion is to throw a troop of soldiers into his hero’s way.” Between the works of Hugo and those of Fielding there is indeed an even greater “sulph in thought and sentiment.’’*’ Deferring for the moment further discussion of this mat- ter, we may note that Stevenson, like many other romancers (though it seems strange in this instance) greatly preferred Richardson to Fielding. In a letter of December, 1877, he asked a friend to “ Gnstitute a search in all Melbourne for one of the rarest and certainly one of the best books—Clarissa Harlowe.” “For any man who takes an interest in the problem of the two sexes,” the letter goes on, “that book is a perfect mine of documents..And it is written, sir, with the pen of an angel.”*® He was not blind, however, to the unpopularity of Richardson in the Eighties, the reason for which he discourses upon in “A Gossip on Romance” (November, 1882). Noth- ing, he writes, “‘can more strongly illustrate the necessity for marking incident than to compare the living fame of ‘Robin- son Crusoe’ with the discredit of ‘Clarissa Harlowe.’ ‘Clarissa’ 37 The Cornhill Magazine, XXX, 179-184 (August, 1874). S8lCi a ae 8 ‘ Stevenson, R. L., Letters, edited by S. Colvin, New York, 1900, 7h Sinan ae bene aerate rer ae: owe tiene snerelsiwinened ry reb ain 7 ~ ta: ba errr > pe ee A annBEGINNING OF THE REACTION 463 is a book of a far more startling import, worked out, on a great canvas, with inimitable courage and unflagging art; it con- tains wit, character, passion, plot, conversations full of spirit and insight, letters sparkling with unstrained humanity; and yet a little story of a shipwrecked sailor, with not a tenth part of the style nor a thousandth part of the wisdom, exploring none of the arcana of humanity . . . goes on from edition to edition . . . while ‘Clarissa’ lies upon the shelves unread.”*® Sir Walter Scott, unlike his distinguished young follower, greatly preferred Fielding; and he made an acute observation when he said that the works of Richardson were but a step from the old romance. Despite the truth in Stevenson’s criticism of Fielding as lacking in background, he no doubt overstates his case. So thought the editor of The Cornhill Magazine, Leslie Stephen, who wrote, in a letter dated May 15, 1874, “In my opinion, you are scarcely just to Scott or Fielding as compared with Hugo.””*° Moreover, as his friendly editor pointed out, Steven- son had blundered in his use of terms. ““ITo my mind,” said Stephen, “Hugo is far more dramatic in spirit than Fielding, though his method involves . . . a use of scenery and back- ground which would hardly be admissible in drama,” and “surely Hugo’s dramas are a sufficient proof that a drama may be romantic as well as a novel.” Yet the author of these stric- tures, who, like his contributor, delighted in the romances of Scott, was never quite comfortable with the author of Tom Jones, though he wrote more about him than anyone else in this decade and was soon to become his editor. While he had for several years spoken casually of Fielding in magazine articles, it was in his History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century (1876) that Stephen first sketched in firm outline his portrait of the novelist as the writer of all writers who gives us the very “form and pressure” of a cen- 88 Stevenson’s “A Gossip on Romance,” Longman’s Magazine, I, 73, 74. 40 The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, Biographical edition, edited by S. Colvin, New York, 1911, I, 155-156 note. erry bes he . ce rte beter eet ant teed ate of i aa re se “fT FH mits a wart en ear ery rs Senate tee a Teer creer J PDR RA Reber firth Semen NH NE Eten? a, errr eree os Poreerettewkeantene og a Tree a a Gorey vege poe wanmiveante euta sponge!‘ts be LOE Pee ae Te Ia PS @ 464 FIELDING THE NOVELIST tury distinguished for its sturdy common sense and for its sus- picion of all forms of spiritual or romantic exaltation. he following passage will serve as an illustration, not only of his attitude toward Fielding in this work but also in his Hours im a Library (1879) and in his “Memoir” of Fielding (1882): “No enchanted light of old romance colours or distorts his fictions; we do not feel that his characters are puppets in the hands of an irresistible destiny, or constituent atoms of a vast organism slowly developing under the action of gigantic forces; there is no tender regret for past forms of society or passionate aspirations for the future. But for insight into the motives of his contemporaries; for a power of seeing things as they are; for sympathy with homely virtues; and contempt for shams and hypocrites, Fielding is as superior to some later writers of equal imaginative force as they are superior to him in width of sympathy and delicacy of perception. His art 1s thus the most faithful representative of his age; he gives its coarseness and its brutalities, and sometimes with too little consciousness of their evils, though no one ever satirised more powerfully the worst abuses of the time. But he also represents the strong healthy common sense and stubborn honesty of the sound English nature, with a certain massive power of group- ing and colouring which is peculiar to himself. “In Fielding and his beloved Hogarth we have the ‘prosai- of the middle class of comi-epos—I use Fielding’s phrase the time. Richardson, though a greater artist, is far inferior in sheer intellectual vigour; and Smollett is comparatively but a caricaturist. Fielding announced that his object is to give a faithful picture of human nature. Human nature includes many faculties which had an imperfect play under the condi- tions of the time; there were dark sides to it, of which, with all his insight, he had but little experience; and heroic im- pulses, which he was too much inclined to treat as follies. But the more solid constituents of that queer compound, as they presented themselves under the conditions of the time, were never more clearly revealed to any observer. A complete criti- cism of the English artistic literature of the eighteenth century ot ON pen snpeptsdnisenath reselaiat Sees eses me 2 eset a ee ae dined ad ee ee wey = - 3 rs Fs tay Ls ee EE i eee ayBEGINNING OF THE REACTION 465 would place Fielding at the centre, and measure the complete- ness of other representatives pretty much as they recede from an approach to his work. Others, as Addison and Goldsmith, may show finer qualities of workmanship and more delicate sentiment; but Fielding, more than any one, gives the essential —the very form and pressure of the time.””** Not long after the appearance of his History of English Thought, Stephen devoted an entire essay to “Fielding’s Nov- els,’ which, originally published in The Cornhill Magazine (1877), came out in book form in the Third Series of Hours in a Library (1879). In this article we find the same order of Fielding’s love for the homely virtues, his ideas as before “common sense” and “intellectual vigour,” his lack of heroic impulses; but the tone has changed to a kind of enforced chumminess—obviously an aping of his father-in-law, Thack- eray, whose manner does not sit quite easily upon the funda- mentally ascetic Stephen. There are admirable things in the essay; and none deserves higher praise than his portrait of Fielding as a great and serious artist. To begin with, Stephen reacted, as far as his devotion to Thackeray would allow him, against the popular idea of a mere careless and dissolute hu- morist: Fielding’s biographers have dwelt, he says, “far too exclusively upon the uglier side of his Bohemian life.” Nor could anyone be ‘“‘more heartily convinced” than Fielding “of the beauty and value of those solid domestic instincts on which human happiness must chiefly depend.” Again, Stephen was sure not only of Fielding’s seriousness of purpose but—despite his previous statement that Richardson was the “greater artist” —of his artistic superiority; to his mind, he was unquestion- ably the greatest novelist of the eighteenth century. Several years before, in his First Series of Hours in a Library, Stephen had endeavored to explode Richardson’s claim as a great mor- alist. Now, in this essay, he drew the line even more firmly and distinctly between Fielding and Smollett. Fielding’s “seri- ousness of purpose,” he insists, should not be confused for a 41 History of English Thought.in the Eighteenth Century, London, 1876, II, 380. oe cS ee v8. 2 i = Sey “ne Pook Sane re alc ri ; ys Bs rf Sa] st eo ri +s 3 ‘i ro Ai q ; ty t ee ae ee A$ vA ways depts ee ree ae eT . a rare OFS, ib dren pameeenieeien Uncen tin - = aa By: rt eS) a's) ra ee ; nea re at pe la poe eee ee ae ~* ats hes eh Rel, Bree 2 ba ete el eer ieee ee ee eets hb [eee eee de ete TS baeenneennasas eon ah sf bl Ie. iat het at ee beleal tetera etapa eee POST ea se sopemteienmemeh ry ted ain ’ Bute Te y-' awis 466 FIELDING THE NOVELIST moment with Smollett’s mere desire to amuse. [his seriousness of purpose brings about “unity” as opposed to “looseness of construction”—not mere unity of plot, but “organic unity.” In other words, the excellence of plot in Fielding “depends upon the skill with which it is made subservient to the develop- ment of character and the thoroughness with which the work- ing motives of the persons involved have been thought out.” It had been obvious to many critics that Fielding was a greater plot-builder than Smollett; but Stephen called attention to the fact that between Fielding and Smollett there was a complete difference in aim and method. Fielding’s novels, he declared, were “intended in our modern jargon as genuine studies in psychological analysis” ; and the author himself, in his opinion, has the best claim to be considered the founder of the modern novel. Still, in presenting a worldly-minded Fielding whose most essential qualities are shrewd common sense, and an ethical system for the average man of the world, Stephen assuredly mistakes his author. The most essential teaching of Tom Jones and Amelia is not the merely prudential advice to avoid serious inconveniences by shunning intemperance.*” Fielding does, in- deed, show the results of folly and villainy; but his main pur- pose is the inculcation of good-heartedness and human brother- hood. No writer of his day was more impressed by the fact that society is quite generally deceived as to what constitutes true greatness and true Christianity. According to Stephen, Fielding’s vision included merely the “domestic” virtues; he > motive. As a matter had little conception of any more “lofty of fact, Fielding drew attention constantly (as Lytton pointed out in 1832) to what we call to-day the standards of “public morality”; and if the ideals of true-heartedness and gener- osity, of brotherly love, self-sacrifice, and forgiveness be not 42 As early as 1862, T. H. Green, the philosopher, denying to Field- ing (in a youthful prize essay) ‘all romantic virtue,” declared that the “‘moral” of his novels, “if moral it can be called, is simply the im- portance of . prudence.”—An Estimate of the Value . ... of Fiction, edited by F. N. Scott, Ann Arbor, 1911, pp. 39, 66.BEGINNING OF THE REACTION 467 “lofty,” one wonders how Stephen would classify the teach- ings of the Master himself. ‘Talk as we may, position, wealth, and capability of mere nervous exaltation are more sought after even at the present day than a pure and generous heart, which, in Fielding’s opinion, is of more value than a coronet. ce Not only did Stephen discover no “‘philosophy” in the great novels, but he insisted that Fielding turned up his nose at phi- losophers in general and that he regarded “‘philosophy”’ as a fine name for “humbug.” Nothing could be farther from the truth than either of these assumptions. Anyone who is inclined to believe with Stephen that Fielding despised the ancient philoso- phers should turn to the following passage about them in T’om Jones: “These authors, though they instructed me in no science by which men may promise to themselves to acquire the least riches or worldly power, taught me, however, the art of de- spising the highest acquisitions of both. They elevate the mind, and steel and harden it against the capricious invasions of for- tune. They not only instruct in the knowledge of Wisdom, but confirm men in her habits, and demonstrate plainly, that this must be our guide, if we propose ever to arrive at the greatest worldly happiness, or to defend ourselves, with any tolerable security, against the misery which everywhere surrounds and invests us.”** It was no mere “homespun moralist”’ or low- thoughted materialist or “amiable buffalo” or “reckless en- joyer” who wrote: ‘“True it is that philosophy makes us wiser, but Christianity makes us better men. Philosophy elevates and steels the mind but Christianity softens and sweetens it.” And here is the root of the matter—Fielding’s works are unphilo- sophical, declares Stephen, because in them “we scarcely come into contact with man as he appears in presence of the infinite, and therefore with the deepest thoughts and loftiest imagin- ings of the great poets and philosophers.” Fielding, like Parson Adams, he says, “has no eye for the romantic side of his creed”; in short, his “‘dislike to the romantic makes him rather blind to the elevated.” This is the old heresy which had been 48 Tom Jones, Book VIII, ch. xiii. aT wr ere eat os TAP a F é Tr ‘ a S uN fe h i a cal > rT 4 Pa ba { al pi met rr 44 if “i 2} oe Sf a ‘ oo) r iH ry a TL ee i Saeed ott ee res Py Th OTe 4 ie. a eer mel eed hdr Seat ol woaeey rs i wt re es ee err ar aieth Te G « pyotecerebberekeanty: Sa erepb Les ee E 468 FIELDING THE NOVELIST prevalent ever since the days of Walter Scott. Stephen missed in Fielding the sense of the mystical, the feeling of “Oh! Altitudo!’’** awe. But Fielding’s belief in the beneficence of Providence, the emotions of romantic wonder and religious in the essential goodness of man’s nature, in the possibility of human regeneration, in the immortality of the soul—all these are philosophic ideas which deserve neither neglect nor con- tempt. Fielding is not, indeed, a mystic—his mood is not often the mood of wonder; but though few writers have enjoyed life more, still fewer have set a higher value upon the spiritual nature of man as opposed to the extrinsic trappings of riches and position. To him a romantic over-emotionalism which does not express itself in generous deeds was pernicious rather than Vlofty:~ As a devoted son-in-law of Thackeray, Leslie Stephen found it difficult to eradicate from his mind the notion that Tom Jones was “Fielding in his youth,” and that Captain Booth was ‘‘Fielding of later years”; that the “worldly wis- dom for which Fielding is so conspicuous” had been “‘gathered in doubtful places”; that since his tastes had been perverted by his life, he ““condemned purity as puritanical”; that this lam- entable “confusion” “shows itself in one shape or other throughout his work”; and, finally, that Colonel Newcome, rather than Coleridge, has given the true criticism of the Lady Bellaston incident—the “great and obvious blot upon the story’ of Tom Jones.** And so it happened that in 1882, when Stephen had to prepare (for his édition de luxe) an account not merely of Fielding the Novelist but of Fielding the Man, he apparently forgot his excellent observations in the Hours in a Library to the effect that previous biographers had dealt too exclusively with the Bohemian side of the author of ya nan btSuenenl metvovsagauoieaithaanaiacns, Tom Jones, and accepted in many particulars the roysterer which his father-in-law Thackeray delighted to portray. Though Stephen distrusted the story that the “liveries” at East ** History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, Il, 370. *° For “Fielding’s Novels,” see The Cornhill Magazine, XXXV, pp. 154-171 (February, 1877). See a en ane TEE eat i a ee be +. ee ee Po s. hl uy 3 Mi ri 1 iBBEGINNING OF THE REACTION 469 Stour were “yellow,” he had no thought of relinquishing the idea of Fielding’s wanton extravagance; though he could not avoid realizing Fielding’s great accomplishment as a magis- trate, yet, chary of praise, he would have it that the justice em- and that one of these “tools” was to be found among his second “wife’s poor rela- 9946 > ployed in his work “‘very dirty tools,’ tions “"—a wild conjecture, as has been proved, albeit Stephen clung to it tenaciously. And again, following the lead of Lawrence and others (who took their cue from Thackeray), Stephen hears in Amelia Fielding’s “‘penitential regrets for the neglect with which he had sometimes treated the woman of whom he was not worthy” on account of ‘“‘his occasional back- slidings.” We need not go on with the biographical part of the “Memoir,” which, to quote Professor Cross, is an “outrageous” performance on the part of the “last” of Fielding’s “‘brilliant defamers.’”** Suffice it to say that Stephen was never quite com- fortable with Fielding, nor, in spite of his many excellent observations, was he ever quite at that novelist’s point of view; always in the background was the apparition conjured up by Thackeray. For the critical portion of his “Memoir” Stephen contented himself, for the most part, with a reiteration of his previous dicta. Some new findings there are, of course, and among these several very admirable ones. He was, for example, per- haps the first influential English critic to draw the line firmly ¢ between the realism of Fielding and the “naturalism” of the French novelists, which was then so popular in England. Criti- cally, as well as biographically, however, the “Memoir,”** in spite of much that is good, is disappointing—often actually misleading. Stephen starts out again and again in some excel- lently reasoned passage and then, catching sight as it were of the bogies constructed by Thackeray and Taine, hastens to remind us that Fielding and his works are indelibly stained, 48 Cross’s Fielding, III, 242-247. 47 Fielding’s Works, edited by Leslie Stephen, London, 1882, I, iii- Civ. Spent ae lane eH bree zeewse-wvatanateumeshononancenpeples oe oS ers eg od er A i Phy % ad mar bat n ‘if bred) rt i , et 77) ed ee Fe O48, tery aye eet eresure pt eeee, wienwwtendn lca gS Sree al tee ee Sere ee . Et de be eee eae a I ee RO A te SOS Pehl ar rr af ah . 0 4 ae ebthidubes atte se re BR nha > NS ve eens ‘ 470 FIELDING THE NOVELIST and that instead of being an imaginative artist of the highest rank he is only a wonderfully “shrewd observer” whose prime virtue is “homespun morality” and “massive common-sense.” There is “‘no English novelist,” runs a characteristic passage, “who within the prescribed limits of his work gives us the same impression of thorough sincerity and complete mastery ‘ of his materials”; but he is ‘“‘wanting in refinement, and his sensibility to the higher moral impulses is limited.” What he does give us (according to Stephen he leaves out “much’’), is “the first-hand observation of a thoroughly shrewd, reflective, generous mind.” For portraying a very intellectual and sub- stantial Fielding in a time when the popular presentment was that of a reckless and wastrel enjoyer Stephen undoubtedly de- serves credit; but we really get little notion in his essay of the supreme ironist of the comédie humaine. A more unlucky epithet than “homespun” for the radiant follower of Moliére could hardly be discovered; Fielding was neither a Polonius (as Stephen suggests in the Hours) nor a Benjamin Franklin. The “Memoir” was well received; for there was in it enough adverse criticism of Fielding to satisfy the ordinary paragrapher. A writer in The Saturday Review, characteriz- “admirable” piece of work, proceeds to find ing the essay as an most of its admirableness in Stephen’s derogatory concessions rather than in his direct praise of Fielding’s intellectual quality. He commends the editor for wasting no time in the vain at- tempt to remove the “stains” from the novels, and quotes with approbation the statement that “Fielding did not always know when he was becoming disgusting.”’ And then, as is the way with reviewers, he ends inconsistently by saying that “‘we re- gard [Fielding] almost with a feeling of personal affection”; and that, reprehensible as his works are, they are preferable to those of “more than one” of the popular novelists of 1882. According to The Spectator, Scott’s “range is immeasurably wider” than that of Fielding; his novels are “glorified throughout by a poetical imagination”; and, being ‘“‘always 48 The Saturday Review, LIII, 114, 115 (January 28, 1882).BEGINNING OF THE REACTION 471 the gentleman,” he avoids by instinct “the coarse animalism” of his predecessor. Dickens, too, “never panders” to a “pruri- ent” mind. To sum up, Fielding “‘was not a serious thinker” ; for had not Mr. Stephen himself admitted that “the kind of reflections by which the highest minds are preoccupied are en- tirely alien to such a writer?”’*® The influence of Stephen’s characterization of Fielding as a ““common-sense” and “homespun” moralist upon subsequent accounts of him has been very different at different times. Be- cause of the author’s position as a critic, it gave Fielding in some quarters and on certain occasions a higher rating as a thinker and reformer than he had ever before enjoyed. A notable review of Stephen was one by Paul Stapfer (in the Revue des Deux Mondes for September 15, 1890) which begins, “Fielding est, comme Moliére, un de ces auteurs ex- cellens dont le solide génie est fait surtout de bon sens.”’ The French critic pictures for his readers ““ce débauché de Field- ing” squandering his money heedlessly; yet he finds L’om Jones more radiant than Stephen did with “‘la gaité” and “la joie,” and—taking the hint from Brunetiére—asserts that the great novels were read with profit by George Eliot, whose “srand roman de sympathie et d’amour”’ was certainly not “dorigine russe.””°° But Stapfer was greatly in the minority. In too many instances the logical outcome of Stephen’s essay was such a criticism as the following in the Quarterly for July, 1886: ‘“Fielding’s genius is limited to the commonplace, and restrained by the common-sense of the day. His mind is pro- saic. He is not sympathetic enough to attempt pathos; he is dull to the more enthusiastic side of human nature; scenery exer- cised no spell over his feelings.”°* Such an unspiritualized Fielding is also elaborated in Morality in English Fiction by J. A. Noble, who, repeating Stephen’s catchword “common sense,” asserts that Fielding’s weakness is “‘a certain want of elevation, which expressed itself in an implied denial of any 49 The Spectator, LV, 533 (April 22, 1882). 50 Revue des Deux Mondes, Cl, 412-454. 51 The Quarterly Review, CLXIII, 48. pee Dee ee — whem am - “y aot sts Pt! bear ete pee ryt Neds Lois ot ee PvP Pye — , Pt. > altertt rates o wa Pn A a ea a Kr ges e ye SL eee eer ee een eee et es: esr rer eT eer saneees sens ae hime teste eH al vy re f ib t rt Sd ity aE aay Ore . rere eo. a at . bs Ci . Se er ee bane ee eet Creer thane af a ia. ws eS . i ri ea at ea a) mas) ria e re}. 3 ‘3 ant ad Eze472 FIELDING THE NOVELIST ideal whatsoever’; or, that if he had an ideal, ‘Tom Jones was “clearly an embodiment” of it. Obviously with Stephen in mind, Noble says Fielding’s creed is “ that of the average man of the world,” a prudential morality which declares: “Take care of yourself by all means; be as respectable as you can if your taste leads you” that way.°* One can imagine the ironic smile with which Fielding would have perused such an inter- pretation as this of his philosophy of life! Leslie Stephen, who carried on the work that Thackeray started, was one of the most influential pioneers in that renais- sance of interest in the age of Pope and Johnson which became perceptible by the "Seventies. ““Till recent years the eighteenth century had a bad name among us ,’ runs an article in The Cornhill Magazine for November, 1878, “Moralists condemned its vices. The High Churchman of 1833 blotted it from his calendar. It was generally voted an unspiritual, 9953 ‘unideal,’ and materialistic age. But the revival was now actually under way, as a glance at the publications of this period will show; and in consequence of the new awakening, Fielding became a figure of increasing importance. Mark Pat- tison, in a review (1872) of Elwin’s Pope, speaks admiringly of those “‘imperceptible suggestions” which characterize “the refined humour of Fielding’’;°* and during the same year, William Allingham records in his diary this bit of conversa- tion with Carlyle: ALLINGHAM. Voltaire is always crapulous, often nasty, when speaking of the relation of the sexes. Very different from Fielding who, though he takes liberties, warmly recognizes true love. CartyLe. And I believe Fielding was very much attached to his own wife.* 62 J. A. Noble’s Morality in English Fiction, Liverpool, 1886, 19, N55) 20: °8 Kebbel, T. E., “The Eighteenth Century,” in The Cornhill Maga- zine, XXXVIII, 541. 54 Essays by . Mark Pattison, Oxford, 1889, II, 393; see The British Quarterly Review, LV, 444. °° William Allingham’s Diary, 1907, p. 213.BEGINNING OF THE REACTION 473 a Was Carlyle at last relenting, as so many others had done? Certainly this was the case with Anthony Trollope, who, scorning Fielding in his earlier days, had lived to see his own productions weighed in the balance with Tom Jones.*® Scott, he declared, “still [1879] towers among us as the first of novelists’; but Fielding is “supreme” in “‘the construction of a story and the development of a character.” It is “unfair,” he thinks, “to bracket”’** Fielding with Smollett; and, though he is not quite sure about the morality of Tom Jones, he now regards that novel—wherein the author has “shown how a noble and sanguine nature may fall away under temptation and be again strengthened and made to stand upright”—as “one of the greatest” in “the English language.”°* Lecky’s England in the Eighteenth Century (Vols. I and II, 1878), in which the novels of Fielding were used as historical docu- ments, furnished the theme for many a paragraph in subse- quent books and periodicals on the author of Tom Jones as the photographer”® of the life of his day—an innocent idea which eventually caused considerable mischief. But the general dis- cussion of Fielding in relation to his age brought about in at least one instance a saner account of his genius than had ever before been popular in standard books of reference. “There was no moralist of the time,” declared William Minto in the Ninth Edition of the Excyclopaedia Britannica (1879), “‘whose scorn was so heartily and steadily directed against vice, SS ee Ee rt es nm apr, a heebeteeh ot eet niet inline Anant Was ~~ Su ta ty < Pl - a ws 5 See ban as phen ateh ek hens eg ee ana yeni = bet oe ak) 4 ve eee pera s) eae et pbedeeet eet Oe erie . a i + ny i] ti ea er! oF B32 +e! +i) rs) ess La Piet vet 3 against profligacy, avarice, hypocrisy, meanness in every shape and size. . . . In breaking with conventions he remained true to society.”°° More joyous than Minto was Frederic Harrison, who in that counterblast against popular prejudice entitled “A Few Words about the Eighteenth Century” exclaims, “For 56 See, for instance, The Quarterly Review, CXLV, 27 (1878). 57 The Nineteenth Century, V, 31, 30. 58 A. Trollope’s Autobiography, Edinburgh and London, 1883, II, 162. 59 See The Quarterly Review, CXLV, 514. 60 In his popular lectures, however, Minto seems to have been a backslider. s ae eee pakt eet hs tee ee oe ee re rt ene mind eer pera ven eae baert Ter ery ns med Oana Tenney) Serre Sean Se ene ye a 2— a ae tne ae a oe — a ewe ee eee sie tad bthhdebeheih a tee nee 474 FIELDING THE NOVELIST my part I find ‘the vision and the faculty divine’ in the inex- haustible vivacity of Tom Jones”—an “imaginative force” which “‘has never since been reached in prose save by Walter Scott himself, and not even by him in such inimitable wichery e 361 of words.” But in the light of subsequent events the most interesting article which appeared at this time was an anonymous notice of Stephen’s edition in The Athenaeum, November 4, 1882; for the reviewer was no less a personage than W. E. Henley. Even in the early "Eighties, Henley had made up his mind about Fielding’s greatness and essential qualities, though he dealt very gently with the shortcomings of Stephen’s “Memoir.” “Tike Scott, like Cervantes, like Shakspeare,” Fielding, writes Henley, is ‘“‘a writer to be studied,” and “claims not merely our acquaintance, but an intimate and abiding familiarity.” Of the “essential elements of Fielding’s art and mind,” the “most vigorous and the most individual” is “perhaps, his irony ; the next is that abundant vein of pure intellectual comedy” which exalts him “to a place not much inferior” to that of Moliére. With both these qualities the “sympathy” of the reading world of 1882 was, Henley asserted, “imperfect in no small degree.” “The present is an epoch of sentiment’; he continues, ‘‘its ideals and ambitions are mainly emotional; what it chiefly loves is the affectation of romance, pas- sion, self-conscious solemnity, and a certain striving after the picturesque.” As evidence in point Henley calls attention to the merely “picturesque and romantic” illustrations (by Small) in Stephen’s edition; these, he says, and justly, are “altogether foreign” to Fielding’s art and “‘to the epoch in which it was produced.” Stephen, he thinks, is not ‘so hearty and cheerful” as he was in the Hours: he is too much influenced by Walpole and Lady Mary, and he judges Fielding “a little” too much “according to the canons of modern morality”; but for all that the “Memoir,” in his opinion, is the “best and soundest 61 The Nineteenth Century, XIII, 399 (March, 1883). See other articles by Harrison in The Fortnightly Review for April, 1879; April, 1882; March, 1885.BEGINNING OF THE REACTION 475 estimate”’ that “has yet appeared.” ‘Twenty years later, while writing his own celebrated essay for the 1903 edition, Henley looked back with wonder upon the homespun moralist into which Stephen had transformed Fielding, the “immitigable Tronist.” For some time before Stephen’s edition appeared, Austin Dobson had been engaged upon a new biography of Fielding —carefully collecting materials, inspecting documents, and weighing evidence. Such a work was greatly needed; despite the growing interest in the novelist the old Thackeray-Taine caricature was still the dominant force in accounts of his life and genius. As a sample of the numerous anonymia we may quote the following passage from Episodes of Fiction, in which Fielding is represented as an “erring” and “reckless” man, “always dunning” his friends “‘for a dinner or a guinea” and diversifying “late hours and heavy drinking” by “‘occa- sional intervals of hard drinking.” To such an inebriate as this, imagination and concentration were alike impossible; ) therefore he could describe “only what he saw,” and the in- ference was that “he did not see very deeply.” In conclusion, the author “would say with Thackeray, that to make a hero” of Henry Fielding “would be hopeless.”®* Such characteriza- tions as these were by no means confined to unknown com- pilers. Here is a sentence from John Heneage Jesse’s Memoirs of Celebrated Etonians: ‘Never, perhaps, has there existed a sadder example of a man of illustrious talents, and at the same time of illustrious descent, being reduced by his own indiscre- tions to so grievous a condition of indigence and privation as fell to the lot of the once gay and gallant Henry Fielding.” To this passage should be added the view of Fielding which T.S. Perry, a professed investigator of the eighteenth century, gave to his genteel Boston audience in the winter of 1881- 1882. How strong the pressure of the age was upon him is 62 The Athenaeum, No. 2871, pp. 592-5943 used in part for Views and Reviews: Literature, New York, 1890, pp. 229-235. 63 Episodes of Fiction, Edinburgh, 1870, pp. 53-58. 64 Jesse’s Memoirs of Celebrated Etonians, London, 1875, I, 62. eer Syeer Ren ere a ee + Oa 4 do ee whe +i Pineda ahhabtan arte he re a ah ced tet ee A “< ~~ 1889, ~0 . ren Derg te te wast aceenshettonennenpuytatrene weer Te ‘ P+ He 4 ip rt “J rat aT ny, el es oi eS aie a ¥ ei 9 a ee eer-apers er er oe Gee ee maw - , apne Vy ESA et} ant oh NES Sel Sy aps re wens ea chy me 4 SEEN O wtel Toth eect str Aik panne ae +t eh b-pres pare ee oe pte er ree e >ne ene ee ‘nal A ek i 4 Sar Be irag his ee ee FIELDING THE NOVELIST 476 shown by his statement (in the preface to the published vol- ume) that he dares not use the word “evolution,” and employs the term “growth” instead! Fielding, according to this Tainesque authority, is a rough and brutal picaresquer, whose characters are “forever laughing through the world, begin- ning, enjoying, or getting over a carouse.” No one, he thinks, ‘can get any amusement” who has passed the age of fourteen : from the scene at Parson Trulliber’s; for the author has treated Adams as “‘a jocose savage would treat a captive,’ and ‘a precise copy of the rough had no motive beyond giving us ‘ life he had himself seen.”