Chương Chương 1 · _A dissertation concerning high people and low people, with
. _A dissertation concerning high people and low people, with
Slipslop's departure in no very good temper of mind, and the evil
plight in which she left Adams and his company_
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
PORTRAIT OF FIELDING, FROM BUST IN THE SHIRE HALL, TAUNTON
"JOSEPH, I AM SORRY TO HEAR SUCH COMPLAINTS AGAINST YOU"
THE HOSTLER PRESENTED HIM A BILL
JOSEPH THANKED HER ON HIS KNEES
GENERAL INTRODUCTION.
There are few amusements more dangerous for an author than the
indulgence in ironic descriptions of his own work. If the irony is
depreciatory, posterity is but too likely to say, "Many a true word is
spoken in jest;" if it is encomiastic, the same ruthless and ungrateful
critic is but too likely to take it as an involuntary confession of
folly and vanity. But when Fielding, in one of his serio-comic
introductions to _Tom Jones_, described it as "this prodigious work," he
all unintentionally (for he was the least pretentious of men)
anticipated the verdict which posterity almost at once, and with
ever-increasing suffrage of the best judges as time went on, was about
to pass not merely upon this particular book, but upon his whole genius
and his whole production as a novelist. His work in other kinds is of a
very different order of excellence. It is sufficiently interesting at
times in itself; and always more than sufficiently interesting as his;
for which reasons, as well as for the further one that it is
comparatively little known, a considerable selection from it is offered
to the reader in the last two volumes of this edition. Until the present
occasion (which made it necessary that I should acquaint myself with
it) I own that my own knowledge of these miscellaneous writings was by
no means thorough. It is now pretty complete; but the idea which I
previously had of them at first and second hand, though a little
improved, has not very materially altered. Though in all this hack-work
Fielding displayed, partially and at intervals, the same qualities which
he displayed eminently and constantly in the four great books here
given, he was not, as the French idiom expresses it, _dans son
assiette_, in his own natural and impregnable disposition and situation
of character and ability, when he was occupied on it. The novel was for
him that _assiette_; and all his novels are here.
Although Henry Fielding lived in quite modern times, although by family
and connections he was of a higher rank than most men of letters, and
although his genius was at once recognised by his contemporaries so soon
as it displayed itself in its proper sphere, his biography until very
recently was by no means full; and the most recent researches, including
those of Mr Austin Dobson--a critic unsurpassed for combination of
literary faculty and knowledge of the eighteenth century--have not
altogether sufficed to fill up the gaps. His family, said to have
descended from a member of the great house of Hapsburg who came to
England in the reign of Henry II., distinguished itself in the Wars of
the Roses, and in the seventeenth century was advanced to the peerages
of Denbigh in England and (later) of Desmond in Ireland. The novelist
was the grandson of John Fielding, Canon of Salisbury, the fifth son of
the first Earl of Desmond of this creation. The canon's third son,
Edmond, entered the army, served under Marlborough, and married Sarah
Gold or Gould, daughter of a judge of the King's Bench. Their eldest son
was Henry, who was born on April 22, 1707, and had an uncertain number
of brothers and sisters of the whole blood. After his first wife's
death, General Fielding (for he attained that rank) married again. The
most remarkable offspring of the first marriage, next to Henry, was his
sister Sarah, also a novelist, who wrote David Simple; of the second,
John, afterwards Sir John Fielding, who, though blind, succeeded his
half-brother as a Bow Street magistrate, and in that office combined an
equally honourable record with a longer tenure.
Fielding was born at Sharpham Park in Somersetshire, the seat of his
maternal grandfather; but most of his early youth was spent at East
Stour in Dorsetshire, to which his father removed after the judge's
death. He is said to have received his first education under a parson of
the neighbourhood named Oliver, in whom a very uncomplimentary tradition
sees the original of Parson Trulliber. He was then certainly sent to
Eton, where he did not waste his time as regards learning, and made
several valuable friends. But the dates of his entering and leaving
school are alike unknown; and his subsequent sojourn at Leyden for two
years--though there is no reason to doubt it--depends even less upon
any positive documentary evidence. This famous University still had a
great repute as a training school in law, for which profession he was
intended; but the reason why he did not receive the even then far more
usual completion of a public school education by a sojourn at Oxford or
Cambridge may be suspected to be different. It may even have had
something to do with a curious escapade of his about which not very much
is known--an attempt to carry off a pretty heiress of Lyme, named
Sarah Andrew.
Even at Leyden, however, General Fielding seems to have been unable or
unwilling to pay his son's expenses, which must have been far less there
than at an English University; and Henry's return to London in 1728-29
is said to have been due to sheer impecuniosity. When he returned to
England, his father was good enough to make him an allowance of L200
nominal, which appears to have been equivalent to L0 actual. And as
practically nothing is known of him for the next six or seven years,
except the fact of his having worked industriously enough at a large
number of not very good plays of the lighter kind, with a few poems and
miscellanies, it is reasonably enough supposed that he lived by his pen.
The only product of this period which has kept (or indeed which ever
received) competent applause is _Tom Thumb, or the Tragedy of
Tragedies_, a following of course of the _Rehearsal_, but full of humour
and spirit. The most successful of his other dramatic works were the
_Mock Doctor_ and the _Miser_, adaptations of Moliere's famous pieces.
His undoubted connection with the stage, and the fact of the
contemporary existence of a certain Timothy Fielding, helped suggestions
of less dignified occupations as actor, booth-keeper, and so forth; but
these have long been discredited and indeed disproved.
