No More Learning

Still, when all is
said, the clumsy framework of this epistolary drama is so constantly
hidden under the creative wealth of a wonderfully minute imagina-
tion, and the enormous body of the narrative, as a whole, is borne
along by so irresistible a flow of emotion, that Richardson's
masterpiece remains one of the great novels of the world's litera-
ture,
Its appeal is to the heart. No doubt, the psychological interest
of the book is broader and more varied than that of Pamela.
Though Clarissa is proposed as an example to all young ladies, she
accomplishes the all but impossible feat of remaining an attractive
pattern of virtue. Not that she is faultless-a fact of which
Richardson was well aware, though, perhaps, less so than he would
have allowed. But there is a true nobleness, a natural dignity in
Clarissa, a power of stedfast suffering, a true delicacy, an ardour
of affection; while, together with her serious bent of mind, she has
the supreme touch of a winning naturalness, fresh, unexpected and
even provokingly spontaneous, which makes her a match for her
friend, the sprightly Miss Howe. Nothing is finer or truer than the
evolution of her feeling for her unworthy lover; nowhere else did
Richardson's knowledge of the feminine heart stand him in better
stead. Lovelace, undoubtedly, is the forerunner of a long series of
romantic heroes; the drawing of this character reveals a strangely


## p. 9 (#35) ###############################################

The Power of Clarissa
9
penetrating insight, on the part of the author, into motives and
moods, together with an almost naïve exaggeration. His is a
divided soul, a study in the subtle degradation wrought by desire;
he is, at the same time, more than a mere human personage-a power
of darkness, the prince of lies; and the weird letter in which he
murders his own conscience and himself tells the tale of the bloody
deed is a triumph of imaginative art though a sin against realistic
truth. The Harlowe family, and several of the less important
figures, are depicted with a remarkable wealth and vigour of
characterisation. In the history of the English novel, no such
group of boldly and strongly sketched personalities had, hitherto,
served as a background for so individualised a pair of lovers.
And yet, the mere aesthetic appreciation of a profound study of
the working of the human mind is, as we read, lost in our sympathy
with a heart-rending story of undeserved woe. The family tragedy
of the first volumes seizes upon our emotions like the slow,
oppressive, inevitable approach of a storm; the circle of fate grows
narrower and narrower as it closes round the unprotected Clarissa ;
and the chain of circumstance and event is woven with an extra-
ordinary strength of dramatic cohesion. No sooner has Clarissa
fallen into Lovelace's power, than the crushing of her will and
pride in a hopeless struggle is impressed upon us with the relent-
less, terrible determination of religious enthusiasm; only Dante or
Bunyan could have painted such scenes with the same inflexible
rigour. When her heart is broken, and she has nothing left to her
but to die, the pathos of her long agony is overdone. Such cheap
means of emotion as the coming of death, with all its attending
circumstances, had not yet been exploited to satiety by domestic
dramatists and sentimental novelists; Richardson avails himself of
them only too fully, and our overwrought nerves are offended by
his want of artistic taste. But, as is well known, his contem-
poraries were not so fastidious. During the months of breathless
suspense when Clarissa's fate hung in the balance, many letters
reached the author deprecating a catastrophe; and, when the
heroine, having settled all her affairs and written her eleven
posthumous letters, actually departed this world, England burst
into a wail of lament; nor was it long before the contagion of
sorrow spread to the continent.
As Clarissa had grown out of Pamela, so Sir Charles Grandison
grew out of Clarissa. Richardson's female friends would not rest
satisfied with his portrait of a good woman; he must now give
them a good man. Moreover, had not Fielding's Tom Jones (1749)