®* What a simple-minded yokel that spiritual kinsman of Swift’s must have been! More rabid than Perry was Sidney Lanier, who, in his lectures on the English novel at Johns Hopkins University in the winter and spring of 1881, dealt with Fielding’s productions swiftly and bitterly. Like Perry he, too, referred derisively to Parson Adams in the pig-stye, and protested that he could “read none of these books”—which he would “‘blot” from “‘the face of the earth” —without “feeling as if my soul had been in the rain, drag- 33966 gled, muddy, miserable. 65 T. S. Perry’s English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, New York, 1883, p. 346. 66 Sidney Lanier’s English Novel, New York, 1883, pp. 177, 180.CHAPTER XVI The New Era Part I From Dobson to Henley 1883-1903 HAT Fielding stood in need of in the early "Eighties was an estimate of his genius which should not be colored by the stories told of him as a man, by the unworshipfulness of some of his characters, by the disparagement of the times in which he lived, or by the misinterpretation of the gemre in which he worked. In other words, what he needed was criticism of a painstaking, disin- terested, scientific sort. The caricature of Fielding the Man, made popular by Thackeray, had resulted in a caricature of Fielding the Writer as a reckless and erring genius—either a mere picaresquer or a Zolaesque naturalist; a despiser of purity who sheltered the dissolute; a pedant who paraded his two- penny learning; a mere photographer of a depraved age; a writer lacking in poetic feeling, religious ecstasy, and the higher forms of the imagination; a novelist so tainted by his own vicious life that he could not depict an ideal character. ‘Thackeray had hardly ceased—in the “Roundabout Papers” — to exploit his paradoxically bright-eyed and wonderfully gifted, but claret-stained, repentant, sponging, and morally “blunted” genius, before Taine, as we have seen, caught up the picture and, with his usual brilliant touches, produced a thick-skinned brawler, who was not a genius at all, roaring through his books with ‘‘a broken head and a bellyful.” How difficult it is to eradicate amy caricature from minds predis- posed to receive it is a proposition that needs no demonstration. And so long as such wholesale denunciations of the eighteenth century as those of Carlyle and Ruskin continued to find lis- teners, it was not to be hoped that a saner view of Fielding— Fah tly oy Sie pivtese een PL aeeoneee. Pe, Kibnn eons ne a eid os Rhea ine ie ee ee eae testament pe eet oa ed ieemeeeen a ns bien ‘tae Ss >ey ~ vies es ee cn) “ “ be caer ede ee eT ee tie Sabah eet FROM DOBSON TO HENLEY 487 the “morality” of Fielding’s novels than might be inferred from a reading of the Taunton speech. Had this not been the case he would hardly have suggested to Harriet Beecher Stowe ee ete Nap heitshiebatenes Sn te Pesan TS betty So Sis enue OPO Tay g KP bil erg at ee rere ras (she is said to have been scandalized!) that she might “im- prove her art by reading ‘Tom Jones.’ 2? Though he found re pleasure in romance rather than in realism and honestly felt that Fielding’s imagination was of the secondary or unpoetic order, his admiration, to judge from the evidence, began early and continued late. As in many other instances in this history, Fielding’s genius in Lowell’s final assessment rose to a higher pitch than ever before. In the noble “Inscription for a Memo- rial Bust of Fielding” (published in The Atlantic Monthly for September, 1890) we find no disfiguring qualification such as the English parson felt impelled to insert in his inscrip- tion sixty years before—only the spontaneous and admiring recognition of a brother craftsman who like himself esteemed a kindly heart above all “riches, or worldly power.” ee, en Crs St the He looked on naked Nature unashamed, And saw the Sphinx, now bestial; now divine, Pia F 4 ey A Fo i i) $ In change and rechange; he nor praised nor blamed, - But drew her as he saw with fearless line. Did he good service? God must judge, not we; Manly he was, and generous and sincere; English in all, of genius blithely free: Who loves a Man may see his image here.28 ary — rd ra « Ss ee ee ioaltetint hie es Apropos of the unveiling of the Fielding bust, a writer in The Saturday Review declared that “so far as we remember” there had been “no speech-making over any bust” of “Rich- ardson and Smollett.’®® This interesting fact was made by H. D. Traill the basis of a clever Lucianic dialogue between Fielding and Richardson, in which the latter is represented as consumed with jealousy on account of the honors which have just been paid his rival. For the witty give-and-take of this °7 Cross’s Fielding, III, 230. °8 The Atlantic Monthly, LXVI, 3 29 The Saturday Review, LVI, 303 5 a (September 8, 18 83).‘Si bal DOLE Pee ae 488 FIELDING THE NOVELIST skit, one must read the dialogue itself. ‘The following excerpt, in which Fielding is made to defend his art very soberly, gives an inadequate impression of the lightness of the piece as a whole; but it is included here to show the increasing friendli- ness toward realism which was coming about in 1884. “I can- not see,” runs the passage, “that virtue is any better served by feigning a false certainty for its earthly prizes, than by teach- ing men what is strictly true,—that it need not despair of its recompense even though it be mingled with vice. Besides how is it possible for a faithful delineator of human life to do otherwise than I have done? Are not good and evil mingled in life, and are not those who look upon life—I speak not now of boarding-school misses, but of men and women of the world—are they not, I say, perpetually conscious of the mix- ture? Do they not see too that the tares and wheat . . are allowed to grow together until the harvest, and that the tares sometimes flourish a plaguy deal better than the wheat?”’®*° Traill, the author of this dialogue, fought in the great novel- ist’s cause on more than one occasion thereafter. Interest in the works of Fielding was now manifesting itself in many a casual reference by professed students of English literature. Later in the same year in which Dobson’s book appeared, A, H. Bullen, in an edition of Peter Wilkins, called upon the reading public to take up again the books which Lamb and Leigh Hunt “loved to praise,” and to “exult in the full-blooded, bracing life which pulses in the pages of Fielding.”** John Churton Collins, a careful investigator in the eighteenth-century field, spoke of Fielding in his Boling- 5 broke (1886) as “the prince of English novelists.”** Dowden, 80 Traill, H. D., The New Lucian, London, 1884, pp. 200-215. $1 Bullen’s preface (dated November, 1883) to an edition of Pal- tock’s Peter Wilkins, London, 1884, I, xviii. 82 Collins, J. C., Bolingbroke, New York, 1886, p. 182. In his “Pres- ent Functions of Criticism” (see Ephemera Critica, 1901, p. 28), Col- lins’s estimate of Fielding is implied in the statement that if criticism “has to take the measure of Mr. Hall Caine, it has likewise to take the measure of Cervantes and Fielding.” —— ~ fc bond by ai aes al. eater ed manne etnies n pies pace ae Sees she, aN ae rh ee rae aoe reneFROM DOBSON TO HENLEY 480 in his account of Goldsmith (1883), regarded Tom Jones as the “broadest and brightest study” in that period of ‘“‘the comédie humaine.”** And in 1884, Professor Lounsbury, who felt that the real Fielding should be derived from the books rather than from hearsay, made a strong plea in The Century Magazine for something nearer a complete edition than had as yet appeared.** Before long, news of the Fielding revival had reached the theatres. It was in 1886 that Robert Buchanan produced a new dramatic rendering of Tom Jones in a play entitled “Sophia,”*° which was followed in 1888 by a version of Field- ing’s first novel under the caption, “‘Joseph’s Sweetheart.” A writer in TWe Saturday Review (for April 17, 1886) made sport of the “distortions” which Buchanan had introduced in “Sophia”; yet the fact remains that despite an unpropitious beginning, this play held the boards consecutively for “over five hundred nights.” “Joseph’s Sweetheart” was also success- ful, running for more than “three hundred and fifty”’ nights. Both plays were, of course, remote enough from their origi- nals; but undoubtedly many who witnessed them turned, sooner or later, the pages of that “supreme genius”*°—to use Buchanan’s words—who was their inspiration. The prologue to ““Joseph’s Sweetheart,” spoken by Lady Booby, runs in part: Then rose Sophia at Fielding’s conjuration, Like Venus from the sea—of affectation. Then madcap Tom showed, in his sport and passion, A man’s a man for a’ that, ’spite the fashion. Then Parson Adams, type of honest worth, Born of the pure embrace of Love and Mirth, Smiled in the English sunshine, proving clear That one true heart is worth a world’s veneer! 83 Dowden, E., “Oliver Goldsmith,” in T. H. Ward’s English Poets, London and New York, 1880, III, 368. 84 The Century Magazine, XXVII, 635. 8° For the cast, see The Graphic, April 17, 1886. 86 For a detailed account of the plays, see Harriet Jay’s Robert Buchanan, London, 1903, pp. 237-240. ee a J tuba et v4 rete bs mee ebiienhante Tree ee paiptrehtabetents s ee oa Pt Sr error Tr > Jie ole tee eater tab aet peebinectie cin tat en bat tte) ee eee cit tideeh Let eee oe * . : % lad ry th ip 7 a draabhent pte Ook eatin ae a — te ee rents ke ws Prt Se ag ry ee idm iabee tenement ‘ S41 Aseinns. So eee PSY Et ot bv tke ate awh gh yt ti 4 fe ei; ret : i a ay a ~~) ee ee ee er re re ar Swantonpetenamih ine Ian ane or std St Sr pene ee bihihan lead eee rere 490 FIELDING THE NOVELIST After these many years, then, the characters of Fielding’s novels—rehabilitated for a later time—were again playing their roles on the English stage. In the prologue from which we have just quoted, the voice of the spurious Cawthorn of the Poet’s Corner in The Gentleman's Magazine was heard again: Off fell the mask that darken’d and concealed Life’s face, and Human Nature stood revealed! *? And at least one nineteenth-century Poet’s Corner was redo- lent of Fielding’s new springtime: The trophies of his genius blaze Through three half-centuries of haze We hear the very larks that trilled When Fielding wrote.*® Saintsbury and Gosse—whose editions of the novelist were to appear in the next decade—were already speaking apprecia- tively of him; and Andrew Lang, another great lover of the author, had written that excellent passage—which everyone knows—on Fielding’s style. Fielding’s style, in fact, was now entering upon a new career of praise. As early as 1885, Pro- fessor Saintsbury took occasion to commend his prose in the preface to Craik’s Specimens. Up to that time, the honor of being regarded as a stylist was one which had not been gen- erally conferred upon him; only within the past generation have excerpts from Fielding been at all common in anthologies of English prose. In his preface, Saintsbury, attacking the old charge of pedantry (which, popular at the end of the eight- eenth century, had been revived by Thackeray) boldly de- clared that “The great genius of Fielding . . was from nothing so averse as from everything that had the semblance or the reality of pretension, pedantry, or conceit.”°® But the 87 Harriet Jay’s Robert Buchanan, p. 239. Cawthorn’s verses had ap- peared in Dobson’s Fielding. 88 The Critic (New York), IX (N.S.), 183 (April, 1888). °° Specimens of English Prose Style, London, 1885, p. XXVI.FROM DOBSON TO HENLEY 491 best characterization of Fielding’s style came from the pen of Andrew Lang, who, in his Letters on Literature, gave an es- pecially happy turn to Murphy’s figure of the river as adapted by Walter Scott. ““[here is somewhat inexpressibly heartening, to me,” he says, “‘in the style of Fielding. One seems to be carried along, like a swimmer in a strong, clear, stream, trust- ing one’s self to every whirl and eddy, with a feeling of safety, of comfort, or delightful ease in the motion of the elastic water.”*° Edmund Gosse, in his History of English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, also commends Fielding as “a prose writer,” instancing the initial essays, which, as he observes, were imitated not only by Thackeray but “‘by George Eliot.” His general estimate of Fielding is not, indeed, so eloquent as it became later; nor can he join with Thackeray in warmly praising Amelia. ““Those who have preferred Amelia to its predecessors” must have been “over-enchanted,” he says, “by the character of its patient and saintly heroine, without whom the book would fall to pieces,” for many of the incidents “are crudely introduced.” To his mind, Booth—‘‘on whom it can scarcely be doubted that the world has unjustly built its con- ception of Fielding himself”—is “‘very natural and human, but unstable to the last degree, and noticeably stupid”; and— though “humane and tender’”—the novel on the whole is “a little dull.” But for all that, its author is the “greatest of English novelists”: Parson Adams, “alone, would be a con- tribution to English letters”; Jonathan Wild—never “a fa- vourite” because of its ‘“‘caustic cynicism and the unbroken gloom of its tone”—is “‘equal to the best”’ Fielding “has left us in force and originality”; and in Tom Jones the “winds of heaven blow along the pages” and the “stage is filled” with the “healthiest company ever devised by a human brain.” Dobson’s biography, then, marks a turning point in Field- 40 Andrew Lang’s Letters on Literature, London and New York, 1889, p. 38. 41 Gosse, E., 4 History of English Literature in the Eighteenth Century, London, 1889. it “ et rh Pa a ' i) +! $ ; “+ A 8 datas eet een Aree ae rr Stas Sek ba bea | med beh etal 8 a eee eee ls Ge Spahr ee eet ereatrs seanemne ene ge praeannantertengspentndet Seren bebe wh pit oT it co eee peti ehinnetethenan nets aye aye im ra we wer Eat balers rer ” Ler rea ee aebat ne ee Le EN adeed ane oe Nath - we a Y 7 Ve J kd ve) ' i oe g Pemes 492 FIELDING THE NOVELIST ing’s reputation. But it may be doubted whether such an un- obtrusive book would have had so great an effect a decade or two earlier; it is not overstating the case to say that it appeared in the very nick of time. The critics of the new generation who were now settling down to work disparaged neither the novel nor the century that inaugurated it. Not only Dobson but Henley, Saintsbury, Gosse, Lang, and many others—all well disposed toward Fielding—sincerely desired to bring about a saner appreciation of his achievement. And surely there was work for them to do; for the old stories still per- sisted. A case in point is the “sketch” (1889) of Fielding’s life prepared for the “Illustrated Sterling Edition” —a queer, rhapsodical compilation,*” in which exceptional praise is min- gled with exceptional calumny. The writer, Alfred Trumble, recalling Thackeray, tells us that Fielding was “an honest man generous as just, kindly, considerate, unselfish,” whether in “his cups” or “in the sober senses which brought him . . . anguish and remorse.” Elaborating upon the Wal- pole story, he represents him, even when a magistrate, as “reck- less and given to excess”—-so lacking in ‘“‘personal dignity” that he prefers “low company”; and draws for us a fancy picture of the Justice sitting “‘in dirty ruffles and tarnished and threadbare garb, with red eyes and jaundiced face.” On ac- count of its author’s debts and duns and ‘“‘headaches,” he won- ders that Amelia can be as good as it is. No previous editor had added just this touch—that the novelist was “‘red-eyed” with drink. A more out-and-out disparager of Fielding was the romantic author of John Inglesant. Though Shorthouse praises the character of Amelia for a “purity which walks un- spotted through evil of every kind,” he condemns Tom Jones as “nature in its lowest form.” He draws a long and far- fetched parallel between Tom and the Prodigal Son, and refers to the former as a stupid body “who draws his tedious ** A “Sketch” of Fielding’s life signed “Alfred Trumble,” August, 1889, in the Jonathan Wild volume of the “Illustrated Sterling Edi- tion,” Boston [7.d.].FROM DOBSON TO HENLEY 493 and dirty steps through a slough of . . . filth.”’** Later still, we have a characterization of Fielding and his works by the popular writer of the Reveries of a Bachelor. Mitchell ac- knowledges that Dobson’s Life is “more trustworthy” than that of Scott, yet he deliberately views his subject through the “charming retrospective glasses of Thackeray”; therefore he elaborates upon the “inked ruffles” and the “‘wet towel,” and represents the Great Ironist as a “‘jovial, kind-hearted, rollick- ing, dare-devil of a man, with no great guile in him,” whose works—for “‘filth is filth” —are tainted by “the bestialities of such tavern-bagnios as poor Fielding knew too well.’** As- suredly Dom Jones had a hard name; only after legal action in 1894 was a certain book company permitted “to sell” copies of Tom Jones, Rabelais, and The Decameron.** But against such representations as these Fielding’s defend- ers now came trooping. Fittingly enough the new decade had been ushered in by Henley’s Views and Reviews (1890), which, though merely a revised reprint of the criticisms on Stephen and Dobson seven or eight years before, was now, be- cause of its book form, of the author’s increased reputation as a critic, and of the general movement—since Dobson—toward a more rational outlook on Fielding, to become a rather influ- ential document. While retouching his criticisms Henley could still exclaim as before: ““There is enough of sustained intel- lectual effort” in “‘certain chapters’ of Jonathan Wild “to furnish forth a hundred modern novels; but you only think of Fielding reeling home from the Rose’; and could declare that the “consequence of all these exercises in sentiment and imagination has been that, while many have been ready to deal 43 “The Humorous in Literature” (Macmillan’s Magazine, March, 1883), in the Literary Remains of J. H. Shorthouse, London, 1905, Il, 262, 263, 278-280. 44D. G. Mitchell’s English Lands, Letters, and Kings, New York, 1895, III, 70, 68, 67. 45 The Critic (New York), XXIV, 444. “Not long ago,” writes W. L. George, “the Municipal Libraries of Doncaster and Dewsbury banished T'0m Jones.”—A Novelist on Novels, London, 1918, p. 126. a Sanipeieeatetans = pheiay sae w yes, pi names eS x, “ FY pity Pe; a a fee La M 4) : é peeeerrst rs Ica at et pty Set aia ee re nr eee See par ree eye PR Oh ear rh See ‘ or Ee Se ree See ea te ee 1 mt Ce ee eee ert tie 7FIELDING THE NOVELIST 494 with Fielding as the text for a sermon. . . as the point of a moral or the adornment of a tale, few have cared to think of him as worthy to dispute the palm with Cervantes and Sir Walter as the heroic man of letters.” *® Certainly such persons were now more numerous, however, and the reaction against Thackeray was becoming more and more palpable. In 1891, Mr. Quiller-Couch*’ (now Sir Arthur), objecting to Mr. Marzial’s praise of the English Humourists, characterizes its author as ‘fa volunteer constable—determined to warn his polite hearers what sort of men these were whose books they had hitherto read unsuspectingly.” The Fielding that ‘Thack- eray presents to us, he says, is a “burely fictitious low come- dian.” Of like opinion is Professor Saintsbury, who, notwith- standing his admiration for Thackeray, deals rather firmly with him. In the general introduction to his edition (1893) of Fielding’s works, he writes as follows: “Partly on the obiter dicta of persons like these [i.e., Lady Mary, Walpole, Richardson, and Johnson], partly on the still more tempting and still more treacherous ground of indications drawn from his works, a Fielding of fantasy has been constructed, which in Thackeray’s admirable sketch attains real life and immor- tality as a creature of art, but which possesses rather dubious claims as a historical character. It is astonishing how this Fielding of fantasy sinks and shrivels when we begin to apply the horrid tests of criticism” to ‘‘component parts’’—this “eidolon, with inked ruffles and a towel round his head.””*® Nothing could better illustrate the changing attitude toward Fielding which was now coming about than the clash of arms which resulted from Stevenson’s attack*® on Tom Jones in Scribner's Magazine for June, 1888. In this article Stevenson 46 Henley’s Views and Reviews: Literature, London, 1890, p. 231. 47 Quiller-Couch, A., Adventures in Criticism, London, 1896, pp. 91, 92. 48 Fielding’s Works, edited by Saintsbury, London, 1893, I, xxil- xxiii (Introduction to Joseph Andrews). 49 Among Fielding’s defenders was J. A. Steuart.—Letters to Living Authors, new ed., London, 1892, pp. 14, 168, 208. Smeets tee - Pinhead ee ee eee BL ees fF | ae ieFROM DOBSON TO HENLEY 495 labors to maintain the paradox that while as a man Fielding was “‘a gentleman” and Richardson “undeniably was not,” as an “‘odd inversion.” an author the case was just the reverse Therefore he finds Lovelace a gentleman “of undisputed quality,” while “in Tom Jones, with its voluminous bulk and troops of characters, there is no shadow of a gentleman, for Allworthy is only ink and paper.” Parson Adams, he says, “has no pretension ‘to the genteel’”’; and in Amelia, though “things get better” —for “Booth and Dr. Harrison will pass in a crowd’—Dr. Harrison among Richardson’s elegant peo- ple would have “‘seemed a plain, honest man, a trifle below his company; while poor Booth” would have “‘been glad to slink away with Mowbray and crack a bottle in the butler’s room.” And how, pray, do gentlemen act! Stevenson tells us: ‘“They rs 2 eI oe =: ere eens Fa} bt 5 i | j i i Bi 3 have a gallant, a conspicuous carriage; they roll into the book, four in hand, in gracious attitudes.” It “is one of the curiosities that Fielding, who wrote one cc of literature,” says Stevenson, book that was engaging, truthful, kind, and clean, and another book that was dirty, dull, and false, should be spoken of, the world over, as the author of the second and not the first, as the author of Tom Jones, not of Amelia.”°’° Even Augustine Bir- rell—_who was so fond of Richardson as to make the amazing statement that the printer did “more good every week of his life” than “Fielding was ever able to do throughout the whole of his”°*—regarded Stevenson’s own dictum as a “curiosity of literature”; criticism was in a vastly precarious state, he said, when Tom Jones could be characterized as “‘dull.” In 1893 the battle was still raging, with the odds in Fielding’s favor. The Saturday Review of April 22, commenting on the “little controversy, of a kind beloved by the aggressively Pure,” that “has arisen over the morals of T'om Jones,” de- clares that Stevenson’s assertion to the effect that T'om Jones is both “dull and dirty,” causes “the eyes of amazement to 50 Stevenson, R. L., “Some Gentlemen in Fiction,” in Scribner's Magazine, Ill, 766. 51 A. Birrell’s “Samuel Richardson” (1892), in Res Judicatae, New York, 1892, p. 7.496 FIELDING THE NOVELIST open wide.” Fielding’s “real position,” continues the reviewer, was to correct an attitude of mind in which “a prodigious pother” is made “about one single point of conduct,” while ““senerosity, kindness, charity, goodness of heart—are almost neglected.” It is to this controversy that Professor Saintsbury refers in the general introduction from which we quoted a moment ago. “‘Just when the first sheets of this edition were passing through the press” (1893), he writes, “a violent at- tack 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.”°* Of the latter opinion were many of the fiction-writers of the day, among them Marion Crawford, who says: ““That our prevailing moral literary pu- rity is to some extent assumed is shown by the undeniable fact that women who blush scarlet, and men who feel an odd sensation of repulsion in reading some pages of “Tom Jones’ are not conscious of any particular shock when their sensibilities are attacked in French. Some of them call Zola a ‘pig’ but read all his books industriously.”** Instead of repeating the time-worn slanders of ‘Thackeray and others, critics were now more and more inclining toward actual investigation. There was, for example, the venerable sneer at what Thackeray was pleased to call Fielding’s “two- penny learning,” a libel which runs back to the days of “Or- bilius” and other Grub Street enemies. This ancient fallacy, which had done particular damage since the days of The Eng- lish Humourists, received a considerable set-back when Austin Dobson, ever busy, fortunately discovered the “Catalogue of the entire and valuable Library of Books of the Late Henry Fielding, Esq.,” and called the attention of the public (in 1895) to the size and quality of the collection which Fielding °2 The Saturday Review, LXXV, 421. 63 Fielding’s Works, I, xxv. 54 Crawford, M., The Novel: What it is, London and New York, 1893, pp. 38-39. Not so Holmes, who, though repudiating Zola, pleas- antly refers (in his Autocrat) to Tom Jones. Sate pal Ooteereer nc Te > a ramen bomen esFROM DOBSON TO HENLEY 497 ee teed had accumulated and which he had turned to such good advan- tage during his lifetime. After discussing in detail the con- r Hf if Fee fi iG | ay * i= (p Hf = Pai es aif ree A pe tents of the library, Dobson comes to the following conclu- sion: “When it is found that in his youth Fielding had been a fervent student of the classics, that he remained throughout life a voracious reader; and that his works everywhere afford confirmation of both these things, it is perhaps not unreason- ge collection able to conclude that he made good use of the lar of Greek and Latin authors which he left behind him at his death, and that he was, in reality, the scholar he has been af- firmed to be. In any case, the evidence of his learning is a hundred times better than most of that which for years past has been industriously brought forward in regard to some of 9955 the less worshipful incidents of his career. Accordingly Professor Cross, who has recently gone over the matter in greater detail and has emphasized the proper inferences which should be drawn regarding the novelist’s scholarship, declares that “Fielding acquired the largest working library possessed by any man of letters in the eighteenth century, surpassing 86 As early as the ’Nineties, Dobson’s even Dr. Johnson’s. discovery gave the signal for a new evaluation of Fielding as a scholar. Edmund Gosse, for example, wrote as follows: “A singularly false conception of Fielding prevails, as of a rude and rustic talent, without training, without the humanities. Even Thackeray has sneered at his ‘two-penny learning.’ . But our conception of him is imperfect at the outset if we do not realize that he was preéminently one of those great English writers who have owed their start-word to a sound classical scholarship. Fielding was the type of the well-edu- cated country gentleman, taught at Eton, trained at Leyden, elegantly proficient in the modern languages. But he was more than this: he was ‘uncommonly versed in the Greek authors,’ and when all other intellectual comforts failed, his Plato ac- companied him on the last sad voyage to Lisbon. His library, 55 Bibliographica, Vol. 1, 1895, pp- 163-1735 Teprinted in Ezght- eenth Century Vignettes, third series, 1896, pp. 164-178. 56 Cross’s Fielding, Ill, 77.| A 7 fe a We ¥ is ig Wd: yh hy my PS ‘3 $/ te a nn errr Ts Ast, “ eee ee Tune eee Se a . 498 FIELDING THE NOVELIST which was poor in light literature, was rich in editions of Lucian and Aristophanes, and his statement of what he owed to the Greeks was no such ‘absurd brag’ as hasty criticism has affected to think it.’”’”' If Fielding was, after all, a scholar, the inference followed that his initial essays might deserve more careful consideration than they had ever before received. Fin de siécle critics turned again to the prolegomenous chapters; and the question of their legitimacy and their effectiveness—a topic which from the be- ginning had been heatedly discussed—was, at the end of the nineteenth century, nearer a solution than ever before. One reason for this, presumably, is to be found in the popularity given to interpolated commentary by Thackeray, George Eliot, Meredith, and Henry James. George Eliot’s own praise of Fielding’s inter-chapters.was frequently quoted. There were critics, of course, who complained that any intervention on the part of the author himself spoils the illusion; but since Ste- phen’s defense of the “‘chorus” in the early Eighties; that is, since the beginning of the new actual study of the novelist’s art, Fielding’s practice had been more generally defended. By the new school of critics, with whom the ‘“‘author’s purpose” became a slogan, Fielding’s own intention (.e., to fuse drama, epic, and essay in one great narrative vehicle for the criticism of life) was more commonly understood, and it was often conceded that the essay element further justified its use by charm of expression. As Andrew Lang remarked in 1898, Dickens’s attempts in this way “never won an excuse by a style like that of Thackeray or Fielding.”°* No one but a child,” wrote Leslie Stephen, could find his delight in the progress of the story really destroyed by the writer’s judicious commentary. We may observe, moreover, that the use of ini- tial essays can be justified by the principle of variety (Field- ing’s own contention), particularly in an immense architec- tural plan like that of Tom Jones. They can also be defended, 57 Edmund Gosse’s Introduction to The Works of Henry Fielding, I; xv. 58 The Fortnightly Review, LXIV (N.S.), 954.FROM DOBSON TO HENLEY 499 It a ort —— ' ee — ‘ sabe phatehhaet terres thie we sea — Stews de ~S as Professor Winchester has pointed out, on the score that they 9959 a Sen, oti ahok agen ane” Set ee ees give a certain “objective reality”®® to the persons and events >) > i" which they discuss. “Some recent English novelists wrote Professor Cross in 1899, “who have learned the tech- a nique of their art from the French, find it against their liter- ary conscience to indulge in the excursus. . . . But in Field- ee ey are ing’s large conception of a novel, these introductory chapters rs id pn) a Cor Pilani eet eet heen a tee form a distinctive part; they are the chorus of the drama in- at oe we ee si} terpreting the meaning of the passing incidents, or they are a4 the monologues and asides of the author turned player when he wishes to take the audience into his confidence.” When George Eliot spoke of the “‘lusty ease” of Fielding’s ‘ A PSS aaa oe att bubthel es pee " Sthc*viwrtp cepsabanet a peeks “fine English,” she was thinking mainly of his “‘initial chap- § ) ge ) } ters’; a consideration of these miniature essays very naturally resulted—with an unprejudiced reader—in an increased atten- tion to the author’s style. Thus it happened that at the end of the century, after Stevenson had drawn especial notice to « beauty of pattern, and when—as never before—critics of ore ae literature became interested in English prose style, Fielding’s t met A rtf i es +e iy power of expression was subjected to a more thorough inspec- tion than it had previously received. That his rating as a stylist went steadily higher must be regarded as a substantial triumph. Perceptible in the "Eighties, the new movement had advanced very greatly by the following decade. “‘As a master of style,” wrote Henry Craik,” in 1895, “Fielding has a claim on our admiration, apart from all the other attributes of his genius. It seems strange in regard to Fielding to set aside all the wealth of human sympathy, all the range of humour, all the vividness of character-drawing, and to restrict ourselves solely to the one aspect that interests us here, his place as a writer of prose. His style reflects much that is distinctive of his genius, its massive carelessness, its strong simplicity, its clearness of oe a ONT Ty 9 AiAj= vmhi>Compeba gah sgspepm\rwngaae ee oan praemennnnte wiginoainds ysetesnosorecesrants 59 Winchester, C. T., Some Principles of Literary Criticism, New York, 1899, p. 306. 60 Development of the English Novel, p. 48. 