In or about 1735, when Fielding was twenty-eight, we find him in a new,
a more brilliant and agreeable, but even a more transient phase. He had
married (we do not know when or where) Miss Charlotte Cradock, one of
three sisters who lived at Salisbury (it is to be observed that
Fielding's entire connections, both in life and letters, are with the
Western Counties and London), who were certainly of competent means, and
for whose alleged illegitimacy there is no evidence but an unsupported
fling of that old maid of genius, Richardson. The descriptions both of
Sophia and of Amelia are said to have been taken from this lady; her
good looks and her amiability are as well established as anything of the
kind can be in the absence of photographs and affidavits; and it is
certain that her husband was passionately attached to her, during their
too short married life. His method, however, of showing his affection
smacked in some ways too much of the foibles which he has attributed to
Captain Booth, and of those which we must suspect Mr Thomas Jones would
also have exhibited, if he had not been adopted as Mr Allworthy's heir,
and had not had Mr Western's fortune to share and look forward to. It is
true that grave breaches have been made by recent criticism in the very
picturesque and circumstantial story told on the subject by Murphy, the
first of Fielding's biographers. This legend was that Fielding, having
succeeded by the death of his mother to a small estate at East Stour,
worth about L200 a year, and having received L1500 in ready money as his
wife's fortune, got through the whole in three years by keeping open
house, with a large retinue in "costly yellow liveries," and so forth.
In details, this story has been simply riddled. His mother had died long
before; he was certainly not away from London three years, or anything
like it; and so forth. At the same time, the best and soberest judges
agree that there is an intrinsic probability, a consensus (if a vague
one) of tradition, and a chain of almost unmistakably personal
references in the novels, which plead for a certain amount of truth, at
the bottom of a much embellished legend. At any rate, if Fielding
established himself in the country, it was not long before he returned
to town; for early in 1736 we find him back again, and not merely a
playwright, but lessee of the "Little Theatre" in the Haymarket. The
plays which he produced here--satirico-political pieces, such as
_Pasquin_ and the _Historical Register_--were popular enough, but
offended the Government; and in 1737 a new bill regulating theatrical
performances, and instituting the Lord Chamberlain's control, was
passed. This measure put an end directly to the "Great Mogul's Company,"
as Fielding had called his troop, and indirectly to its manager's career
as a playwright. He did indeed write a few pieces in future years, but
they were of the smallest importance.
After this check he turned at last to a serious profession, entered
himself of the Middle Temple in November of the same year, and was
called three years later; but during these years, and indeed for some
time afterwards, our information about him is still of the vaguest
character. Nobody doubts that he had a large share in the _Champion_, an
essay-periodical on the usual eighteenth-century model, which began to
appear in 1739, and which is still occasionally consulted for the work
that is certainly or probably his. He went the Western Circuit, and
attended the Wiltshire Sessions, after he was called, giving up his
contributions to periodicals soon after that event. But he soon returned
to literature proper, or rather made his _debut_ in it, with the
immortal book now republished. The _History of the Adventures of Joseph
Andrews, and his Friend Mr Abraham Adams_, appeared in February 1742,
and its author received from Andrew Millar, the publisher, the sum of
L183, 11s. Even greater works have fetched much smaller sums; but it
will be admitted that _Joseph Andrews_ was not dear.
The advantage, however, of presenting a survey of an author's life
uninterrupted by criticism is so clear, that what has to be said about
_Joseph_ may be conveniently postponed for the moment. Immediately after
its publication the author fell back upon miscellaneous writing, and in
the next year (1743) collected and issued three volumes of
_Miscellanies_. In the two first volumes the only thing of much interest
is the unfinished and unequal, but in part powerful, _Journey from this
World to the Next_, an attempt of a kind which Fontenelle and others,
following Lucian, had made very popular with the time. But the third
volume of the _Miscellanies_ deserved a less modest and gregarious
appearance, for it contained, and is wholly occupied by, the wonderful
and terrible satire of _Jonathan Wild_, the greatest piece of pure irony
in English out of Swift. Soon after the publication of the book, a great
calamity came on Fielding. His wife had been very ill when he wrote the
preface; soon afterwards she was dead. They had taken the chance, had
made the choice, that the more prudent and less wise student-hero and
heroine of Mr Browning's _Youth and Art_ had shunned; they had no doubt
"sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired," and we need
not question, that they had also "been happy."
Except this sad event and its rather incongruous sequel, Fielding's
marriage to his wife's maid Mary Daniel--a marriage, however, which did
not take place till full four years later, and which by all accounts
supplied him with a faithful and excellent companion and nurse, and his
children with a kind stepmother--little or nothing is again known of
this elusive man of genius between the publication of the _Miscellanies_
in 1743, and that of _Tom Jones_ in 1749. The second marriage itself in
November 1747; an interview which Joseph Warton had with him rather more
than a year earlier (one of the very few direct interviews we have); the
publication of two anti-Jacobite newspapers (Fielding was always a
strong Whig and Hanoverian), called the _True Patriot_ and the
_Jacobite's Journal_ in 1745 and the following years; some indistinct
traditions about residences at Twickenham and elsewhere, and some, more
precise but not much more authenticated, respecting patronage by the
Duke of Bedford, Mr Lyttelton, Mr Allen, and others, pretty well sum up
the whole.
_Tom Jones_ was published in February (a favourite month with Fielding
or his publisher Millar) 1749; and as it brought him the, for those
days, very considerable sum of L600 to which Millar added another
hundred later, the novelist must have been, for a time at any rate,
relieved from his chronic penury. But he had already, by Lyttelton's
interest, secured his first and last piece of preferment, being made
Justice of the Peace for Westminster, an office on which he entered with
characteristic vigour. He was qualified for it not merely by a solid
knowledge of the law, and by great natural abilities, but by his
thorough kindness of heart; and, perhaps, it may also be added, by his
long years of queer experience on (as Mr Carlyle would have said) the
"burning marl" of the London Bohemia. Very shortly afterwards he was
chosen Chairman of Quarter Sessions, and established himself in Bow
Street. The Bow Street magistrate of that time occupied a most singular
position, and was more like a French Prefect of Police or even a
Minister of Public Safety than a mere justice. Yet he was ill paid.
Fielding says that the emoluments, which before his accession had but
been L500 a year of "dirty" money, were by his own action but L300 of
clean; and the work, if properly performed, was very severe.