## p. 10 (#36) ##############################################

ΙΟ
Richardson
insolently, and, as Richardson thought, most unfairly, encroached
upon his own province of holding up examples and depicting
heroes, and, immediately, found many readers for itself? The easy
morals and low' tone of his rival's book were all the more odious
to Richardson's sense of propriety, because his vanity, ever a weak
point with him, was sorely tried. Before the end of 1749, he
had, though reluctantly, undertaken the difficult task which his
admirers and his conscience were, alike, pressing upon him. The
slow progress of the novel bears witness to the particularly arduous
nature of the task; it came out, in seven volumes, between
November 1753 and March 1754. The History of Sir Charles
Grandison; in a Series of Letters published from the Originals
professed to be 'by the Editor of Pamela and Clarissa'; but, in
the preface, Richardson practically admitted his authorship.
None of his three novels has set modern criticism so much at
variance as Grandison. The student of literature must, primarily,
bear in mind that the success of the last effort was not unequal
to that of its predecessors. At the same time, the aim and con-
ception of the book show a marked falling off from the higher
artistic level of Clarissa. The didactic purpose is as glaring as it
is in the previous novels, without being, in the present instance,
relieved by the wealth of human pathos which made the story of
Clarissa, in itself, a moving tragedy. Sir Charles's trials are but
slight, as befits the good fortune of a man not less beloved by
Providence than by a consensus of mere mortals; and the embar-
rassing predicament in which he finds himself between half-a-dozen
women admirers—even the annoying prospect of being obliged,
on principle, to marry Clementina, while, at heart, preferring
Miss Byron-cannot ruffle the well-founded composure of his mind.
Richardson, of course, took care that the Italian signorina should
be very attractive indeed, though we feel sure that where Sir
Charles's duty lies his affections will soon enough follow. Those
readers—and they are not few—who find Harriet Byron lacking in
genuine delicacy and unaffected charm, are, of course, not privileged
to take an interest in her doubts and anxieties. The disappointed
ladies—Clementina and Emily-certainly appeal more strongly to
our sympathies; though Clementina’s madness is not so successfully
devised that the touch of cheap romanticism in it can be passed
over. Thus, our emotions, on the whole, are little stirred. Apart
from the first incidents, which concern Miss Byron's abduction and
her rescue by Sir Charles, the development of the story is not very
exciting to blunted tastes; while the Italian episodes, and the


## p. 11 (#37) ##############################################

Sir Charles Grandison
II
lengthy negotiations with the della Porretta family, are wholly
tedious.
The despairing reader falls back upon the psychological value of
the book. Here, indeed, lies its greatness—if great it can, indeed,
be said to be. The characters are more numerous than in either
Pamela or Clarissa; they are more varied, and more of them are
interesting. Sir Hargrave and the wicked personages in general
are merely awkward performers who play at being naughty while
remaining very conscious of the difference between good and evil;
so that their conversion, in due time, by Sir Charles's triumphant
example, seems to us merely a matter of course. But there
is a vein of fresh observation in such comic figures as that of
Sir Rowland Meredith, and an almost delicate intuition of girlish
feeling in Miss Jervois; as for Charlotte Grandison, she is not less
true to life than she is perversely and abnormally provoking. It
seems as if the artist in Richardson had availed himself of this
character to wreak some obscure unavowed revenge on the
constraint wbich the moralist was imposing upon him in the rigid
self-consistency of Sir Charles. Of the hero and overwhelmingly
predominant personage of the book, it is difficult to speak in cold
blood-so irritating to our noblest (and to some of our worst)
instincts is his self-possessed, ready-made, infallible sense of virtue.
The most we can say in his favour is that, considering the difficulties
of the task, Richardson has managed to create a remarkably
acceptable 'beau idéal' of a gentleman, more genuine in his ways,
and freer from the most objectionable features of puritanic priggish-
ness, than might reasonably have been expected.
All through the composition of his last novel, Richardson had
been aware of declining powers and failing health. He still kept
up his epistolary intercourse with his admirers and friends; and
his letters, most of which, duly prepared by himself for the use of
posterity, have been preserved and handed down to us, are a mine
of information for the student of the period. Our knowledge of
his life is, to this day, mainly based on the selection of his corre-
spondence, published, in 1804, by Mrs Barbauld. Besides a
pamphlet (1753) aimed against certain piratical Irish booksellers
who had forestalled the authorised issue of the last volumes of
Grandison, and a letter to The Rambler on the change in the
manners of women (no. 97, for 19 February 1751), perhaps his
most characteristic, though not his most interesting, literary
productions still remain to be mentioned. One of these is A Col-
lection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cautions,
6