61 Henry Craik’s introduction to English Prose Selections, New York, 1895, IV, 10. eee eras " , ‘ Tra et Sy een Cee eer ry tad dpe oot d Se ee et ee CAEL Af fn iar y ES ett Ne RAS “ ee Pt aeee a ror ee Soe) See m" < oe ear rents eneene aC EE RET ars So ial ieee cca tuhaiaadie eens ha ee ei Seren rears a F 4 Ld , 500 FIELDING THE NOVELIST outline, and its consummate ease. But above all things” he represents “two leading characteristics of his age, its irony and its scholarship. Fielding was from first to last a man of letters, as the character was conceived in his time—without pedantry, without strain, without the constraint of subtlety, but always imbued with the instinct of the scholar, never forgetting that, in the full rush of his exuberant fancy and his audacious hu- mour, he must give to his style that indescribable quality that makes it permanent, that forces us to place it in the first rank of literary effort, that, even when irregular, pleads for no allowance on the score of neglect of art. He challenges com- parison on merely literary grounds with the best models of literary art, and he is no loser by the comparison.” In the same volume, Professor Saintsbury dwelt upon the service which ‘mighty merits . Fielding had rendered English fiction by his of power and range” of expression;°* while J. H. Millar wrote, ““We are not, indeed, to look to Richardson for that nameless quality of style which is the property of a scholar and a gentleman such as Fielding was.”** Three years before, even Mr. Birrell had allowed Richardson’s competitor a “superb lusty style” (presumably a reminiscence of George Eliot) which “carries you along like a pair of horses over a level moorland road.”°* In 1896, J. H. Lobban commended (in his English Essays) Fielding’s “‘vigorous easy style” and “sood-humoured racy wit.” ‘Thackeray . . .,” wrote Her- bert Paul, during the following year, “‘cannot quite be said to have made the novel literary. Fielding with his ripe scholar- ship and his magnificent sweep of diction, was beforehand Edmund Gosse, perhaps thinking of Andrew Lang, praises the “‘vitality and elastic vigour” of the language of Joseph Andrews. And a reviewer in The Academy, writ- ing of the status of the novelist in the year 1898, asserts that 9965 with him. 82 Craik’s English Prose, IV, 114, 115. 63 Ibid. IV, <8. ®* Res Judicatae, p. 19. 6° Paul, Herbert, The Victorian Novel, London, 1897, p. 127. 68 Gosse, E.. The Works of Henry Fielding, 1, xxvi.FROM DOBSON TO HENLEY 501 whatever else critics may quarrel about they are unanimous in declaring Fielding to be “the greatest master of narrative style who ever wrote in the English tongue. The supple, sin- ewy strength of the sentences; their apparent ease and sim- plicity; their real force and expression and mastery are un- approached.”®’ In his initial essays, wrote Professor Cross in 1899, Fielding “found a place for that poetry which the >) Euphuists tried to incorporate into fiction”; the passage on Sophia, in his judgment, reaching “the high-water mark of restrained eloquence.” From the fact that so many writers were looking minutely into the style of Fielding 5) it may be inferred that fiction had now become the object of serious study. Such was, indeed, the case. It was in 1884 that Walter Besant, Stevenson, and Henry James took part in their celebrated triangular controversy on the “Art of Fiction,” during which Besant, by the way, al- ways a lover of the novelist—whose works he had already turned to account in The Chaplain of the Fleet—ignored Richardson and Smollett and listed the “great Masters” as “Fielding, Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Victor Hugo.”’®* James, also, had an eye on Fielding, classing him (at a later time) with Shakespeare and Cervantes as one of the “fine painters of life,” and particularly admiring the “amplitude of re- flexion” of this man who was “handsomely possessed of a mind.” We see the character of the unimaginative Tom Jones, he remarks, “through the mellow air of Fielding’s fine old moralism, fine old humour and fine old style, which somehow 2970 ar 4 HY a3 3 re. a3 rr ret ay really enlarge, make every one and every thing important. In the ’Nineties the English novel, belatedly taking its place in college curricula (at least in America), was at last securing attention from trained investigators within academic walls as ay Ea Behe hotel nant ie Oe ee net er eR re 87 The Academy, LIII, 128 (signed “P”). 68 Development of the English Novel, p. 48. 69 See his Art of Fiction (April 25, 1884). In The Chaplain of the Fleet by Besant and Rice, London, 1881, there are many references; for example, I, 307, 308, 309; II, 128, 200, 259; III, 1o. 70 The Princess Casamassima, New York, 1908, I, xii, xiii, xiv. ee ae Pose este tg eeER rere een Pt re ral Pare ST ee eae anastasia ee nae era verge ped ete i peepee tet He 502 FIELDING THE NOVELIST well as without. Significantly enough, there appeared during this decade two notable works on fiction—Raleigh’s English Novel (1894), which ended with Walter Scott; and Cross’s Development of the English Novel (1899), which covered the entire field. One has only to look back through previous treatises to realize the striking change in breadth and sanity that was now coming about. Even the excellent “Tuckerman in 1882, who did better by Fielding than previous historians of fiction, was so greatly influenced by Taine that he found “unfit for general pe- the “tone” of the great novels—then rusal”—merely a “rollicking, careless joyousness.”** Unlike most of their predecessors, both Professor (later Sir Walter) Raleigh and Professor Cross approach their subject in a spirit of disinterested inquiry; with them Tom Jones is not a scape- grace because Fielding’s ethical notions were “tainted” or “blunted” by his life, nor do they express the wish that the work might be blotted “from the face of the earth.” The Lady Bellaston incident, according to Raleigh, only “lays a strong emphasis on the main theme of the book, and makes its intel- lectual framework all the clearer.”"* In Tom Jones, writes Cross,** “‘the novel not only definitely assumes a new form, but a new ethics much more respectable than that founded upon utilitarianism and formulated in ‘beautiful and edifying maxims.’ ” Fielding had said,"* “‘I have shown that no acqui- sitions of guilt can compensate the loss of that solid inward comfort of mind, which is the sure companion of innocence and virtue; nor can in the least balance the evil of that horror and anxiety which, in their room, guilt introduces into our bosoms.” Here we have, as Cross points out, “a complete re- pudiation of Richardson, if not of Addison; the point of view has shifted from . doing to being, and the shifting means 71B. Tuckerman’s History of English Prose Fiction, New York, 1882, pp. 203 ff. 72. W. Raleigh’s English Novel, London, 1894, p. 174. "3 Development of the English Novel, pp. 51, 50. “4 Dedication to Tom Jones, Henley edition, III, 12.FROM DOBSON TO HENLEY 503 war against formalism.” Very different, this, from the heredi- tary comparisons between Richardson the moralist and Field- ing the profligate! T'om Jones, declares Professor Raleigh, is Fielding’s “sonorous verdict on human life and human con- duct. Whether regarded for its art or for its thought, whether treated as detached scenes of the human comedy, as an example of plot-architecture, or as an attempt at the solution of certain wide problems of life, no truer, saner book has ever been written. Indeed, to borrow the words of the American poet, ‘this is no book; who touches this touches a man.’” Raleigh cannot refrain from adding, in view of the old stories about the novelist still current at the century-end: ““The very quali- ties that have been foremost in finding Fielding enemies (if those who waste their time in apologizing for him, allowing him the benefit of the age in which he lived, and pitying him, may be so called) have also found him the warmest friends. His splendid candour, his magnanimity, his tolerance, spring from no ignorance or indifference; he is keenly sensitive to minute traits of character, and merciless to meanness.” Then, as a parting shot, comes this statement: “Books are written to be read by those who can understand them; their possible effect on those who cannot is a matter of medical rather than of lit- erary interest.” As may well be imagined, the position taken by Professor Cross and Professor Raleigh in what were to become standard treatises on fiction for college classes as well as for the general public, was one of the most influential fac- tors in establishing a truer evaluation of Fielding’s achieve- ment. And there can be no better evidence of the high quality of that achievement than the fact that under the disinterested and comparative method of the specialist his rating even more palpably outdistanced that of his famous contemporaries. One of the most important features of the great awakening as regards prose fiction in general and Henry Fielding in par- ticular, was a better understanding and appreciation of the art of the realist. It is true that W. D. Howells had little use for Fielding, whose Amelia and Sophia found no place in the 5) PN ae OP Ti Ie i art trecesarerwensenabndehatit® aa vere eo Pt Martot ETE E TT $a Ms See a Leen) a ttc sk bia a On ford it bo pe) ee eee etphe Seer iti Mie aren. oo rt al ee ere ive ten ee Poren ee art re eas ete or eens eee er Soesyenen: Teel nd =.) A ~~ >, oo 4 , na ag aehecmoybangs eoemrobeastvowagsicleh t ao = ew eee ee fee pre er net een ares0 Nt a ertattel tedsnrashes eeban bnaetee eee ae heihiacie date ee een Oe 504 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Heroines of Fiction (1901) and whose coarseness’° barred him from that writer’s Literary Passions. Even George Gis- sing, commenting (1898) upon the novels read by young Dickens, declares that ‘‘these old novelists are strong food,” though he thinks ‘‘a boy who 1s to enrich the literature of the world may well be nourished upon them.”"* But the compari- son invited by the works of Zola and his followers threw a new light on the realism of Fielding. The difference between the two writers (noted earlier by Brunetiére and Leslie Ste- phen) was now much more generally recognized than ever be- fore. In 1892, Brander Matthews, for instance, apropos of Zola’s lack of “‘joyousness and humour,” particularly com- mended the love which Fielding, as a true follower of Cer- vantes, bore “‘the children of his brain”; “Thackeray, in his opinion, did not follow his master closely in this respect, or he would never have “‘pursued” and “‘harried” Becky Sharp.”* In 1894, attention’® had been called to Fielding’s inclusion in Amelia of real children, whose “‘prattle is natural,” and who “in the most innocent fashion the stead- constantly illustrate fastness” of their beloved mother. In fact, so often during this period (while the public was reading Zola) did Fielding have the preference with the reviewers that, in the words of J. M. Robertson—who held a brief for the Frenchman—the “same journals” which lifted their “hands” at the “‘passionless sci- ence” of Zola glossed over the “leering prurience”” of Field- ing. In 1899 Cross drew the line distinctly and finally be- tween French naturalism and the realism of Fielding by showing how a naturalistic writer would have handled the ’S Howells’s “Henry James, Jr.,” in The Century Magazine, XXV, 28 (November, 1882). “© George Gissing’s Charles Dickens, New York, 1904, p. 27. ‘' Matthews, Brander, Aspects of Fiction, New York, 1896, pp. 180, 171. 78 . d ‘ . . . . By H. E. Scudder in Childhood in Literature and Art, 1894, Pp. 135. 79 : / ite ‘’ Robertson, J. M., Essays towards a Critical Method, London, 1889, p. 137.ae baht ahs oe pm mort Seni ee ee te ? ete ete SEI ta ras ee Tey PT faye tet ys 4 eed a at omennem, Ps 3 s — “4 j Hj 1% ) BB, 5 Me Soh Late fh. LAL. BALE. (Aig £4, 1 — ———— ~ ho call ue = ee eee ee a pert bd ~ Ts ar - sona-wratanat soa thGusohonrat gt it~ Reyne RS eras te + re Sa AMELIA. <== the affecting interview between Amelia - whi ber children on their being brought — = a4 fo ocr dung their Pa fhers imprisonment dH Bask: 3 Duyr 3 Lage (57 i r i t . AMELIA AND HER CHILDREN an tte Cee eres ee PN ae ta LO FEE TV rte hn es 2 pie in wtee Lenn aa ee oan’ SSS ee ee toe ene ae Nene pean Sere ene me he See Hl ee ee acs = maya eee rhe errr eee ee Sear eyFROM DOBSON TO HENLEY 505 theme of Amelia—by transporting Booth “to the West In- dies,” and turning “Amelia with her children into the street” or giving “her over as mistress to Colonel James”—a proce- dure which, as he justly observes, the “‘infinite tenderness” of the English author prevented.*° This appreciation of Fielding’s realism sounds very different from the talk of Sidney Lanier, or—to go back a generation or two—the grumblings of the idealistic Northcote or those of the sentimental Fitzgerald. Bliss Perry, defending realism in 1902, declared that Lanier’s “rather tropical language for a professed critic.” outburst was “Without claiming for a moment that eighteenth century fic- tion shows perfect art or a perfect morality,” he writes, “we may still assert that it is just as legitimate for a novelist to base his work upon human nature as it is, as upon human nature as he would wish it to be.” Fielding, he continues, “‘is quite ca- pable of fighting his own battles. His readers will gladly sacri- fice “the sublimities’ if they may be allowed to observe Partridge in the theatre,” or Amelia “more Amiable than Gay.” “Such 8" Also of this opinion was Professor Saints- writing endures. bury, who emphatically insisted some years later that ‘“The art that re-creates the model is certainly not less great than the art that invents out of the head.’’** It need hardly be said that the recognition of the greatness of the art of the realist as com- pared with that of the romantic idealist forms one of the most important modern contributions to the study of fiction. Fielding’s tenderness, thus revealed by students of the novel, was seen more clearly than ever before by reason of the vir- tual reclamation, during the last years of the century, of the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. In 1892 Austin Dobson 80 Development of the English Novel, pp. 56-57. To Coventry Pat- more “there are few things so pathetic in literature as the story of the supper” and Amelia’s “noble reticence.”—Principle in Art, London, N.d.. P. 33- 81 Bliss Perry’s Study of Prose Fiction, Boston and New York, 1902, PP- 234-235. 82 Saintsbury, G., Fielding (“Masters of Literature”), London, 1909, p. XXvIl. ee ae ees are ry air on ee PRT re SE eee an Ee eee Terr PPP Mp im, mPa LP EP ry FE ae ang See a Ps Bey or Te ee nn ore? Remy Temeee ee me Hf i Ei . oy ee if i a ip oes | 7. t oY oH if atl ae ei ee Pham inde ygerepegeneurmanes a eye oe a506 FIELDING THE NOVELIST brought out an edition of the work in a separate volume, pref- acing it with an excellent introduction, in which he drew at- tention to the two forms in which the book had appeared and suggested the solution to a rather puzzling question. At the end of his essay he wrote, “In short, if the ‘Voyage to Lisbon’ be not” Fielding’s “best work, at least it gives a picture of fortitude, of cheerful patience, of manly endurance under trial, which may be fairly described as unexampled in our literature.” “Many men,” he continues, “begin life as wildly and recklessly as Henry Fielding, but not to many is it given to end it as nobly as he did. He expended his last energies in works of philanthropy and benevolence; . ._ and he went to a foreign grave with the courage of a hero and the dignity 322 of a philosopher.”** Dobson admits too readily, no doubt, the wildness of the novelist in his younger days—surely, in this matter, Professor Cross’s recent biography is the safer guide; but the attention which he thus drew to a work everyone must know if he would understand the author aright was a note- worthy item in establishing a new Fielding in place of the old. When Stevenson died (in 1894), Mr. Quiller-Couch very happily pointed out the parallel between the “cheerful stoi- cism” of the modern romancer and that of his famous prede- cessor.** It is an interesting fact that, during the Great War, , as Mr. de Castro observes, considered the V ovage of “‘sufficient interest to include passages from 1t among 9985 the London Times the broadsheets supplied to the English army in the trenches. Had the earlier writers on Fielding and his works studied his last Journal with even ordinary care the caricature of him as a rollicking wastrel or a brutal picaresquer could never have enjoyed so great a vogue. During the last decade of the century, along with the saner appreciation of Fielding’s own tenderness and wholesomeness, came a more cordial and rational view of the tenderness and 8: . : 8 “Introduction” to the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, London, 1892, p. Xxi. acest eee ae eevee ae aa SE idaho focus Adventures in Criticism, London, 1896, p. 179. 5 Notes and Queries, 12 S., Il, August 5, 1916, p. oat. ee ee peer tat ~ ptaiebhere tie ee ne BO respee) Ps oo oe Oa OS 4 A Cake ea BP EEE PS ee ee Te 7 FROM DOBSON TO HENLEY 507 wholesomeness of his women characters. Mr. Birrell, it is true, defending Richardson,” falls foul of Amelia and Sophia as “stage properties as old as the Plantagenets’; declares that their “characters” are ‘ ‘made to hinge solely upon their will- the triumphant, orthodox Fielding, to whom man was a rollicking ingness . . . to turn a blind eye’; and pictures for us “ sinner, and woman a loving slave.’ But this hereditary view of Fielding’s heroines was in the ’Nineties much less com- monly entertained. It was Thackeray, of course, who made Amelia popular. Still, “(Thackeray’s appreciation, eulogistic as it was, was somewhat over-sentimentalized, somewhat lacking in strength: there was always lurking in the background the idea that when Fielding created Amelia he was thinking of himself as the erring and penitent Booth; that in pleading for Booth, Amelia was pleading for Fielding the profligate; and that a woman who would excuse the delinquencies of such a reprehensible creature must be somewhat lacking in spirit. ‘Che real Amelia, however, as Clara Thomson*‘ and others have pointed out, is a woman of strength rather than of weakness— not insipid, but instinct with womanly charm. As for Sophia, ‘Thackeray’s picture of her as a “‘fond, palpitating little crea- ture’—an inheritance from Richardson—was exceedingly tenacious. Such a characterization was, of course, entirely mis- leading; but only within the last generation has the actual Sophia been restored. As a matter of fact, Fielding’s heroines “modern”? woman, who, have many of the qualities of the before Meredith, was (save in Shakespeare) the exception rather than the rule. Andrew Lang says of them: “The hu- mour of Fielding and his tenderness make Amelia and Sophia far more sure of our hearts than, let us say, Rowena, or the Hains Viaidsot berth) . . . Horta. . serious and life-long affection there are few heroines so satisfactory as Sophia West- ern and Amelia Booth. . . . Never before nor since did a man’s ideal put on flesh and blood—out of poetry, that is,— 86 Res Judicatae, pp. 18, 27. 87 See Clara Thomson’s “Note on Fielding’s Amelia,” in The West- minster Review, CLII, 579-588 (November, 1899). Lpebtee eke hoe Lense tt me on eee el + Ee eee ee 4 cs on re . * eee Se ott baie ee eee Tt oe ar rte re) eT ~— ‘-3 Sanya popes een 2 ae - Sree silent eeeresecens tel ma mt ee aon eee Sivdnhdeh ook Sit ete tpn eT Coan gine oan yrewanebnaete ewig rp iain de ey as er on ss ee Py a pee! erat eel ed Ete es ete erent ht PeesSee ree eee ORT Steeda eee SS 508 FIELDING THE NOVELIST and apart from the ladies of Shakespeare. Fielding’s women have a manly honour, tolerance, greatness, in addition to their tenderness and kindness. Literature has not their peers, and life. has never had many to compare with them. They are not ‘superior like Romola, nor flighty and destitute of taste like Maggie Tulliver; among Fielding’s crowd of fribbles and sots and oafs they carry that pure moly of the Lady in ‘Gomusi cee Thus, in the closing years of the century, with a better un- derstanding of Fielding’s attainments as a scholar, of his tenderness as shown by the Voyage to Lisbon, of the charm and strength of his women characters, of the breadth and wholesomeness of his ethical purpose, of the heartening quality of his prose style, and of the nobility as an art form of the kind of realism in which he worked, the fame of the great novelist, released more and more from Victorian misrepresen- tation, shone with increased brightness. Even those who de- fended Richardson were compelled to admit the esteem in which Fielding was held by the majority of critics. G. B. Hill, the editor of Johnson, who (in 1891) quotes at length the praise, foreign and domestic, of Richardson’s novels, con- cedes that Fielding has “ten readers” to Richardson’s one.” And a year or so later, Augustine Birrell, in the midst of his defense of Richardson, exclaims, ““No wonder Tom Jones 1s still running; where, I should like to know, is the man bold enough to stop him.””°® Looking back upon the period in ques- tion, Edmund Gosse writes, “The new curiosity about Field- ing was appeased by successive editions of his ‘Works,’ that edited by Leslie Stephen (1882) in ten volumes, by Mr. Saintsbury (1893) in twelve, by myself (1899)** in twelve, and by Henley (1903), also in twelve volumes. The released 88 A. Lang’s Old Friends, London, 1890, p. 17. 89 Hill, G. B., Writers and Readers, New York and London, 1892, p. 91 (his lecture was given in 1891). °0 Res Judicatae, p. 20. For a recent appreciation, see Mr. Birrell’s More Obiter Dicta, New York, pp. 105-111. ®1 Volume I is dated 1898.FROM DOBSON TO HENLEY 509 popularity of Fielding was shown by the fact that these four extended and expensive editions were immediately bought 9992 up. Of Stephen’s edition we have spoken at some length; of the editions of Saintsbury, Gosse, and Henley—from which ex- cerpts have already been given—some account is now in order. Saintsbury’s edition in 1893—furnished with a general intro- duction on the author and several prefatory essays on his works —was particularly hearty in its praise of the great novels; and this critical apparatus, frequently reprinted in the popular *“Temple Edition,” has exerted, no doubt, considerable influ- ence. Defying objectors, Saintsbury boldly proclaimed Field- ing one of the four Atlantes of English verse and prose—the others being Shakespeare, Milton, and Swift—‘“‘Atlantes” in the sense that they either bore a whole world on their shoulders or looked down on a world. He had no hesitation in declaring Fielding the first to display the qualities of a perfect novelist as distinguished from those of a romancer: probable and in- teresting course of action, lively dialogue, appropriate use of description, and—last and chiefly—character absolutely life- like. He admitted Fielding’s lack of the “poet’s thought,” but defended him as a structural artist against those who either quarreled with his inter-chapters, exordiums, and insertions, or with what—in the days of “Russian Nihilists and French Naturalists’—some critics were pleased to call Fielding’s “toylike world.”°* Bagehot, it will be remembered, character- ized Fielding as a “reckless enjoyer,” as had Taine also—a notion which had taken a strong hold upon the popular fancy. Perhaps the best thing that Saintsbury did was to point out the proper refutation of this fallacy. ““[here are two moods,” he says, “‘in which the motto is Carpe diem; one a mood of sim- ply childish hurry, the other where behind the enjoyment of that vast ironic consciousness of the the moment lurks before and after, which I at least see everywhere in the back- 82 Gosse, Edmund, Books on the Table, New York, 1921, pp. 262, 263. 83 Fielding’s Works, London, 1893, I, xxvii. 7 ee ae er CF rk ee Sine eee ee ET an oe eee tetas a ee ar - a ~ a Pierre eee an ee DE DAB a hey tans 590 sO ene, ee a ve core S "i ees Bei ars ter Shes po er ee moe woR tend ins - ean ma A Ppetefeeeregigne ar tpleeeligsssr serene 19 ork 848 , =: 0! sumatios Bi ieksie. =. 0 Sa eed - bat be eee eee ee en rr anabAd ere Ci erton ta ee tenia Seen Oy ha by mhA Fee ea ea + et sae bteieseemey reyes ain”! ee ' i ' i eS 566 FIELDING THE NOVELIST even in the midst of the vogue of Scott he was generally re- garded as the superior craftsman. Strange as it may seem, never before had his novels been so highly esteemed among competent critics as during the triumphant era of romance. The golden words of Coleridge, Hazlitt, and Lamb (as well as those of Byron, Leigh Hunt, and many others) make the years between 1814 and 1832 a most enthusiastic period in Fielding criticism. While Jeffrey, Lockhart, and Wilson exalted Scott’s romances above Tom Jones the three greatest critics continued to read their Fielding with as much enjoy- ment as ever and to sprinkle their essays, their letters, or the margins of the books themselves with admiring comment. All three were convinced of Fielding’s wholesomeness; and all three, eventually, regarded him as second to no other novelist of his time. Very early in his career Lamb had used that fa- mous phrase about thehearty_laugh” of Tom Jones, and his admiration increased with the years; Hazlitt, lover as he was of Richardson, made clear at the outset that it was Fielding who exhibited the more real and profound truths of human nature, and, if we may judge from the frequency of his ref- erences, he must have known the great books down to the minutest details; Coleridge, most influential of all, after a lifelong acquaintance with the author’s works, and after a careful consideration in his latter years not only of Tom Jones but of Jonathan Wild, deliberately made his celebrated pro- nouncements on the healthfulness of Fielding (and the un- healthfulness of Richardson), on his wonderful irony, and on his supremacy as an artist. Finally, all three critics defended Fielding against that “‘senseless fastidiousness” into which the refinement of manners, toward the end of the second decade, was, in their opinion, degenerating. Celebrated as the dicta of Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt eventually became, however, their influence was surprisingly tardy. It was what Scott said that gained the ear of the public, and Sir Walter had ill words for his predecessor as well as good. By proclaiming Fielding the “father of the English novel” he dealt a hard blow to the old antithesis between that “comic” author and his ‘“‘serious”FIELDING—PAST AND PRESENT 567 rival; but by accepting the Aikin-Barbauld insinuation he did irreparable injury to Fielding’s fame. Much as he admired him as a craftsman (for the plot of Tom Jones was his de- spair), he was in several ways incapacitated for rightly esti- mating the author’s genius. Nor was his most obvious mis- conception—the one about the equality of Smollett and Fielding—his greatest error, an error due to his romantic pre- dilections and to his Scottish patriotism. His prime mistake was in thinking of Fielding as a mere entertainer, whose nov- els were written hastily and without serious purpose—a mis- apprehension which accounts for his disparagement of J ona- than Wild and Amelia, and which powerfully deflected criticism from its right course in the years thereafter. Still it is true that even to greater critics than Scott—to Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt themselves—the difference in stature be- tween Fielding and his contemporaries was not at all what it became at the end of the nineteenth century. Only after the struggle of a lifetime did Coleridge definitely renounce Rich- ardson; only after several years of persuasion on the part of Hazlitt was Lamb convinced that Fielding was better than Smollett; while Hazlitt himself, enamored of Lovelace, never saw Richardson as he appeared to succeeding generations. In those days there were not enough excellent novels available to furnish a proper basis for comparison, and the wonder is that, in spite of the tremendous vogue of romance and romanticism, not only Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt, but Byron, Hunt, and Southey continued to admire Fielding as greatly as before. To appreciate the length and breadth of the novelist’s achieve- ment we must wait until later; for none of the three Great Critics was interested in the development of Fielding’s genius or in his relationship to his times. But the pronouncements of this splendid period did more in the long run to establish the author’s fame on a high and enduring level than those of pre- ceding decades together. Except in the case of Gibbon, the most eulogistic passages available in the eighteenth century did not emanate from the most distinguished men of the age; they were the utterances of a Beattie, a Monboddo, or a Blair. Ln | Poe oe he | ~~ ey serbeh even Ze SRI sitet oe ae ee eae Te Ee See tiie Spiratieretateet eer ete 0 eee Spiers i eee ee ebay Arenas Sy peng it er toe rivet bees er et aye — ee eye naa ee ee ae OnE ae rn mt ae Swen ns ens gece: i Ghatehaneteiind iahadhean haan ta Parr re rr = 4 ETS ot ty 3 <9] y 4 7) =. MH ? i i a pre any / at , ay AE f t° ) bees artes eres568 FIELDING THE NOVELIST The situation had now been reversed. To be called by Scott the “father of the English novel” and by Byron the “prose Homer of human nature,” to be praised by Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt (despite the fact that the influence of these writers had not yet come to its maturity), and to be admired by the many other notable men of letters whose opinions have been recorded in these pages, was fame indeed, even though the glory which now actually invested Fielding was as yet not fully perceived. With the death of Scott and the great critics the golden period of praise was over. During the Thirties and the ’Forties the increasing affectation of gentility, which Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt had exclaimed against, told heavily against Field- ing. Biographical ineptitudes, previously held in check, now grew in number, absurdity, and influence. Fresh gossip was retailed by Lady Stuart; and Roscoe, the compiler, drew an unfortunate comparison between Fielding and Burns. Fur- thermore, the romantic confusion of richness of material with richness of imagination, notwithstanding the protests of Dick- ens and Thackeray, now ran its course. Fielding’s works, no longer read in the family circle, were commonly regarded as belonging to a genre decidedly inferior to that of Scott. Not until realism in fiction was better understood and appreciated could this erroneous notion be corrected. Among the early Vic- torians it became the fashion to disparage the eighteenth cen- tury im toto, and to arraign as one of the chief offenders of that age, the novelist Henry Fielding. The old stories of Mur- phy, Walpole, Richardson, and Lady Mary, which had been gathering accretions during the time of Scott, now furnished the basis for even wilder conjectures on the part of the literary journeymen of the “Thirties and ’Forties. Nor was this low opinion of Fielding confined to writers of an inferior order. Carlyle, who had previously complained of the novelist’s “loose morality,” found no place for him among his “heroes” and stigmatized Tom Jones as “immeasurably less than a Reality.” Young Ruskin, a devotee of Richardson, whose works had been read aloud to him in boyhood, complained ofese) fa Co on oe FIELDING—PAST AND PRESENT 569 the “‘open filth’” of Fielding and visualized the author as “licking” his “chops” over “nastiness.” Obviously a great change had come about since the days of Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt. Of course Fielding had his defenders: individuals, here and there, as, for instance, Lewes and John Forster; occasional book-reviewers, who used his works as touchstones on which to try Pickwick and Vanity Fair; and, finally, the novelists themselves, Bulwer, Dickens, and Vhackeray, each of whom raised a voice of protest against the “senseless fastidi- ousness” which the great critics of the previous generation had deprecated. But on the subject of Fielding the remarks of Bulwer, though at times very acute, were inconsistent; the allusions of Dickens were few and casual; and the only ex- tended contribution which Thackeray had yet made, notwith- standing frequent incidental references, was a review of the novelist’s works (the Roscoe volume) that was buried in the files of the London Times. Accepting Roscoe at face value and taking a hint or two from Scott, yet at the same time read- ing the novels with deep attention and with a view to his own profit, Thackeray in 1840 portrayed in one and the same article, without dreaming of reconciling them, two utterly different Fieldings—the Penitent Rake, that had held