That he performed it properly all competent evidence shows, a foolish,
inconclusive, and I fear it must be said emphatically snobbish story of
Walpole's notwithstanding. In particular, he broke up a gang of
cut-throat thieves, which had been the terror of London. But his tenure
of the post was short enough, and scarcely extended to five years. His
health had long been broken, and he was now constantly attacked by gout,
so that he had frequently to retreat on Bath from Bow Street, or his
suburban cottage of Fordhook, Ealing. But he did not relax his literary
work. His pen was active with pamphlets concerning his office; _Amelia_,
his last novel, appeared towards the close of 1751; and next year saw
the beginning of a new paper, the _Covent Garden Journal_, which
appeared twice a week, ran for the greater part of the year, and died in
November. Its great author did not see that month twice again. In the
spring of 1753 he grew worse; and after a year's struggle with ill
health, hard work, and hard weather, lesser measures being pronounced
useless, was persuaded to try the "Portugal Voyage," of which he has
left so charming a record in the _Journey to Lisbon_. He left Fordhook
on June 26, 1754, reached Lisbon in August, and, dying there on the 8th
of October, was buried in the cemetery of the Estrella.
Of not many writers perhaps does a clearer notion, as far as their
personality goes, exist in the general mind that interests itself at all
in literature than of Fielding. Yet more than once a warning has been
sounded, especially by his best and most recent biographer, to the
effect that this idea is founded upon very little warranty of scripture.
The truth is, that as the foregoing record--which, brief as it is, is a
sufficiently faithful summary--will have shown, we know very little
about Fielding. We have hardly any letters of his, and so lack the best
by far and the most revealing of all character-portraits; we have but
one important autobiographic fragment, and though that is of the highest
interest and value, it was written far in the valley of the shadow of
death, it is not in the least retrospective, and it affords but dim and
inferential light on his younger, healthier, and happier days and ways.
He came, moreover, just short of one set of men of letters, of whom we
have a great deal of personal knowledge, and just beyond another. He was
neither of those about Addison, nor of those about Johnson. No intimate
friend of his has left us anything elaborate about him. On the other
hand, we have a far from inconsiderable body of documentary evidence, of
a kind often by no means trustworthy. The best part of it is contained
in the letters of his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the
reminiscences or family traditions of her grand-daughter, Lady Louisa
Stuart. But Lady Mary, vivacious and agreeable as she is, had with all
her talent a very considerable knack of writing for effect, of drawing
strong contrasts and the like; and it is not quite certain that she saw
very much of Fielding in the last and most interesting third of his
life. Another witness, Horace Walpole, to less knowledge and equally
dubious accuracy, added decided ill-will, which may have been due partly
to the shrinking of a dilettante and a fop from a burly Bohemian; but I
fear is also consequent upon the fact that Horace could not afford to
despise Fielding's birth, and knew him to be vastly his own superior in
genius. We hear something of him again from Richardson; and Richardson
hated him with the hatred of dissimilar genius, of inferior social
position, and, lastly, of the cat for the dog who touzles and worries
her. Johnson partly inherited or shared Richardson's aversion, partly
was blinded to Fielding's genius by his aggressive Whiggery. I fear,
too, that he was incapable of appreciating it for reasons other than
political. It is certain that Johnson, sane and robust as he was, was
never quite at ease before genius of the gigantic kind, either in dead
or living. Whether he did not like to have to look up too much, or was
actually unable to do so, it is certain that Shakespeare, Milton,
Swift, and Fielding, those four Atlantes of English verse and prose, all
affected him with lukewarm admiration, or with positive dislike, for
which it is vain to attempt to assign any uniform secondary cause,
political or other. It may be permitted to hint another reason. All
Johnson's most sharp-sighted critics have noticed, though most have
discreetly refrained from insisting on, his "thorn-in-the-flesh," the
combination in him of very strong physical passions with the deepest
sense of the moral and religious duty of abstinence. It is perhaps
impossible to imagine anything more distasteful to a man so buffeted,
than the extreme indulgence with which Fielding regards, and the easy
freedom, not to say gusto, with which he depicts, those who succumb to
similar temptation. Only by supposing the workings of some subtle
influence of this kind is it possible to explain, even in so capricious
a humour as Johnson's, the famous and absurd application of the term
"barren rascal" to a writer who, dying almost young, after having for
many years lived a life of pleasure, and then for four or five one of
laborious official duty, has left work anything but small in actual
bulk, and fertile with the most luxuriant growth of intellectual
originality.
Partly on the _obiter dicta_ of persons like these, 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 immortality 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 his component parts. The _eidolon_, with inked ruffles and a towel
round his head, sits in the Temple and dashes off articles for the
_Covent Garden Journal_; then comes Criticism, hellish maid, and reminds
us that when the _Covent Garden Journal_ appeared, Fielding's wild oats,
if ever sown at all, had been sown long ago; that he was a busy
magistrate and householder in Bow Street; and that, if he had towels
round his head, it was probably less because he had exceeded in liquor
than because his Grace of Newcastle had given him a headache by wanting
elaborate plans and schemes prepared at an hour's notice. Lady Mary,
apparently with some envy, tells us that he could "feel rapture with his
cook-maid." "Which many has," as Mr Ridley remarks, from Xanthias
Phoceus downwards; but when we remember the historic fact that he
married this maid (not a "cook-maid" at all), and that though he always
speaks of her with warm affection and hearty respect, such "raptures" as
we have of his clearly refer to a very different woman, who was both a
lady and a beautiful one, we begin a little to shake our heads. Horace
Walpole at second-hand draws us a Fielding, pigging with low companions
in a house kept like a hedge tavern; Fielding himself, within a year or
two, shows us more than half-undesignedly in the _Voyage to Lisbon_ that
he was very careful about the appointments and decency of his table,
that he stood rather upon ceremony in regard to his own treatment of his
family, and the treatment of them and himself by others, and that he was
altogether a person orderly, correct, and even a little finikin. Nor is
there the slightest reasonable reason to regard this as a piece of
hypocrisy, a vice as alien from the Fielding of fancy as from the
Fielding of fact, and one the particular manifestation of which, in this
particular place, would have been equally unlikely and unintelligible.