## p. 12 (#38) ##############################################

I 2
Richardson
and Reflexions, contained in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa,
and Sir Charles Grandison (1755). As every reader of the novels
knows only too well, they are rich with the ore of wisdom ready
coined; and on such subjects as duelling, education, marriage and
family relations, Richardson has even provided us with elaborate
treatises. The other is Meditations collected from the Sacred
Books, and adapted to the different Stages of a Deep Distress;
gloriously surmounted by Patience, Piety and Resignation.
Being those mentioned in the History of Clarissa as drawn up
for her own Use (1750). These meditations are thirty-six in
number, only four of which are inserted in the novel.
In 1754, Richardson removed from North end to Parson's
green, Fulham; and, in the following year, his printing-house in
Salisbury square had to be rebuilt on an adjoining site. This
expenditure points to a prosperous condition of affairs; in fact,
Richardson's means and social position were so far improved that
he had become master of the Stationers' company. Though he
never was in touch with the most brilliant society of the time, he
numbered among his acquaintances men of a standing far superior
to his own, and certainly did something to promote the gradual
recognition of literary genius as a distinction equal to any other.
His eldest daughter, Mary, made a good match in 1757; and, on
the occasion of her marriage, he wrote his will, which Austin
Dobson describes as 'very lengthy, and having four codicils. His
last years were afflicted with increasing nervous disorders, and
insomnia. He died, from a paralytic stroke, on 4 July 1761.
At the present day, the interest taken in Richardson's works
is very largely historical. Their popularity, which did not show
any symptoms of decline down to the beginning of the nineteenth
century, is now, mainly, a thing of the past. Several causes may
help to account for the neglect of them, even by cultivated readers,
in our liberal-minded age. The length of the novels is, ob-
viously, the first stumbling-block, as is testified by the many
abridgments which have, more or less in vain, sought to adapt
the cumbrous volumes to the exigencies of a more hurried life.
Their epistolary form, probably, is another drawback. If, as has
been said above, it permits a fresh and particular presentment of
everyday facts to us, yet it is apt to seem hopelessly slow and
antiquated; it savours of a time when letters were a work of
leisure and love, and people liked to piece together the different
threads of a story. More subtle elements in Richardson's writings,
certainly, contribute to envelop them in an atmosphere of faint
6
1
1
1


## p. 13 (#39) ##############################################

Limitations of Richardson's Art
13
appreciation and widespread indifference. Together with the
limitations of his art, those of his psychology and of his morals
have grown more and more apparent, while their real strength is
easily forgotten. His essential power was hardly personal; it was
that of puritanism. His genius reached as deep as the conscious-
ness of sin and the source of tears; but, in the depth of his emotions
and in matters of conscience, he did not pass beyond the bounds of
his time and of his class; and his intuitions possessed but little
creative originality. With the passing of the sentimental age,
and with the toning down of the puritan spirit, he ceased to be a
prophet and sank into the part of a representative thinker and
writer. The light thrown by him into the obscure undergrowths
of the soul does not break from heaven like the flashes of a
Shakespeare ; it is a humble ray of poring, searching intensity.
In these latter days, new shades have been added to our notions
of conduct; morality has been revived in new forms and touched
with an unwonted delicacy, a more anxious self-diffidence; and
Richardson's hard, plain idea of duty cannot but appear blunt
and harsh to us, as his analysis of the soul seems poor when com-
pared with the luxuriant growth of modern psychology. Thus,
the wonderful penetration of his genius has not maintained its
supremacy, and time has pitilessly revealed its narrowness.
But his novels deserve more than the disinterested curiosity
of students; their significance is other than relative. Taken by
themselves, they constitute a literary achievement of enduring
worth. The moral passion with which they are instinct may not
appeal to us unreservedly; yet the forceful grasp of the stories
holds us fast so soon as we have become reconciled to the atmo-
sphere; and those regions of the human heart in which nature and
grace, selfishness and love are always at war slowly and pitilessly
open themselves to us, while we read, together with some part, at
least, of the free, individual, spontaneous life of the shallow self.
Richardson's realism is great in its handling of minute details,
its imaginative power, its concatenation of events. Though the
picturesque aspects of the world are hardly ever called up by him,
the material circumstances of the drama in which his characters
are engaged stand depicted with diligent fulness, and the inner
incidents of the sentient, struggling soul have never been more
graphically or abundantly narrated. His style is a self-created
instrument of small intrinsic merit but of excellent utility; it
shows variety enough to adjust itself to the personalities of different
correspondents; it moves on with a certain elaborate ease, but