sway in the reference books, and the Supreme Artist, whom he genuinely admired. During the next ten years, while “Thack- eray amused himself, in many an allusion, with first one and then the other of these presentments, the fate of the great “master” hung in the balance of his disciple’s whim. Once again—this time with particularly disastrous conse- quences—luck turned against Fielding. While working on Pendennis (1850), Thackeray appreciated as never before the greatness of his predecessor as an artist, whose truth to life and whose “literary providence” he had marveled at in the Times article. Therefore it pleased him to complain that since “the author of Tom Jones was buried” writers of fiction had been compelled to “drape” their “MAN” and “give him a certain conventional simper.” But in the new réle of public lecturer in 1851 Thackeray could not resist the temptation to Sebeke re. terol ise +) Tee eee eI e aT Taye VE TE et eens I Lape , = a 7 aed 2 Pats itetier — ee meee eee i saree ot er eT Les Septet be %, way at Dibereoathet nd TR lease erties tee Sere it rs aa ey 5 ane Pes roe badedind bills oes os os ata ergata esadal all lakecwenrenet ar on ae ora yr 7 waewree Epa een weg ry - ¢ ee ree RE 1 bes ete btn at tal eh ot TT ee yh. errrOh sna eee ee eo ae aon ee ek eae ese etal: hag eo eee roe ae ame Seen tee | = 570 FIELDING THE NOVELIST elaborate the portrait of Fielding the Profligate, letting his imagination play about him and his reputed weaknesses as though he were a character he had himself invented. As an anonymous Times reviewer, Thackeray had admitted that Fielding’s “errors” were doubtless “great’’ and that his “tastes” were “low”; but he had stoutly asserted that the “chief immorality” of that writer was simply that he called things “by their names” and that in his “honest, downright books” vice was never ‘“‘mistaken for virtue.” Eleven years later, secure in fame but eager to succeed as a lecturer, he threw himself into a spirited arraignment of his master as a dissipated fellow whose “art and ethics” were “blunted by his life.” It is true that in one or two paragraphs of ringing elo- quence he let his own heart speak out regarding those precious and noble qualities in Fielding which he had really perceived from the beginning. But though he posed as his champion and apologist, he could not “‘offer or hope” to make a “hero” out of such a bibulous wastrel as it now pleased him to represent. To judge by the reports that have come down in literary history regarding the lecture, it is clear that the speaker had foretold precisely the temper of his audience. If anything it was thought that Thackeray, the professed follower of Field- ing, had been much too lenient with him; though Charlotte Bronté may have been exceptionally violent in her denuncia- tion of the author of Tom Jones, her outburst was only an exaggerated expression of an attitude which had become rather general. After the great Thackeray had spoken, the question of Fielding’s character was practically settled for the next twenty years. Not only was the picture accepted by reviewers and compilers almost unanimously but even a professed in- vestigator such as Lawrence (1855) was so impressed by it that, unable to draw the proper inferences from the new facts discovered, he concluded his task by referring his readers to the English Humourists. ‘Thus assurance was made doubly sure, and the practice of inventing caricatures of a debauched Fielding was more in vogue than ever. When Thomas Keight- ley in his papers in Fraser’s Magazine (1858) made the firstpee ee Oo oe be Oe ak ee ae oe oe Oe ek Ook oon | Cte he eee ere. aT AG Peer tasers ecslsges FIELDING—PAST AND PRESENT 571 real step forward by exposing the ineptitudes of Lawrence and by endeavoring to retrieve the character of Tom Jones from popular misconception, his labor was apparently ineffectual. Certainly his findings were all lost on Thackeray himself, who, after his triumph with the Humourists at home and abroad, continued to make use of the Fielding of his fancy in subsequent novels and essays. The most notable instance in this way was Colonel Newcome’s indictment of Tom Jones— a scene so powerfully depicted that it continued to leave its im- print on sober criticism far down the century; even after the appearance of Keightley’s articles, Thackeray still clung to Walpole’s representation of Fielding as a sponger. Of course there is another side to the Thackeray story, one which is some- times neglected. In his books, his conversation, and his miscel- laneous writings, Thackeray kept the name of his “brave old master” before the public; it was he who named the “Field- ing”’ club, and so closely did he relate himself to his predeces- sor that ever since his day a discussion of ‘Thackeray has or- dinarily included a reference to the writer in whose footsteps he followed. His exploitation of Amelia gave the novel a higher standing than it had ever before enjoyed; and his elo- quent passages on Fielding’s art, together with his subordina- tion of Richardson and Smollett, aided in establishing Fielding as the supreme novelist of the eighteenth century at a time when that century was commonly disparaged. Whatever fancy pictures Thackeray might draw of Fielding as a man, he bowed in reverence before him as an artist. True, his appre ciation is not always perfect: no one who is in doubt about Jones and Blifil can rightly understand their raison d étre, though Thackeray’s estimate might have been very different had he obtained his notion of Jones from the book rather than from his own imagination. But his high regard for Fielding as a master builder was always unshaken; and when a writer in Blackwood’s (1860) attacked the art of Tom Jones, he administered the merited reproof in one of his “Roundabout Papers.” No doubt it would have surprised him to see to what lengths his successors could go in using his remarks on Field- se os ~ eee Cebthentet ee a — Pee eben bole ete rreenet Soto abeibo teretishshisbetadeearat oe Geert von ¥ re aaa (ewe aapeeee 7 8 eiocug oe rte bia = « mia a « ~ sae on eer «Pes - oe eae o . ee “ cr et een ed Ot De nena aes . To ee eer er es errr ars " oe eee en “ ea Pe ee i er AAO er wee eee me re eet eter rena, =xahamniineeiel Be A RC RE R eit bymitdeh POE BT Ry Ea ine! ES iene eee tae et is 6p AEM BE Oe hv ee eee re tetrad re ba a arid « pay ~she 2. Ay 4 4 iF 3 * a} ‘ if Fa Hi Ry aay572 FIELDING THE NOVELIST ing’s character to destroy that author’s reputation as a writer; surely the biographical entanglements in which criticism soon found itself are almost unbelievable. If Fielding really was the rake and Mohock that Thackeray represented, it was easy to infer that his novels were hastily thrown together, that he wrote with no seriousness of purpose, and that his reprehensible scenes and characters were indications of his own depravity. During the ’Sixties and the Seventies, such inferences con- tinued to flourish, particularly after the appearance of Taine’s brilliant discovery (the translation was in 1871), which pre- sumably owed something to the English Humourists, that Fielding was not uly c a “drinker” and a “roysterer” but an “amiable buffalo.” Had Keightley, the historian, seen fit to write the life of "Fielding for which he is said to have made certain preparations, the reaction might not have had to wait, as it did, until Dobson’s biography in 1883. But Keightley’s project never came to fruition, and his excellent articles (1858) remained buried in the files of Fraser’s Magazine. In Seventies, however, while the followers of Thackeray and ‘Taine went to the limit of absurdity, hints of change were in the air. In 1871, the same year in which the fanatical For- syth pronounced his anathema against Fielding, calling upon the author of the Husmourists as his witness, a new editor, the unknown Dr. Browne, made an excellent though ineffectual protest against Thackeray’s unjust characterization of Tom and Sophia and against his singular assertion about Blifil and Jones. Even though his efforts were unavailing, it was some- thing in those days to oppose great Thackeray. But the first breath of the freshening wind comes from a delightful page Middlemarch (1871) in which a great woman novelist, scorning all qualifying phrases, had the boldness to proclaim Fielding one of the “‘colossi” of English literature, and to glory in the “lusty ease of his fine English.”” Nor was George Meredith thinking of a ‘‘wine-stained” prodigal or thick- skinned brawler when, in his essay “On the Idea of Comedy,” he placed Fielding beside Moliére and Cervantes and declared that the very “invocation” of these choice spirits was like a Oe CR een ney ae OR oe ae eS NG NDE YCaET RSD ETEbe One ne Le Lea be ob ee ears. oye t eters eee eka s FIELDING—PAST AND PRESENT 573 “renovating air.” Such references, however, though excellent, were brief and casual; the really important influence before Dobson, both for good and for ill, was that of Leslie Stephen. As the result of his studies in eighteenth-century thought, Stephen saw clearly (before he had to play the part of a biog- rapher) that Fielding could have been no mere reckless Bohe- mian. Accordingly he elaborated, on several occasions, a sub- stantial and intellectual personage whose writings abounded > ¢¢ in “homespun” morality and “‘massive” “common sense.”’ But, as a son-in-law of Thackeray, Stephen was too often disturbed by the thought of the indignant Colonel Newcome. ‘There- fore he took pains to insist upon Fielding’s limitations; and, though he filled his essays with excellent dicta, managed to convey the general idea that the kinship of the great Ironist was rather with Benjamin Franklin than with Cervantes and Moliére. Meanwhile, neither Stephen nor anyone else had ‘mad wag” of popular fancy. succeeded in sobering down the ‘ When a professed critic such as G. P. Lathrop could declare that Tom Jones was a “hastily gathered bundle,” and when a college professor—Sidney Lanier—could announce to his au- dience that he would “blot” that great book and its fellows from “‘the face of the earth,” a change was assuredly in order. Since during the entire Victorian age the web of criticism had been perplexed by biographical considerations, nothing but a more trustworthy life of the novelist could straighten out the tangles. The period of some forty years since the appearance of Dobson’s Fielding is, in its general character, as different from the previous half century as sunlight from shadow—an era not only of increasing enlightenment regarding the man but also of increasing appreciation of his achievement. No mere accident is the fact that Dobson’s Life in 1883 was only a short monograph, while Cross’s biography in 1918 fills three large volumes; it is symbolic of the position that, in the past two decades, Fielding has succeeded in winning as a man of letters. During this period the difference in altitude between him and his noted contemporaries has grown so great that even eee Shiela bir Wind, woe ~tane® — - ai ¥e et oe as tint piishiolotbenadh-paebiehaees hee \eabhers ae Ps Seen ae eae jai Pare bo See ate bee TEASE Poort ewan een Geen \ oon ~* = ey ie oie os pM PPE a bin sant ete nt a ei ted bee Fob ed aaa tht toate een see ae smete® eat es awamten btreene= tee oem Roce nh one qe pou ert he brbe tty spon ln dels gereenenseleonns an = eS ee et eeSfp egegrac age vrure 3 ee Se Ree eT Le eS AEE Now ne tt beiechhetrie betel eee ee he end 574 FIELDING THE NOVELIST the advocates of Richardson and Smollett have usually con- ceded the fact; for example, Sir A. C. Doyle, who admitted “fone in a hun- in 1909 that in preferring Richardson he was dred.” The general inference is, then, that to the minds of critics of the past generation Fielding’s art and thought have made a particular appeal. Take, to begin with, the first half of the period—from Dobson (1883) to Henley (1903). During these twenty years, when, due to the efforts of his first competent biog- rapher his reputation was considerably eased of the burden of scandal it had borne so long, Fielding suddenly found himself in a new and populous world of admirers—Dobson, Lowell, Henley, Saintsbury, Lang, and Gosse all came forward as his champions. Within the second decade four new editions of his Works enjoyed a ready sale. Leslie Stephen, as Professor Cross has said, had been the last of Fielding’s “‘brilliant de- famers”; the attitude of Saintsbury (1893), Gosse (1898), and Henley (1903) was one of vindication not only of the man but of the artist. All three editors spoke out boldly against ‘Thackeray’s caricature and against the resultant disparagement of Fielding’s novels. To Thackeray, even in 1860, the Wal- pole story was a reflection on Fielding’s character; to Mr. Gosse in 1898 it was a reflection on the eighteenth century. Dobson’s book represented two movements which have con- tinued in favor ever since: the renaissance of interest in that century which Carlyle and Ruskin had excoriated, and the new desire for scientific, or accurate, biography. Furthermore, prose fiction, coming to be regarded as one of the grand divi- sions of literature, was receiving serious attention. Thus was brought about genre-study, as the result of which Fielding was seen to belong to a different class from that of Smollett, or from that of the French naturalists. Then, too, since liter- ary criticism now found it necessary to take account of an author’s development, students of Fielding were turning: with interest and enjoyment to the Voyage to Lisbon and Jonathan Wild, and to those introductory passages in the three great novels in which the author discoursed upon his theory of proseey ed sia se, Tere ee eee rere EEE XE Le OS tpee Peter ce cece se Se Ahk FIELDING—PAST AND PRESENT 575 narrative. Dobson’s discovery in the ’Nineties of the catalogue of Fielding’s library became, accordingly, a fact which re- ceived considerable notice; had papers such as Keightley’s ap- peared in 1898 instead of 1858 they would never have been so completely neglected. Again, inasmuch as fin de siécle critics were greatly interested in English prose style, Fielding suddenly achieved a considerable reputation as a stylist. Steven- son himself, who turned up his nose at T'o7m Jones, bracketed its author with Addison in his essay on “Style.” Finally, when Henley issued his brilliant manifesto in 1903, a strong band of critics was fighting under Fielding’s banner. Since 1903 the history of the novelist’s reputation is an ac- count of the broadening and deepening of that better under- standing of his achievement which began with Dobson in 1883. For the acceptance of the new view of Fielding several tendencies of the times have been most propitious: the dissipa- tion of prudishness, the even more widespread study of fic- tion, and the vogue of modern realism. The change in the atti- tude of women toward Fielding is evidenced by Mrs. Craigie’s recommendation concerning Amelia in 1904 and by Miss Godden’s Memoir in 1910; and the high estimation in which Fielding was held at the time of his Bi-centenary (1907) by both men and women may be judged from the enthusiastic articles which appeared on that occasion. The novelist’s works had now become the object of serious study on the part of scholars, to whom every new biographical or critical fact concerning him was an item of deep interest. It had long been obvious that it was necessary, in order to under- stand not only Fielding’s character but his accomplishment, to make a thorough investigation of those works which in the days of Christopher North were summarily dismissed as rub- bish and which even modern writers were inclined to neglect and disparage. Only in this way could be obtained a trust- worthy view of his development. The value of this kind of study is amply proved in Fielding’s case by the light which was thrown upon his career by Cross’s admirable biography in 1918. In these volumes the fact was established beyond a i? oe) we eR Seto Ter se D ; >a Cie eee fees Ps eee oer A Py ry He Tah tg palterteeiend a SO Aree beetle See renin en 1“ err ee en eT ‘tttactay eee ey e ree rete bates pase ee rs = i=peant apa Doegnenaaake srerghice® ih cae adel a Cee arty ere ne fui oF n it tenon be eee eh ant NR KR pe betel Oy fy ot Pa ae eee eth etre eer ee aay eee ioe i al if he see) 4 com wm576 FIELDING THE NOVELIST doubt that Fielding’s life, instead of being divided into two violently contrasted periods—the period of the “inept “dra- matic adventurer’ ” and the period of the “consummate novel- ist’’—-was a unified progress from the first production to the last, the consistent development of a social satirist. Such is the story of the author’s fame from Joseph Andrews down to our own day. After making due allowances for the celebrated dicta of Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt, it is clear that Fielding’s position as a great imaginative artist has been higher among critics of the past generation than ever before. This condition has mainly come about as the result of careful and extended investigation and comparison. And the greatest aid of all has been the gradual clearing of his name of the re- proaches which envious and malicious contemporaries heaped upon it, and which modern writers have thoughtlessly and un- justly repeated. Of late years it has become more and more ap- parent that Fielding was a satirist and reformer who spoke before his time. Since he spoke laughingly, his profundity was not, in his own outwardly formal and elegant age, generally perceived; since he painted the nude he was accused of ob- scenity; since he attacked emptiness and corruption in all re- ligions he was accused of irreligion; since he portrayed good- heartedness in the poor and censured its absence in the rich he was accused of “lowness” and injudicious “levelling”; since he dealt with universal truths in fictions of epic scope instead of spinning out the minutiae of sentimental analysis, he was accused of shallowness; since he paused from time to time to interpolate in his stories his humorous and wise and tolerant views on human life, he was accused of lack of seriousness. In the eighteenth century the attitude toward Fielding as a social reformer was very different from what it would be to-day. Lady Mary pitied her cousin because he managed to get no higher preferment than “raking in the lowest sinks of vice and misery.” In our day a magistrate who had achieved such a signal triumph over the forces of evil in the greatest city of England would be written up in every magazine in the land. And if, at the same time, that magistrate were the author ofFIELDING—PAST AND PRESENT 577 a great novel such as T’om Jones, his death would have been regretted throughout the English-speaking world as a public calamity.In Fielding’s own day comparatively little attention was paid by the most eminent judges of literature to his efforts as a social reformer either as a magistrate or as an ironic realist. It is a significant fact that irony has been a stumbling block in the path of many another writer beside Fielding, while English realism has been obliged to wait for its greater triumph until our own generation. The wonder is that, notwithstanding the amount and variety of disparagement to which Fielding as a novelist has been subjected, his sterling qualities—particularly his insight into human nature—have withstood the showers of sentimentality, the fire-bath of romance, the scalpel of the psychological ana- lyst, and the inquisition of the specialist in prose narrative. Historical and comparative criticism have only served to make us understand him better. While Richardson has fallen from his high estate, and Smollett has taken a step down, Fielding has been more and more highly regarded. Possibly when an- other wave of extreme sentimentalism or ultra-emotional ro- manticism sweeps over English literature the present estimate of Fielding will be temporarily lowered. But he has already weathered successfully such storms more than once; and the modern tendencies of liberalism in our view of human society, tolerance in religion, and realism and organic unity in art, which have widened the distance between him and his con- temporaries, bid fair to “seat him sure” among the critics of the immediate future. And it may be predicted that with the historians of democratic thought the creator of Parson Adams will some day be accorded the place, notwithstanding his fear of government by the “mob,” which in the opinion of Lord Byron had never been bestowed upon him. Moreover, to fu- ture historians of fiction Fielding’s importance will presum- ably seem greater than it does now; for, though his direct imitators have rarely been distinguished for their number or their success, the genres of fiction which he has suggested and the minds to whom his work has appealed are seen on investi- 24% . ee hoa ea Le oe! alte ae eee ro ees Me ee a ahr ren ts es Seer yt Peer iad er hee “ ran, caer erent api on lot TYR Teen ewan scneececenaraspiaetene th - 6% ih titans Pept ser! aes rs en Ere Nees rey anne oo rary ie i.Te Te ae ihe: pc ehrce eas BIBLIOGRAPHY 583 BALLANTYNE’s Nove .ist’s Liprary. London. 1821-1824. 10 vols. BaRBAULD, Mrs, A. L. The British Novelists. New edition. Lon- don. 1820. 50 vols. The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson. London. 1804. 6 vols. Bates, Arto. Talks on the Study of Literature. Boston and New York. 1900. BEATTIE, JAMEs. Dissertations. Moral and Critical. By James Beat- tie. London and Edinburgh. 1783. The Elements of Moral Science. London and Edinburgh. 1790, 1793. 2 vols. Essays. Edinburgh, 1776. Works. Philadelphia. 1809. 10 vols. BeaTTieE, WILLIAM. See CAMPBELL, I’HoMas. THE BEAUTIES OF FIELDING. See FIELDING, HENRY. Beavan, A. H. James and Horace Smith. London. 1899. BepporEs, THomas L. Poems. London. 1851. 2 vols. BELJAME, ALEXANDRE. Le Public et les Hommes de Lettres en Angleterre au Dix-huitiéme Siécle. 2 éd. augm. Paris. 1897. BeLogz, WivuiaM. The Sexagenarian. London. 1817. 2 vols. BELsHAM, WixuiAM. Essays. London. 1789-1791. 2 vols. Benjamin, L. S. [“Lewis Melville” ]. William Makepeace Thack- eray. London. 1910. 2 vols. BENNETT, ARNOLD. The Author’s Craft. New York. 1914. Books and Persons. London. 1917. BENTHAM, JEREMY. The Works of . . . edited by John Bowring. Edinburgh. 1843. 11 vols. BENTLEY’s MiscELLany. London. Vol. XXXIX. Bercuer, L. T. The British Essayists. Edited by the Rev. L. T. Berguer. London. 1823. 45 vols. BeERNBAUM, ErNEstT. The Drama of Sensibility. Boston and Lon- don. 1915S. Besant, Sir Water. The Art of Fiction. Boston. 1885. The Chaplain of the Fleet. By Walter Besant and James Rice. London. 1881. 3 vols. London in the 18th Century. London. 1903. Beyte, M. H. [“Stendhal”]. Mémoires d’un Touriste par de Stendhal. Paris. 1877. 2 vols. Brstiocrapuica. Vol. I. Tue BrsrioGRAPHICcAL Society. Transactions. Second series. Vol. I. een a a 5a ae et Neca tbeitgrcr ts at piebtehttetak meer Eran an ee eet se Pe crerrey reo eT en DOr ee ene eee nes eee ey J ns net a) Th enn mit c=p al shasbirh-s mh rine peeled at TL el ed ee ee dele genpeyeusejesmerenine= ws. Ey nh! Teton et nl een Pepeteed Sada me re ane he ey eed a a eng enene meas ent r i] qi ay i i Bs i a be584 FIELDING THE NOVELIST BIBLIOTHEQUE FRANGOISE. 1744. BioGRAPHIE UNIVERSELLE. Tome XIV. Paris. 1815. BirrRELL, Aucustine. William Hazlitt (E. M. L. Series). New York and London. 1902. More Obiter Dicta. New York. 1924. Res Judicatae. New York. 1892. BispHam, G. T. Fielding’s Jonathan Wild. Jw Eighteenth Century Literature. An Oxford Miscellany. Oxford. 1909. Bisset, Ropert. Modern Literature. London. 1804. 3 vols. Biackwoop’s EpinpurcH Macazine. Edinburgh. Vols. XI, XIII, XV, XXX, XXXII, XXXVI, LXIV, LXXXVII, CV, CLXXXI. Buarr, Hucu. Lectures on Rhetoric . . . Complete in One Vol- ume. London, Edinburgh. 1834. Lectures on Rhetoric . . . To which are added, Copious Ques- tions. . . . By Abraham Mills. Philadelphia. 1833. BLANKENBURG, CuHRISTIAN F. von. Versuch tiber den Roman. Leip- Zip. 1774. Tue Booxman (London). Vols. XXII, XXXII, XXXVII. Tue Booxman (New York). Vols. IV, XXV, XXVII, XLII, XLVIII, XLIX. Borrow, GrorcE. The Bible in Spain. Fourth edition. London. 1843. 3 vols. Lavengro. London. 1851. 3 vols. Works. Norwich edition. London, New York. 1923. 16 vols. BosporFr, E. Entstehungsgeschichte von Fieldings Joseph Andrews. Berlin. 1908. BoswELL, James. Letters of. Edited by C. B. Tinker. Oxford. 1924. 2 vols. The Life of Samuel Johnson. Seventh edition. London. 1811. Life of Samuel Johnson. Edited by G. B. Hill. Oxford. 1887. 6 vols. The Life of Samuel Johnson. New edition. Edited by J. W. Croker. New York. 1837. 2 vols. Bray, Anna E. Autobiography. Edited by John A. Kempe. London. 1884. Brewer, Georce. The History of Tom Weston. A Novel, after the Manner of Tom Jones. London. 1791. 2 vols. BREWER, James. Jz Vol. X of The Beauties of England and Wales. London. 1816. sme Set Sa nT Sthideces betel ote een ie"BA CRATER EE OS Cle SEER PO Se eG ra eae te ce kta Se cae ee ear OP bt Pree i ead ae ae ea eee ba ye, BIBLIOGRAPHY Brewster, Dororuy. Aaron Hill. New York. 1913. BriGHTWELL, Cecitia L. Memorials of the Life of Amelia Opie. Second edition. Norwich. 1854. Tuer British ArcuivistT. London. 1914. Tue British Critic. London. 1804, 1814. Tue BrinisH QuartTerty Review. London. Vols. II, LV, LXXVIII. Bronté, CuHaRLotre. Jane Eyre. Second edition. London. 1847. Brooke, Frances. The Excursion. London. 1777. 2 vols. Brooke, Henry. The Fool of Quality. London. 1766-1770. § vols. Juliet Grenville. London. 1774. 3 vols. BROOKFIELD, CHARLES AND Frances. Mrs. Brookfield and her Cir- cle. London. 1905. 2 vols. Brown, Dr. Joun. Letters of Dr. John Brown. London. 1907. Browne, W. Y. Fun, Poetry, and Pathos. London. 1850. The Village Tale. London. 1850 BRownELL, W. C. William M. Thackeray. New York. 1900. Browninc, ExizaBetu B. Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning Addressed to Richard Hengist Horne. Edited by S. R. T. Mayer. London. 1877. 2 vols. Browninc, Ropert. The Letters of Robert Browning and Eliza- beth Barrett Browning. New York and London. 1899. 2 vols. BruNETIERE, F. Le Roman Naturaliste. Nouvelle édition. Paris. 1892. Brunton, Mrs. Mary. Emmeline. Edinburgh. 1819. Self-Control. Fourth edition. Edinburgh. 1812. 3 vols. Bryce, J. University and Historical Addresses. London. 1913. Brypces, Sir SamuEL Ecrerton. The Autobiography . . . of Sir Egerton Brydges. London. 1834. 2 vols. Censura Literaria. Second edition. London. 1815. 10 vols. Buuren, A. H. Preface to The Life and Adventures of Peter Wil- kins. London. 1884. 2 vols. Butwer, Epwarp. See LyTron. Burn, Ricuarp. The History of the Poor Laws. London. 1764. Burney, Fanny. See Arsiay, D’. Burns, Ropert. The Correspondence between Burns and Clarinda. Edinburgh. 1843. The Poetry of Robert Burns. Edited by W. E. Henley and T. F. Henderson. Edinburgh. 1897. 4 vols. : . , SP ere TEL lee rh ee Tee a Le ete eee) er re tees ee cae ee Sy qenyene tee yecmes goh ae ete eee errs ~~ - mires as ey Lapel EY Uae nei etree ave ee Moa penne eet ene te eet It Sees ve a er ee ae586 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Robert Burns and Mrs. Dunlop. Edited by William Wallace. New York. 1898. 2 vols. Burton, JoHN Hiri. The Life and Correspondence of David Hume. Edinburgh. 1846. 2 vols. BuTLerR, CuHARLEs. Reminiscences. Fourth edition. London. 1824. BuTLER, SAMUEL. The Note-Books of Samuel Butler. Edited by He i Jones. London. IQO12. Byrom, JoHn. The Poems of John Byrom. Edited by A. W. Ward. Manchester. 1894 (Chetham Society Publications, Vol. XXIX). Byron, GEorRGE Gorpon Byron, te Letters and Journals. Edited by T. Moore. London. 1830. 2 vols. The Works of Lord Byron. A New, Revised and Enlarged Edi- ion. Poetry. Edited by E. H. Coleridge. London and New York. 7 vols. (Letters and Journals. Edited by R. E. Prothero. 6 vols.) 13 vols. 1898-1904. CainE, Hau. My First Book . . with an Introduction by Jerome K. Jerome. London. 1897. CaLpDERWoop, Mrs. Marcarer. Letters and Journals of Mrs. Cal- derwood of Polton. Edited by Alexander reese “Edin- burgh. 1884. THE ee History oF EncuisH Lirerature. New York, Cambridge [1907-1917]. 14 vols. CAMPBELL, JoHN CAMPBELL, rst baron. The Lives of the Chief Justices of England. London. 1849. 2 vols. CaMPBELL, Tuomas. Life and Letters of Thomas Campbell. Edited by W. Beattie. New York. 1850. 2 vol A Canpip Examination of the History of Sir Charles Grandison. London. 1754. Carew, BampryLpE-Moore. See An APoLocy. CaRLYLE, ALEXANDER. Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle. Edinburgh and London. 1860. CarLyLE, JANE Wetsu. New Letters and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle. Annotated by Thomas Carlyle. London and New York. 1903. 2 vols. CarLyLeE, THomas. Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. London. Chapman and Hall edition. roe 6 vols. Early Letters. Edited by C. E. Norton. London and New York. 1886. The History of Friedrich the Second. New York. Harper edition. 1862. 4 vols. er a ee Ln ne Tn Peed ab tnenya Siig .sap-oret Mnincoep rasod ana! >. $ PS aie ae os ; J 1SORELLE iGleuk oe. BIBLIOGRAPHY 587 Lectures on the History of Literature. Edited by J. R. Green. New York. 1892. The Life of John Sterling. London. 1851. CarTER, ELizaABETH. Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montagu. London. 1817. 3 vols. A Series of Letters between Mrs. Elizabeth Carter and Miss Catherine Talbot. London. 1809. 4 vols. CarRTWRIGHT, EpmMuND. Letters and Sonnets. London. 1807. Castro, J. P. de. Jz The Bibliographical Society. Transactions. 1921. In The Library. 1917. Ix Notes and Queries. 1916, 1917. Ture Century ILLustraTED Montuiy Macazine. New York. Vols. XXV, XXVII. CuaicneEau, WixuiaM. The History of Jack Connor. London. 1752. CuatMeErs, ALEXANDER. The British Essayists; with Prefaces, His- torical and Biographical. London. 1802. 45 vols. The General Biographical Dictionary. New edition. Revised by A. Chalmers. London. 1814-1817. 32 vols. CuambBers, Ropert. Chambers’s Cyclopedia of English Literature. New edition by David Patrick, LL.D. Philadelphia, London and Edinburgh. 1903-1906. 3 vols. Cyclopedia of English Literature. Edited by Robert Chambers. Edinburgh. 1843-1844. 2 vols. History of the English Language and Literature. Hartford. 1837. Cuanpier, F. W. The Literature of Roguery. Boston and New York. 1907. 2 vols. Cuapone, Mrs. Hester. The Works of Mrs. Chapone. London. 1807. 4 vols. CHATEAUBRIAND, Francois A. R., Vicomte de. Giuvres Completes de . . . Chateaubriand. Paris. 1836-1839. 36 vols. CHEpDworTH, Joun Howe, 4th baron. Letters from the Late Lord Chedworth to the Rev. Thomas Crompton. Norwich. 1840. Cueney, Epnau D. Louisa May Alcott. Boston. 1923. Cueénier, ANpRE. Céuvres Posthumes. Paris. 1824. 3 vols. Poésies. Paris. 1888. CuesnayE-DesBois, AUBERT de la. Lettres Amusantes et Critiques sur les Romans. Paris. 1743. CHESTERFIELD, PHitip DoRMER STANHOPE, 4th earl of. Letters of eer rer era: Ge ee rer eae ~ cane bhai bettas Senn aetna i a ve rs eS een ed rompers |. —* Tere eae band be Se « oe a eet ey es, <1 + :4m epee ete reseed mp Se ee elehtha data took beter pe rare pall yell ae ere Terre ~ 2 Aatehetaniidichtiettaidhatiy LAdintaee edthh bed adaehidaind ube de at hAte <= - bite SY eee Cha beet en t + )thencwe lew senkermese Ee 5 ST ae Te tial ea rte al” fae pe eee err ings phar : t ! i 33 brSLEG PAPEL ETS FIELDING THE NOVELIST Chesterfield to his Godson. Edited by the Earl of Car- narvon. Oxford. 1890. 588 Miscellaneous Works. Second edition. London. 1779. 4 vols. CuesrerTon, G. K. All Things Considered. Third edition. Lon- don. 1908. The Victorian Age in Literature. New York, London. 1913. CuiLp, Haron. Fielding and Smollett. Jz The Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge. 1913. (X, 22-39.) CuisHoLM, Hucu. Meredith. Jz The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Eleventh edition. Vol. XVIII. CuRIsTIAN OBsERVER. From the London edition. Boston. 1816. CHURCHILL, CHARLEs. The Apology. London. 1761. Poems. London. 1763. Cipper, Correy. An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber. Lon- don. 1740. CrarkeE, CuHarLes Cowpen. On the Comic Writers of England. J The Gentleman’s Magazine, N.S., VIII, 556-580 (May, 1872). CrarxE, C. H. Fielding u. d. deutsche Sturm u. Drang. Freiburg Diss. Freiburg. 1897. CLEMENT, P. Les Cing Années Littéraires. La Haye. 1754. 4 vols. Copsett, R. S. Memorials of Twickenham. London. 1872. Consett, W. Advice to Young Men. London. 1829. CoLeman, Joun. Charles Reade as 1 Knew Him. London. 1903. CoLERIDGE, HarTiey. See MAssINGER. CoLERIDGE, SAMUEL. Anima Poetae. Edited by E. H. Coleridge. London. 1895. Biographia Epistolaris. Edited by A. Turnbull. Bohn’s Library. London. 