It may be asked whether I propose to substitute for the traditional
Fielding a quite different person, of regular habits and methodical
economy. Certainly not. The traditional estimate of great men is rarely
wrong altogether, but it constantly has a habit of exaggerating and
dramatising their characteristics. For some things in Fielding's career
we have positive evidence of document, and evidence hardly less certain
of probability. Although I believe the best judges are now of opinion
that his impecuniosity has been overcharged, he certainly had
experiences which did not often fall to the lot of even a cadet of good
family in the eighteenth century. There can be no reasonable doubt that
he was a man who had a leaning towards pretty girls and bottles of good
wine; and I should suppose that if the girl were kind and fairly
winsome, he would not have insisted that she should possess Helen's
beauty, that if the bottle of good wine were not forthcoming, he would
have been very tolerant of a mug of good ale. He may very possibly have
drunk more than he should, and lost more than he could conveniently pay.
It may be put down as morally ascertained that towards all these
weaknesses of humanity, and others like unto them, he held an attitude
which was less that of the unassailable philosopher than that of the
sympathiser, indulgent and excusing. In regard more especially to what
are commonly called moral delinquencies, this attitude was so decided
as to shock some people even in those days, and many in these. Just when
the first sheets of this edition were passing through the press, a
violent attack 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. Even midway between the two periods we find the admirable
Miss Ferrier, a sister of Fielding's own craft, who sometimes had
touches of nature and satire not far inferior to his own, expressing by
the mouth of one of her characters with whom she seems partly to agree,
the sentiment that his works are "vanishing like noxious exhalations."
Towards any misdoing by persons of the one sex towards persons of the
other, when it involved brutality or treachery, Fielding was pitiless;
but when treachery and brutality were not concerned, he was, to say the
least, facile. So, too, he probably knew by experience--he certainly
knew by native shrewdness and acquired observation--that to look too
much on the wine when it is red, or on the cards when they are
parti-coloured, is ruinous to health and fortune; but he thought not
over badly of any man who did these things. Still it is possible to
admit this in him, and to stop short of that idea of a careless and
reckless _viveur_ which has so often been put forward. In particular,
Lady Mary's view of his childlike enjoyment of the moment has been, I
think, much exaggerated by posterity, and was probably not a little
mistaken by the lady herself. There are two moods in which the motto is
_Carpe diem_, one a mood of simply childish hurry, the other one where
behind the enjoyment of the moment lurks, and in which the enjoyment of
the moment is not a little heightened by, that vast ironic consciousness
of the before and after, which I at least see everywhere in the
background of Fielding's work.
The man, however, of whom we know so little, concerns us much less than
the author of the works, of which it only rests with ourselves to know
everything. I have above classed Fielding as one of the four Atlantes of
English verse and prose, and I doubt not that both the phrase and the
application of it to him will meet with question and demur. I have only
to interject, as the critic so often has to interject, a request to the
court to take what I say in the sense in which I say it. I do not mean
that Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, and Fielding are in all or even in most
respects on a level. I do not mean that the three last are in all
respects of the greatest names in English literature. I only mean that,
in a certain quality, which for want of a better word I have chosen to
call Atlantean, they stand alone. Each of them, for the metaphor is
applicable either way, carries a whole world on his shoulders, or looks
down on a whole world from his natural altitude. The worlds are
different, but they are worlds; and though the attitude of the giants is
different also, it agrees in all of them on the points of competence and
strength. Take whomsoever else we may among our men of letters, and we
shall find this characteristic to be in comparison wanting. These four
carry their world, and are not carried by it; and if it, in the language
so dear to Fielding himself, were to crash and shatter, the inquiry,
"_Que vous reste-t-il?_" could be answered by each, "_Moi!_"
The appearance which Fielding makes is no doubt the most modest of the
four. He has not Shakespeare's absolute universality, and in fact not
merely the poet's tongue, but the poet's thought seems to have been
denied him. His sphere is not the ideal like Milton's. His irony,
splendid as it is, falls a little short of that diabolical magnificence
which exalts Swift to the point whence, in his own way, he surveys all
the kingdoms of the world, and the glory or vainglory of them. All
Fielding's critics have noted the manner, in a certain sense modest, in
another ostentatious, in which he seems to confine himself to the
presentation of things English. They might have added to the
presentation of things English--as they appear in London, and on the
Western Circuit, and on the Bath Road.
But this apparent parochialism has never deceived good judges. It did
not deceive Lady Mary, who had seen the men and manners of very many
climes; it did not deceive Gibbon, who was not especially prone to
overvalue things English, and who could look down from twenty centuries
on things ephemeral. It deceives, indeed, I am told, some excellent
persons at the present day, who think Fielding's microcosm a "toylike
world," and imagine that Russian Nihilists and French Naturalists have
gone beyond it. It will deceive no one who has lived for some competent
space of time a life during which he has tried to regard his
fellow-creatures and himself, as nearly as a mortal may, _sub specie
aeternitatis_.
As this is in the main an introduction to a complete reprint of
Fielding's four great novels, the justification in detail of the
estimate just made or hinted of the novelist's genius will be best and
most fitly made by a brief successive discussion of the four as they are
here presented, with some subsequent remarks on the _Miscellanies_ here
selected. And, indeed, it is not fanciful to perceive in each book a
somewhat different presentment of the author's genius; though in no one
of the four is any one of his masterly qualities absent. There is
tenderness even in _Jonathan Wild_; there are touches in _Joseph
Andrews_ of that irony of the Preacher, the last echo of which is heard
amid the kindly resignation of the _Journey to Lisbon_, in the sentence,
"Whereas envy of all things most exposes us to danger from others, so
contempt of all things best secures us from them." But on the whole it
is safe to say that _Joseph Andrews_ best presents Fielding's
mischievous and playful wit; _Jonathan Wild_ his half-Lucianic
half-Swiftian irony; _Tom Jones_ his unerring knowledge of human nature,
and his constructive faculty; _Amelia_ his tenderness, his _mitis
sapientia_, his observation of the details of life. And first of
the first.