## p. 14 (#40) ##############################################

14
Richardson
3
knows how to rise, at times, to a straightforward, telling energy.
It is not free from artistic, or even from grammatical, flaws, but,
considering Richardson's personal lack of culture, it bears witness
to a remarkable natural gift. Its tone is most often slightly self-
conscious, with a preference for Latin, genteel words and phrases ;
but it not unfrequently displays the strength of racy idioms and
the charm of native English simplicity.
Richardson's influence upon the course of English and European
literature cannot be overestimated. To understand the extent and
meaning of the effect exercised by him at home, the state of the
English novel before and after him should be borne in mind. The
assertion, frequently made, that he put an end to the romance
of fancy, after the pattern of The Grand Cyrus, should not be
repeated without qualification; the vogue of the D'Urfé and
Scudéry school had long been on the wane, and the tendency
to realism had already come to the front, principally through
Defoe and Swift. But it is certain that Pamela, besides being
the first notable English novel of sentimental analysis, heralded
the advent of everyday manners and common people to artistic
acceptance. The claims of Richardson to the favour of contem-
porary readers were, thus, manifold; he stirred their emotions,
and gave definite satisfaction to their latent thirst for sentiment;
he presented them with living, actual, flesh-and-bone heroes and
heroines, and responded to their longing for reality and substance
in fiction; he imparted a moral lesson, and, thus, found himself
at one with the rising reaction against the sceptical levity of the
preceding age. One more point should be emphasised: at the very
moment when the social power of the middle classes was growing
apace, Richardson, himself one of them, exactly expressed their
grievances and prejudices. His novels are filled with a spirit of
bourgeois—it might almost be said, popular--criticism of the
privileges and the corruption of the great; and, at the same time,
they are flavoured with the essence of snobbishness. It is easy
to exaggerate the fondness with which Richardson dwells on the
manners of servants or 'low' people; the class with which he
deals, that forming, so to say, the social plane of his novels, is
the gentry. To him, the right of birth is an all but impassable
barrier, and Pamela is no exception; she remains an inferior in
her own eyes, if not exactly in those of her husband. No doubt,
the higher circles of society in which Sir Charles Grandison moves
were not known to Richardson from personal experience, and it is
unnecessary to dwell on the mistakes with which he has been