1911. 2 vols. Biographia Literaria. London. 1817. 2 vols. The Complete Works. Edited by W. G. T. Shedd. New York. 1853. 7 vols. Lectures and Notes on Shakspere. London. Bohn’s Library. 1904. The Poetical Works. Edited by J. D. Campbell. London. 1907. The Table Talk and Omniana. Oxford University Press. Lon- don. 1917. A CoLLection oF Scarce, Curious, AND VALUABLE PIECES from the . . . Most Eminent Wits of the Present Age. Edin- burgh. 1785. pata heen bertur Seder ee neem ee ibtheneietee en ee Sen es if fT 3 F.SOS ete LAC Le alee. gps Ti seats BIBLIOGRAPHY CoLiiER, JANE. An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting. London. 1753. CoLuikER, JANE, and Freupine, Saran. The Cry. London. 1754. 3 vols. Coiuier, WitiiaM F. A History of English Literature. Edinburgh and New York. 1865. Coiuins, JoHn C. Bolingbroke. New York. 1886. Ephemera Critica. Westminster. 1901. Cotman, Grorce, The Elder. The Dramatick Works of George Colman. London. 1777. 4 vols. The Jealous Wife. London. 1761. Polly Honeycombe, a Dramatick Novel. London. 1760. Prose on Several Occasions. London. 1787. 3 vols. Cotman, GeorceE, The Younger. Broad Grins. My Nightgown & Slippers and other Humorous Works. London. 1.d. [1872.]| Vagaries Vindicated. Second edition. /7 Poetical Vagaries. Lon- don. 1814. Compe, WituiaM. The History of Johnny Quae Genus. The Little Foundling. New edition. New York. 1903. Original Love-Letters. London. 1784. 2 vols. Comte, AucusteE. System of Positive Polity. London. 1875-1877. 4 vols. Tuer Conremporary Review. London. Vol. XLV. Copr’s Tosacco Piant. London. Vol. Il. CoppéEe, Henry. Manual of English Literature. 1872. Tue Cornuitt Macazine. London. Vols. I, II, VIII, 1X, XXVIII, XXX, XXXV, XXXVIII. Cosmopouitan Macazine. New York. Vol. LIL. Coventry, Francis. The History of Pompey the Little: or, The Life and Adventures of a Lap-Dog. London. 1751. Third edition. London. 1752. Cowper, Witiiam. The Correspondence of William Cowper. Edited by Thomas Wright. London. 1904. 4 vols. Coxe, Witiiam. Memoirs of . Sir Robert Walpole. New edi- tion. London. 1816. 4 vols. Coxueap, A. C. Thomas Stothard, R.A. London. 1906. Tue Crartsman. London. 1743. Craicie, Mrs. P. M. [“John Oliver Hobbes” ]. Letters from a Si- lent Study. London. 1904. The Life of John Oliver Hobbes. London. IgQII. ‘ S35 24252559) fe aber mae caren wrmserdbns gual yettetahet * = nn eit mrnmes af eietee Aad be eee Cee fond bed FF ee het ae eet pedeaie teehee bl niet te ame arr ra ery eer re’ rs ey ee ners Eee pnb) ad) eter ee) Py tl nt ed ie e Reap te Son ee AE Ee ee Re pee ERE e NEEM be Tete sem inde hee eErNe MEM Imemes genre. wearer oO ar ear ae ay Pat ‘k ny eit HY aoa le i 2 Le i is ’ n ‘ f Ss tt 4 } 3 £ 2) ere tres aoe e?590 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Craik, GreorcE L. Sketches of the History of Literature and Learn- ing in England. Series Third. London. 1845. 2 vols. Craik, Henry. English Prose Selections. Edited by Henry Craik. New York and London. 1895. (Vol. IV.) Crawrorp, F. M. The Novel What It Is. London and New York. 1893. Creasy, Sir Epwarp S. Memoirs of Eminent Etonians. London. 1850. Creecu, WixuiaMm. Edinburgh Fugitive Pieces. Edinburgh and London. 1815. Tue Critic (New York). Vols. XII, XX, XXIV. Critica, Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, Clarissa, and Pamela. London. 1754. Tue Criticat Review. London. Vols. 1X, XIV, XVIII. Crort, Sir HerBERT. The Life of Edward Young. J Johnson’s Lives of the . Poets. Love and Madness. London. 1780. Croker, Joun W. The Croker Papers. The Correspondence and Diaries of John Wilson Croker. Edited by Louis J. Jennings. New York. 1884. 2 vols. Cross, W. L. The Development of the English Novel. New York. 1899. The History of Henry Fielding. New Haven. 1918. 3 vols. The Legend of Henry Fielding. Jz The Yale Review, October, 1918. Macaulay’s First Essay. Jz The Lamp, February, 1903. The New Fielding Collection. Jz Yale Alumni Weekly, February Die Ors The Secret of Tom Jones. Iz The Bookman (New York), XLVIII, 20-29 (September, 1918). Croruers, S. M. The Gentle Reader. Boston and New York. [1903.] Cru, R. L. Diderot as a Disciple of English Thought. New York. 1913. CruiksHANK, GerorcE. Illustrations of Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith. London. 1832. CUMBERLAND, GrorcE. The Cumberland Letters. Edited by Clem- entina Black. London. 1912. CUMBERLAND, Ricuarp. The Brothers. London. 1770. Henry. London. 1795. 4 vols.STL PET eFSi Sl ei gezeids Sec bys sate saiz ese cetek SA Oe OPOR ese br reat Tete OE Pe ree ETE Pe Sete TRESS eee EES EAE SE ee oa ea) MCD ree hee eeer eee eres RO AeA eh ae SAUER E Ee ree ores OPE 2 BIBLIOGRAPHY 591 Memoirs of Richard Cumberland Written by Himself. London. 1807. 2 vols. The Natural Son. London. 1785. Cun.iFFe, J. W. English Literature during the Last Half Century. New York. 1919. CunnincHaM, ALLAN. Biographical and Critical History of the British Literature of the Last Fifty Years. Paris. 1834. CunnINGHAM, GEoRGE G. Lives of Eminent and Illustrious Eng- lishmen. Glasgow. 8 vols. CurrENT LITERATURE. 1912. Curtis, G. W. Im Harper’s Magazine, XX, 413-414 (Easy Chair, February, 1860). Dacre, Lord. See AN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CORRESPONDENCE. Davies, THomas. Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick. Third edition. London. 1781. 2 vols. DeFFanp, Marie, Marquise du. Lettres de la Marquise du Deffand 4 Horace Walpole. Edited by Mrs. Paget Toynbee. Londres. 1912. 3 vols. | Dexany, Mrs. Mary. The Autobiography and Correspondence of . Mrs. Delany. London. 1861. 3 vols. Demans, Ropert. The Prose Writers of Great Britain. Edinburgh. 1860. Dermopy, Tuomas. The Harp of Erin. London. 1807. 2 vols. De Quincey, Tuomas. The Collected Writings. Edited by David Masson. Edinburgh. 1889-1890. 14 vols. Literary Reminiscences. Boston. 1854. 2 vols. The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey. Edited by A. Japp. London. 1891. 2 vols. DesForcEs, P. Tom Jones 4 Londres. Paris. 1782. Tom Jones et Fellamar. Paris. 1788. Dispin, Cuarres. A Complete History of the Stage. London. #.d. 5 vols. The Professional Life of Mr. Dibdin. London. 1803. 4 vols. Dippin, THomas. The Reminiscences. New York. 1828. 2 vols. Dippin, THomas F. The Library Companion. Second edition. Lon- don. 1825. Dickens, A. T. My Father and his Friends. Jz Cosmopolitan, LII, 149-159 (January, 1912). Dickens, Cuaries. Charles Dickens and Maria Beadnell. Boston. 1908. a er ee z ere tee ke hte ene . pei tee ete eet Leh areas yr eer ee eer Oe eee ime he eer eee . Soe pe a ath nr are SS ee MAS CRE errr renal ahem t Sra ye ae ee et te es aig iste tes) Yao a eT Or eres Sa &SPAPaS er es 2. 255% 592 FIELDING THE NOVELIST David Copperfield. London. 1850. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Second edition. London. 1880. 2 vols. Oliver Twist. Third edition. London. 1841. 3 vols. The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. London. 1837. Dickson, F. S. The Author of Tom Jones. /x The Yale Review, January, 1919. The Chronology of Tom Jones. Jz The Library, VIII, 218-224 (July, 1917). Errors and Omissions in Tom Jones. Jz The Library, IX, 18-26 (January, 1918). Index to Tom Jones. MS. in the Yale Library. William Makepeace Thackeray and Henry Fielding. Im The North American Review, CXCVII, 522-537 (April, 1913). DipErot, Denis. CEuvres Completes. Paris. 1875-1877. 20 vols. / foe (Euvres de Denis Diderot. Paris. 1821. 21 vols. Dicron, AuRELIEN. Autour de Fielding. Jz Revue Germanique, XI, 209-219. Une Nouvelle Biographie de Fielding. Jz Revue Germanique, XIII, 412-417. Les Romans de Fielding. Paris. 1923. Trans. London. 1925. Le Texte des Romans de Fielding. Paris. 1923. DisraE vi, Isaac. The Calamities . . . of Authors. New edition. London, New York. 1869. Curiosities of Literature. New edition. London. 1866. The Literary Character. London. 1818. DoBELL, SypnEy. The Life and Letters of Sydney Dobell. Edited by E. J. London. 1878. 2 vols. Doxsson, Austin. At Prior Park. New York. [1912.] De Libris. New York. 1908. Eighteenth Century Vignettes. First series. London. 1892; Second series. 1894; Third series. 1896. Fielding. London. 1883. New York edition. 1883; Second edi- tion. London. 1889; Another edition. London. 1907. Fielding, Henry. Jz The Encyclopaedia Britannica. Cambridge. 1910. (Vol. X.) Fielding’s Library. J7 Bibliographica, I, pt. ii (1895). Fresh Facts about Fielding. Jz Macmillan’s Magazine, XCV, 417- 422 (April, 1907).BIBLIOGRAPHY 393 A Handbook of English Literature. New edition (Revised by W. H. Griffin). London. 1897. Henry Fielding. Jz Chambers’s Cyclopedia of English Litera- ture. New edition. London and Edinburgh. 1902. (Vol. II.) Introduction to Fielding’s The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. London. 1892. Later Essays. London. 1921. A New Dialogue of the Dead. Jz The National Review, LX, 609- 617 (December, 1912). Old Kensington Place. London. 1910. Samuel Richardson. London. 1902. Dowpen, Epwarp. Oliver Goldsmith. Jz T. H. Ward’s The Eng- lish Poets. London and New York. 1880. (Vol. III.) Southey. New York. 1880. Dowuinc, W. The Eton Portrait Gallery. London. 1876. Dore, Sir A. C. Through the Magic Door. New York. 1909. Drake, NaTuan. Essays . . . Illustrative of the Rambler, Adven- turer, & Idler. London. 1809-1810. 2 vols. Drinkwater, Joun. The Outline of Literature. New York. 1923. 3 vols. Droop, Apotr. Die Belesenheit Percy Bysshe Shelley’s. Weimar. 1906 (Jena Dissertation). DuncomBE, Joun. The Feminiad [Feminead]. London. 1754. Dunuop, J. The History of Fiction. London. 1814. 3 vols. Even, Sir F. M. The State of the Poor. London. 1797. 3 vols. Epcrwortu, Maria. The Life and Letters. Edited by A. Tec: Hare. Boston and New York. 1895. 2 vols. Tue Epinpurcy Review. Edinburgh. Vols. Il, V, XIV, XXIV, XXV, XXXI, LXVIII, LXXXVII, XCIX, CX. Ecan, Pierce. Life in London. London. 1821. An EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CoRRESPONDENCE. London. 1910. Extor, Grorce. Essays and Reviews of George Eliot. Edited by Mrs. S. B. Herrick. Boston. 1887. Middlemarch. Edinburgh and London. 1871. 4 vols. The Mill on the Floss. London. 1860. 3 vols. Eiwin, Wuitwe tt. Some XVIII Century Men of Letters. London. 1902. 2 vols. Encyciop#pia Britannica. Third edition. Edinburgh. 1797. 18 vols.; Ninth edition. Vol. IX (1879, “Fielding” by Minto) ; et ES Fe AP ee Ot ee oe Ph ae erry ee SS +o rere: a e= a arr 4 el bite tet ee eren yt ar eenes ps rrr ser pil art ee Dette eee es a arr ee ree eee ar nen eee. et heen noenens pe eet tar ee eres594 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Eleventh edition. Vol. X (1910, “Fielding” by Dobson), Vol. XVIII (‘Meredith’). EpisopEs oF Fiction. Edinburgh. 1870. Erskine, J. Leading American Novelists. New York. 1910. Escotr, T. H. S. Anthony Trollope. London and New York. 1913. EsPinassE, Francis. Literary Recollections. New York. 1893. An Essay oN THE New SpeciEs oF Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding. London. 1751. THe European MacazingE, AND Lonpon Review. London. Vols. XXIII, XXX. Tue Eveninc ApvERTISER. London. 1754. An EXAMEN OF THE History of Tom Jones. London. 1750. Tue Exempvary Moruer; or, Letters between Mrs. Villars and her Family. Dublin. 1769. 2 vols. FARINGTON, JosEPH. The Farington Diary. Edited by James Greig. : Third edition. New York. 1923. Vol. I. FERRIER, Susan E. The Inheritance. Edinburgh. 1824. 3 vols. Marriage. Edinburgh. 1818. 3 vols. FIELDING, Henry. The Beauties of Fielding. London. 1782. The Complete Works of Henry Fielding. With a Memoir by Thomas Roscoe. London, Glasgow. 1840. The Complete Works of Henry Fielding. With an Essay by W. E. Henley. London [1903]. 16 vols. The Covent-Garden Journal. Edited by G. E. Jensen. New Haven. 1915. 2 vols. Geschichte Tom Jones, eines Findlings, tr. by W. von Liidemann. Leipzig. 1826. Histoire de Tom Jones, ou Enfant Trouvé.. London. 1750. 4 vols. The Historical Register . . . To which is added . . . Eury- dice Hiss’d. ‘Third edition. London. 1744. The History of Tom Jones. London. 1831. 2 vols. The Humorous and Diverting History of Tom Jones. Second edition. London. .d. The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. London. 1755. The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. Introduction by A. Dobson. London. 1892. Miscellanies. London. 1743. 3 vols. Miscellanies and Poems. Edited by J. P. Browne, M.D. London. 1872. webhost bank ppnetciniereep rere aint ere. a ie : a: ; \t 7 te a | ieeT e Ts Of ae Oe DRA Ree eee ee Oe bt ee PAS AP AS oy Oe OA OS Oe OL oe re reer dbl BIBLIOGRAPHY 595 Selected Essays of Henry Fielding. Edited by G. H. Gerould. Boston, etc. [1905]. Select Works. Edinburgh. 1807. 5 vols. Tom Jones. Edited by his Great-granddaughter, J. E. M. Field- ing. London. 1896. Tom Jones Histoire d’un Enfant Trouve. Traduction nouvelle par Defauconpret. Paris. 1836. 2 vols. Tom Jones, ou Enfant Trouvé. Par le Citoyen Davaux. A Paris. L?An IV [1796]. 4 vols. Tom Jones, ou Enfant Trouve. Paris (Dautherau). 1828. 6 vols. Tom Jones, ou |’Enfant Trouve. Imitation de l’Anglais de Field- ing par de la Place. Paris (Hiard). 1832. 4 vols. The Wedding Day. London. 1743. The Works of Henry Fielding, Esq. London. 1762. 4 vols. The Works of Henry Fielding. New edition. London. 1783. 12 vols. The Works of Henry Fielding. New edition. London. 1784. 10 vols. The Works of Henry Fielding. New edition. London. 1806. 10 vols. The Works of Henry Fielding. Edited by James P. Browne, M.D. New edition. London. 1871. 10 vols. The Works of Henry Fielding. Edited by Leslie Stephen. Lon- don. 1882. 10 vols. The Works of Henry Fielding. Edited by George Saintsbury. London. 1893. 12 vols. The Works of Henry Fielding with an Introduction by Edmund Gosse. Westminster, New York. 1898-1899. 12 vols. FieLpinc, Sir Joun. Extracts from such of the Penal Laws, as par- ticularly relate to the Peace of this Metropolis. New edition. London. 1769. FIELDING, SARAH. The Adventures of David Simple. Second edition. London. 1744. 2 vols. Familiar Letters between Simple. London. 1747. 2 vols. The History of the Countess of Dellwyn. London. 1759. 2 vols. The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia. London. 1757. the Principal Characters of David Fietps, James IT. Yesterdays with Authors. Eighth edition. Boston. 1874. PEP Urer Gs fe Se TTS es eee ee, prt TaN Rm taycthtreenoweoecemenecsomtalgiteacee hart stres we 6 ee ater! or) Ps i Mittbvons . ~ Pees pt onde ot Ph eked Pt ee Stetysewese- west anaebpoendleReonserendupuet rose pete et be et a el fe dee ee he ithe hutetoiaradeen be ghee tan Solel Lace eee dan n eas ae oo oy eee eee eae ee es rte Sa TY - 7 rs Pa a eer ayy rN pant Pd ee eee ett rer eens Mae e Neeint fem Snes pT otis bite ath) te eee pee renee nl rer ay « ay | eet et f| iF 3) i 5 4! ra 7 a | ot a S a Pa] ve **) #} t t i, eebahetApeherbieeed ee oe ener BOR Trampenee ta a S : eet amen a ye a een . sheen nd Leer en a het 596 FIELDING THE NOVELIST FITZGERALD, Epwarp. Letters and Literary Remains. Edited by William Wright. London and New York. ae 3 vols. Letters of Edward Fitzgerald to Fanny Kemble. Edited by W. A. Wright. London. 1895. More Letters of Edward Fitzgerald. London. 1902. 1 FLETCHER, Mrs. Exiza. Autobiography. Boston. 1876. FooTE, SaMUEL. The Works of Samuel Foote. London. 1830. 3 vols. ForsBes, Marcaret. Beattie and his Friends. Westminster. 1904. Fores, Sir Witiiam. An Account of the Life and Writings of James Beattie. New York. 1807. Forpyce, JAMEs. Sermons to Young Women. Sixth edition. London. 1766. 2 vols. ForsTErR, Joun. The Life and Adventures of Oliver Goldsmith. London. 1848. The Life and Times of Oliver Goldsmith. Second Edition. Lon- don. 1854. 2 vols. The Life of Charles Dickens. London. 1872-1874. 3 vols. Walter Savage Landor. Boston. 1869. ForsyTH, WituiaM. The Novels and Novelists of the Eighteenth Century. London. 1871 THE FortnicHtLty Review. London. Vols. XVIII, XXV, XXXI, AXXVII, LXIV, LXXILV, LXXVI, LXXXVIT XC Gv FrasEr’s Macazine. London. Vols. XVII, XXVIII, XXIX, XXXIII, XXXV, XXXVI, XXXVIII, LV, LVIII. FrRERE, JoHN Hookuam. The Works of . . . John Hookham Frere. London. 1872. 2 vols. Fritu, W. P. My Autol iography. New York. 1888. 2 vols. Frost, Tuomas. The Life of . . . Lord Lertelton: London. 1876. FroupeE, J. A. Gleanings from the Record Office. J# Fraser’s Maga- zine, LV, 127-143 (February, 1857). Gatswortuy, Joun. The Inn of Tranquillity. New York. 1912. Gat, Joun. The Bachelor’s Wife. E dinburgh and London. 1824. GarvEN, Francis, Lord Gardenstone. Miscellanies. Second edi- tion. Edinburgh. 1792. GarneETT, Epwarp. Preface to the Everyman’s edition of Defoe’s Captain Singleton. London. .d. Garrick, Davin. The Private Correspondence of David Garrick. London. 1831-1832. 2 vols.Pa PAO LeAP LO LGA eee eee. bh Oh }1 Oa O2 Ed $2 BIBLIOGRAPHY 597 Some Unpublished Correspondence of David Garrick. Edited by G. P. Baker. Boston. 1907. GaskELL, Mrs. Evizaperu. The Life of Charlotte Bronté. London. 1857. 2 vols. The Life of Charlotte Bronté. Introduction by C. K. Shorter. London. 1900. THe GENERAL ADVERTISER. London. 1749, 1752. Tue GENTLEMAN’s Macazine. London. Vols. XI, XIII, XV, XVI, PXOVANL es NGXG. XOX NOX NEXUS XEXITIV,, | XEXIVS, DOXA OVS XEXENI XG XE VL OLE VALS VALI (NSS): Grorce, WALTER L. Literary Chapters. Boston. 1918. Sincerity and Literature. Jz A Modern Book of Criticism. Edited by Ludwig Lewisohn. New York. 1919. Diz GERAUBTE EINSIEDLERINN, Oder Ophelia, aus dem Englischen des Herrn Fielding. Berlin. 1767. GrscHICHTE pDFs RirrerRs von Kirpar. Aus dem Englischen des Herrn Fielding. Leipzig. 1769. Gipson, Epwarp. The Autobiographies of Edward Gibbon. Second edition. Edited by J. Murray. London. 1897. Autobiography of Edward Gibbon. Introduction by J. B. Bury. London, New York [1907]. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Edited by J. B. Bury. London. 1896-1900. 7 vols. The Memoirs of . . . Edward Gibbon. Edited by G. B. Hill. London. 1900. The Miscellaneous Works of Edward Gibbon. By the Right Hon- ourable John Lord Sheffield. New edition. London. 1814. 5 vols. Gitritian, Georce. A Third Gallery of Portraits. Edinburgh and London. 1854. Gisstinc, GEorcE. Charles Dickens. New York. 1904. Goppen, G. M. Henry Fielding. London. 1910. Henry Fielding: Some Unpublished Letters and Records. Iz The Fortnightly Review, XCII, 821-832 (November, 1909). Gopwin, Wituiam. The Enquirer. London. 1797. Gorrue, J. W. von. Conversations with Goethe [ Eckermann’s]. Edited by S. M. Fuller. New edition. Boston and Cambridge. 1852. Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. New York. 1901. 2 vols, oe ar PPh uae ve SS nae eh oe ot ‘sibbetatanteth-pephabioet te od i" 0 ore err Py Pn Bh pear I rte + on eee SB) Gu. ~ UPS AAU Ete erer eee _* snes 4 et Sot Ra deed tent beheadoo Leelee eae ae ~ tes ed “ae ebtaeihiie tthe ere er Be ir 598 FIELDING THE NOVELIST GoLtpsMITH, Oxiver. The Vicar of Wakefield. Second edition. Lon- don. 1766. The Works of Oliver Goldsmith. New edition. London. 1885- 1886. 4 vols. GoopaLL, W. The Adventures of Capt. Greenland. London. 1752. 4 vols. GossE, Sir Epmunp. Books on the Table. New York. 1921. Gossip in a Library. New York. 1891. A History of Eighteenth Century Literature. London. 1889. Introduction to The Works of Henry Fielding. London. 1898- 1899. 12 vols. A Short History of Modern English Literature. London. 1898. GraF, Arturo. Litteratura Inglese in Italia. Torino. 1911. GrauaM, J. Murray. An Historical View of Literature and Art in Great Britain. London. 1871. GraHAm’s AMERICAN MontHiy Macazine_. Philadelphia. Vol. XX. Grant, Mrs. Anne. Letters from the Mountains. Second edition. London. 1807. 3 vols. GRANVILLE, A. B. Autobiography of A. B. Granville. London. 1874. 2 vols. Tue Grapuic. London. Vols. XXXIII, XXXVII, LXXVI. Graves, RicHarp. The Spiritual Quixote. Second edition. London. 1774. 3 vols. Gray, THomas. The Poems of Mr. Gray. Edited by W. Mason. MON Kaaki7s7i6" Green, EmManue. Henry Fielding. An Independent Criticism. London. 1909. GreEN, Tuomas. Extracts from the Diary of a Lover of Literature. Ipswich, London. 1810. GREEN, THomas Hitt. An Estimate of the Value . . . of Works of Fiction in Modern Times. Edited by F. N. Scott. Ann Arbor. 1911. GriFFITH, RicHarp and ExizaBetu. A Series of Genuine Letters between Henry and Frances. Third edition. London. 1766- 1770. 6 vols. GRIFFITH, RICHARD. Something New. Second edition. London. 1762. 2 vols. Grimm, Friepricu M. Freiherr von. Correspondance Littéraire. Paris. 1877. 16 vols.Dect tee Leah aes ae! SE SD SAS Pree BEET PACA TAS CTO SADE aE US Coes eo ter br bt bk bs DADS Slay Ose Se oe ye tech te ee BIBLIOGRAPHY 599 Grimm, Herman. The Life and Times of Goethe. Translated by S. H. Adams. Boston. 1880. Grosr, Francis. Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. With additions by Pierce Egan. London. 1823. The Olio. London. 1792. GutTuriz, WituiaM. The Friends. A Sentimental History. London. 1754. 2 vols. Hatuam, Henry. Introduction to the Literature of Europe. Fourth edition. London. 1854. 3 vols. Hamitton, Crayton. Materials and Methods of Fiction. New York. 1908. Hammerton, J. A. George Meredith. London. 1909. Hannay, James. A Course of English Literature. London. 1866. Satire and Satirists. London.. 1854. A Scotchman in Holland. Jz The Cornhill Magazine, VIII, 539- 555 (November, 1863). Harper’s New Montuiy Macazine. New York. Vols. VII, VIII, XOX, exons, Ts CIV. Harper’s WEEKLY. New York. Vol. LI. Harris, Grorce. The Life of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke. Lon- don. 1847. 3 vols. Harris, JAMES. Philological Inquiries. London. 1781. Harrison, Freperic. Autobiographic Memoirs. London. I19II. 2 vols. The Choice of Books. London. 1886. A Few Words about the Eighteenth Century. Jz The Nineteenth Century, XIII, 385-403 (March, 1883). The New Calendar of Great Men. London and New York. 1892. Studies in Early Victorian Literature. London, New York [1895]. Tennyson, Ruskin, Mill. London and New York. 1899. Hawkins, Sir Joun. The Life of Samuel Johnson. Jz The Works of Samuel Johnson. London. 1787. 11 vols. Hawruorne, Naruanier. The Hall of Fantasy. Iz The Pioneer, February, 1843. Haypon, Benjamin R. Benj Boston. 1877. 2 vols. Life of Benjamin Robert Haydon. don. 1853. 2 vols. Hayey, WituiaM. Poems and Plays, by William Hayley. 1785. 6 vols. amin Robert Haydon: Correspondence. Edited by T. Taylor. Lon- London. Tet Pte eye a. ot Oi VE EL PEEL PTET RS: ai land tee ee dha 1) > Sait hae i pep eee mr nielbtinenth-eeahenee eT eee ea eee ere Pe Ae se a ne et a Ps sl ta py Wi ur thee eee 5 TRUST reese aw a ws on ramets mer —~ Dr Ae bai id. babe eee meee Seat Rotate tet el pelea! Soh bie ete at i en ee ey eer eo ~renky se - Lr

t rt pe ren, Laine ae rk ae WPWhara ie ele Le ran el ee = ee Pie: eerreri sy ores a - et os Le bab tt beara eee tet nal =jAL- es IT pent epee a ae oe ee -_* - ae ° gee 4 tae ss errr eS oe ne #021 tea 8S: Neary ear ee Lepr ot nol gttewndabe-meyracany-cecssbeadtesubgrpeetadelpeoteemicieteks - pry pears =e ee ee es ee arora ere Teeee nee errr it pore erie 604 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Poems Plays and Miscellaneous Essays. Edited by A. Ainger. New York. 1885. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Edited by E. V. Lucas. London. 1903-1905. 7 vols. The Works of Charles Lamb and a Sketch of his Life, by Thomas Noon Talfourd. New York. 1845. 2 vols. Tue Lamp. New York. Vols. XXVI, XXIX. Lancaster, Henry H. Essays and Reviews. Edinburgh. 1876. Lanpor, W. S. Charles James Fox. Edited by S. Wheeler. London. 1907. Imaginary Conversations. Second edition. London. 1826-1828. 3 vols. Lanc, Anprew. Adventures Among Books. London [etc.]. 1905. Essays in Little. New York. 1897. History of English Literature. London. 1912. Letters on Literature. London, New York. 1889. The Life and Letters of John Gibson Lockhart. London. 1897. 2 vols. Old Friends. London and New York. 1890. Pickle the Spy. London. 1897. Prince Charles Edward. London [etc.]. 1900. Lanc, Mrs. ANpREw. Richardson. Jz Lang, A., Letters on Litera- ture, London, New York. 1889. LANIER, SIDNEY. The English Novel. New York. 1883. La Prace, Prerre-ANnTOoINE de. Iutroductory remarks in Histoire de Tom Jones, ou l’Enfant Trouvé. London. 1750. 4 vols. LAWRENCE, FrepERICcK. Henry Fielding. /# Sharpe’s London Magazine. N.S., Vol. IV (1854). The Life of Henry Fielding. London. 1855. Le Breton, Anna L. Memoir of Mrs. Barbauld. London. 1874. Lecxy, W. E. H. History of England in the Eighteenth Century. London. 1878-1890. 8 vols. Lecouts, E., and Cazamian, L. Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise. Paris. 1924. Lennox, Mrs. Cuartotre. The Female Quixote. London. 1752. 2 vols. Henrietta. London. 1758. 2 vols. Lessinc, G. E. Selected Prose Works. Translated by E. C. Beasley and Helen Zimmern. Edited by E. Bell. London. 1879.TEaeas Cre on ee a eR Oe Tien Vere ee ae ‘Pevarsec es Chee Gg CS Sy SvEr si ae € Re eae s CRC PUREST Pe OPER IE hal oe oe OR EAP RP os TRS LO Parke as ba ae AT od | Perr i O68 Be oe So Pe eS he ee weer 7 be Gee ee Tee Ae ae oe ok e- BIBLIOGRAPHY L’EstrancE, A. G. K. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford. New York. 1870. 2 vols. Letter III [and Letter IV]. From a Gentleman in the Country to his Son in the College of Dublin relating to the Life and Writings of Dr. Swift. Dublin. 1753. LETTERS OF THE LaTE Lorp Lytretton. Vol. I, eighth edition; Vol. II, fifth edition. London. 1793. 2 vols. Letters To Honoria AND Marianne. London. 1784. 3 vols. Lewes, G. H. The Lady Novelists. Jz The Westminster Review, LVIII, 129-141. Tue Lisrary. London. Third series, Vols. VIII, 1X; Fourth series, Vol. I. Tue Lire anp ADVENTURES OF A Cat, By the late Mr. Fielding. London. 1760. Tue Lire anp Memoirs oF Mr. Epuramm Tristram Bates. Lon- don. 1756. Tue Lire anp Rea ADVENTURES OF HamiLtTon Murray. Lon- don. 1759. 3 vols. Lippincotr’s Monruiy Macazine. Philadelphia. Vol. LXXII. Tue Lirerary Dicrst. New York. Vol. XXXIV. Tue Literary Gazetre. London. 1820, 1821, 1822. Tue Lirerary Wor tp. Boston. Vol. XIV. LITERATURE. London. Vol. IV. Luioyp’s Eveninc Post. London. 1769, 1778. Loszan, J. H. English Essays. London [etc.]. 1896. Locxuart, J. G. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott. Edin- burgh. 1837-1838. 7 vols. Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott. Boston and New York. 1910. 5 vols. Tur Lonpon CHRONICLE. 1769, 1777, 1778, 1780. Tue Lonpon Dairy ADVERTISER. 1751, 1752. Tue Lonpon Eveninc Post. 1748, 1755- Tue Lonpon Macazine. Vols. XVIII, XX, XXXII, XXXVIII, XLVII. Tue Lonpon Review. Vol. I. Tur Lonpon QuarTERLy Review. Vols. XXII, LX. Loncman’s Macazine. London. Vol. I. Lowe, James Russert. The Complete Works of James Russell Lowell. Fireside edition. Boston and New York. 1910. 11 vols. Democracy and Other Addresses. Boston. 1887. 605 ree) Psy eee a) ~ oe “4%. Teen haere er eerthi «f hatred - vant ne a a ae oe Terre er eee peel t edt pte et a trtine Seageene een any eke ERSTE mpeg mp Cet ee as oe ar Se ahd te . igtue-os Seale ee patel ATs pt 42 tee tte SN he pe el is be Sh daniel aed EPETPIEET TE Cae, } rey ieee e eee oe’ 7 | EPs FR GT eT Gt | + Ae ee Ter606 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Inscription for a Memorial Bust of Fielding. J The Atlantic Monthly, LXVI, 322 (September, 1890). Letters of James Russell Lowell. Edited by C. E. Norton. New York. 1894. 2 vols. Literary Essays. Boston and New York. 1895. LowTuiAn, J. The Life and Literary Remains of Thomas Sander- son. Carlisle. 1829. Lucas, E. V. The Life of Charles Lamb. Third edition. New York and London. 1907. 2 vols. LuxsporoucH, Henrietta, Lady. Letters Written . . . to William Shenstone. London. 1775. LyTTELTON, GEORGE, 15st baron. See PHILLIMORE. Lytton, Epwarp Butwer, rst Jord. The Disowned. London. 1835. Lucretia. London. 1846. Miscellaneous Works. New York. 1868. 2 vols. Paul Clifford. London. 1830. Pelham. London. 1840. Macautay, THomas B., rst baron. The Works of Lord Macaulay. Edited by Lady Trevelyan. New York. 1866. 8 vols. Macsean, Lacuian.’Pet Marjorie. Fourth edition. London and Stirling. 1914. MackeEnziE, R. S. Sir Walter Scott. Boston. 1871. MackinTosH, Sir James. Memoirs of the Life of Sir James Mack- intosh. From the second London edition. Boston. 1853. 2 vols. The Miscellaneous Works of . . . Sir James Mackintosh. Lon- don. 1846. 3 vols. Macmixian’s Macazine. London. Vols. XXX, XCV. Macreapy, WixuiaM C. The Diaries of William Charles Macready. 1833-1851. New York. 1912. 2 vols. Macready’s Reminiscences. Edited by Sir F. Pollock. New York. 1875. THE Macazine oF Art. London. Vol. VI. THE Macazine oF Macazines. Limerick. Vol. I. Macinn, WivuiaM. Miscellanies. London. 1885. 2 vols. Manain, Epwarp. An Essay on Light Reading. London. 1808. Marcu, Cuartes, Earl of. A Duke and His Friends. The Life and Letters of the Second Duke of Richmond. London. 1911. 2 vols. MarmonrTe., Jean F. CEuvres Completes. Paris. 1818-1819. 18 vols,“TLV ETP aS Si Si gers emaves Ce ee By < P doe EP ek oy PS Be ee oe he Oe Ol be OS be ete br be ik Be BIBLIOGRAPHY 607 Mason, Wivuiam. The Works of William Mason. London. 1811. 4 vols. MassincER, Puitip. The Dramatic Works of Massinger and Ford. Introduction by Hartley Coleridge. New edition. London. 1869. Masson, Davin. British Novelists and their Styles. Cambridge and London. 1859. Matcuam, M. E. The Nelsons of Burnham Thorpe. London, New WOLKeL OL It. Maruias, T. J. The Pursuits of Literature. Seventh edition. Lon- don. 1798. Matruews, Branp_Er. Aspects of Fiction. New York. 1896. The Historical Novel. New York. 1901. Mémoires DU CHEVALIER DE KILPAR Paris. 1768. 2 vols. Memorrs oF CuarLes Town ey. London. 1789. 3 vols. Memoirs oF THE SHAKESPEAR’S-HeEap. London. 1755. 2 vols. Mennecuet, E. Fielding, Comédie en un Acte et en Vers. Paris. 1823. Merepitu, GrorcE. On the Idea of Comedy. Jz The New Quar- terly Magazine, VIII, 1-40 (1877). Works. Westminster. 1896, etc. 34 vols. Tue Microcosm. 1835. Mitt, Joun Sruarr. Autobiography. New York. 1874. Mittar, J. H. Richardson. Jz H. Craik’s English Prose Selections. New York and London. Vol. IV. 1895. Miter, Hucu. Essays. Third edition. Edinburgh. 1869. The Scott Monument. Jz The Witness, August 18, 1840 (as re- printed in Oliphant Smeaton’s Scots Essayists. London. 7.d.). Mixts, AprauaM. The Literature and Literary Men of Great Brit- ain. London. 1852. 2 vols. Minto, Wituiam. Fielding. Jz Encyclopedia Britannica. Ninth edition. Vol. IX, Edinburgh, 1879. The Literature of the Georgian Era. Edinburgh and London. 1894. Mircuer, Donatp G. English Lands Letters and Kings. Part III. New York. 1895. Moprern LaNncGuaGE ASSOCIATION. XXXVI. Mopvern Lancuace Notes. Vol. XXXI. pE M. FIELDING. Publications. Vols. XXVIII, re ee ape a “a oe Die hee re: ea raee Seton te 4 alee ea ore Pitre tte a ahaa eee re a a oc tnabed ot pret hia oe he hey ate aad piled tet Ste eae cee ore ae eRe Ot ‘* Ts ; ya ree s ee are ert ee et re ta bng Vern Ee eee en Yee) pe nia toe an p. oe ee re aN we wien + yi rr iF . bt it 8G ag t) ee608 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Tue Mopern LancuacE Review. 1906. Monszoppo, JAMEs Burnett, Lord. Of the Origin and Progress of Language. Edinburgh. 1773-1776. 3 vols. Monracu, Mrs. EvizaBetu. Letters. Edited by Pennington. Lon- don. 1809. 4 vols. Montacu, Lady Mary Wort ey. The Letters and Works. Edited by Wharncliffe. New edition. London. 1837. 3 vols. : The Letters and Works. Third edition. Edited by W. Moy Thomas. London [1861]. 2 vols. The Works. Edited by J. Dallaway. London. 1803. § vols. THE MontTuiy Curonicie. London. 1838. THe MonTuiy Review. London. Vols. II, IV, V, VI, XII, XXV, XXVII, XLIX, LVII. Moore, GeorceE. Avowals. /7 Lippincott’s Magazine, LXXII, 343- 352 (September, 1903). Impressions and Opinions. London. 1913. Moore, Dr. Joun. The Life of Dr. Smollett. J Smollett’s Works. London. 1797. 8 vols. A View of the . Progress of Romance. /# Smollett’s Works. London. 1797. 8 vols. Moore, THomas. Memoirs, Journal, and Correspondence. Edited by Lord John Russell. London. 1853-1856. 8 vols. More, Hannan. Coelebs in Search of a Wife. London. 1808. 2 vols. The Works of Hannah More. New edition. London. 1830. I! vols. The Works. First complete American edition. New York. 1852. 2 vols. Morison, James A. C. Macaulay (E. M. L.). New York. 1894. Morey, Henry. Memoirs of Bartholomew Fair. London. 1859. Morris, WitiiamM. The Collected Works of William Morris. By his Daughter. London. 1910-1915. 24 vols. Muprorp, Wiuuiam. The British Novelists. London. 1811. Vols. LVEEV.. A Critical Examination of the Writings of Richard Cumberland. New and improved edition. London. 1812. 2 vols. Murpny, Artuur. The Examiner. London. 1761. The Gray’s-Inn Journal. Folio edition. London. 7.d. The Gray’s-Inn Journal. London. 1756. 