_The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend Mr
Abraham Adams_ was, as has been said above, published in February 1742.
A facsimile of the agreement between author and publisher will be given
in the second volume of this series; and it is not uninteresting to
observe that the witness, William Young, is none other than the asserted
original of the immortal Mr Adams himself. He might, on Balzac's plea in
a tolerably well-known anecdote, have demanded half of the L183, 11s. Of
the other origins of the book we have a pretty full account, partly
documentary. That it is "writ in the manner of Cervantes," and is
intended as a kind of comic epic, is the author's own statement--no
doubt as near the actual truth as is consistent with comic-epic theory.
That there are resemblances to Scarron, to Le Sage, and to other
practitioners of the Picaresque novel is certain; and it was inevitable
that there should be. Of directer and more immediate models or
starting-points one is undoubted; the other, though less generally
admitted, not much less indubitable to my mind. The parody of
Richardson's _Pamela_, which was little more than a year earlier (Nov.
1740), is avowed, open, flagrant; nor do I think that the author was so
soon carried away by the greater and larger tide of his own invention as
some critics seem to hold. He is always more or less returning to the
ironic charge; and the multiplicity of the assailants of Joseph's virtue
only disguises the resemblance to the long-drawn dangers of Pamela from
a single ravisher. But Fielding was also well acquainted with Marivaux's
_Paysan Parvenu_, and the resemblances between that book and _Joseph
Andrews_ are much stronger than Fielding's admirers have always been
willing to admit. This recalcitrance has, I think, been mainly due to
the erroneous conception of Marivaux as, if not a mere fribble, yet a
Dresden-Shepherdess kind of writer, good at "preciousness" and
patch-and-powder manners, but nothing more.
There was, in fact, a very strong satiric and ironic touch in the author
of _Marianne_, and I do not think that I was too rash when some years
ago I ventured to speak of him as "playing Fielding to his own
Richardson" in the _Paysan Parvenu_.
Origins, however, and indebtedness and the like, are, when great work is
concerned, questions for the study and the lecture-room, for the
literary historian and the professional critic, rather than for the
reader, however intelligent and alert, who wishes to enjoy a
masterpiece, and is content simply to enjoy it. It does not really
matter how close to anything else something which possesses independent
goodness is; the very utmost technical originality, the most spotless
purity from the faintest taint of suggestion, will not suffice to confer
merit on what does not otherwise possess it. Whether, as I rather think,
Fielding pursued the plan he had formed _ab incepto_, or whether he
cavalierly neglected it, or whether the current of his own genius
carried him off his legs and landed him, half against his will, on the
shore of originality, are questions for the Schools, and, as I venture
to think, not for the higher forms in them. We have _Joseph Andrews_ as
it is; and we may be abundantly thankful for it. The contents of it, as
of all Fielding's work in this kind, include certain things for which
the moderns are scantly grateful. Of late years, and not of late years
only, there has grown up a singular and perhaps an ignorant impatience
of digressions, of episodes, of tales within a tale. The example of this
which has been most maltreated is the "Man of the Hill" episode in _Tom
Jones_; but the stories of the "Unfortunate Jilt" and of Mr Wilson in
our present subject, do not appear to me to be much less obnoxious to
the censure; and _Amelia_ contains more than one or two things of the
same kind. Me they do not greatly disturb; and I see many defences for
them besides the obvious, and at a pinch sufficient one, that
divagations of this kind existed in all Fielding's Spanish and French
models, that the public of the day expected them, and so forth. This
defence is enough, but it is easy to amplify and reintrench it. It is
not by any means the fact that the Picaresque novel of adventure is the
only or the chief form of fiction which prescribes or admits these
episodic excursions. All the classical epics have them; many eastern and
other stories present them; they are common, if not invariable, in the
abundant mediaeval literature of prose and verse romance; they are not
unknown by any means in the modern novel; and you will very rarely hear
a story told orally at the dinner-table or in the smoking-room without
something of the kind. There must, therefore, be something in them
corresponding to an inseparable accident of that most unchanging of all
things, human nature. And I do not think the special form with which we
are here concerned by any means the worst that they have taken. It has
the grand and prominent virtue of being at once and easily skippable.
There is about Cervantes and Le Sage, about Fielding and Smollett, none
of the treachery of the modern novelist, who induces the conscientious
reader to drag through pages, chapters, and sometimes volumes which have
nothing to do with the action, for fear he should miss something that
has to do with it. These great men have a fearless frankness, and almost
tell you in so many words when and what you may skip. Therefore, if the
"Curious Impertinent," and the "Baneful Marriage," and the "Man of the
Hill," and the "Lady of Quality," get in the way, when you desire to
"read for the story," you have nothing to do but turn the page till
_finis_ comes. The defence has already been made by an illustrious hand
for Fielding's inter-chapters and exordiums. It appears to me to be
almost more applicable to his insertions.