## p. 15 (#41) ##############################################

Richardson's Influence on the English Novel 15
charged in his description of aristocratic life; still, he took a secret
delight in holding intercourse, though it were of a more or less
imaginary sort, with the nobility, and his conception of a gentle-
man was certainly not in advance of his time. Both the impatient
self-assertion of the middle class, and its quiet settling down into
conservative grooves of feeling, are thus foreshadowed. The story
of Pamela is an illustration of the Christian equality of souls,
quite in keeping with the widespread modern tendency to exalt a
sentimental, theoretical democracy; it breathes, on the other hand,
an involuntary subservience to the intrinsic dignity of rank and
riches. In both ways, the social tone of Richardson's novels was
that of a class, which, thenceforth, contributed its own elements
to the formation of the literary atmosphere.
This general, diffused effect is of more importance than the
direct and particular influence of Richardson on his imitators or
disciples in England. The course of the English novel was not
shaped by him alone, since Fielding rose to eminence almost
simultaneously with him; but who can gauge the exact indebted-
ness of Tom Jones to Pamela and Clarissa ? Is not a negative
impulse an efficient motive power in its way; and, besides, was not
the example of the older writer of positive value to the younger ?
Among the novelists who came after them, Sterne, in a large
measure, may be included among the descendants of Richardson.
So may Henry Brooke, whose Fool of Quality (1766—70)' bears
some resemblance in matter to Sir Charles Grandison, Oliver
Goldsmith, the kind-hearted moralist of The Vicar of Wakefield?
(1766), and Henry Mackenzie, author of The Man of Feeling (1771)*.
Special mention should, also, be made of Fanny Burney, who wrote
her first novel Evelina (1778) in the epistolary style“, and of Jane
Austen, who used the same method in the first form of Sense
and Sensibility (1811). With both these writers, Richardson's
influence, engrafted on a passionate admiration, was supreme ;
yet it need hardly be added that they both and, preeminently,
Jane Austen, achieved distinct originality. It is a characteristic
fact that, within the fifty years which followed Richardson's death,
it should be impossible to single out any novelist on whom his
individual spirit may be said to have descended, while there is
hardly one who might not be said to have inherited something
from him. With the new century and its new literature, his
action did not cease to be felt; but it sank into subterranean
3
i Cf. ante, vol. 1x, chap. xn.
* Cf. chap. II, post.
Cf, chap. A, post.
6 Ot. vol. II, post.
: Cf. chap. III, post.


## p. 16 (#42) ##############################################

16
Richardson
channels, and dissolved into the general tendency in fiction to
realism, accepted morality and mental analysis. These sources of
inspiration are still fresh and running in the English novel of the
present day; and, through them, the impulse given by Richardson
is as notable as ever.
Whatever estimate may be formed of the relative merits of
Richardson and Fielding individually, the significance of the former
is seen to be immeasurably superior to that of his great rival, so
soon as the wider field of European literature is taken into account.
From the author of Clarissa is derived one of those pervading
lines of influence out of which was woven the web of international
life and thought in the latter half of the eighteenth century. By
falling in with the revival of feeling on the continent, Richardson
helped the wave of sentimentalism to break loose, and, thus, had a
large share in the rise of the cosmopolitan age. In France, his works
may be said to have played as great a part as any indigenous pro-
duction. The admirable disquisition of Joseph Texte has thrown
full light on this episode, which is one of paramount importance
in the history of French letters. Public taste was then in a state of
transition. The latent possibilities of French genius were stirred
as by the coming of a new springtime; fresh powers of imagination
and emotion were seeking to assert themselves in the dry atmo-
sphere of philosophical rationalism. The decay of classical ideals
left room for new subjects and a new treatment; not only the
manners of man in the abstract, but the complexity of the indi-
vidual, not only the dignity of tragic or epic heroes, but the charm
of real, everyday scenes and characters, were dimly felt to lie still
unexplored a field of boundless promise for a resolutely modern
and original literature. Akin to the craving for sentiment and
to the desire for reality in fiction was the moralising propensity;
the spirit of the time indulged easily in free enquiries into problems
of conduct, since the power of the old beliefs was in all spheres
shaken by criticism. Richardson's novels answered to all those
aspirations. The Anglomanie had fairly set in before he became
the idol of the French public; but no English writer was more
widely read in France during the eighteenth century. He was
fortunate in being translated by abbé Prévost, himself a distin-
guished novelist and a warm admirer of English manners. Pamela
was gallicised as early as 1742; Clarissa in 1751; Grandison from
1755 to 1758, with that freedom of adaptation and suppression
which is characteristic of the time.
It would be out of place here to attempt more than a summary