2 vols. a ee Le alte ae ee ante bth tas healt co om asad ames ie del etree 7” glatete le =~ y Be ftSiS aT es pa gi aieiele Bas RigGi sae Te a eee sess biatree tial hd he Se er OP SEES Pepe CS eae DeLee LE ee ER re igezsitetaiteslaked 78 Oe ek ee eer tee rete er ee reed YY BIBLIOGRAPHY The Life of David Garrick. London. 1801. 2 vols. The Works of Arthur Murphy. London. 1786. 7 vols. Murpny, J. C. Travels in Portugal. London. 1795. Voyage en Portugal. Paris. 1797. 2 vols. Murray, Hucu. Morality of Fiction. Edinburgh. 1805. Museum oF Foreicn Lirerature & Science. Philadelphia and New York. 1824. Tuer Nation. New York. Vols. LXXVII, XCI, CVIII, CXVI. Tue NationaL Review. London. Vols. XVIII, LX. Netrieton, GrorcEe H. English Drama of the Restoration and Eighteenth Century. New York. 1914. Newman, J. H. Letters . . . of John Henry Newman. Edited by Anne Mozley. London. 1891. 2 vols. Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics. Edited by A. S. Cook. Boston. 1891. Ture New Monruzty Macazine. London. Vols. II, X, XX, XXXV. Ture New Quartrerty Macazine. London. Vol. VIII. Nicuo1s, Joun. Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century. London. 1812-1816. 9 vols. Prefatory Introduction to the General Index of The Gentleman’s Magazine. Vol. III. London. 1821. Nicuoizrs, Norron. Reminiscences of Gray. /7 Correspondence of Thomas Gray and the Rev. Norton Nicholls. Edited by John Mitford. London. 1843. Nico, W. R., and SeccomsBeE, I. A History of English Literature. New York. 1907. 3 vols. Tue NINETEENTH Century. London. Vols. V, XIII. Nose, James A. Morality in English Fiction. Liverpool and Lon- don [1886]. Norcate, G. L. The Life of Sir Walter Scott. London [1906]. Tur Nortu American Review. Boston, New York. Vols. XXXV, XXXVI, LXVII, LXVIII, LXXVIU, CXCVIT, CCL Tue Nortu British Review. Edinburgh. Vols. XXIV, XLV. Norron, Cuarves E. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton. Boston and New York. 1913. 2 vols. Nores AND Queries. London. 1884, 1916, 1917. NouveE.ie BiocraPHir GENERALE. Paris. 1855-1866. 46 vols. Ocitvie, Joun. Philosophical and Critical Observations on the Na- ture, Characters, and Various Species of Composition. London. 1774. 2 vols. Pk Pre. vet Ol Oe Se Fe Sl SAL OE EY OF Og Og eS ts on eee fo “77 BE “a? $ A ae >, b ee i 738 ed aes: Rt et) +] ry. i i ie - ma om) +f f/ ; mee er oe rice aie Lt ee Pt veieeeincebe 2 rb rT ee Se arse warts ~ a err Oy pRjenis Terra = lee ee aed ~™ er eye Sees SE ey Lb el pees pee ee eee ara wren ee pater eS he eT Pare Cite pe ihe Rapp oe Oe Meme ap TO a Fa REY) aa Tat TGF ea 8 Rly pean al eaten eee rare cent bt teeter eel einer tee ee eens abenatcrusathlinlndoipstesavelhenencasteie aerate - wt no Pa at and ~ “ > ~ = bd vache ot tr natant asee eae ihre ee Pate Pikeenbe Meh) ee aed i> ekbtsscyaali.,casepeet Motese Setar yaa 610 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Op Encrianp. London. 1748, 1749, 1750, 1751. OuipHanT, Mrs. M. O. W. Autobiography and Letters. New York. 1899. Historical Sketches of the Reign of George Second. Second edi- tion. Edinburgh and London. 1870. THE Oxxa Popripa. Second edition. Oxford, London. 1788. Orrery, Lord. The Orrery Papers. London. 1903. 2 vols. Outton, W. C. The Busy Body. London. .d. 2 vols. The History of the Theatres of London. London. 1796. 2 vols. PAMELA CENsURED: IN A LETTER TO THE EpiTor. London. 1741. Paston, GrEorGE. See SyMoNDs. PaTMorE, Coventry. Principle in Art [Readers’ Library]. Lon- don. 1.d. Tue Patriot ANALIZED. London. 1748. Pattison, Mark. Essays by the Late Mark Pattison. Oxford. 1889. 2 vols. PauL, Herpert. The Victorian Novel. London. 1897. Payn, James. Some Private Views. London. 1881. Peake, Ricuarp B. Memoirs of the Colman Family. London. 1841. 2 vols. Perry, Briss. A Study of Prose Fiction. Boston and New York. 1903. Perry, THomas S. English Literature in the Eighteenth Century. New York. 1883. Pueups, Wititiam L. The Advance of the English Novel. New York. 1916. PHILLIMORE, Rosert. Memoirs and Correspondence of George, Lord Lyttelton. Edited by Robert Phillimore. London. 1845. 2 vols. PuiLtipotts, Epen. Critical Standards. Jz the Times (New York), August 22, 1915. Pitxincton, Letitia. Memoirs of Mrs. Letitia Pilkington. Vols. I and II, Dublin, 1748; Vol. III, London, 1754. 3 vols. Piozzi, Mrs. Hester L. Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson. London. 1786. Autobiography . . . of Mrs. Piozzi. Edited by A. Hayward. Boston. 1861. Letters to and from the Late Samuel Johnson. London. 1788. 2 vols.pac tess sirecsaiietie eed We CE Se BESS ERET OS PLP LE Lees bi a) bid: BE ed yy hr hr bt BY SL Oa Sia | Pere rere ae cere ds eb BIBLIOGRAPHY 611 Prancue, JEAN Baptiste Gustave. Henry Fielding. Jz Revue des Deux Mondes, 1832. PorrzscHE, Ericu. Samuel Richardsons Belesenheit. Kiel. 1907. Popr, ALEXANDER. Works. Edited by W. L. Bowles. London. 1806. 10 vols. Works. Edited by W. Warburton. London. 1751. 9 vols. Works. Edited by Joseph Warton and Others. London. 1797. 9 vols. Porter, JANE. Thaddeus of Warsaw. London. 1803. 4 vols. Tue Portrotio. Philadelphia. Vol. VI. Pratt, Samuet J. [“Courtney Melmouth”]. Liberal Opinions. London. 1775-1777. 6 vols. Miscellanies. London. 1785. 4 vols. The Pupil of Pleasure. Second edition. London. 1777. Prescott, W. H. Biographical and Critical Essays. London. 1856. English Literature of the Nineteenth Century. In The North American Review, XXXV, 165-195 (July, 1832). Prior, Sir James. Life of Edmond Malone. London. 1860. Procter, B. W. Charles Lamb. Boston. 1892. Puncu. London. June 7, 1845. Pyr, Henry J. A Commentary Illustrating the Poetic of Aristotle. London. 1792. Sketches on Various Subjects. Second edition. London. 1797. Pyne, W. H. [‘Ephraim Hardcastle” ]. Wine and Walnuts. Second edition. London. 1824. 2 vols. Tur QuartTerty Review. London. Vols. I, 1 Xe XVI XE XXIV, XXXIV, LXIV, XCVIII, CII, CVIII, CXLV. Qur1LLER-Coucu, Sir ARTHUR THOMAS. Adventures in Criticism. London. 1896. Rack, Epmunp. Essays, Letters, and Poems. Bath. 1781. Rar, W. Fraser. Sheridan A Biography. New York. 1896. 2 vols. Rareicu, Sir Water. The English Novel. London. 1894. Ramsay, ALian. An Essay on Ridicule. London. 1753- A Letter . . . concerning the Affair of Elizabeth Canning. Lon- don. 1753- Raymonp, J. G. The Life of Thomas Dermody. London. 1806. 2 vols. Reape, Cuarves. Griffith Gaunt. 1866. 3 vols. Readiana. London. 1883. Tet ot ator cr wr os te ae Phe os perl, ~ : Ni wonaheteretncentteiatsose ere ee pact espeeesenecatanas anes en qtote® sae s4ey< eee ere arers mae er 7 See ee ee a ree / : + rel rat 4¢ Pan +33 aa +t) ai 7 ra oa 4 7] ih eeayant y a SS ae ners Waheed ee waren Shia teehee tee ee rhea : ee et i f oe s 612 FIELDING THE NOVELIST REED, JosEPH. Tom Jones, a Comic Opera. Second edition. Lon- don. 1769. Rees, ABRAHAM. [he Cyclopedia. Vol. XIV. REEVE, Mrs. Ciara. The Champion of Virtue. London. 1777. The Progress of Romance. Colchester and London. 1785. 2 vols. in I. Reip, Stuart J. A Sketch . . . of the Rev. Sydney Smith. Second edition. London. 1884. REILLY, JosEPH J. James Russell Lowell as a Critic. New York and London. 1915. REMARKABLE SaTiREs. London. 1760. REPPLIER, AGNES. Varia. Boston and New York. 1897. REvVvE pEs Deux Monpes. Paris. Vols. 1: XI; 3: CI. REVUE GERMANIQUE. Paris. Vols. XI, XIII. Reyno.ps, Sir JosHua. Discourses. Edited by Roger Fry. London. 1905. RICHARDSON, SAMUEL. The Works of. Edited by Leslie Stephen. London. 1883. 12 vols. RoBerts, WiLuiam. Memoirs of . . . Hannah More. New York. 1836. 2 vols. RoBErTsoN, JouHN M. Essays towards a Critical Method. London. 1889. Ropinson, Henry Crass. Diary. Second edition. London. 1869. 3 vols. Ror, F. W. Thomas Carlyle as a Critic of Literature. New York. 1910. Rocers, SaMuEt. Recollections. Edited by William Sharpe. Lon- don. 1859. Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers. Edited by Dyce. London. 1887. Tue Rowuiap PoriticaL Miscevuanies. London. 1795. Roscor, WitxiiAm C, Poems and Essays. London. 1860. 2 vols. Rousseau, JEAN-Jacques. CEuvres Completes. Paris. 1909. 13 vols. Ruskin, Joun. The Works of John Ruskin. Edited by E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn. London, New York. 1903-1912. 39 vols. SACKVILLE, Lady Marcaret. Jane Austen. London. 7.d. Tue St. James’s Eveninc Post. London. 1743. Tue Sr. James’s Macazine. London. Vol. II. SAINTSBURY, GrEorcE. The English Novel. London, New York. 1913.EY Ob DEAD SE COSTAR OTE CES CEPR CSSA SG CT AC EAC CO AR ee pee treet ot te Te Tea hed ye re Sd Pe Petes on Od oe Oe Dba RPh SERS Pe ee bt SPAS ASAD be of ee Oe ‘tlio bd ee ee SE ee TE SP OT Oe eT Lod Pe Per ee bP DA On Sie OL Se yee eee th ed Pee ae Se AT a da P en . eee tite ree tote be eps e fees hele 8 BIBLIOGRAPHY Fielding. Jz English Prose. Edited by Henry Craik. New York and London. 1895. Fielding [Masters of Literature]. London. 1909. A History of Criticism. New York. 1904. 3 vols. The Peace of the Augustans. London. 1916. Specimens of English Prose Style. London. 1885. The Works of Henry Fielding. Edited by G. Saintsbury. London. 1893. 12 vols. Tue Sarurpay Review. London. Vols. LIII, LV, LVI, LXXV, CILE SCHIMMELPENNINCK, Mrs. Mary A. Life of Mary Anne Schim- melpenninck. London. 1858. 2 vols. ScHLossER, FRIEDRICH CHRISTOPH. History of the Eighteenth Cen- tury. Translated by D. Davison. London. 1843-1852. 8 vols. ScumipT, Ericu. Richardson, Rousseau und Goethe. Jena. 1875. Tue Scots Macazine. Edinburgh. Vol. LXIX. Scott, Sir Water. Familiar Letters of Sir Walter Scott. Edin- burgh. 1894. 2 vols. The Fortunes of Nigel. Edinburgh, London. 1822. 3 vols. The Journal of Sir Walter Scott. New York. 1891. 2 vols. Lives of Bage, Fielding, Richardson. Smollett. Jz Ballantyne’s Novelist’s Library. Edinburgh. 1821-1824. Lives of the Novelists. Published by A. and W. Galignani. Paris. 1825. 2 vols. The Miscellaneous Prose Works. Edinburgh. z.d. The Monastery. Edinburgh, London. 1830. 3 vols. Woodstock. Edinburgh. 1826. 3 vols. ScrRIBNER’s MacazinE. New York. Vols. I, III. Scupper, Horace E. Childhood in Literature and Art. Boston and New York. 1894. SécuR, A. J. P. pE, anp Oruers. Le Portrait de Fielding. Paris. An VIII [1800]. Senror, N. W. Essays on Fiction. London. 1864. Sewarp, Anna. Letters of Anna Seward. Edinburgh. 1811. 6 vols. SHaRPE’s Lonpon Macazine. N.S., Vol. IV. SHaw, G. B. Plays: Pleasant and Unpleasant . . . The First Vol- ume Containing the Unpleasant Plays. New York. 1906. SHaw, THomas B. Outlines of English Literature. St. Petersburg. 1847. London. 1849. ee) TSE TEI Yee Pere ET et he ey See Peres es Gs Ph et Pe eee if " , ee , P, +, P34 or . Pa . i a ‘ ck ; be) . Hi be otieth-bekihiiaes ter aoa Les SUNS FE Se Spin rtrk senenteeceth need me be hemi steele deel pel eee eats Cpe tier ts ipeeeneh tira eter ener ans ree habe Mer 52 —_ pao te 8} ye cs v8 See ee * supa al eee Py eee bhealr s e - MaenPusn ote ene ant a ee phate hen intact font eal! irate ee eet ee Se eee #19 By a) heap ee el ee tee ere eee nee ee ener h — : 7 : t 4 a i ie 3.) 2 | 4 a 1: cf RS i Da “ RY rt EE $35 ; a i : ce : iAwe ee a eet et sTAsathendied ee ee 614 FIELDING THE NOVELIST SHEBBEARE, JOHN. Lydia; or, Filial Piety. London. 1786. The Marriage Act. London. 1754. 2 vols. SHELLEY, Henry C. The Life and Letters of Edward Young. London. 1914. SHELLEY, Percy Byssue. The Letters of. Edited by R. Ingpen. London. 1909. 2 vols. SHENSTONE, WILLIAM. The Works . . . of . . . William Shen- stone. Third edition. (Vols. 1 and 2, fourth edition.) London. 1773. 3 vols. SHERLock, Martin. Letters on Several Subjects. London. 1781. 2 vols. New Letters from an English Traveller. London. 1781. SHIRREFs, ANDREW. Poems. Edinburgh. 1790. SHORTER, CLEMENT K. The Brontés Life and Letters. London. 1908. 2 vols. Immortal Memories. New York and London. 1907. SHoRTHOUSE, J. H. Literary Remains of J. H. Shorthouse. Edited by his Wife. London and New York. 1905. Sinctair, May. The Three Brontés. Boston and New York. 1912. SMART, CHRISTOPHER. The Hilliad. London. 1753. The Midwife, or the Old Woman’s Magazine. London. 3 vols. in I. Poems on Several Occasions. London. 1763. SMEATON, OLIPHANT. Scots Essayists. London. .d. SmirH, ApamM. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New edition [ Bohn’s]. London. 1911. SmiTH, CHarLotTe. Marchmont. London. 1796. 4 vols. Smiru, G. B. Our First Great Novelist. J Macmillan’s Magazine, XXX, 1-18 (May, 1874). Poets and Novelists. New York. 1876. SMITH, GoLtpwyn. The Lamps of Fiction. Jz Modern Eloquence. Philadelphia. 7.¢d. IX, 1068-1075. SmitH, James. Memoirs. Edited by his Brother Horace Smith. London. 1840. 2 vols. SmirH, Sir James E. Memoir and Correspondence of. London. 1832. 2 vols. SmitH, JoHN T. Nollekens and his Times. Second edition. 1828. 2 vols. SmirH, SypNEY. The Works. Second edition. London. 1840. 3 vols. SMOLLETT, Topsras. The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle. London. 1751. 4 vols.SOSLiAtclLiandss Sa! FL ho O48 Oe eee ese ee ee Te Te ee oe Ge Le BIBLIOGRAPHY Continuation of the Complete History of England. London. 1766. 2 vols. A Faithful Narrative. London. 1752. The Miscellaneous Works. Second edition. Edited by R. Ander- son. Edinburgh. 1800. 6 vols. Works. Edited by John Moore, M.D. London. 1797. 8 vols. Works. Edited by W. E. Henley. Westminster. 1899-1901. 12 vols. Sotty, Henry S. The Life of Henry Morley. London. 1898. Some REMARKS ON THE LIFE AND Writincs of Dr. John Hill. London. 1752. SouTHEY, Ropert. The Correspondence of Robert Southey with Caroline Bowles. Edited by Edward Dowden. Dublin, London. 1881. The Doctor. London. 1834. 7 vols. Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey. Edited by J. W. Warter. London. 1856. 4 vols. Southey’s Common-Place Book. Edited by J. W. Warter. Fourth series. London. 1851. SPALDING, WiLL1aM. Fielding. Jz Handbook of Biography. London. 1863. History of English Literature. London [1852]. Tue Spectator. London. Vols. LV, LVI. SPENCE, JosEPH. Anecdotes. Edited by S. W. Singer. London and Edinburgh. 1820. SpreLMANN, M. H. The Hitherto Unidentified Contributions of W. M. Thackeray to “Punch.”? New York and London. 1900. Srazt-Hoisrein, ANNE, Baronne de. The Influence of Literature on Society. From the second London edition. Boston [etc.]. 1813. 2 vols. Sraprer, Paut. Le Grand Classique du Roman Anglais. /z Revue des Deux Mondes, 3: Cl, 412-454 (September 15, 1890). SreFFeEns, J. H. Thomas Jones, ein Lustspiel . . . nach der Grund- lage des Herrn Fielding. Zelle. 1765. STENDHAL. See BEYLE. STEPHEN, FirzyaMes. The Relation of Novels to Life. Jz Cam- bridge Essays. London. 1855. STEPHEN, Sir Lesiie. English Literature and Society in the Eight- eenth Century. London. 1904. Perey Ss oe eRe Pe eee Oe PPO eles er ee | Ce ee SS rere sy eo: eee ee! Pee ee Tee erie oe Pere? tint thas rr | te ee ~ rie Marg be ‘ een rigs re eT ee et eee eee ee eee Senay Seen616 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Fielding. Jz Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. XVIII. London. 1889. Fielding’s Novels. Iz The Cornhill Magazine, XXXV, 154-171 (February, 1877). History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. Lon- don. 1876. 2 vols. Hours in a Library. First, second, and third series. London. 1874- 1879. 3 vols. Memoir of Henry Fielding. Jz Vol. I, iii-civ, of Fielding’s Works. London. 1882. 10 vols. STEPHENS, JAMES. An Essay in Cubes. Jw The English Review, XVII, 84 (April, 1914). SrEuarT, J. A. Letters to Living Authors. New edition. London. 1892. STEVENS, GeorGE A. The Adventures of a Speculist. London. 1788. 2 vols. Distress upon Distress: or, Tragedy in True Taste. London. 1752. STEVENSON, R. L. Familiar Studies of Men and Books. London. 1882. A Gossip on Romance. Jz Longman’s Magazine, I, 69-79 (No- vember, 1882). The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson. Edited by S. Colvin. New York. 1900. 2 vols. New edition. New York. 1911. 4 vols. On Falling in Love. Jz The Cornhill Magazine, XXXV, 214-220 (February, 1877). Some Gentlemen in Fiction. J# Scribner’s Magazine, III, 764- 768 (June, 1888). Victor Hugo’s Romances. Jz The Cornhill Magazine, XXX, 175- 194 (August, 1874). STEWART, DucaLp. The Collected Works. Edinburgh. 1854-1860. II vols. STOCKDALE, PEercitvaL. The Memoirs of . . . Percival Stockdale. London. 1809. 2 vols. SToppaRD, Francis. The Evolution of the English Novel. New York, London. 1906. STOWE, Cuartes E. The Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Boston and New York. 1890. Stowe, Harrier B. A Library of Famous Fiction. New York. 1873. STuART, Lady Louisa. See Home, J. A. NE irae ee heidi tee tae eee te ee eee edie ee a ete Jai ntc et sae eect ee ee ee a an ’ : : aa rt bee thay oeSe Te Ie Ih ee Seer bE Oe PT OS wt eR Co case hae ee BIBLIOGRAPHY Tue StupENT, or the Oxford and Cambridge Monthly Miscellany. Oxford. Vol. II [1751]. Suarp, Jean B. A. Fielding. I” Biographie Universelle. Paris. Tome XIV. Swirt, JonaTHAN. On Poetry: A Rapsody. Dublin (ar743 il Swinpurne, A. C. Charles Dickens. J The Quarterly Review, CXCVI, 20-39 (July, 1902). The Collected Poetical Works. London. 1917. 6 vols. The Letters of. Edited by Thomas Hake and A. Compton- Rickett. London. 1918. A Note on Charlotte Bronté. London. 1877. Symonps, Emity M. [‘“‘George Paston”]. Mr. Pope his Life and Times. New York and London. 1909. 2 vols. Side-lights on the Georgian Period. London. 1902. Social Caricature in the Eighteenth Century. London [1906]. Symons, ArTHuR. Dramatis Personae. Indianapolis [1923]. Tang, H. A. History of English Literature. Translated by H. Van Laun. Edinburgh. 1871. 2 vols. TaLrourp, Sir Tuomas N. Critical and Miscellaneous Writings. Second American edition. Philadelphia. 1853. The Works of Charles Lamb . . . and a Sketch by . fourd. New York. 1845. Taytor, Sir Henry. Autobiography of Henry Taylor. London. 1885. 2 vols. Tennyson, Hatiam, 2d baron. Alfred Lord Tennyson. A Memoir by his Son. London. 1898. 2 vols. Texte, JosEPH. Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Translated by J. W. Mat- thews. London. 1899. Tuackeray, W. M. Charity and Humor. Jz Harper’s Magazine, VII, 82-88 (June, 1853). A Collection of Letters of Thackeray. New York. 1888. The Complete Works. Edited by W. P. Trent and J. B. Henne- man. New York. [1904.] 30 vols. The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century. London. 1853. Fielding’s Works. Jz The Times [London], September 2, 1840. George the Third. I~ The Cornhill Magazine, II, 257-277 (September, 1860). The History of Henry Esmond. London. 1852. 3 vols. edlval= 2s 4 bE AT PE Oe ELSE Oo! ok on eben en ene 4 hebben tse i ele pete rr bar ae ee he RR Per ee mt Mh we me 8, ee ated = ts a Puntos ie ee Tee fe UPTO ewe ee aac teens or wr en % ee as “ east nk iwnaehetireennnetbodarnsnent st ors os 8 Sito -prcateS iin sie Pua ween, ae my Cet tiee ler rs » Se ow —~ Latta bet bd tote ea Le tt Seen eet eben tein pa Bi . P= eben Apter - To) be ee Phy i Arle let a red abbey ei SE py La ira nt eh been a ary eT ery ee er r ‘ : _ er ee eee ee ne ae— inant Teheran cae ea . Atiaehhtie need ee en aes 618 FIELDING THE NOVELIST The History of Pendennis. London. 1849-1850. 2 vols. The Newcomes. London. 1854-1855. 2 vols. Nil Nisi Bonum. Jz The Cornhill Magazine, I, 129-134 (Feb- ruary, 1860). The Paris Sketch-Book. Second edition. London. 1840. 2 vols. Roundabout Papers. London. 1863. Thackerayana. London. 1875. The Virginians. London. 1858-1859. 2 vols. THELWALL, JoHN. Poems. Hereford. 1801. THICKNESsE, Puitip. Useful Hints to Those Who Make the Tour of France. London. 1768. Tomson, ALEXANDER. Essay on Novels. Edinburgh. 1793. Tomson, Ciara. A Note on Fielding’s Amelia. Jz The Westmin- ster Review, CLII, 579-588 (November, 1899). Samuel Richardson. London. 1900. Tomson, JaMeEs. Review of Meredith’s Richard Feverel. J Cope’s Tobacco Plant, II, 334-336 (May, 1879). THornTon, Bonnett. Have at You All: or, The Drury-Lane Jour- nal. London. 1752. Tue Times (London). 1838, 1840. Tue Times (New York). 1902, 1904, 1907, 1915. Trait, H. D. The New Fiction. London. 1897. The New Lucian. London. 1884. Trent, W. P. The Authority of Criticism. New York. 1899. Greatness in Literature. New York [1905]. TREVELYAN, Sir Grorce. The Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay. New York. 1876. 2 vols. Trotiope, AnTuony. An Autobiography. Edinburgh and London. 1883. 2 vols. TrumBxiE, AutFrep. Henry Fielding. Jz Vol. VII of Illustrated Sterling Edition. Boston. .d. Tuckerman, Bayarp. A History of English Prose Fiction. New York. 1882. Twininc, Ricuarp. Selections from Papers of the Twining Family. Edited by Richard Twining. London. 1887. Twininc, Tuomas. Recreations and Studies of a Country Clergy- man. London. 1882. Translation of Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry. Second edition. London. 1812. 2 vols.o> 329, 97-8554 3-39 br bo! PSS TS Te Sy Oe SBF PE TLC VERT ACEI SS Ss Figs 74 teehee kes ene ee OF Bt Oe OS Pe Cea Pe LE RC RR ES PT ET Ee oe: SS o@ OA wd ed Et ky he Oe bh Ok Oi Oe OY SCL lees BIBLIOGRAPHY Van Doren, Cart C. The Greatest English Man of Letters. I” The Nation (New York), CXVI, 659-660 (June 6, 1923). The Life of Thomas Love Peacock. London. 1911. Vaucuan, C. E. English Literary Criticism. London. 1896. Victor, Benyamin. The History of the Theatres. London. 1761. 2 vols. [Vol. III, 1771.] Vo.rairE, F. M. A. de. CEuvres Completes. Nouvelle édition. Paris. 1877-1885. 52 vols. WaxpscumipT, Cart. Die Dramatisierungen von . . . Tom Jones. Wetzlar. 1906. Watrote, Horace. The Letters of. Edited by Mrs. Paget Toyn- bee. Oxford. 1913-1915. 16 vols. Supplement to the Letters of Horace Walpole. Edited by Paget Toynbee. Oxford. 1918. 2 vols. Warp, Sir Avotpuus W. Dickens. New York. 1882. The Political and Social Novel. Jz The Cambridge History of English Literature, XIII, 377-446. Warp, Rosert P. Fielding; or, Society. Philadelphia. 1838. Warp, T. H. The English Poets. London and New York. 1880. 4 vols. Warp, Witrriv. The Life of John Henry Newman. London. 1912. 2 vols. Warner, R. An History of the Abbey of Glaston; and of the Town of Glastonbury. Bath. 1826. Warton, JosEpH. An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope. London. Vol. I (1756); Vol. II (1782). Watson, Wituiam. The Life of Henry Fielding. Edinburgh. 1807. We ts, J. E. The Dating of Shenstone’s Letters. In Anglia, N. F., XXIII, 429-452. Jonathan Wild. Iz Modern Language Publications, XXVIII, 1-55 (March, 1913). West, Mrs. Jane. Refusal. London. 1810. 3 vols. Tue Wesrminster Review [Including earlier titles]. London. Vols. XVI, XX, XXVI, XXVII, XXX, XXXII], XXXIV, XE, ELIA, HAVINIIS IDI 1D.4 NY, LXXVII, LXXXI, LXXXIV, Chil: WuatTe ty, E. J. Life and Correspondence of Richard Whately. London. 1866. 2 vols. Wuarety, Ricuarp. Miscellaneous Lectures and Reviews. London. 1861. PREY PAR er et rs oi Phere ce ee Of be Oe PR BL Per eres eo el Gs BP Pees be STRURIURSG Sie ad $O 8h" Abauei aiapnsege. sls emer ean iete en eee \ por se rs -etinhsinbetatieas naka eer tah ebve peaked atts eal .. ~. gtr = ea ee Er ip ne . an es -“ spqele . geen bodes fort See een yk ean eee s s TATU err) corre seen o: Cry ove ee eee eras 4 ~~ rr ne 3 oom weer @enee. 7 Fon ae he Le Shy igi sene tata een enn GL ey om ee ae > ry ee eee Se el ke et a) ee el a - - a. 2 pevenene-by srenyenyee Sener eS eer Treen) ieee nis * [ hepuips “hs, = 450 tt p= apo rn - “ : ee “ mcr peta ae ere i 3 Ea i aa ad % ar are re part one v # a ty “ee eryTeles es La tele wrars $ 620 FIELDING THE NOVELIST Wuincop, I'Homas. Scanderbeg. London. 1747. WuippLe, Epwin P. Essays and Reviews. Third edition. Boston. 1856. 2 vols. Literature and Life. Boston and New York. 1888. Wuirte, Wiriiam Hate. Letters to Three Friends. Oxford. 1924. WHITEHEAD, Pau. An Epistle to Dr. Thompson. Dublin. 1755. WHITEHEAD, Wi1aM. Charge to the Poets. /# The Annual Regis- ter for 1762. Plays and Poems. London. 1774. 2 vols. WitBerForce, WiuiaM. A Practical View of the Prevailing Re- ligious System of Professed Christians. First American edition. Philadelphia. 1798. A Practical View [Evangelical Family Library, Vol. II]. New York. 2.d. WixuiaMs, Haroip. Two Centuries of the English Novel. London. IQII. Witson, D. A. Carlyle till Marriage. London. 1923. Witson, Franx. Dickens in seinen Beziehungen zu den Humor- isten, Fielding u. Smollett. Leipzig. 1894. Witson, J. E. Thackeray in the United States. New York. 1909. 2 vols, WINCHESTER, CaLEB T. Some Principles of Literary Criticism. New York. 1899. Woop, Aucustus. Einfluss Fieldings auf die deutsche Literatur. Yokohama. 1895. Woopserry, Gerorce E. Literary Essays. New York. 1920. Literary Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century. New York. 1921. Woot, Joun. Biographical Memoirs of the Late Rev Joseph Warton. London. 1806. WorpswortH, CuristopHER. Memoirs of William Wordsworth. Boston. 1851. 2 vols. Worpswortu, Dororny. Journals of Dorothy Wordsworth. Edited by W. Knight. London. 1897. 2 vols. WorpswortH, WILLIAM. Lyrical Ballads. Second edition. London. 1800. 2 vols. The Prose Works of. Edited by A. B. Grosart. London. 1876. 3 vols, Tue Wor tp. London. 17 2) 5 WRraxaLxL, Sir NatuaniE.. The Historical and the Posthumous SS ae rene b ene ee ors ee ee pales dunt teas aut) eee Ma . ne eeBIBLIOGRAPHY 621 Memoirs of Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall. Edited by Henry B. Wheatley. London. 1884. 5 vols. YaLE ALuMNI WEEKLY. Vol. XXII. Yate Review. Vols. V, VIII. Yates, Epmunpv. Edmund Yates: his Recollections. London. 1884. 2 vols. Yonce, C. D. Three Centuries of English Literature. New York. 1872. Younc, Epwarp. Conjectures on Original Composition in a Letter to the Author of Sir Charles Grandison. Second edition. Lon- don. 1759. ty ee rere Perea panei eer) she Abek bs man, Sesishebatatinns - a 7 cat ms a a ern rel Waar rr PU ate meee ik theater tte ten TT jee, ewe od ee ee ee Py fy Le “ Rs i ry Ma ie ti ¥ 4} ig # zy H { i e s 34 i PS i F 3 ar a a ee ene a nen; OE er rae ies ee ated De ee Teens i ae ee i rears ’ ae eee Nhe eee ¥ Lr te aes alte tee) Ne an we) erent eea oe BBT, Thomas, on Jones and Grandison, 318. Academy, The, on Fielding’s style, 500-501; on Fielding, 513-514, 52035 524. Adams, Mrs. John, 259 2. Adams, John Q., on Tom Jones, 259. | Addison, Joseph, 109, 223, 364, 457, 465. Admonitions from the Dead, at- tack on Fielding, 109. Adventures of an Author, 176. Adventures of Capt. Greenland, see Goodall, W. Adventures of David Simple, see Fielding, Sarah. Adventures of Joe Thompson, 58. Aikin, Dr. John, 154 ”, 275; on Fielding, 276-277; 281, 286, 297 M, 375, 378, 565. Ainger, Alfred, 312, 366 ”. Ainsworth, W. H., 381, 382. Alcott, Louisa M., on Amelia, 523 7. Alden, H. M., on Fielding, 539. Alison, Archibald, on Fielding and Scott, 372-373: Allen, James Lane, 532. Allen, Ralph, 9; assists Fielding, 273 39) 355- Allibone, S. A., on Fielding, 432. Allingham, William, on Fielding and Voltaire, 472. Amanda, 140. Amelia, see Fielding, Henry. Works. ~ Amicable Quixote, 247. Anderson, Dr. Robert, prefers Smollett to Fielding, 240; 329. Sere Tere t Pa i Se Index eT UE SRI R Aes ve ee Teh eS Pea Cate) OPO EET we PIS? Cer elated rere Te Année Littéraire, 168 n. Annual Register, 166, 481. Anti-Jacobin, 265, 279, 291. Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, see Shamela. Argenson, Marquis d’, 46-47. Aristophanes, 56, 454, 498. Aristotle, Fielding on, 221, 292; 580. Armstrong, Dr. John, 107, 108. Arnold, Matthew, 369, 440. Astley, Thomas, 36. Athenaeum, The, 426, 538. Atlantic Monthly, 480. Austen, Jane, on Fielding and Richardson, 273-274; 3583 G. H. Lewes on, 390, 3913 393) 424) 439) 449) 459- Austin, Mrs. Sarah, on Fielding, 521 2H. Authoress, The, 359. ADCOCK, John, on Field- ing, 377: Bage, Robert, 328, 352 7%. Bagehot, Walter, on Fielding and Thackeray, 442. Baker, David E., 168-169. Baldwin, C. S., 527. Balzac, 439, 531- Bampfylde-Moore Carew, see Ca- rew, Bampfylde Moore. Barbauld, Mrs. A. L., 55, 267; 275; on Fielding, 277-279, 281, 551, 5653 316, 325, 328, 355) 375) 3783; excludes Ame- lia from British Novelists, 428. Barnes, Thomas, 347. Barthe, Nicolas T., on Fielding, 182-184. ae 4 ih Hee 4] i on ie “eS “ 5 S35 ij ros * £3% 3 a ean Nae ad rang § 4 hh Sedetpel. Shbsietoese er ea rebte " 7 gn eget wn A ae irae et ee Se eres ~ wr oe ao po eye 9 Pty Regi a ee ene ee or ie! er is ai} : t: Ti . i} fi tf / : f au ray ve ae Wa te oes neene teas Stee he NES Ne 624 Bates, Arlo, on Fielding, 527. Beattie, James, 147; on Fielding, 218-226, 558; surprised at Johnson’s opposition to Field- 219; Place, 220; on fiction, 221-222; on ing, censures La Smollett, 222, 225; strictures on Fielding, 224; censured by Lord Hailes for praising Field- ing, 225; Beauttes of Beattie, raises Amelia, 226; cen- res Richardson, 226; 282, 6, 287 Beattie, James Hay, estimate of » 378, 563. Fielding, 223-224. Beauties of Fielding, 209. Beddoes, T. L., attempts a Field- ing novel, 356. Beloe, William, enjoys Tom Jones, 210. Belsham, William, 564. Bennett, Arnold, on Fielding, 533-534- Benson, Bishop Martin, 100. Bentham, Jeremy, weeps over Clarissa, 556 n. Bentley’s Miscellany, on Fielding, 431. Besant, Walter, 445; on Fielding, 501; references in Chaplain of the Fleet, 501. Bibliography, 581-621. Birch, Dr. Thomas, reports Lyt- telton’s commendation of Tom writes Earl of Or- rery about Tom Jones, 29, 30. Birrell, and Richardson, 495; on Field- Jones, 29; Augustine, on Fielding ing’s style, 500; on Fielding, 507, 519; on Tom Jones, 507, 508. Bisset, Robert, on Fielding, 264, 265-266; on height of Field- INDEX Blackwood’s Magazine, on Field- INZ, 335-336, 404, 438. Blair, Hugh, estimate of Fielding and Richardson, 234-235, 527; 286. Blair, Robert, 511. Blake, William, 279 2. Blankenburg, C. F., 258. Bode, J. J., 258. Bolingbroke, Lord, Fielding’s an- swer to, 116. Bookman, The (New York), 524. Borrow, George, on Fielding and Scott, 374-375; welcomes Dick- ens as second Fielding, 395- 396. Boswell, James, puzzled by John- sons’s disparagement of Field- IQI-192, 193) 559355 ae- monstrates, 193; on Fielding, ing, 260-261. Bowles, Caroline, 344-345. Bowles, Rev. W. L., 292. Bradshaigh, Lady, 40, 42, 65, 66, 67, 97. Brewer, George, History of Tom Weston, 249. Brewer, J. N., on Fielding, 363. British Critic, 279, 291, 293, 297 n, British Quarterly Review, mis- represents Tom Jones, 421; 481. Bronté, Charlotte, 370, 379-380, 390, 3933 contrasts Fielding and Thackeray, 404; Rochester and Squire Western compared, 404; dedicates second edition of Jane Eyre to Thackeray, 419; 419-420; on Thackeray’s Lecture, 420; 459. on Fielding, Brooke, Frances, 211-212. ing’s heroes, 265 m, 421. Brooke, Henry, 176, 365. Noein atte eer eda ee ee eas eyRgGeerer tee 6 TRUST ETAI SA SIGS CLD 2452943432 he PEO CaS Oe SoS Fe re eT INDEX 625 Brookfield, Mrs. 406, 4153 | Burns, Robert, on Fielding, 251- Thackeray compares to Amelia, 427 1. Brown, Dr. John, on Fielding, 441. Browne, James P., edits Fielding, 447-450; calls Thackeray to ac- count, 448-449, 572. Browne, W. Y., 403. Browning, Mrs. E. B., in girl- hood forbidden to read Gibbon and Tom Jones, 237; on Field- ing, Smollett, and Hugo, 396. Browning, Robert, 439. Brunetiére, F., on Fielding and George Eliot, 454, 471. Brunton, Mrs. Mary, 272, 293, 302. Bryce, Viscount, 272. Brydges, Sir Egerton, on Fielding, 288; 345. Buchanan, Robert, dramatic adap- tations, 489. Bullen, A. H., on Fielding, 488. Buller, Charles, reviews Pickwick, 399-400. Bulloch, J. M., 520. Bulwer, see Lytton, Lord. Burn, Dr. Richard, 184-185. Burney, Dr. Charles, on Johnson’s animus toward Fielding, 191; reads Pasquin aloud, 191; on Evelina, 191; on Smollett’s grossness, 191; on Fielding and Smollett, 200. Burney, Frances, 177; on Field- ing and Richardson, 198; pref- ace to Evelina, 1993; reception of Evelina, 199; Cecilia, 199; praised by Johnson, 200, 201; praised by Crisp, 202; on Pas- quin, 206; 208, 2243 Robert Bisset on, 2653; 274, 562. 