And so we need not trouble ourselves any more either about the
insertions or about the exordiums. They both please me; the second class
has pleased persons much better worth pleasing than I can pretend to be;
but the making or marring of the book lies elsewhere. I do not think
that it lies in the construction, though Fielding's following of the
ancients, both sincere and satiric, has imposed a false air of
regularity upon that. The Odyssey of Joseph, of Fanny, and of their
ghostly mentor and bodily guard is, in truth, a little haphazard, and
might have been longer or shorter without any discreet man approving it
the more or the less therefor. The real merits lie partly in the
abounding humour and satire of the artist's criticism, but even more in
the marvellous vivacity and fertility of his creation. For the very
first time in English prose fiction every character is alive, every
incident is capable of having happened. There are lively touches in the
Elizabethan romances; but they are buried in verbiage, swathed in stage
costume, choked and fettered by their authors' want of art. The quality
of Bunyan's knowledge of men was not much inferior to Shakespeare's, or
at least to Fielding's; but the range and the results of it were cramped
by his single theological purpose, and his unvaried allegoric or typical
form. Why Defoe did not discover the New World of Fiction, I at least
have never been able to put into any brief critical formula that
satisfies me, and I have never seen it put by any one else. He had not
only seen it afar off, he had made landings and descents on it; he had
carried off and exhibited in triumph natives such as Robinson Crusoe,
as Man Friday, as Moll Flanders, as William the Quaker; but he had
conquered, subdued, and settled no province therein. I like _Pamela_; I
like it better than some persons who admire Richardson on the whole more
than I do, seem to like it. But, as in all its author's work, the
handling seems to me academic--the working out on paper of an
ingeniously conceived problem rather than the observation or evolution
of actual or possible life. I should not greatly fear to push the
comparison even into foreign countries; but it is well to observe
limits. Let us be content with holding that in England at least, without
prejudice to anything further, Fielding was the first to display the
qualities of the perfect novelist as distinguished from the romancer.
What are those qualities, as shown in _Joseph Andrews_? The faculty of
arranging a probable and interesting course of action is one, of course,
and Fielding showed it here. But I do not think that it is at any time
the greatest one; and nobody denies that he made great advances in this
direction later. The faculty of lively dialogue is another; and that he
has not often been refused; but much the same may be said of it. The
interspersing of appropriate description is another; but here also we
shall not find him exactly a paragon. It is in character--the chief
_differentia_ of the novel as distinguished not merely from its elder
sister the romance, and its cousin the drama, but still more from every
other kind of literature--that Fielding stands even here pre-eminent. No
one that I can think of, except his greatest successor in the present
century, has the same unfailing gift of breathing life into every
character he creates or borrows; and even Thackeray draws, if I may use
the phrase, his characters more in the flat and less in the round than
Fielding. Whether in Blifil he once failed, we must discuss hereafter;
he has failed nowhere in _Joseph Andrews_. Some of his sketches may
require the caution that they are eighteenth-century men and women; some
the warning that they are obviously caricatured, or set in designed
profile, or merely sketched. But they are all alive. The finical
estimate of Gray (it is a horrid joy to think how perfectly capable
Fielding was of having joined in that practical joke of the young
gentlemen of Cambridge, which made Gray change his college), while
dismissing these light things with patronage, had to admit that "parson
Adams is perfectly well, so is Mrs Slipslop." "They _were_, Mr
Gray," said some one once, "they were more perfectly well, and in a
higher kind, than anything you ever did; though you were a pretty
workman too."
Yes, parson Adams is perfectly well, and so is Mrs Slipslop. But so are
they all. Even the hero and heroine, tied and bound as they are by the
necessity under which their maker lay of preserving Joseph's
Joseph-hood, and of making Fanny the example of a franker and less
interested virtue than her sister-in-law that might have been, are
surprisingly human where most writers would have made them sticks. And
the rest require no allowance. Lady Booby, few as are the strokes given
to her, is not much less alive than Lady Bellaston. Mr Trulliber,
monster and not at all delicate monster as he is, is also a man, and
when he lays it down that no one even in his own house shall drink when
he "caaled vurst," one can but pay his maker the tribute of that silent
shudder of admiration which hails the addition of one more everlasting
entity to the world of thought and fancy. And Mr Tow-wouse is real, and
Mrs Tow-wouse is more real still, and Betty is real; and the coachman,
and Miss Grave-airs, and all the wonderful crew from first to last. The
dresses they wear, the manners they exhibit, the laws they live under,
the very foods and drinks they live upon, are "past like the shadows on
glasses"--to the comfort and rejoicing of some, to the greater or less
sorrow of others. But _they_ are there--alive, full of blood, full of
breath as we are, and, in truth, I fear a little more so. For some
purposes a century is a gap harder to cross and more estranging than a
couple of millenniums. But in their case the gap is nothing; and it is
not too much to say that as they have stood the harder test, they will
stand the easier. There are very striking differences between Nausicaa
and Mrs Slipslop; there are differences not less striking between Mrs
Slipslop and Beatrice. But their likeness is a stranger and more
wonderful thing than any of their unlikenesses. It is that they are
all women, that they are all live citizenesses of the Land of Matters
Unforgot, the fashion whereof passeth not away, and the franchise
whereof, once acquired, assures immortality.
NOTE TO GENERAL INTRODUCTION.
_The text of this issue in the main follows that of the standard or
first collected edition of 1762. The variants which the author
introduced in successive editions during his lifetime are not
inconsiderable; but for the purposes of the present issue it did not
seem necessary or indeed desirable to take account of them. In the case
of prose fiction, more than in any other department of literature, it is
desirable that work should be read in the form which represents the
completest intention and execution of the author. Nor have any notes
been attempted; for again such things, in the case of prose fiction, are
of very doubtful use, and supply pretty certain stumbling-blocks to
enjoyment; while in the particular case of Fielding, the annotation,
unless extremely capricious, would have to be disgustingly full. Far be
it at any rate from the present editor to bury these delightful
creations under an ugly crust of parallel passages and miscellaneous
erudition. The sheets, however, have been carefully read in order to
prevent the casual errors which are wont to creep into frequently
reprinted texts; and the editor hopes that if any such have escaped him,
the escape will not be attributed to wilful negligence. A few obvious
errors, in spelling of proper names, &c., which occur in the 1762
version have been corrected: but wherever the readings of that version
are possible they have been preferred. The embellishments of the edition
are partly fanciful and partly "documentary;" so that it is hoped both
classes of taste may have something to feed upon._
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
As it is possible the mere English reader may have a different idea of
romance from the author of these little[A] volumes, and may consequently
expect a kind of entertainment not to be found, nor which was even
intended, in the following pages, it may not be improper to premise a
few words concerning this kind of writing, which I do not remember to
have seen hitherto attempted in our language.