## p. 17 (#43) ##############################################

Richardson's Influence on French Literature 17
notice of the fortune with which Richardson's novels met in
France. They were eagerly welcomed and only a very few dis-
sentient voices made themselves heard in the chorus of praise;
their author was worshipped by the swelling crowd of the votaries
of sensibility. A series of imitations and sequels of the novels, and
of plays founded upon them, bore witness to the lasting favour of
the public. The reception of Clarissa was still more enthusiastic
than that of Pamela; and even the somewhat stiff self-conscious-
ness of Grandison could not blunt the appetites of French
readers, forgetful, for once, of their keen susceptibility to the
ridiculous. The versatile genius of Voltaire himself was carried
away by the fashion of the day, and his Nanine (1749) was a
strangely dissimilar dramatisation of Pamela; later, the irre-
pressible antipathy of his temperament broke out in angry con-
demnations of the novels? Worthy of special notice is Diderot's
Éloge de Richardson (1761), a somewhat indiscriminate, but, on
the whole, penetrating, criticism, laying eloquent stress on some
of the main aspects of the English writer's real greatness, and
turning them to account as a confirmation of Diderot's own
dramatic theory. Still more momentous in the history of French
and European literature is the admiration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
for Richardson. That his Nouvelle Héloïse (begun 1756, completed
1760) was suggested by Clarissa has, from the first, been a
commonplace of literary criticism. The similitude in the theme and
in its treatment, indeed, is extremely striking. Rousseau's heroine
conquers her passion for Saint-Preux when virtue claims her
under the more pressing form of duty to a husband, as Clarissa
subdues her love for Lovelace when he has proved unworthy of
her. In both stories, the death of the heroine crowns a pathetic
tale with a supreme consummation. The French Claire and the
English Miss Howe play pretty much the same part as confidantes.
That both novels are written in the form of letters furnishes tangible
proof of an influence which Rousseau never attempted to deny.
The inner analogies are of still greater importance. A didactic
spirit breathes through La Nouvelle Héloïse, a spirit of sober and
earnest morality; the book aims at vindicating the sanctity of
marriage, and at illustrating the artistic interest of domestic
manners; it stands opposed to the artificial, aristocratic tone of
older French fiction, as well as to the cynical mockery of Lesage.
Needless to say, Rousseau's genius touched the book with its own
originality; a more impassioned fervour of emotion, a poetical
I For other French dramatic adaptations of Pamela see bibliography.
2
E. L. X.
CH. 1.


## p. 18 (#44) ##############################################

18
Richardson
worship of nature, a self-indulgent enjoyment of melancholy moods,
set upon it the distinct stamp of romanticism, while Richardson's
sensibility kept within the bounds of the inner life, and was
checked by his puritanism when half-way to romantic morbidness.
It was his fate, nevertheless, to become one of the most active
among the literary forces from which was to spring, together with
the revival of letters, a state of moral unrest which would have
caused his conscience many an anxious qualm. Not only most
French novelists after 1760, but the leaders of the new school, from
1790 to 1830, either directly or through Rousseau, felt the inspiring
and guiding influence of Richardson.
Hardly less deep-reaching or extensive was his influence in
Germany. Richardson,' says Erich Schmidt, in his still indispen-
sable study, “belongs as well to the history of the German, as to that
of the English, novel. ' The chords which the author of Clarissa
struck in the hearts of his earnest, religious and sentimental German
readers were no other than those which he had stirred in his light
and sceptical French admirers—so true it is that one great tide
of emotional enthusiasm swept, at that time, over the bounds of
nationality and race. But the individual genius of each nation
was, of course, recognisable in the chorus of praise by a tone of its
,
own. The state of German romance before Gellert, says the critic
just quoted, was much the same as that of English fiction before
Richardson-with this difference only, that Germany had no Defoe.
Gellert, who translated Pamela and Grandison, was, indeed, a
writer after Richardson's heart; and his novel, Das Leben der
schwedischen Gräfin von G. (1746), though it falls far short of his
model, still affords ample proof of the most praiseworthy intentions.
Meanwhile, the German literary market, just like the French, was
flooded with imitations and sequels; 'histories' of an individual
or of a family, in epistolary form, became the fashion. Among
novelists who followed Gellert's example may be mentioned Hermes
(Geschichte der Miss Fanny Wilkes, 1766) and Sophie La Roche
(Geschichte der Fräulein von Sternheim, 1771). Wieland's ad-
miration found vent in a drama on the unfortunate Clementina
della Poretta (1760), after he had planned a series of letters from
Sir Charles Grandison to Miss Jervois (1759). In their impulsive
eagerness, many admirers would visit the scenes which Richardson
had described or make a pilgrimage to those in which he had lived.
Characteristic, in this respect, is Klopstock's longing to be per-
sonally acquainted with the author of Clarissa, and the touching
episode of his young wife's correspondence with a man upon whom,
5!