2533 379: Bute, Countess of, 73. Butler, Charles, on Amelia, 360. Butler, Samuel, on Fielding, 513. Byrom, John, lines on Richardson, 130. Byron, Lord, 217, 302, 331, 3333 on Fielding, 349-3523 on Rich- ardson, 351; on Fielding’s democratic spirit, 351-3523 378, 568. AINE, Hall, 460. Calderwood, Mrs., on Rich- ardson and Fielding abroad, 152. Cambridge Jest Book, 42. Campbell, Thomas, debates with Crabbe about Fielding and Smollett, 239. Cannan, Gilbert, on Fielding, 532. , Canning, Elizabeth, 107. Canning, George, on Tom Jones, 268. Carew, Bampfylde Moore, Apology hostile to Fielding, 42-433 52, 58, 85, 143, 385. Carleton, William, 288-289. Carlyle, Jane Welsh, on Amelia, 418. Carlyle, Thomas, 329; on Tom Jones, 3613; on Fielding, Smol- lett, and Sterne, 384-385, 3925 flouts Pickwick, 400; 418, 4233 on Fielding, 472, 568; 477> 486. Carter, Elizabeth, reads and de- fends Joseph Andrews, 17, 18, 24; defends Tom Jones, 19, 74; defends Amelia, 19, 99~ 100, 102; partial to Clarissa, 74, 763; 96, 110; lines on Rich- ag i. oe es et meg. iv! 5 ee ap ahaa tee a ee ribeye eresestindatets — Py) ee ere ee ee PETE A pe ent ~~ . SARrs . els ret aa titer ey) re ah ee err ee * wren wy etait - rina ire! rr Py tc tho reas a . es . eae Eres wryresesoesababat tre phebacpenrabetel bry eee apagey igen at Penk. a ame sre Pe pe Ba EXETETR AEE IRICT TOP EUTEL UL as Meee Le ioe EERE T eT Se Noe Te Te ay, o's a AS Py ee ere ee es ie A te ee er Terfei rararsfes 2 a deena tie hae Ltt SE et dal tod tereaieete ete ieee —— ern Torey 626 INDEX ardson, 129; on Richardson’s defects, 197. Cartwright, Rev. Edmund, 293. Cary; H: E:, 214: Castro, J. Paul de, 3, 12 , 79 2, [22 9%, SOG, SAN. Catherine Second, reads Jonathan Wild, 48 n. Cawthorn, Thomas, verses on Fielding, 38. Cazamian, Louis, on Fielding, 547 N. Cervantes, 44, 60, 106, 114, 145, 185, 221, 226, 238, 264, 326, 349) 3» 394, 406, 359, 365, 3 454, 474, 486, 494, 501, 504, 3 528, 533, 573) 5 Chaigneau, William, 55. Chalmers, Alexander, on Fielding, 286-287, 364; 378. Chambers, Robert, on Fielding and Richardson, 383-384; 528. Champion, The, 3. Charles Edward Stuart, 48. Charleville, Lady, 272. Chateaubriand, Francois, on popu- larity of the novelists, 242. Chaucer, 306, 349, 406, 437, 486, 548, 580. Chedworth, Lord, on Gibbon’s praise of Fielding’s Journey, 237. Chénier, André de, 181, 181 2. Chesnaye-Desbois, A. de la, on Pamela, 555. Chesterfield, Lord, discusses Pa- mela with Crébillon and com- mends, 8; subscribes for the Miscellanies, 16; 255 7.0% > 132, 555; calls Tom Jones a chain of stories, 132; 204, 326. Chesterton, G. K., on Fielding, 534. praises Richardson, 113, 127 Child, Harold, on Fielding, 542. Churchill, Charles, on Smollett’s jealousy, 185-186; 432. Cibber, Colley, attacks Fielding in his Apology, 4, 562; 64; slanders revived by Victor, 143- 144. Cicero, 442. Clarke, C. C., on Fielding and Scott, 460-461. Clarissa, see Richardson, Samuel. Clément, P., 82 . Cobbett, William, on Fielding, 357-358. Coleridge, Hartley, on Fielding, 403. Coleridge, S. T., reviews Ned Evans, 249; 258; at first a Richardsonian, 263, 298, 315, 567; verses on Amelia, 263, 315; 271; on Richardson and Fielding, 298-299, 562; on Fielding, 315-322, 566; re- bukes Mrs. Barbauld, 316; on hypocrisy, 316; on Richardson, 317; on Fielding and Scott, 318; defense of Fielding, 319; famous praise of Fielding, 319-3215 323, 343, 352, 368, 418, 429, 431, 432, 433, 437) 443, 450, 468, 479, 562, 566, 567, 568, 569. A Collection of Scarce, Curious, and Valuable Pieces . . ., 184. Collier, Jane, 61; collaborates with Sarah Fielding on The Cry, 110; The Art of Tor- menting, 110. Collier, Margaret, 61 ”; on Voy- age to Lisbon, 122-123; 165. Collier, W. F., on Fielding, 422- 443. Collins, J. C., on Fielding, 488. Colman, George, the Elder, onINDEX 627 novels in Polly Honeycombe, 140; 167; adapts Tom Jones in Jealous Wife, 170-1713 1723 defends Fielding, 208, 559. Colman, George, the Younger, on Gothic romance, 246; on Field- ing’s parsons, 294-295. Combe, William, admires Field- ing, 212-213. Comment on Bolingbroke, see Bo- lingbroke, Lord. Comte, Auguste, includes Tom Jones in Positivist Library, 452. Coppée, Henry, on Fielding, 451. Corbould, R., illustrates Fielding, 560. Cottin, Sophie, 293. Countess of Dellwyn, see Fielding, Sarah. Covent-Garden Journal, see Field- ing, Henry. Works. Covent-Garden Journal Extraor- dinary, attacks Amelia, 91-92. Coventry, Francis, Pompey the Little, 55, 713; on novel-writ- ing, 55-573 58 #5; 135. Cowper, William, on Fielding, 250-2513 355- Crabbe, George, debates with Campbell about Fielding and Smollett, 239; influenced by Fielding, 251. Craftsman, The, refers to Joseph Andrews, 14-15. Craik, G. L., on Fielding, 382- 383. Craik, Henry, on Fielding’s style, | 499-500. Crisp, Samuel, 199; compares Fanny Burney and Fielding, 202. Critical Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison , censures Rich- ardson, 112-113. Critical Review, review of Mur- phy, 166. Croft, Sir Herbert, 212. Croker.) J, (W-;, 3065) os557eou Fielding, Smollett, and Dick- ens, 392. Cross, Wilbur L., 3, 12, 26 2, 36, 58 1, 79, 84 ”, 93 %, 103 %, 123, 159, 180, 268-269, 281, 414) 417, 421, 446-447, 469, 497, 499, 501; on Fielding, 502-503; 504-505, 540; life of Fielding, 543-5473; 557) 573, 574) 575» 576. Crothers, S. M., 532 #. Cruikshank, George, illustrates Fielding, 378; Thackeray on, 4003 410. Cry, The, see Fielding, Sarah. Cumberland, George, 211. Cumberland, Richard, 17, 141, 174-175; imitates Fielding in Henry, 243-244, 250, 5593 on Fielding, 249-250; 282, 285, 289, 293- Cunningham, George, on Field- ing, 377-378. Curtis, G. W., on Fielding, 437. eS Lord, commends reading of Fielding to San- derson Miller, 149. Crawford, Marion, on Tom | Dante, 379, 385 7. Jones, 496. Crébillon, C. P. de, 5, 108, 391- Creech, William, on popularity of Tom Jones, 210; on Field- ing, 211. D’Arblay, Mme., see Burney, Frances. Dautherau, 334. Davaux, Citizen, 256-257. David Simple, see Fielding, Sarah. Pee eee rae We viel ant wa teties he eobtheee tated Trey tl rink jg teed oe es a eet y oe - at ene te Aare are Sth toate tea ins et rr =a fA SupMritce . = eet OnE ts ot kum eee ore ee PE rate eee Beets trate : Y eer Mi fF ray re eren ats Peery oe = esee ee) ake net etidneepa ements Se ee "a ewe erie SE ester eal Sosa Sal ee Leary ee etree i } i ‘ l i Wee ke , = a 628 INDEX Davies, Thomas, 128. Deffand, Marquise du, defends Fielding against Voltaire, 182; against Walpole, 203-204. Defoe, Daniel, 49, 224, 313, 318, 385, 460, 462, 479, 526. Defreval, J. B., 46. Delany, Patrick, 95. Delany, Mrs. Patrick, Amelia, 95-96. o Nn “ © — Demans, Robert, 422. De Quincey, Thomas, on Field- ing, 354, 386-387; on Rich- ardson, 387 7. Dermody, Thomas, on Fielding, 4“ Wn 3-254. Desfaucherets, J. L., 256 Desforges, Pierre, Tom oust a Londres and Tom Jones et Fel- lamar, 217, 256. Després, Jean B. D., 256 Dibdin, Charles, praises ‘Fielding, 209; plans to adapt Jonathan Wild, 209. Dibdin, Thomas, 319. Dibdin, Thomas F., 238. Dickens, Charles, 356, 368, on Fielding, 381; review 3725 s of Pickwick, 392, 399-400; influ- ence of Fielding on, 395-399; reads Fielding in boyhood, 397- 398; on Richardson, 398; on the interpolated story, 398; on realism, 398; on Journey to the Next World, 399; 403, 410, 425) 434, 453, 459, 485, 498, 501, 513, 569. Dickens, Henry Fielding, 399. Dickson, Frederick S., 43 401, 402 m, 406, 414, 417-418, 420, 436, 536, 537, 540. Diderot, Denis, eulogizes Richard- son, 127, 154, 557; on Field- ing, 154 7. 158, ) Digeon, Aurélien, 3 ”, 26 ; on Fielding, 548-549. Disraeli, Isaac, eulogizes Richard- ) ) 5 SON, 242-243. Dobson, Austin, 2, 65, 149, 157, 191, X98, 208, 274, 428° 9, 473 life of Fielding, 478- on Richardson, 479; 4 48 verses on Fielding, 483-484; 485; on Fielding’s scholarship, 496-497; on Voyage to Lisbon, casero 512, 515, 535, 536, ~ “~ 13-57 Dodington, George Bubb, sub- scribes for the Miscellanies, 16; 54255 reads Jonathan Wild, 17. Donnellan, Mrs., 68, 95, 96, 98. Douglas, Bishop John, weeps over Clarissa, 130. Dowden, E., on Tom Jones, 489. Doyle, Sir A. C., on. Fielding and Richardson, 523-5243; 542, 574. Drake, Nathan, 285-286. Drinkwater, John, on Fielding and Richardson, 549 ”. Drury-Lane Journal, 88. Dryden, John, 6, a Duncombe, John, lines on Rich- ardson, 130; 555. Dunlop, John, 299-300; 563 Daalon, Mrs., 252. DEN, Sir F. M., on Field- ing, 255. Edgeworth, Maria, 273, 294, 386. Edgeworth, R. L., 273. Edinburgh Evening Courant, 210. Edinburgh Review, 279, 391, 392; on Fielding and Thack- eray, 424. Edwards, Thomas, on Voyage to Lisbon, 124. Egan, Pierce, on Fielding, 356.INDEX 629 Eliot, George, 368; compared | with Fielding, 440-441, 4543 | 451-452; on Fielding, 452- | 453, 572; famous passage in Middlemarch, 452-4533 Aa | 485, 491, 498; on Fielding’s style, 499, 500; 508, 513, 531- Elwin, Rev. Whitwell, on Rich- ardson, 426-4273; 429-430; on Fielding, 431. Encyclopedia Britannica, on Rich- ardson and Fielding, 269-270; 562. Enquiry into the Increase of Rob- bers, see Fielding, Henry. Works. Episodes of Fiction, on Fielding, 475. Erskine, Thomas, 193. Ervine, St. John, on Tom Jones, 532. Espinasse, Francis, 384-385. Essay on the New Species of Writing, estimate of Fielding, 58-60. European Magazine, ignores Gib- bon’s praise of Tom Jones, 2373 255 1. Evening Advertiser, 114. Examen of Tom Jones, 40-42, 52, 58, 552. Exemplary Mother, 176-177. AMILIAR Letters, see Field- K ing, Sarah. Farington, Joseph, 255. Fathers, The, see Fielding, Henry. Works. Ferrier, Susan, on Fielding and | Smollett, 359. Fielding, Henry, supplies preface to second edition of David Simple, 20, 26; appointment as magistrate, 31; Old England ¢te9 8.3 attacks, 31-32, 33; Lom Jones in frontispiece. to Gentleman’s Magazine, 40; attacked in Ex- amen, 40-41; Carew attacks, 42-43; 52, 583; recommends ending for Clarissa, 61; wel- comes Clarissa in Jacobite’s Journal, 64; refers to Richard- son in Covent-Garden Journal, 64; attacked by Smollett, 74, 87, 550; attacked by Hurd, 74- 75; attacked by Walpole, 75, 144, 550; attacked by Bonnell Thornton, 84, 88; refers to Roderick Random, 86; men- tioned in Inspectors Rhapsody, 94; imitated by Guthrie, 104; by Shebbeare, 105; attitude of contemporaries, 126-139, 554- 556; democratic spirit of, 135- 139) 351-352) 365, 449, 5773 philosophy of life, 138; be- fore Murphy’s Essay, 140-1553 reputation in France, 152-1553 Murphy’s Essay, 156-169; turning of the tide, 170-187; Sheridan’s debt to, 175; edi- tions of: 1762-1775, 180-181; 1775-1800, 268-269; 1780- 1784, 2173 1806 (Chalmers), 286; 1807 (Watson), 281 7; 1840 (Roscoe), 3783; 1871- 1872 (Browne), 447-450; 1882 (Stephen), 468, 508; 1893 (Saintsbury), 509-510; 1898 (Gosse), 508, 510-511; 1903 (Henley), 508, 516-518}; schol- arly recognition, 188-236; end of the century, 237-270; Miss Seward disparages, 2433; before Waverley, 271-300; Watson’s biography, 281-283; from Waverley to Scott’s death, 301- 3673; on sycophancy of War- pr er se ae he Aha eet ede eet need es Ae teed | Cree raion eres . : ie Tt ee ne 4s 5 er Tero eS eee weet: CERT i ae Rin Atv@e~yeneréeie . ee 4 4 arr era “ o el a8 hens ae Rat et one qm poe eae h bebe theta ee:halted hd tete ben teem re ea oe ans d le ead ed eee Dee 630 burton, 355; inscription on tomb, 367; reputation during the Victorian Age, 368-476; reputation summarized, 368- 369; Lytton acknowledges debt to, 395; influence on Dickens, 395-399; Thackeray and his influence, 408-445; reaction against Thackeray, 446-476; Dobson to Henley, 477-516; library of, 496-498; on his ini- tial essays: Andrew Lang, 498; Leslie Stephen, 408: -CeaL.- Winchester, 499; W. L. Cross, 499, 501; George Eliot, 499; Status at end of nineteenth cen- tury, 508-509; since Henley’s Essay, 517-549; Fielding’s Bi- centenary, 523-527; miscon- ceptions concerning, 550-552, 578; suggests many genres of fiction, 577-578; wins the abid- ing affection of men, 578-579; history of Fielding’s reputation summarized, 550-580; general estimate of, 579-580. HIS WORKS. Amelia, sum paid for, 78; reception of, 79-103, 553-554; apologia, 89-90; at- tacked by Thornton, 90; notice in Gentleman’s Magazine, 92- 93; failure of, 103; revised edition delayed, 103; adapted in Kenrick’s Duellist, 175; ex- cluded by Mrs. Barbauld from British Novelists, 428; 553. Es- timate of Amelia by Dr. John Aikin, 276-277; Louisa M. Al- cott, 523 2; Robert Anderson, 240; The Anti-Jacobin, 291 Mrs. A. L. Barbauld, 27 James Beattie, 220, 222; Mar- tin Benson, 100; George Bor- row, 375; Sir Egerton Brydges, } INDEX 288; Dr. Charles Burney, 202 253; Charles Butler, 360; Lord Byron, 351; Mrs. Carlyle, 418; Elizabeth Carter, 96, 100-101; Alexander Chalmers, 287; P. Clément, 82 n; S. T. Coleridge, 263, 415; W. L. Cross. roa=rar. m; Robert Burns, George Cunningham, 378; G. W. Curtis, 437; Mrs. De- lany, 95-96; Austin Dobson, 479; Mrs. Donnellan, 95- 96; Nathan Drake, 285-286; George Gilfillan, 423; Sir Ed- mund Gosse, 491; Grimm, 108- 109; William Hazlitt, 303; John Oliver Hobbes, 520-521, 523; Leigh Hunt, 347; J. C. Jeaffreson, 433-434; Dr. John- son, 198; Journal Britannique, 82; William Kenrick, 91; London Magazine, 81-82; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 102, 117-118; Monthly Re- view, 79-81; Hester Mulso, 96, 100, 101; Arthur Murphy, 160; Lady Orrery, ror, 102, 554; Coventry Patmore, 505 7; Clara Reeve, 245, 246; Samuel Richardson, 97-99; Sir Walter Scott, 328; H. E. Scudder, 504; J. H. Shorthouse, 492- 493; Sir Leslie Stephen, 469; R. L. Stevenson, 495; Catherine Talbot, 100-101; W. M. Thackeray, 402, 406, 413-414, 427-428, 507; Clara Thomson, 507. [For other references, see Fielding, Estimates. |] Covent-Garden Journal, 82, 83, 88; given up, 92, 935 compliments Richardson, 98; imitated by Murphy, ros.a: @) F475 7-85 oy 2 pe ee Ot ae | Enquiry into the Increase of Robbers, 77. Fathers, The, 196, 214-216. Historical Register, 3, 16. Jacobite’s Journal, protest against injurious treatment, 21; on the Pretender, 48. Jonathan Wild, Old England attacks, 22, 33, 34; adaptation projected by Charles Dibdin, 209; 563. Estimate of Jona- than Wild by John Aikin, 277; Lord Byron, 351; S. T. Cole- ridge, 320, 321-3223 Jane Col- lier, 110; J. W. Croker, 306; George Cunningham, 378; Sir Edmund Gosse, 512; Thomas 551; W. E. Henley, 493; Leigh Hunt, 346; Charles Lamb, 297; Lord Lytton, 394- 395; George Meredith, 455; Thomas Moore, 353; William Mudford, 284; Arthur Mur- phy, John Nichols, 286; George Saintsbury, 510; Sir Walter Scott, 328; W. M. Thackeray, 400, 405; J. E. Wells, 540. [For other refer- ences, see Fielding, Estimates. | Joseph Andrews, of, 1-25; editions and number of copies. printed, 12; 16; Old Green, 162-163; reception England assails, 22, 33, 343 paucity of reference to, 25} enemies pretend to find attack on lawyers, 26, 32; popularity aided by Tom Jones, 513; re- ferred to in The Student, 51- 523; 54; adapted by Pratt, 175; Thackeray 4013 552, 554, 555, 563. Estimate of Joseph Andrews by Dr. John Aikin, 276; Dr. Robert Ander- 240; David E. Baker, illustrates, son, rey ries e INDEX wee A TORS 1! Cree a Ry St. eesti siezri 168; Mrs: A. L.- Barbauld), 78; James Beattie, 222; Rob- ert Buchanan, 489; Lord By- ron, 350; Elizabeth Carter, 17, 18, 19; S. T. Coleridge, 318; William Combes, 2ir2ye ata Francis Coventry, 56, 57; George Cunningham, 378; Charles Dibdin, 209; Austin Dobson, 479; Nathan Drake, 285; Sarah Fielding and Jane Colliers i103) Ce. J. Boxsezsis: David Garrick, 215; George Gilfillan, 423; Miss G. M. Godden, 23, 539; Sir Edmund Gosse, 6; Rev. Richard Graves, 7; Thomas Gray, 5; Grimm, 108; James Harris, 230; Wil- Hazlitt, 308, 316; M. Hill, 434, 4353 Hogarth, 12-133 Hood, 389; Leigh Hunt, 6, 347, 348, 3493; J. C. Jeaffreson, 433; Charles Lamb, 6, 313, 3143; Lady Mary Wort- ley Montagu, 8, 73; Thomas Moore, 353; Hannah More, 194; Arthur Murphy, 160, 161; Hugh Murray, 283; Dr. John Ogilvie, 218-219; Mrs. Oliphant, So je eeratt. Chevalier Ramsay, 25; Clara Reeve, 245; Richardson, 10, 66; John Rus- kin, 458; George Saintsbury, 6; Sir Walter Scott, 327, 3313 William Shenstone, 6-7, 24; Lady Spencer, 214 ”; Sir Les- lie Stephen, 467; Catherine Talbots 171s; le eNeeeal— fourd, 343; W. M. Thackeray, 400, 401, 406, 412-413; Jo- seph Warton, 233; Richard West, 5-6; John Wilson, 362. liam 1 Davenport William Thomas 5223 206; Samuel FETA OT a) ae ere Oe b Sey Or. ros ON TEP OE an. de bgt, oy - tibaaah pena eee eee a Cenietisbaten a ae is Pl biter kode ee! bed oe hibeetenheteeh ee peed thee wT = a PhaGinabageg- be em tak toy J 4. bay mt, 3 SL a me eee aan prsemebnnate tg sponlndelysetyee new reness ant tece ET hd sake pee Ee eee ae if i Ag : 4 ad een ihe) PO es e632 INDEX en. eee an [For other Fielding, Estimates. | references, see Journal of a Voyage to Lis- bom, 104-125; two versions, 114, 117 ; reception of, 114- 125, 563; apologetic dedica- tion, 117; number of copies, 121-122; reprinted for English soldiers during Great War, 506. Estimate of Journal » by J. N. Brewer, 363; Margaret Collier, 122-123; Austin Dob- son, 480, 505-506; Thomas Edwards, 124; W. E. Henley, 519; M. Davenport Hill, 434; Charles Lamb, 117; J. H. Lob- ban, 525; James R. Lowell, Wortley Montagu, 117-120; Arthur 485; Lady Mary Murphy, 122, 156, 163; Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, 506; Sir Walter Scott, 332, 563; Rob- ert Southey, 117, Horace Walpole, 123-124. [For other references, see Fielding Estimates. | Journey from this World to the Next, reference to Parson Adams, 13; Murphy on, 162; praised by Gibbon, 235; Lord Chedworth reads Gibbon’s ref- erence, 237; scene in admired by Dickens, 3993 [For other Fielding, Estimates. ] 513-514. references, see Miscellanies, The, references to Pope and Ralph Allen, 9; large list of subscribers, 16-17; protest against injurious treat- ment, 20; 162. [For other ref- erences, S€é mates. | Fielding, Esti- Pasquin, 3; Dr. Burney reads to Fanny, 191; Fanny Burney on, 206. [For other references, see Fielding, Estimates. ] Tom Jones, Fielding begins, 26; reception of, 26-78; com- mended by Lyttelton, 27; read Radway Grange, 27; Birch tells Orrery of Lyttelton’s praise, 29-30; in Manuscript at delay in publication, 29-30; Old England attacks, 32-34, 49-503; appearance of, 34; Millar’s advertisement of, 35; editions of, 35; London Maga- zine reviews, 35, 36-373 cold- ness of Gentleman’s Magazine, 36, 37, 38, 39; attacked by au- thor of Examen, 40-42, 58; vogue of, 40, 43, 46, 51, 52, 61, 70, 77-78; attacked in Ca- rew’s Apology, 42-43; trans- lated by La Place, 43; review of La Place, 43-44; suppressed in France, 45-46, 48; Richard- son rejoices over arrét, 46; D’Argenson’s explanation of French arrét, 46-47; dance named after, 50; attacked by Kenrick, 50; imitations by mi- nor writers, 52-60; Richardson ill at ease, 60-70; Lady Brad- shaigh on popularity of, 65, 66; hostile verses by Mrs. Pilk- ington, 68; 86; adapted by Colman, 170-171; Poinsinet, 172-173; Steffens, 173; Heu- feld, 173; Reed, 173-174; in- fluences Cumberland, 174-175; chapbook edition, 184; recom- mended by Comte, 452; in court, 493; banished from li- braries, 493 ; Stevenson at- tacks, 494-496; 502-503, 508; expurgated edition, 514; sym- posium on, 532; 552-553) 554- Sa ’ ‘; i ‘ {> / a hers Sddeiieneddeeta dene ee ee ’ SSeT ET Lie oS CE PEE aS ea F . aS oi 2 : . 4 ‘ J Pe ee ke a ote tela eae ae wl 28397 ks. 7 th Be aad oh ee ed he | ‘Oe Sh Or Sted Sie ae ‘tr oy te reed sre Tee | - . eres ores Sib pcb ests S es est re , eC ball ee sme eeg at ei Po RA INDEX 633 555. Estimate of Tom Jones | by Thomas Abbt, 318; John Q. | Adams, 259; Dr. John Aikin, 276; Dr. Robert Anderson, 240; Marquis d’Argenson, 46- 473; Dr. John Armstrong, 108; D. E. Baker, 168; Bampfylde- Moore Carew, 42-43; Mrs. A. L. Barbauld, 278, 279; James Beattie, 220-221, 222- 223, 224-225; William Beloe, 210; Augustine Birrell, 507, 508; Robert Bisset, 265; Black- wood’s Magazine, 335, 4383 Hugh Blair, 234; James Bos- well, 261; W. L. Bowles, 292; Lady Bradshaigh, 40, 66; British Quarterly Review, 421; Dr. John Brown, 441; James P. Browne, 448-450; Mrs. Mary Brunton, 272, 293; Sir Egerton Brydges, 288; Robert Buchanan, 489; Samuel Butler, 513; Lord Byron, 349, 3513 George Canning, 268; William Carleton, 288-289; Thomas Carlyle, 361, 385, 568; Eliza- beth Carter, 19, 74, 100; Alex- ander Chalmers, 287; André Chénier, 181 7; G. K. Chester- ton, 534; William Cobbett, 357-358; S. T. Coleridge, 249, 316-317, 318, 319-3215 Jane Collier, 110; George Colman the Elder, 171; George Colman the Younger, 295; William Combe, 213; Henry Coppée, 451; Francis Coventry, 56-57; Marion Crawford, 496; Wil- liam Creech, 210; W. L. Cross, 502-503, 543) 544) 5463 Rich- ard Cumberland, 244, 249- 250; G. W. Curtis, 437; Citi- zen Davaux, 257; Mme. du Pao SRP ely Ve et wh ee eee EGR OS £5 24 ee eres Le ie Ss Ty Tt On! " Deffand, 182, 203-204; J. B. Defreval, 46; Mrs. Delany, 95-96; Thomas De Quincey, 386-387; Thomas Dermody, 253-254; Charles Dibdin, 209; Charles Dickens, 398; F. S. Dickson, 417, 420, 537; Auré- lien Digeon, 548-549; Austin Dobson, 479; Edward Dow- den, 489; Nathan Drake, 285- 286; John Dunlop, 299; Pierce Egan, 356; George Eliot, 452; St. John Ervine, 532; Essay on the New Species of Writing, 59-60; Examen of Tom Jones, 40-42, 52, 58, 5523 Archibald Fletcher, 211; C. J. Fox, 255; a French critic, 43-44; J. H. Frere, 360; Elie C. Fréron, GR Valo 1X Frith, 458; J. A. Froude, 435; David Garrick, 214-215; Edward Gibbon, 235, 560, 561; George Gilfillan, 23, 551; Miss G. M. Godden, 539-540; William Godwin, 240-241; Oliver Goldsmith, 150, 151; W. Goodall, 58; Sir Edmund Gosse, 491, 5113 Thomas Gray, 128; Elizabeth and Richard Griffith, 1773 Grimm, 47, 108; George Har- dinge, 204; Thomas Hardy, 513; James Harris, 230; Fred- eric Harrison, 473-474) 5153 Sir John Hawkins, 262; BYR: Haydon, 338; William Hazlitt, 264, 306, 307-311, 340, 3415 W. E. Henley, 518; Lady Hert- ford, 30-31; Maurice Hewlett, 532; Astraea and Minerva Hill, 61-63; Dr. John Hill, Ach oy 5B. Jone Oliver Hobbes, 521, 523; Ihomas Hood, 389; C. F. Horne, 5293 eeayc7iit ieee me. aA +e ch oe eager lia, e oe o ena lame 4 Stk itera ant nt ee ete ener eny la eres “t+. eaetin ase ris 4h ieee ey eiiethte L Ty osarr episiaferans eye 4 eet need OF 4 te oF ped eirbn tite ee eee a ee er ee ose Pn uot Stl. ee ee eer ane nee otters naaganehrareenh=i-.. Pa, Sa me al der reerery a ee er oie or ae aePo ents ' Fre ee eee La ee Paes ain Urreaseeeetes eee eee ee rere 634 Leigh Hunt, 347, 348, 349; Henry James, 501; Francis Jeffrey, 291, 566; Charles Jen- ner, 178-179; Jerome K. Jer- ome, 520 ”; Samuel Johnson, 194, 195; John Keats, ae 7 4 Thomas Keightley, 436; Wil- liam Kenrick, 50; Lady RE dare, 72; Charles Kingsley, 393; Vicesimus Knox, 230; Ladies Magazine, 78; J. F. La Harpe, 257; Charles Lamb, 312-314; Henry Lancaster, 440; Andrew Lang, 514-515; La Place, 45; Frederick Law- rence, 429; G. E. Lessing, 258; G. H. Lewes, 390; Je. Gs Lock- hart, 336-337; Solomon Lowe, 68; James R. Lowell, 487; Lady Luxborough, 70-71; Lord Lyttelton, 29-30; Lord Lytton, 3H0-381, 404, 3095: IT. BR; Macrae. 387-388; Sir James Mackintosh, 289-290; Rev. Ed- ward Mangin, 288; Harriet Martineau, 418-419; T. Ve Mathias, 264-265; Brander Matthews, 527; George Mere- dith, 454; Hugh Mi ller, 433; Lord Monboddo, 2 28-229; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 8, 73, 118; Hannah More, 194-195; William Mudford, 284-285; Arthur Murphy, 161- 163; Hugh Murray, 28 James Northcote, 341; Mrs. Oliphant, 522; W. L. Phelps 530-531; Sir Robert Philli- more, 375; Mrs. H. L. Piozzi, L963) °S: 2).* Pratt: 206-207; E. Purcell, 481; H. J. Pye, 232-233; Quarterly Re VIEW, 294; Sir Walter Raleigh, 502, 503; Allan Ramsay, 107; INDEX Charles Reade, 441; Joseph Reed, 174; Clara Reeve, 245, 246; Sir Joshua Reynolds, 260; Samuel Richardson, 63-64, 68, 98; Samuel Rogers, 175» 2533 John Ruskin, 457, 458 ; George Saintsbury, 496; Sqlucday Re- VIEW, 495-496; Schiller, 259 Sir Walter Scott, 326-327 William Shenstone, 70; R. B. Sheridan, 175; Clement Shorter, 533 2; J. H. Short- house, 492-493; Christopher Smart, 94; G. B. Smith, 450; Tobias Smollett, 87; Mme. de Staél, 296; Paul Stapfer, 471; Stendhal, 389; Sir Leslie Ste- phen, 468; R. L. Stevenson, 372, 461, 462, 494-495; Lady Louisa Stuart, 376; A. C. Swin- burne, 459; Arthur Symons, 456° #; Ho AL Tames aaa Catherine Talbot, 19, 68, 74; T. N. Talfourd, 343; W. M. Thackeray, 400, 401, 405, 407, 410-414, 415, 416; Bonnell Thornton, 92; W. P. Trent, 512 ”; Anthony Trollope, 393, 473; Rev. Thomas Twining, 1; Voltaire, 182; Horace Walpole, 203-204; Sir A. W. Ward, 397; R. P. Ward, 393; Joseph Warton, 234; Richard Whately, 358; E. P. Whipple, 405; C. M. Wieland, 258; Harold Williams, 530. [For other references, see Fielding, Estimates, | Tom Thumb, 3; parodies Young and Thomson, 14; Swift enjoys, 69; Kane O’Hara’s burletta, 217; Mark Lemon takes part in, 399. Tumble-Down-Dick, 333.Paes eo ee 8 Pog ie 2 se oe tog cok foe eb he ict ak et xd YS ok Of od OL Wedding Day, reference to Parson Adams in prologue, 13, 15-16. ESTIMATES OF FIELDING: by Mshomas| Abbt, 318; Ihe Academy, 500-501, 513-514; Admonitions from the Dead, 109; Dr. John Aikin, 276-277; Alfred Ainger, 312; H. M. Alden, 539; Archibald Alison, 372-373; S. A. Allibone, 432; William Allingham, 472; Azz- cable Quixote, 247; Dr. Robert Anderson, 240; Année Litté- raire, 168 n; Anti-Jacobin, 291; Marquis d’ Argenson, 46-47; Dr. John Armstrong, 108; The Athenaeum, 538; Atlantic Monthly, 480; Jane Austen, 273-274; Mrs. Sarah Austin, 521 n; The Authoress, 3593 John Badcock, 377; Robert Bage, 352 2; Walter Bagehot, 442; D. E. Baker, 168-169; C. S. Baldwin, 527; Bamp- fylde-Moore Carew, 42-433 Mrs. A. L. Barbauld, 277-279, 551, 565; Thomas Barnes, 347; N. T. Barthe, 182-184; Arlo Bates, 527; James Beattie, 218-226, 558-559; James Hay Beattie, 223-224; William Beloe, 210; ‘Arnold Bennett, 533-534; Bentley’s Miscellany, 431; Walter Besant, 501; Augustine Birrell, 495, 500, 507, 519; Robert Bisset, 265, 266; Blackwood’s Magazine, 335-336, 404, 438; Hugh Blair, 234, 527; C. F. Blank- enburg, 258; The Bookman (New York), 524; George Borrow, 374-3753; James Bos- well, 193, 260-261; Lady xT CE TEER EERE SUS OE etek OE FORO EVEIOCEA Ve ct we a8 Oe eae eet OP Ot De Pe be INDEX VERGE TEP SS Ss SL P2529 Bradshaigh, 40, 65, 66, 67; George Brewer, 249; J. N. Brewer, 363; British Critic, 291, 293, 297 ”; British Quar- terly Review, 481; Charlotte Bronté, 404, 419-420; Dr. John Brown, 441; James P. Browne, 447-450; W. - Y. Browne, 403 Mrsy Es 3B: Browning, 396; F. Brunetiére, 454; Mrs. Mary Brunton, 272, 293, 302; Sir Egerton Brydges, 288; Robert Buchanan, 489; A. H. Bullen, 488; Charles Buller, 399-400; J. M. Bulloch, 520; Dr. Richard Burn, 184- 185; Dr. Charles Burney, 191, 200, 202 m; Frances Burney, 198-199, 206; Robert Burns, 251-253; Samuel Butler, 513; Lord Byron, 349-352; Mrs. Calderwood, 152; Thomas Campbell, 239-240; Gilbert Cannan, 532; George Canning, 268; Thomas Carlyle, 384-385, 472, 568; Elizabeth Carter, 18, 19, 24, 74, 99-100; Edmund Cartwright, 292-293; J. P. de Castro, 541; Thomas Caw- thorn, 38; Louis Cazamian, 547 m; Alexander Chalmers, 286-287, 364; Robert Cham- bers, 383-384; Francois Cha- teaubriand, 242; Lord Ched- worth, 237; André Chénier, 181 2; Lord Chesterfield, 132; G. K. Chesterton, 534; Harold Child, 542; Charles Churchill, 185-186; Colley Cibber, 4, 144-1443)... Co Clarkes 46o- 461; P. Clément, 82 2”; Wil- liam Cobbett, 357-358; Hart- ley Coleridge, 403; S. T. Cole- ridge, 298-299, 315-322, 562, er esc A BeaFurestsssesis eet ieeg rec ee ey ee Sere Te 96% oe ~ Se ie tet baat o pai me altap ian, enka eet OP ae OE eee ee Se ee ro ard y a ye nees, rite e TT ee aaa cade en a ee es * <« ee a - Ste eae Sieh Oh Seeleie ele tt tS Siete eee er aa ~— ao ” ¥ See ee ee ee ele rt ies nae te ee ee tte eer Ceres ee ere ne aptgerrnny ee ee eee esry pate Ee TLR ae Oe ee te yee Seedaiieeteheche sete, OO ee Se Ser i } i ie i U 6 36 INDEX 566, 567, 568, 569; Jane Col- lier, 110; Margaret Collier, 2-123, 165; W. F. Collier, 442-443; J. C. Collins, 488; I N George Colman the Elder, 172, 208; George Colman the Younger, 294-295; William @ombe, 212-213; Henry Cop- pée, 451; Francis Coventry, 55-57; William Cowper, 250- 251; George Crabbe, 239, 2513 The Craftsman, 14-15; G. L. Craik, 382-383; Henry Craik, 499-500; Marion Crawford, 496; William Creech, 210- 211; Samuel Crisp, 202; Criu- cal Remarks on Sir Charles Grandison, 112-113; Critical Review, 166; J. W. Croker, g92; W. L. Cross, 502-503, 543-547; S. M. Crothers, 532 m; Richard Cumberland, 243- 244; George Cunningham, 377-378; G. W. Curtis, 437; Citizen Davaux, 257; Mme. du Deffand, 182, 203-204; J. B. Defreval, 46; Mrs. De- lany, 96; Robert Demans, 422; Thomas De Quincey, 354, 386- 387; Thomas Dermody, 253- 2543; Charles Dibdin, 208-209; Thomas Dibdin, 319; Charles Dickens, 381, 395-399; Fred- erick S. Dickson, 414, 417, 418, 537; Denis Diderot, 154 2; Aurélien Digeon, 548-549; Austin Dobson, 478-484, 496- 497, 542; Mrs. Donnellan, 68, 95; Sir A. C. Doyle, 523-524, 542; Nathan Drake, 285-286; John Drinkwater, 549 ; John Dunlop, 299; Mrs. Dunlop, zs23 oir b..M. Eden, 2 Maria Edgeworth, 273; Edin- burgh Review, 392, 424-425; Thomas Edwards, 124; Pierce Egan, 356; George Eliot, 452- 453, 572; Rev. Whitwell El- win, 431; Encyclopedia Bri- tannica, 269-270; Episodes of Fiction, 475; St. John Ervine, 2; Francis Espinasse, 384- Essay on the New Species Vriting, 58; Evening Ad- <—t w- vertiser, 114; Examen of Tom Jones, 40-42; Susan Ferrier, 359; Sir John Fielding, 164, 216; Sarah Fielding, 20, 110; Edward Fitzgerald, 439, 457; Archibald Fletcher, 211; John Forster, 403; William Forsyth, 444; Co}. Fox, 254-26 sy i. Frere, 360; Elie C. Fréron, us3; W. P. Brith) 058. Froude, 435; C. H. Gaines, 526; John Galsworthy, 531- 532; Lord Gardenstone, 239; David Garrick, 214-216; Gen- eral Advertiser, 89; Gentle- man’s Magazine, 116; W. L. George, 531; G. H. Gerould, 542; Edward Gibbon, 235; Sir Vicary Gibbs, 347-348; George Gilfillan, 423; George Gissing, 504; Miss G. M. Godden, 23, 538-540; William Godwin, 240-241, 564; Goethe, 258- 259; Oliver Goldsmith, 150- 152; W. Goodall, 57-58; Sir Edmund Gosse, 491, 497-498, §00, 510-511, 561; Rev. Rich- ard Graves, 6-7, 79-180; Thomas Gray, 5-6, 76, 128; Emanuel Green, 539; Thomas Green, 551; I. H. Green, 466 n; Elizabeth and Richard Grif- fith, 177; Grimm, 47, 108- / 109; F. B. Gummere, 527;| eae Means Se Lo pee iese Ge Ce SBN TOV Ere aed SLOSS ES CSET RUST ES bib ah od So EE ab OM A OG eb fbr bt od ts LOR SCS? Lord Hailes, 225; Henry Hal- lam, 373; James Hannay, 432- 4335 Thomas Hardy, 512-513; Har- George Hardinge, 204; per’s Magazine, 436-437; James Harris, 230-231; Frederic Har- rison, 473-474, 515; Sir John Hawkins, 261-262, 550; Na- thaniel Hawthorne, 372; B. R. Haydon, 338; William Hayley, 213; Abraham Hayward, 393; Mrs. Eliza Haywood, 141 2”; William Hazlitt, 303-311; W. Carew Hazlitt, 524 ”; W. E. Henley, 474-475, 482, 493-494, 515-516, 517-520; Lady Hert- ford, 30-31; Maurice Hewlett, 532; Dr. John Hill, 53-55; M. Davenport Hill, 434-435; John Hoadly, Hobbes, 520-521, 523; Lhomas Hood, 389-390; C. F. Horne, 529; R. H. Horne, 396; Lord Houghton, 418; W. D. How- ells, 503-504; Leigh Hunt, 345- 349; Richard Hurd, 131; Mrs. 191; William Jack- son, 212; Henry James, 501; J. C. Jeaffreson, 425, 433-4343 Francis Jeffrey, 279, 291-292, 144 m”; John Oliver Hussey, 301; Charles Jenner, 178-1793 Gye jensen,’ 5413, J. K. Jerome, 520 m; J. H. Jesse, 475;. Lionel Johnson, 512; Samuel Johnson, 192-193, 196, 200-201, 529; Journal Britan- mique, 82; John Keats, 354; Thomas Keightley, 149, 414, 435-436, 446-447; James Kent, 259; J. F. Kirk, 424; Vicesi- mus Knox, 229-230; Ladies Magazine, 78; J. F. de La Harpe, 257) 297) 5593 Charles Lamb, 312-315, 566, 5673 Ce re | INDEX i Henry Lancaster, 440-441; W. S. Landor, 354-3553 507-508; Lang, 5225 Andrew Mrs. Sidney Lanier, 476, 5733; G:. P. La- throp, 451-452, 573; Frederick Lawrence, 428-430; G. E. Less- ing, 258; G. H. Lewes, 390, 419; G. C. Lichtenberg, 258; Literary World, 480-481; Rob- ert Lloyd) 171-172; J. Ho: Lobban, 500, 525-526; J. G. Lockhart, 336-337; Rev. Smyth Loftus, 145; James R. Lowell, 484-487; Lady 70-713; Lord Lyttelton, 29-30, 147, 562; Lord Lytton, 380- 381, 394-395; LT. B. Macaulay, 356-357, 387-389; R. S. Mac- Lang, 491, Andrew Luxborough, kenzie, 457; Sir James Mackin- tosh, 289-290, 360; Magazine of Magazines, 77-78; William Maginn, 361; Rev. Edward Mangin, 288; Harriet Mar- tineau, 418-419; David Mas- son, 422, 433; 1. J. Mathias, Matthews, 504, 527; Lewis Melville, 512 264-265; Brander nm; George Meredith, 454-457, 572-573; J. H. Millar, 500; Hugh Miller, 433; H. C. Min- chin, 525; William Miunto, 473; D. G. Mitchell, 493; Mary R. Mitford, 359; D. M. Moir, 227-229, 558, 559; Mrs. Eliza- 391; Lord Monboddo, beth Montagu, 147, 201-202; Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, 8, 73, 117-121, 554; Monthly Edward George Review, 77, 166; Moore, 126 %”, 1493 Moore, 531; Dr. John Moore, Thomas 3533 Hannah More, 194-195; Wil- 238; Moore, fa 344-5854 7° a4 weet! n SS cael, eae = Py > ot te A oy Ai aha; > ea oy oa * ee dee Sate Taree ere wept erdl alguna tte hep emens ef eh dome att en Lanne a eh bts ° tty eee) arr Te ir rerere cs ee Dat eae heed tee acetone oa he ceed Wine Redhat. Lal be eee Sie ieae tte te ry et et rie} Dopey $s vu = Se ee ee ae) ray arr aes * a = vars ee eee et a ere ~638 INDEX liam Mudford, 283-285; Ar- | 528 m; Lady Margaret Sack- thur Murphy, 156-169, 543, ville, 273; George Saintsbury, 556-557; James C. Murphy, 6, 192, 490, 500, 505, 509- 255; Hugh Murray, 283; The 510, 512, 524-525, 529, 5355 Nation, 518-519; ae ee 536; Thomas Sanderson, 271; 286; W. R. Nicoll ef A Saturday Review, 470, 481, Noble, 471-472; aoe Am- 484, 495-496; Schiller, 