[A] _Joseph Andrews_ was originally published in 2 vols. duodecimo.
The EPIC, as well as the DRAMA, is divided into tragedy and comedy.
HOMER, who was the father of this species of poetry, gave us a pattern
of both these, though that of the latter kind is entirely lost; which
Aristotle tells us, bore the same relation to comedy which his Iliad
bears to tragedy. And perhaps, that we have no more instances of it
among the writers of antiquity, is owing to the loss of this great
pattern, which, had it survived, would have found its imitators equally
with the other poems of this great original.
And farther, as this poetry may be tragic or comic, I will not scruple
to say it may be likewise either in verse or prose: for though it wants
one particular, which the critic enumerates in the constituent parts of
an epic poem, namely metre; yet, when any kind of writing contains all
its other parts, such as fable, action, characters, sentiments, and
diction, and is deficient in metre only, it seems, I think, reasonable
to refer it to the epic; at least, as no critic hath thought proper to
range it under any other head, or to assign it a particular name
to itself.
Thus the Telemachus of the archbishop of Cambray appears to me of the
epic kind, as well as the Odyssey of Homer; indeed, it is much fairer
and more reasonable to give it a name common with that species from
which it differs only in a single instance, than to confound it with
those which it resembles in no other. Such are those voluminous works,
commonly called Romances, namely, Clelia, Cleopatra, Astraea, Cassandra,
the Grand Cyrus, and innumerable others, which contain, as I apprehend,
very little instruction or entertainment.
Now, a comic romance is a comic epic poem in prose; differing from
comedy, as the serious epic from tragedy: its action being more extended
and comprehensive; containing a much larger circle of incidents, and
introducing a greater variety of characters. It differs from the serious
romance in its fable and action, in this; that as in the one these are
grave and solemn, so in the other they are light and ridiculous: it
differs in its characters by introducing persons of inferior rank, and
consequently, of inferior manners, whereas the grave romance sets the
highest before us: lastly, in its sentiments and diction; by preserving
the ludicrous instead of the sublime. In the diction, I think,
burlesque itself may be sometimes admitted; of which many instances
will occur in this work, as in the description of the battles, and some
other places, not necessary to be pointed out to the classical reader,
for whose entertainment those parodies or burlesque imitations are
chiefly calculated.
But though we have sometimes admitted this in our diction, we have
carefully excluded it from our sentiments and characters; for there it
is never properly introduced, unless in writings of the burlesque kind,
which this is not intended to be. Indeed, no two species of writing can
differ more widely than the comic and the burlesque; for as the latter
is ever the exhibition of what is monstrous and unnatural, and where our
delight, if we examine it, arises from the surprizing absurdity, as in
appropriating the manners of the highest to the lowest, or _e converso_;
so in the former we should ever confine ourselves strictly to nature,
from the just imitation of which will flow all the pleasure we can this
way convey to a sensible reader. And perhaps there is one reason why a
comic writer should of all others be the least excused for deviating
from nature, since it may not be always so easy for a serious poet to
meet with the great and the admirable; but life everywhere furnishes an
accurate observer with the ridiculous.
I have hinted this little concerning burlesque, because I have often
heard that name given to performances which have been truly of the comic
kind, from the author's having sometimes admitted it in his diction
only; which, as it is the dress of poetry, doth, like the dress of men,
establish characters (the one of the whole poem, and the other of the
whole man), in vulgar opinion, beyond any of their greater excellences:
but surely, a certain drollery in stile, where characters and sentiments
are perfectly natural, no more constitutes the burlesque, than an empty
pomp and dignity of words, where everything else is mean and low, can
entitle any performance to the appellation of the true sublime.
And I apprehend my Lord Shaftesbury's opinion of mere burlesque agrees
with mine, when he asserts, There is no such thing to be found in the
writings of the ancients. But perhaps I have less abhorrence than he
professes for it; and that, not because I have had some little success
on the stage this way, but rather as it contributes more to exquisite
mirth and laughter than any other; and these are probably more wholesome
physic for the mind, and conduce better to purge away spleen,
melancholy, and ill affections, than is generally imagined. Nay, I will
appeal to common observation, whether the same companies are not found
more full of good-humour and benevolence, after they have been sweetened
for two or three hours with entertainments of this kind, than when
soured by a tragedy or a grave lecture.
But to illustrate all this by another science, in which, perhaps, we
shall see the distinction more clearly and plainly, let us examine the
works of a comic history painter, with those performances which the
Italians call Caricatura, where we shall find the true excellence of the
former to consist in the exactest copying of nature; insomuch that a
judicious eye instantly rejects anything _outre_, any liberty which the
painter hath taken with the features of that _alma mater_; whereas in
the Caricatura we allow all licence--its aim is to exhibit monsters,
not men; and all distortions and exaggerations whatever are within its
proper province.
Now, what Caricatura is in painting, Burlesque is in writing; and in the
same manner the comic writer and painter correlate to each other. And
here I shall observe, that, as in the former the painter seems to have
the advantage; so it is in the latter infinitely on the side of the
writer; for the Monstrous is much easier to paint than describe, and the
Ridiculous to describe than paint.
And though perhaps this latter species doth not in either science so
strongly affect and agitate the muscles as the other; yet it will be
owned, I believe, that a more rational and useful pleasure arises to us
from it. He who should call the ingenious Hogarth a burlesque painter,
would, in my opinion, do him very little honour; for sure it is much
easier, much less the subject of admiration, to paint a man with a nose,
or any other feature, of a preposterous size, or to expose him in some
absurd or monstrous attitude, than to express the affections of men on
canvas. It hath been thought a vast commendation of a painter to say his
figures seem to breathe; but surely it is a much greater and nobler
applause, that they appear to think.