## p. 19 (#45) ##############################################

Richardson and Goethe
19
in her naive enthusiasm, she looked as little less than a saintly
painter of angelic figures. As years went by, the rationalists and
disciples of the Aufklärung grew rather bitter against the
sentimental influence wielded by the English writer; Wieland
himself somewhat recanted his undiscerning praise; and the parody
of Musäus (Grandison der Zweite, written in 1759, recast in 1781)
pointed, at least, to some irreverence in the minds of a few. But
the popularity of Richardson was rooted in the love of all tender
hearts, and, as is well known, tender hearts were then, and
remained long afterwards, the majority in Germany. Moreover,
to the direct action of Richardson must be added that which
he exercised through Rousseau and La Nouvelle Héloïse; and,
thus, the puritanic, insular English genius is brought into close
association with the world-wide, supremely liberal intellect of
the author of Werther's Leiden. This summary would be too
manifestly incomplete if a brief mention were not made of the
Dutch translation of Clarissa, by John Stinstra ; and of the
sensation which Pamela created in Italy, where Goldoni adapted
it for the stage.
2-2


## p. 20 (#46) ##############################################

CHAPTER II
FIELDING AND SMOLLETT
THE two novelists with whom this chapter is to deal were
very different in character, aims and achievement. Fielding was
humane, genial, sweet-tempered; Smollett rancorous and im-
patient. Fielding, a philosopher and moralist, tried to show by a
wide and deep representation of life the beauty of certain qualities
of virtue; Smollett, to whom, in his old age at any rate, life seemed
'a sort of debtors' prison, where we are all playthings of fortune,
was more concerned with the superficial absurdities of men and
circumstance. Fielding established the form of the novel in
England; Smollett left a myriad of brilliant episodes. But, as men
and as authors, they have, also, their resemblances. Both lived
lives of bardship and labour with courage ; both indulged the
irony born of shrewd and independent minds. And both, by
developing the study of the actual life around them as a subject
for fiction, which had been begun by Bunyan and carried on by
Defoe, Addison and Swift, conquered new kingdoms, and left the
novel supreme in English imaginative literature.
Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham park, near Glastonbury,
Somerset, on 22 April 1707. In 1713, his father, Edmund Fielding
(who was directly descended from the first earl of Desmond),
moved, with his wife and family, to East Stour, a few miles to the
west of Shaftesbury, in the northern corner of Dorset, where
Henry's sister Sarah, the author of David Simple (1744-52),
was born. His tutor here was a clergyman, named Oliver, of
whom parson Trulliber, in Joseph Andrews, is said by Murphy
to be a portrait. At the end of 1719 or beginning of 1720, he
was sent to school at Eton, where he made friends with George
(afterwards the good' lord) Lyttelton, author of Dialogues
'
of the Dead (1740), his firm friend in later years, to whom he
dedicated Tom Jones. Here, too, he acquired a knowledge of the
classics to which his works bear witness. At Lyme Regis, when