259; brostanae, 361-362; North Brit- Mrs. M. A. Schimmelpenninck, ssh Review, 424, 426, 430- 267; F. C. Schlosser, 403-404; 431; James Northcote, 339- Sir Walter Scott, 324-338, 551, 342; Dr. John Ogilvie, 218- 566-567; Nassau Senior, 391, 219, 558; Mrs. M. Oliphant, 22; Anna Seward, 243; G. B. 522-523; Lady Orrery, t1or- Shaw, 533; T. B. Shaw, 383; 102; Coventry Patmore, 505 William Shenstone, 6-7, 24, 70, n; Mark Pattison, 472; Her- 76, 128-129, 555; R. B. Sheri- bert Paul, 500; T. L. Peacock, dan, 260; Clement Shorter, 533 364-365; Bliss Perry, 505; n; J. H. Shorthouse, 492-493; i. S, Perry; 475-476: W. L. May Sinclair, 531; Christopher Phelps, 530-531; Sir Robert Smart, 94-95, 167, 558; Char- Phillimore, 375; Eden Phill- lotte Smith, 272; G. B. Smith, potts, 531; Mrs. H. L. Piozzi, 450; James Smith, 355; Sydney r96; E. A. Poe, 372; S, J. Smith, 292; Tobias Smollett, Pratt, 206-207; E. Purcell, 74, 86, 87, 185, 550, 558; 481; H. J. Pye, 196, 232-233; Robert Southey, 117, 344-345, Quarterly Review, 293, 294, 352, 365; William Spalding, 392, 471, 473; Sir Arthur 432; The Spectator, 470-471; Quiller-Couch, 494, 506; Ed- Lady Spencer, 214 ; Mme. de a ta mund Rack, 212; Sir Walter Staél, 296; Paul Stapfer, 471; Raleigh, 502-503; Allan Ram- Stendhal; 789; ‘Sir J) ok say, 107; Chevalier Ramsay, Stephen, 434; Sir Leslie Ste- 25; Charles Reade, 441; Jo- phen, 463-475, 498, 510, 511- > ph Reed, 174; Clara Reeve, 512, 515, 5733; James Stephens, 244-246, 267, 562-563; Sir 531 ; John Sterling, 392; Joshua Reynolds, 260; Mme. J. A. Steuart, 494 2; G. A. Riccoboni, 182; Samuel Rich- Stevens, 148-149; R. L. Steven- ardson, 10-11, 63-64, 65, 66- | son, 460-463, 494-495; Dugald 67, 68, 97-98, 99, 145, 550, Stewart, 255 2; Lady Louisa 565; J. M. Robertson, 504; Stuart, 375-3775 J. Bi eA Crabb Robinson, 305; Samuel Suard, 297; Jonathan Swift, Rogers, 175, 253; Thomas 4, 10, 69; A. C. Swinburne, Roscoe, 378-379; W. C. Roscoe, 459; Arthur Symons, 456 2; i 422, 427; John Ruskin, 38s5- H. A, Taine, 443-445, 5513 a 386, 389, 423, 457-458, 551, Catherine Talbot, 17-18, 19, ne 568-569; Mark Rutherford, 68, 74, 100-101; IT. N. Tal- i i i ‘ a ; a i ie oe fel. ie !INDEX 639 fourd, 343; Joseph Texte, 153, | Fielding, Sarah, David Simple, 170, 182; W. M. Thackeray, 378, 382, 400-407, 408-421, 423-428, 430, 432-434, 438; 444, 446, 448, 450, 468, 477, 479, 481, 491, 492) 493, 4945 497) 507) 510, 511, 513, 5155 518, 525, 535, 551, 569-5795 John Thelwall, 210; Clara Thomson, 507; James Thom- son, 455 2; The Times (New York), 520-521; H. D. Traill, 487-488; W. P. Trent, 512 7; Anthony Trollope, 393, 4733 Alfred Trumble, 492; Rev. Thomas Twining, 231-232; Carl Van Doren, 547-548; C. E. Vaughan, 190 7; Ben- jamin Victor, 143-144; Vol- taire, 182; Horace Walpole, 75, - oe 123-124, 144, 203-204, 205, 207, 325) 328, 337) 379» 416; 510-511, 550, 562; William Warburton, 76; Sir A. W. Ward, 397; R. P. Ward, 3933 Rev. Richard Warner, 363; Joseph Warton, 13, 233-2345 William Watson, 281-283; H. G. Wells, 534; Westminster Review, 371-372) 390-391) 426; Richard Whately, 3585 H. B. Wheatley, 296; E. P. Whipple, 371, 392, 4053 Wil- liam Whitehead, 107; C. M. Wieland, 258; Harold Wil- liams, 530; Owen Wister, 532; Augustus Wood, 257-2593 G. E. Woodberry, 527; Wil- liam Wordsworth, 353-3543 Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, 296; Ce: Yonre, (4:57. Fielding, Sir John, 1645; dedicates The Fathers to the Duke of Northumberland, 216. bak FS PPV er ere 20, 26; defends her brother in Familiar Letters, 20; 58, 61, 61 »; defends Parson Adams in The Cry, 110; 1113; praised by Richardson, 145; praises Joseph Andrews and Grandison, 145- 146; refers to Fielding in Countess of Dellwyn, 146; 165; translation of Xenophon, 230; 550. Fielding, Timothy, 430. Fielding, William, 311, 345, 348. Fields, J. T. 396. Fitzgerald, Edward, on Fielding, Richardson, and Scott, 439; on Fielding, 457. Fleming, Marjorie, on Tom Jones, 289. Fletcher, Archibald, 211. Fordyce, Rev. James, eulogizes Richardson, 187. Forster, John, on Fielding’s in- fluence, 149, 150 %; 192, 3553 on the most astounding of Johnson’s heresies, 4.03. Forsyth, William, on Fielding, 443. Fouqué, H. A., 372. Fox, C. J., 254-2553 quotes Field- ing at Literary Club, 263, 5595 280. Franklin, Benjamin, 470, 573- Frederick, Prince of Wales, sub- scribes for the Miscellanies, 16. Frere, J. H., on Allworthy, 360. Fréron, Elie C., on Tom Jones, 53% Frith, W. P., paints Sophia West- ern, 458. Froude, J. A., on Tom Jones, 435- Fun, see Kenrick, William. i $1 rh oI oe PT babar ehaken tance Tt na aekstae An Pere eeenent ees eee veer Se = Ot Sn tn, bs aaa So ont mas 4%, oder ee ee ee ae) Sthiatiaheiceenidmaskendeeel er 7 a sengoase oe (ya he bet here ete ee eer airs i Pata 2 Ses een eeereneot fe eeCe nen, Oe ane ae ee ee SR eye hal ‘Actasietetidens eed en ae, AIN de Montagnac, L. L. J.. 180 2. Gaines, C. H., on Fielding, 526. Galignani, A. and W., 334. Galsworthy, John, on Fielding, 532. Galt, John, 323. Gardenstone, Lord, admirer of Smollett, 239; on Fielding, 239. Garnett, Edward, 370. Garrick, David, subscribes for the Miscellanies, 16; writes pro- logue for The Fathers, 17 n, WiA-216, SSOs SA, L7ly woes; 562. Gaskell, Mrs. Elizabeth, 419-420. General Advertiser, 85 m; on Amelia, 89. Genlis, Mme. de, 267. Gentleman's Magazine, pufts Pamela and slights Joseph Andrews, 11; alludes to Joseph Andrews, 143 15, 22, 333; slurs Tom Jones, 37, 493 praises 385 39) 43, 45-46, 48- 49, 50, 51, 59, 69, 79, 87, 92; on Voyage to Lisbon, 116; 166, Clarissa, 176, 182-184, 244 m, George, W. L., on Fielding, Geraubte Einsiedlerinn, 180 n. 531. Gerould, G. H., on Fielding, 542. Gibbon, Edward, 82; praises Grandison, 1133; 192; admires Journey to the Next World, 235; famous passage on Tom Jones, 235, 560-561; Thack- eray on, 237; Elizabeth Barrett forbidden to read, 237; T. B. Macaulay on, 387-388; 409, 415, 437, 438, 485. Gibbs, Sir Vicary, 347-348. Gifford, William, 360 640 INDEX Gilfillan, George, calls Tom Jones a palace built of dung, 423, 551. Gissing, George, on Fielding, 504. Godden, Miss G. M., on Fielding, 23, 538-540. Godwin, William, disparages Fielding’s style and _ praises Smollett, 240-241; 246, 564. Goethe, praises Grandison, 113; 258-259, 292 m, 361, 385. Goldsmith, Oliver, Fielding’s in- fluence on, 149; on Fielding, 5 177) 207, 314, 346, » 392, 395, 406, 459, 465. Goodall, W., praises and imitates Fielding in Capt. Greenland, 7-58. Gosse, Sir Edmund, on Joseph Andrews, 6; 55, 57; on Field- Ing, 491, 500, 5 561; on Fielding’s scholarship, 497-498; 508, 536, 547, 574- Grandison, Sir Charles, see Rich- ardson, Samuel. _ §O-152 W 353 Wn LO-52%1, S25 Grant, Mrs. Anne, complains of waning popularity of Richard- son, 197. Graves, Rev. Richard, on Joseph Andrews, 6, 73; compliments Richardson, 7; refers to Tom Jones in The Spiritual Quixote, 7, 179-180; 87. Gray, Thomas, estimate of Joseph Andrews; ss: 24. ak ocean » 128, 5553 disparages Fielding, 128; 286, 391. Gray’s-Inn Journal, 105-106. Richardsonian, 127 Green, Emanuel, on Fielding, 539. Green, Thomas, on Fielding, 551. Green, T. H., on Fielding, 466 2. Griffth, Elizabeth and Richard, Ls]Grimn, Friedrich M., Baron, 47; prefers Richardson to Fielding, 48; 54; estimate of Fielding, 108-109. Grose, Francis, refers to Joseph Andrews, 231. Grub-street Journal, 157. Gummere, F. B., on Fielding, 527. Guthrie, William, 104. H AILES, Lord, censures Field- ine.22)6. Hallam, Henry, on Fielding, Cer- vantes, and Scott, 373. Hannay, James, on Fielding, 432- 4333 537- Hardinge, George, tries to explain Walpole’s disparagement of Fielding, 204. Hardy, Thomas, on Fielding and Richardson, 512-513. Harper's Magazine, on Fielding, 436-437. Harrington, Dr., 355. Harris, James, estimate of Field- ing, 230-2313. 286. Harrison, Frederic, 373; on Tom Jones, 473-474) 5153 547: Harte, Bret, 532. Havardys)-7 A, 334. Hawkins, Sir John, Fielding, 261-262, 550; 416, 444. Hawthorne, Nathaniel, on Field- ing, 372. Haydon, B. R., on Fielding and Richardson, 338-339- Hayley, William, alludes to Field- ing in verse, 2133; 355: Hayward, Abraham, on Fielding and Thackeray, 393. Mrs. Eliza, denounces 286, Betsy Haywood, aT et EVEL RE Oo ee ole ee im eee tay ee a a eek SoS ey ee oreo Ge Os Fe Se eee OSS VAT ET FS a € RLS CEZ Sere arse peer a a Bi AT oe aot cal ol ee Ge eb ee od bt Bt Ol | INDEX TIPE hE ROGET ALE Leah oR ed eee ee eee ee Te Ted ele 4: oo ee | oo Seee Teele ere rere © reyes Thoughtless, 141; Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy, 141. Hazlitt, William, 163; on John- SON, 192, 304; 220; early love for Fielding, 264, 303, 560; on parties at Lamb’s, 297-298; discusses Fielding and Smollett with Lamb, 299; essay on the 299, 305; Dunlop, 300; compares Field- with Fanny Burney, Le Sage, and Smollett, 304; many novelists, reviews ing allusions to Fielding, 305 7; on Richardson, 306; on Field- ing’s morality, 307; blinded by Lovelace, 308, 567; on Field- ing’s life, 309; defends Field- ing, Fielding’s SON, 3113 321, 322) 325; Con- versations of Northcote, 339- 342; 352, 364, 366, 368, 380, 418, 450, 510, 566. Hazlitt, W. Carew, on Fielding, 524 2. Henley, W. E., on Thackeray’s misrepresentations of Fielding, 310-311; on 414; reviews Stephen, 474-475; reviews Dobson, 482; on Field- ing, 493-494, 515-516, 517- 520. Herring, Archbishop Thomas, 130. Hertford, Lady, Duchess of Somerset, reads advance vol- umes of Tom Jones, 30-313 70. Heufeld, Franz von, adapts Tom Jones, 173. Hewlett, Maurice, on Fielding, 532. Hildesley, Bishop Mark, praises Richardson, 130. Hill, Aaron, refers to Shamela, 10; 25, 61, 64-65; lines on Richardson, 129; 555: rer Lae ret em! even es: PICTCLOLY ELS Ty Od Os ad ee > tTagara 4 : ‘ Pee | he bees eee Rhee! ee rer a, 2 a c= rales 259155965150; 57, 76, 148, 282, 391. Marmontel, J. F., praises Rich- ardson, 1333; 153-154- Marryat, Frederick, 362. Martial, 85. Martineau, Harriet, on Tom Jones, 418-419. Mason, William, refers to Field- ing, 14. Masson, David, on Fielding, 422, 433; on Richardson, 433. Mathias, T. J., 206; on the nov- elists, 264-265. Matthews, Brander, on Fielding and Zola, 504; on Tom Jones, 527. Maty, Matthew, 82. Melville, Lewis (L. S. Benja- min), on Thackeray and Field- ing, 512 %. Mémoires du Chevalier de Kilpar, see Gain de Montagnac. Memoirs of Charles Townley, 249. Memoirs of the Shakespear’s- Head, attacks Fielding, 121. Memoirs of Ulysses, 18. Mennechet, Edouard, writes comedy called Fielding, 361. Mercier, Louis Sébastien, 181. Meredith, George, parodies Rich- ardson, 136; on Fielding and Richardson, 454-4573 498, 507, 572-573- Meyrionet, Chevalier de Saint- Marc de, 255. Mill, John Stuart, reads Fielding to improve style, 364. Millar, Andrew, 78, 79, 85. Millar, J. H., on Fielding’s style, 500. | Miller, Hugh, on Fielding, 433- rT Pree ETE Te Te ee | VECLULY PTET te PO AS SR OARS ee! fo Pe SSPE Ree Ae Re OTe te Le oS ‘tater te es eS ET Fa FAeVerst" G7 ¢ E45 - : ea! mri 1S] ee ee hae Ralaeee wees Setter terested PA Mn wad ema haematite keene — eee Yer SO ee ee eye ae ee eee Lae ta a + Meth wtp ele brs Aaah 5 an eee646 Miller, Fielding, 27. Sanderson, entertains Milton, John, 128, 355, 379, 508, 509. Minchin, H. C., on Fielding, 5 Minto, William, on Fielding, 473. Miscellanies, The, see Henry. Works. Mistakes of the Heart, 176, 206. Mitchell DD: G. on 493- Mitford, Mary R., on Fielding and Scott, 359. Moir, D. M., on Fielding, 391. Moliére, 183, 257, 372 47°, 47 573, 580. Monboddo, 227-229, 558, Fielding, ) 545 I, 486, 510, 528, 533, a ne ord, on Fielding, 559; on the mock-heroic style, 227, 563; on Fielding’s wit, 229; 286. Mrs. Elizabeth, dialogue on Fielding and Rich- ardson, Richard- sonian, 147 #; 201-202. Montagu, 128; 146-147; a Montagu, George, 75. Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, reads Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, 8, 73; disparages Clar- tssa but weeps, 73; on Amelia, 1023; on Fielding, 117-121, 554; 127, 275, 282, 291, 325, 328, 337, 348, 358, 391, 411, 412, 431, 437) 440, 442, 474, 494; attributes Roderick Ran- dom to Fielding, 562. Monthly Review, 42 n 77, 79; on Voyage to Lisbon, 116- 117; 144; phy, 166; 175, 199. Moore, Edward, 126 , 149. > ) ae 140, reviews Mur- Moore, George, on Fielding, 531. Moore, Dr. John, on Fielding and Smollett, 238; 251. INDEX Moore, Thomas, on Fielding, 353- More, Hannah, Johnson repri- mands, 194; on Fielding and Richardson, 194-1953 praises Richardson in Coelebs, 195, 2723 292. Morley, Henry, 430. Morris, William, 460. Mudford, William, 275; on Fielding, 283-285; 328 7. Mulso, Hester, 96, 100; lines on Richardson, 129; changed atti- tude toward Pamela, 197; 288. refers to Fielding in Gray’s-Inn Journal, Hurd and 106, 1563; praises Murphy, Arthur, 94; 105-106; flatters Warburton, Richardson, 106; on Voyage to Lisbon, 122, 156, 1633; essay on Fielding, 156-169, 556-557; essay reflects contemporary en- mity, 157; 171 #, 275, 286, 325, 327, 351, 377, 378, 405, 428, 431, 443, 447, 481, 515, 543; Murphy, James C., on Fielding, 255. Murray, Hugh, on Fielding, 283. Musius, J. K. A., 258. Museum 334- of Foreign Literature, APOLEON, alludes’ to N Lovelace, 306; regarded as a second Jonathan Wild, 306. The (New York), on Fielding, 518-519. Nation, Ned Evans, 249. Nelson, Lord, 311 7%. Newman, J. H., 373. Newton, Sir Isaac, 242. Nicholls, Rev. Norton, 128. btaiietceadetiel nr eer nat es a “ on | j |bk Be ES ES On | PPE SCLC. LA Od an oe CEA RE ke cake ee BP cigig-t 2 Nichols, John, 36, 242; on Field- ing, 286; 325. Nicoll, W. R., on Fielding and Richardson, 528. Noble, J. A., on Fielding, 471- 472. Noctes Ambrosianae, on Fielding and Richardson, 361-362. Norris, Frank, 532. North British Review, 4223; on Fielding and Thackeray, 424; on Richardson and Fielding, 426; on Fielding, 430-431. Northcote, James, on Fielding and Richardson, 339-342. Northumberland, Duke of, 164. Norton, C. E., 385. BSERVER, The, 243, 249. Ogilvie, Dr. John, remarks on Fielding, 218-219, 5583 devotee of Richardson, 219. O’Hara, Kane, 217. Old England, attacks Fielding, 22, 38, 85; attacks Pitt and Lyttelton for commending Tom Jones, 28-29; admits vogue of Tom Jones, 38; at- tacks Tom Jones, 41, 493 45) 52; attacks Amelia, 83; 158. Oliphant, Mrs. M. O. W., on Fielding and Richardson, 522- 523% Olla Podrida, 247. Omar Khayyam, 439. Opie, Amelia, 272. Orrery, Earl of, 29, 305 thanks Richardson for Grandison, 111; 114, 555+ Orrery, Lady, on Amelia, 101- | 102, 135, 554- Orrery Papers, 29, 30. Oulton, W. C., 247: Seer Pe oe et wh Ah Pet: ea 4 eS Pe et ere is os Pe Fe INDEX AE RU LG LRGs ane ee woe eee eee et Pe oe ee oe oe Te rh ee) Pa see Richardson, Samuel. Pamela Censured, 2. Parr, Samuel, 231. Pasquin, see Fielding, Henry. W orks. Paston, George (Emily M. Sy- | monds), 9 #, 211 2%. | Pater, Walter, 369. | Patmore, Coventry, on Amelia, 505 2. Patriot Analized, attacks Fielding, Pattison, Mark, on Fielding, 472. Paul, Herbert, on Fielding’s style, 500. Paul, Saint, Fielding admires, 138. Payn, James, 419. Peabody, O. W. B., 371. Peacock, T. L., on Fielding and Scott, 364-365. Peregrine Pickle, see Smollett, Tobias. Perry, Bliss, defends Fielding’s realism, 505. Perry, T. S., on Fielding, 475- 4.76. Phelps, W. L., on Fielding, 530- 531. Philidor, A. D., 172. Phillimore, Sir Robert, on Field- | ing, 3753 428. | Phillips, Mrs. Constantia, her | Apology, 37. | Phillpotts, Eden, on Fielding, ose Pilkington, Mrs. Laetitia, 10, 68. Pinkerton, John, 204. | Piozzi, Mrs. H. L., praises Rich- ardson and disparages Fielding, : 195-196, 2965 243. moe &) - * . - — = 2 ay “ oe Pe eee bhi et eens eer rere ee a a i wars a ee ae ey ot Sets ee eet etn pean en es meas Ales sity rye OT Rat Gh er sinc pistead eee en rs os niaknioaitea naan iene aes Steep ory BA natn p Dra aan o1 stm AAtI: nob a a. bees Bema bon say sytemgh tues = ~~ tu So Aitcacateoan parent an stackaomneraageyeasenabeants rng iplaladelgyeteomesopestt asae wny ee Se here indbeest eae ree ithe dette eet ee ee 648 Pitt, William, subscribes for the Miscellanies, 16; guest with Fielding at Radway Grange, 27; attacked as Fielding’s pa- tron, 28; 36. Planche, J: B. G:, 331. Plato, 183, 442, 540. Poe, E. A., on Fielding, 372. Poetzsche, Erich, 10. Poinsinet, Antoine, adapts Tom Jones, 172-173. Pompey the Little, see Coventry, Francis, Pope, Alexander, on Pamela, 9; 3 95 25, 76, 126, 147; Murphy on, refers to the Miscellanies 15935 379s 555- Pope, F. J., 538. Porter, Jane, 272. Portland, Duchess of, 127. Pratt, Samuel J. (Courtney Mel- moth), adapts Joseph Andrews, 75, 206; thrust at sentimental fiction in Pupil of Pleasure, 206-207; praises Fielding, 207. Prescott, W. H., 366. Purcell, E., on Fielding, 481. Pye, H. J., on Mrs. Piozzi’s par- tiality, 196; admires Fielding, 232-233; perhaps _ influences Coleridge’s dictum, 233, 321 n; censures Johnson, 233. Pyne, W. H. (Ephraim Hard- castle), many allusions to Fielding, 360. UARTERLY Review, 289, 293-294, 301, 391; on Fielding, 392, 471, 473; on Smollett and Dickens, 425. Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur, criti- cizes Thackeray, 494; on Field- ing and Stevenson, 506. INDEX Rae Francois, 172, 207, 365, 454, 493. Rack, Edmund, 212. Radcliffe, Mrs. Ann, 354. Raleigh, Sir Walter, 267, 502- 503. Ramsay, Allan, 107. Ramsay, Chevalier, attacks Joseph Andrews, 25. Reade, Charles, on Fielding, 441. Reed, Joseph, adapts Tom Jones, 173-174. Reeve, Clara, Progress of Ro- mance, 244; praises Richardson, 244; on Richardson and Field- INgZ, 245-246; 267, 562-563. Reilly, Joi; aaa. ase. Rembrandt, 37 Repplier, Agnes, 522 n. Reynolds, Sir Joshua, on Tom Jones, 260; 340. Riccoboni, Mme. Marie, 108, 153; on Fielding, 182. Richardson, Samuel, triumph of Pamela, 1-2; 11, 25, 47; 585 attacks Fielding, 10, 63-64, 65, 66-67, 98; easy ascent to fame, 19; completion of Clarissa, 30; 38, 40, 46, 48; correspondence with Hill’s daughters, 61, 63; 64; on Shamela, 66; 68; Duke of Richmond’s hoax on, 71-72; unfamiliar with social usages, 7, 86, 95; has ad- 725 74, 76, 77 vance news of Amelia, 97; gloats over failure of Amelia, 97-98; story about Mrs. Field- ing, 98, 447; strikes at Field- ing through Sarah, 99, 550; IO“, 10, LUT, Tre; did not disturb conventions, 1353; hears praise of Fielding, 145; exalts Sarah Fielding above her brother, 145; Mrs. Montagu’sereSataraicesie etter esa al tr bi tsts erereretes sehr e eae e ees SESE TTS) esgheteq EG Le ae ee. Or Ce 08 be 92 re Tee. Eee re PETE Tee. PRP Tea eee TS NESE SUSE ES CP PON Pee Pes OLE os! O46 oe Oe Peo SS ee eee ey eo Pe ee ++ stvnngagste bap ns INDEX 152-155, 181; imitators of, worth, 273; Rev. Whitwell estimate, 147; vogue in France, | Dunlop, 299; R. L. Edge- : : Elwin, 426-427; Encyclopaedia 178; Johnson his champion, 188-190; 197, 207; Lovelace | Britannica, 269; Evangelical and Caliban compared, 232; Family Library, 266; Edward 243; in Germany, 257-258; | Fitzgerald, 439; James For- ere 271, 275, 279-280; waning | dyce, 187; W. P. Frith, 458; iH popularity of, 287-288, 289- Mme. de Genlis, 267; Thomas itt 290, 565; Mangin edits, 288; Gray;) 28) 55537) eu bomas i 297-298, 335; Str Charles Hardy, 513; Nathaniel Haw- i Grandison highly valued by thorne, 372; B. R. Haydon, Ruskin, 385-3863; 433) 437) 338-339; William Hayley, : 443) 494) 507, 508, 511, 5153 213; William Hazlitt, 264, modern views of, 524; 564. | 304, 306, 308; W. E. Henley, ESTIMATES OF RICHARDSON: 515; C. F. Horne, 529; Leigh by Mrs. John Adams, 259 7; Hunt, 345-346; J. C. Jeaffre- Dr. john’ Aikin; 276, 27777; son, 427; Francis Jeffrey, 279, Anti-Jacobin, 279, 291; Jane 291; Samuel Johnson, 70, 186, Austen, 274; Mrs. A. L. Bar- 189-190, 192, 193, 296, 529, bauld, 277, 278, 279; Nicolas 550, 561; Charles Lamb, 314; Barthe, 182-184; James Beat- W. S. Landor, 355; Mrs. An- tie, 226; Augustine Birrell, drew Lang, 522; J. Low- 495; Robert Bisset, 265; Hugh thian, 271; Lord Lytton, 394; Blair, 234; William Blake, 279 T. B. Macaulay, 387-389; Sir m; James Boswell, 260-261; James Mackintosh, 279, 290; W. L. Bowles, 292; British J. F. Marmontel, 153; David oh Critic, 279, 291, 293; Mrs. Masson, 433; 1. J. Mathias, Ay Mary Brunton, 293; Fanny 265; Sébastien Mercier, 181; Hy Burney, 198; Lord Byron, George Meredith, 454-455, Bi 351; George Canning, 268; 456; J. H. Millar, 500; Han- aay Alexander Chalmers, 286-287; nah More, 195; Hester Mulso, Fs Robert Chambers, 383; André 96, 129; John Nichols, 286; Chénier, 181; Chesnaye-Des- W. R. Nicoll, 528; Noctes Am- bois, 555; Lord Chesterfield, | brosianae, 362, 363; North : 113, 132, 5553 s- ow. Cole- | British Review, 426; James By ridge, 298-299, 315-316, 317) Northcote, 340-341; Dr. John fi 320, 562; Richard Cumber- Ogilvie, 219; Mrs. Oliphant, rf land, 243-244; Mrs. Delany, | 522-523; Earl of Orrery, 111, i 96; Thomas De Quincey, 387 555; Mrs. Piozzi, 196; Alex- ih nm; Charles Dickens, 398; Denis | ander Pope, 9, 5553 Jane Por- ie Diderot, 154, 5573 Isaac Dis- | ter, 272; Clara Reeve, 245- i raeli, 242; Austin Dobson, 246; Thomas Roscoe, 379; if Ags) Sin AS Cx Doyle) 5425) || W. C. Roscoe, 427; Rousseau, i | is John Drinkwater, 549 #; John 154; John Ruskin, 385-386; 1 ; 4 ah rh Hi i , a re 59} Y 1H re ri 5 S eae ss Fa SU CLUE YE Pe Te eek i F eh ZEREPLPRE SEP LLP ae bie ee oe PE CE TESE REDE BS eae Le he Cf rE CEED RE Sy Stee LEK CR PAMEORE Of Ot 9) Ce TE RD at A OE RIAL ELE LS OP et ae oe oo SeCEe CLERC ELE OE Pe me : rey i.e chk ek eS PL et erere ee ee eeeer bapa eee re a ee ee seach at, nn ie BOR eh — et a ae a ' f qe 650 Mark Rutherford, 528 2; George Saintsbury, 192, 529; Thomas Sanderson, 271; Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, 267; F. C. Schlosser, 404; Sir Walter Scott, 325; Anna Seward, 243; T. B. Shaw, 383; William Shenstone, 128-129, 555; Mar- tin Sherlock, 242; Adam Smith, 148, 557; James Smith, 355; Sydne Smith, 2; Tobias Smollett, 186; Robert Southey, 280, 344; i Mme. de Staél, 296; Sir Les- lie Stephen, 464, 465; R. L. Stevenson, 462-463; Percival Stockdale, 289; Mrs. H. B. Stowe, 267; H. A. Taine, 444; T. N. Talfourd, 342-343; Al- fred Tennyson, 439; W. M. Thackeray, 427; Joseph War- ton, 233, 243; Westminster Re- view, 426; William Wilber- force, 266; William Words- worth, 354; Sir Nathaniel 127-128, 555. Richmond, Charles, 2d Duke of, hoax on Richardson, 71-72. Rigby, Richard, 75. Robertson, J. M., on Fielding and Zola, 504. Robinson, Crabb, 305, 316. Roderick Random, see Smollett, Tobias. Rogers, samuel. on Fielding, 175, 253, 560. Roland, Mme. Marie, 376. Rolliad, The, casts Pitt and Thur- low for parts in Tom Jones, 248, 559. Roscoe, Thomas, 351; edits Field- ing, 378-379; Thackeray’s re- view of, 401-402; 405, 432. INDEX Roscoe, W. C., 422; on Field- ing and Richardson, 427. Rossetti, D. G., 460. Rousseau, J. J., praises Richard- SON, 127, 154; 223, 266. Rowe, Nicholas, 193. Rowlandson, Thomas, illustrates Fielding, 560. Ruskin, John, on Fielding, Rich- ardson, Smollett, and Scott, 385-386; 389; alleges fimetic 551, 568-569; on Fielding, 457- 4583 477. Rutherford, Mark (W. H. White), on Fielding and Rich- ardson, 528 7. taint in Fielding, 423, Ryder, Sir Dudley, attempts to rescue Joseph Andrews, 12, 24. ACHEVERELL, Henry, 407. S Sackville, Lady Margaret, on Fielding, 273. St. James’s Chronicle, 215. St. James’s Evening Post, 15 n. Saintsbury, G. E. B., defends Jo- seph Andrews, 6; on Fielding and Richardson, 192, 524-525, 5293; 330, 4423; on Fielding’s Style, 490, 5003; _ criticizes Thackeray, 494; on Tom Jones, 496; defends Fielding’s realism, 505; 509-510, 512, 535, 536. Sanderson, Thomas, 271. Saturday Review, on Fielding, 470, 481, 484, 489; on Tom Jones, 495-4963 524. Scanderbeg, 15. Scarron, Paul, imitated by Field- Ing, 445 327, 481. Schiller, 258, 259, 317.my Caled Sree ha (78.8. $h< a : eee he hee Bi le Pe Sete oe oe Oe Oe ak Ke Yt eg ee ie ae ee oe ee 7 WSS ee SD ol ek ea | pea er et SSS PTET ETL LO Le LE Se De Oe OR eT INDEX 65x Schimmelpenninck, Mrs. M. A., 267. Schlosser, F. C., on Fielding and Richardson, 403-404. Scots Magazine, 282 n. Scott, Sir Walter, 120, 185; on Johnson, 1923; 217, 273, 282 %, 284 2, 290, 297, 299, 301; SUC- cess of Waverley, 302, 312, 318, 319, 5653 322, 3233 On Fielding, 324-338, 551, 566- 567; attitude toward fiction, 327-328; on Mackenzie, 327 n; versus Smollett, 329-332; 339, 344, 346, 3523 John Keats on, 3545 356, 359, 3635 T- L. Peacock on, 364; 367; influ- ence of, 369-375; John Ruskin on, 386; I. B. Macaulay on, 387; G. H. Lewes on, 390; 391, 393; Lord Lytton on, 394, 3955 402, 429) 435, 439) 440, 453, 457) 459, 460, 461, 462, 463, 470, 473) 474, 481, 485, 494, 501, 513, 515, 5275 568. Scudder, H. E., on Fielding’s por- traits of children, 504. on Bage, 328; on Fielding Seccombe, Thomas, 528. Ségur, A. J. P. de, 256. Selwyn, George, on popularity of Tom Jones, 211. Senior, Nassau, on Fielding, 391, 422. Seward, Anna, 189, 200, 208; a Richardsonian, 243. Shakespeare, William, 6, 127, 223, 224, 225, 232, 242), 243) 316, 346, 349, 354 %, 373) 379, 389, 395, 406, 427, 435, 459, 470, 474, 485, 486, Sol, 508, 509, 516, 580. PULTE ea aT oe et eA Se ee Oe Te eed oa wh ESP) Ot ee er ot es Os Oe Be te ee Shamela, authorship of, 3; Rich- ardson on, 66. Sharpe's London Magazine, 429. Shaw, G. B., on Fielding, 533. Shaw, T. B., on Fielding, Rich- ardson, and Smollett, 383. Shebbeare, John, Fielding in Lydia, 142. Sheffield, Lord, 235. Shelley, P. B., 354. William, on 105; imitates Shenstone, Joseph Andrews, 6-7, 243; commends Pamela, 7; 70, 76; on Grandt- som, 113; a Richardsonian, 128-129, 555. Sheridan, R. B., Fielding, 175; influenced by produces The Fathers, 215; on Fielding, 260; 411, 559. Sherlock, Rev. Martin, eulogizes Richardson, 242; 286. Sherlock, Bishop Thomas, 49, 292. Shirrefs, Andrew, 248. Shorter, Clement, on Tom Jones, 533 %. Shorthouse, J. H., on Fielding, 492-493. Sinclair, May, on Fielding, 531. Sir Charles Grandison, see Rich- ardson, Samuel. Slocock, Rev. mends Pamela, 2, 130. Smart, Christopher, on Fielding, 94-95, 167, 558. Smith, Adam, praises Richardson, 148, 557- Smith, Charlotte, 272. Smith, G. B., 396; on Fielding, 450. Smith, Horace, 355. Smith, James, on Fielding and Richardson, 355. Smith, Sydney, 292. Benjamin, com- “BYES oa WY F, bt ee er OT Oe tT ate iS ed | i. oI ep i 5 i ee] - ‘BS ; : oan eat nina »7) a babhert anh paste ares oie a er eirtin oe ow We OE a gs earetrehtabtebebnetial oa teary er a 3 a er rs eee ent t Taree a eeree] a 5 = errant > ot re OTE A Se ee SRS eet gay snaaes abana ter enstetennennenbtplat reacts yh Pete eer pat Ket rd 4 es UH oe 5 ¢ . pete eh et ie Sp ectete ees SO ete kere <4 ae 2 tent A P — ead eae. Siete ee ee Ce teal mab ied atid eee Ce roe ITT TS > Oy ne ae eee eer rea reas fear yee ae Cave pe uren naire any eee Te eet et Deen ne inet ee pe ene at Bria - eer ae ere iF 3} 43 ienee e ae . - brsednentl Noimeews rylebaial eee _ ms eee 5 a $ . ys mL 6 Smollett, Tobias, 37; Roderick Random, 58; Peregrine Pickle, WwW 58; attacks Fielding in Pere- grine Pickle, 74, 86, 5503 77; 84, 108, 140; Goldsmith on, 151; makes amends, 185, 558; accused of envying Fielding, 185-186; praises Richardson, 186; 207; his adherents, 238, 6 fluence on Dickens, 396-3973 336; 264, 350, 392, 396; in- A26, Aa, 460, 473; 486, 515. ESTIMATES OF SMOLLETT: by Robert Anderson, 240; Robert Bisset, 265; Mrs. E. B. Brown- ing, 396; Charles Buller, 399; Fanny Burney, 199; Thomas Campbell, 239; Thomas Car- 7 pao yle, 384-385; George Crabbe, 9; Is W. Croker, 3923 arles Dickens, 396; Susan N 3 Ch Ferrier, 359; Lord Garden- stone, 239; William Godwin, 240-241; William Hazlitt, 304; W. E. Henley, 515; M. Dav- enport Hill, 434; R. H. Horne, 396; Leigh Hunt, 346; J. C. Jeaffreson, 425; John Keats, 354; Charles Lamb, 312; T. J. Mathias, 265; Dr. John Moore, 238; Quarterly Review, 425; Thomas Roscoe, 378-379; John Ruskin, 386; Mrs. Schim- ; Sir Walter ss eB: 3; R. B. Sheridan, 260; Sir Leslie Stephen, 464, A6S5, 466; I. N. Talfourd, 343; Thackeray, 401, 425-426. Somerset, Duchess of, see Hert- ford, Lady. Sophocles, 233, 320, 395. Southey, Robert, 117, 280; on melpenninck, 267 scott, 328, Shaw, 38 2 INDEX Fielding and Richardson, 344; on Voyage to Lisbon, 344-3453 on Fielding’s son, 345; 352, 365. Spalding, William, on Fielding, 432. Spectator, The, on Fielding and Scott, 470-471. Spence, Joseph, 128. Spencer, Lady, criticizes Garrick’s prologue to The Fathers, 214 n. Spenser, Edmund, 361. Spring-Garden Journal, 92. Staél, Mme. de, on Fielding and Richardson, 296. Stapfer, Paul, on Fielding, 471. Steele, Sir Richard, 120, 313. Steffens, J. H., adapts Tom Jones, 173. Stendhal (M. H. Beyle), on Fielding, 389. Stephen, Sir James Fitzjames, on Fielding and Dickens, 434. Stephen, Sir Leslie, 99, 324; criti- cizes Stevenson’s essay, 463; on Fielding, 463-475, 573; on Richardson, 464, 465; on Smol- lett, 464, 465-466; 478; de- fends Fielding’s initial essays, 498; 510, 511-512, 515. Stephens, James, on Fielding, 531 2. Sterling, John, on _ Fielding, Goldsmith, Dickens, and Thack- eray, 392. Sterne, Laurence, 140; Fielding’s influence on, 149-150; Gold- smith attacks, 151; 211, 266, 344; Thomas Carlyle on, 384; 394) 440, 441, 459. Steuart, J. A., criticizes Stevenson, 494 7. Stevens, G. A., 104, 148-149.tte ee - Meneses oe oo | VS 7St— Fe Te 4G Be 5 -| . « * Stevenson, R. L., on Tom Jones, 372) 494-495; on Fielding, Hugo, Scott, and Richardson, 460, 461-463; 499, 501, 506, 575: Stewart, Dugald, 255 #. Stockdale, Rev. Percival, 289. Stothard, Thomas, _ illustrates Fielding, 217; 264, 560. Stowe, Harriet B., 267, 487. Strahan, William, 12 ”, 79, 121. Stuart, Lady Louisa, 325, 334- 335; on Fielding, 375-377- Student, The, 51-52. Suard, J. B. A., on Fielding, 297. Swift, Jonathan, attacks Fielding in Rapsody, 4; on Fielding’s wit, 10, 69; 47) 124, 147) 182, 2X1, 322, 365, 379) 416, 418, 422, 486, 509. Swinburne, A. C., on Fielding, Dickens, Charlotte Bronté, and Scott, 459. Symons, Arthur, on Fielding and Meredith, 456 1. AINE, H. A., on Fielding, 443-445, 5513 450, 469, 476, 477) 515, 518. Talbot, Catherine, reads Joseph Andrews, 17-183 19, 68, 74; 100-101. Talfourd, T. N., 312; on Field- ing, Richardson, and Smollett, 342-3435 437- Taylor, Bayard, 402 ”. Tennyson, Alfred, 439. Texte, Joseph, 153, 170, 182. Thackeray, W. M., 58 %, 120, 280, 330, 368, 3713 reviews Roscoe’s edition, 378, 382, 40I- 403; compared with Fielding, 392-393; famous dictum in Pendennis, 398, 407, 424; early INDEX 4 Te. eho &- SPSS Te Te IL ig pees | remarks on Fielding, 400-401, 405-407; illustrates Joseph Andrews, 401; on Smollett, 401; on Amelia, 402, 406, 413-414, 427-428, 507; on Walpole story, 402; lecture on Fielding, 403, 408-421, 5513 regrets not reading Fielding before he was ten, 404; Barry Lyndon and Jonathan Wild, 405; on Johnson’s abuse of Fielding, 405-406; thinks Fielding Tom Hicka- thrift, 406; on Fielding and influence on wrote Chaucer, 406; Fielding’s fame, 408-445, 571- 572; on Fielding and Dickens, 410, 425; Review versus Lec- ture, 410-414; names club af- ter Fielding, 415; recites Gib- bon’s eulogy, 415; refers to Fielding in Esmond, 415; in Four Georges, 416; in The Vir- 416; in The New- comes, 416-417; 418; on Char- lotte Bronté, 420; Nassau Sen- ior on, 422; North British Re- view on, 422; W. C. Roscoe on, 422; J. C. Jeaffreson on, 422; David Masson on, 4223 F, Lawrence on, 422; ranks Fielding above Smollett, 425- 4263; 426-427, 430) 431, 4323 reaction against, 446-476; 477) 479, 481, 485, 491, 492) 493, 494, 497, 498, 504, 507) 5195 is GO Uh Gush Suds 518, 525) 535) 551) 569-570. Thelwall, John, reads Fielding, 210. Thicknesse, Philip, 184. Thomas, Margaret, bust of Field- ing, 483. Thomson, Alexander, 244 %. ginians, . ‘ 2 wi 4 i’ “ bat tel ee ead bee are. : me Ett on hee - as ee nat EET Hy es Te neat si A oe eve: a ee bt dee a es bee ee eet aterenen yi PS sere betes er a 004 -¥\ teeen, Br ere ri Shares atpeeehtnard ba eer es Sma penne peitenenne ne inins none Yeahs $s Ree LORS BT Ot 25 Oo Oe SS Se oe ee eG Be eM et at oe Sh eeP er ar Gs be Ot pe ry ab he oy Pa Os SE oR ey PT Ae Ss Oboe Oe See as teed AG i S CI , : re see*diteetes q tase. ca. G4 Get See el iass tise pie Pe re Petre es Cee ea eee ek654 INDEX Thomson, Clara, defends Amelia, \ \ Y ALDSCHMIDT, Carl, 507. 173 %. Thomson, James (B. V.), on | Wales, Prince of, see Frederick. Fielding, 455 2. Walpole, Horace, on the popu- S ) Oo e i Thornton, Bonnell, 84, 88, go, larity of Pamela, 8; 25, 55; aie 92, 553. disgraceful story about Field- a ri Thurlow, Lord, 211. Tillotson, John, aa bon, 123-124; attacks Fielding Times, The (New York), on d ing, 753 773; on Voyage to Lis- In verse, 144, 550, 562; on 1e ; yr 70-07 . 5 . . Fielding, 1A Onan Richardson’s triumph in France, JiStTO 29. ~ . Tolstoi, 440, 529 152, 181; 173; tilts with Mme. du Deffand over Field- Ing, 203-204; disparages Field- Tom Jones, see Fielding, Henry. W orks. Tom Jones in his Married State, ; : ing to John Pinkerton, 204; 2, 248. 7