But to return. The Ridiculous only, as I have before said, falls within
my province in the present work. Nor will some explanation of this word
be thought impertinent by the reader, if he considers how wonderfully it
hath been mistaken, even by writers who have professed it: for to what
but such a mistake can we attribute the many attempts to ridicule the
blackest villanies, and, what is yet worse, the most dreadful
calamities? What could exceed the absurdity of an author, who should
write the comedy of Nero, with the merry incident of ripping up his
mother's belly? or what would give a greater shock to humanity than an
attempt to expose the miseries of poverty and distress to ridicule? And
yet the reader will not want much learning to suggest such instances
to himself.
Besides, it may seem remarkable, that Aristotle, who is so fond and free
of definitions, hath not thought proper to define the Ridiculous.
Indeed, where he tells us it is proper to comedy, he hath remarked that
villany is not its object: but he hath not, as I remember, positively
asserted what is. Nor doth the Abbe Bellegarde, who hath written a
treatise on this subject, though he shows us many species of it, once
trace it to its fountain.
The only source of the true Ridiculous (as it appears to me) is
affectation. But though it arises from one spring only, when we consider
the infinite streams into which this one branches, we shall presently
cease to admire at the copious field it affords to an observer. Now,
affectation proceeds from one of these two causes, vanity or hypocrisy:
for as vanity puts us on affecting false characters, in order to
purchase applause; so hypocrisy sets us on an endeavour to avoid
censure, by concealing our vices under an appearance of their opposite
virtues. And though these two causes are often confounded (for there is
some difficulty in distinguishing them), yet, as they proceed from very
different motives, so they are as clearly distinct in their operations:
for indeed, the affectation which arises from vanity is nearer to truth
than the other, as it hath not that violent repugnancy of nature to
struggle with, which that of the hypocrite hath. It may be likewise
noted, that affectation doth not imply an absolute negation of those
qualities which are affected; and, therefore, though, when it proceeds
from hypocrisy, it be nearly allied to deceit; yet when it comes from
vanity only, it partakes of the nature of ostentation: for instance, the
affectation of liberality in a vain man differs visibly from the same
affectation in the avaricious; for though the vain man is not what he
would appear, or hath not the virtue he affects, to the degree he would
be thought to have it; yet it sits less awkwardly on him than on the
avaricious man, who is the very reverse of what he would seem to be.
From the discovery of this affectation arises the Ridiculous, which
always strikes the reader with surprize and pleasure; and that in a
higher and stronger degree when the affectation arises from hypocrisy,
than when from vanity; for to discover any one to be the exact reverse
of what he affects, is more surprizing, and consequently more
ridiculous, than to find him a little deficient in the quality he
desires the reputation of. I might observe that our Ben Jonson, who of
all men understood the Ridiculous the best, hath chiefly used the
hypocritical affectation.
Now, from affectation only, the misfortunes and calamities of life, or
the imperfections of nature, may become the objects of ridicule. Surely
he hath a very ill-framed mind who can look on ugliness, infirmity, or
poverty, as ridiculous in themselves: nor do I believe any man living,
who meets a dirty fellow riding through the streets in a cart, is
struck with an idea of the Ridiculous from it; but if he should see the
same figure descend from his coach and six, or bolt from his chair with
his hat under his arm, he would then begin to laugh, and with justice.
In the same manner, were we to enter a poor house and behold a wretched
family shivering with cold and languishing with hunger, it would not
incline us to laughter (at least we must have very diabolical natures if
it would); but should we discover there a grate, instead of coals,
adorned with flowers, empty plate or china dishes on the sideboard, or
any other affectation of riches and finery, either on their persons or
in their furniture, we might then indeed be excused for ridiculing so
fantastical an appearance. Much less are natural imperfections the
object of derision; but when ugliness aims at the applause of beauty, or
lameness endeavours to display agility, it is then that these
unfortunate circumstances, which at first moved our compassion, tend
only to raise our mirth.
The poet carries this very far:--
None are for being what they are in fault,
But for not being what they would be thought.
Where if the metre would suffer the word Ridiculous to close the first
line, the thought would be rather more proper. Great vices are the
proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults, of our pity; but
affectation appears to me the only true source of the Ridiculous.
But perhaps it may be objected to me, that I have against my own rules
introduced vices, and of a very black kind, into this work. To which I
shall answer: first, that it is very difficult to pursue a series of
human actions, and keep clear from them. Secondly, that the vices to be
found here are rather the accidental consequences of some human frailty
or foible, than causes habitually existing in the mind. Thirdly, that
they are never set forth as the objects of ridicule, but detestation.
Fourthly, that they are never the principal figure at that time on the
scene: and, lastly, they never produce the intended evil.
Having thus distinguished Joseph Andrews from the productions of romance
writers on the one hand and burlesque writers on the other, and given
some few very short hints (for I intended no more) of this species of
writing, which I have affirmed to be hitherto unattempted in our
language; I shall leave to my good-natured reader to apply my piece to
my observations, and will detain him no longer than with a word
concerning the characters in this work.
And here I solemnly protest I have no intention to vilify or asperse any
one; for though everything is copied from the book of nature, and scarce
a character or action produced which I have not taken from my I own
observations and experience; yet I have used the utmost care to obscure
the persons by such different circumstances, degrees, and colours, that
it will be impossible to guess at them with any degree of certainty; and
if it ever happens otherwise, it is only where the failure characterized
is so minute, that it is a foible only which the party himself may laugh
at as well as any other.
As to the character of Adams, as it is the most glaring in the whole, so
I conceive it is not to be found in any book now extant. It is designed
a character of perfect simplicity; and as the goodness of his heart
will recommend him to the good-natured, so I hope it will excuse me to
the gentlemen of his cloth; for whom, while they are worthy of their
sacred order, no man can possibly have a greater respect. They will
therefore excuse me, notwithstanding the low adventures in which he is
engaged, that I have made him a clergyman; since no other office could
have given him so many opportunities of displaying his worthy
inclinations.
THE HISTORY OF THE ADVENTURES OF JOSEPH ANDREWS AND HIS FRIEND MR
ABRAHAM ADAMS