## p. 21 (#47) ##############################################

Fielding's Comedies
21
eighteen years old, he fell violently in love with a daughter of a
deceased local merchant named Andrew, and appears to have
planned an abduction. The girl was removed to Devonshire, and
Fielding worked off his emotion in an English version of Juvenal's
sixth satire, which he published, some years afterwards, revised,
in his Miscellanies.
The next news of him is the production of his first play at
Drury lane, in February 1728. A month later, his name appears
as Litt. Stud. in the books of the university of Leyden. He was
still at Leyden in February 1729 ; but within a year his name
disappeared from the roll. In January 1730, his second play was
produced at Goodman's fields theatre. His schooling being over,
and the paternal remittances few or none, he had now come
to London to make a living. A big, strong young man, well-
educated and well-connected, with a great appetite for life,
and small experience of it, he began his activity as author and
dramatist.
Unlike Smollett, Fielding never wrote a tragedy; but his work
for the stage comprises every other then known kind of drama-
comedy, farce, ballad farce, burlesque and adaptation from the
French. The first play produced by him was Love in Several
Masques, a comedy accepted by Cibber, Wilks and Booth for Drury
lane, and acted in February 1728, by Mrs Oldfield and others, with
great success. His second, brought on the stage of the Goodman's
fields theatre, in January 1730, was the comedy The Temple Beau.
In the following March, at the Haymarket theatre, he gave an
example of a vein which was to suit him better than experiments
in imitation of Congreve, of which his comedy mainly consists.
The Author's Farce, and The Pleasures of the Town, by 'Scrib-
lerus Secundus,' as Fielding now for the first time called himself,
satirises the prevalent taste for opera and pantomime. For the
character of Luckless, the young, gay and impecunious author of
the 'puppet-show' The Pleasures of the Town, Fielding has
evidently drawn upon himself; and the first two acts, which serve
as introduction to the puppet-show, abound in that vivacious,
satirical observation of the life about him in which Fielding ex-
celled. He pokes fun at wellknown people, among them Henley
the preacher, Cibber and Wilks ; while the relations between
booksellers and their hack-writers are amusingly exhibited. In the
same year, 1730, appeared not only The Coffee House Politician, a
comedy in which justice Squeezum anticipates justice Thrasher
in Amelia, while the principal character is obsessed with politics


## p. 22 (#48) ##############################################

22
Fielding and Smollett
much like Mrs Western in Tom Jones, but, also, Fielding's longest-
lived and most enjoyable dramatic work, the burlesque Tom
Thumb. In the following year, this play, enlarged from two
acts to three, was revived under the title The Tragedy of
Tragedies; or, The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great 1.
In 1731, Fielding produced three comparatively unimportant plays ;
in 1732, besides writing The Covent Garden Tragedy, a burlesque
of Ambrose Philips’s The Distrest Mother, and two other plays,
he adapted Molière's Le Médecin Malgré Lui under the title
The Mock Doctor. The work is well done, and the version keeps
fairly close to the original, though Fielding did not scruple to
touch it up here and there, or, with his eye for the life about
him, to introduce some personalities about Misaubin, a quack
of the day, to whom he dedicated the printed play. In the
next year, he adapted L'Avare, under the title The Miser ;
after which he remained almost silent till the beginning of 1734,
when Kitty Clive, for whom he had a warm admiration and
friendship, appeared in his comedy, The Intriguing Chambermaid,
partly adapted from Regnard's Le Retour Imprévu. Together
with this, an enlarged and altered version of The Author's Farce
was produced. Don Quixote in England, another play (1734)
(begun, as the preface tells us, at Leyden, in 1728), is chiefly
remarkable for the character of squire Badger, who is very like
squire Western, for the famous hunting song beginning "The
dusky Night rides down the Sky,' and for parliamentary election
scenes which, possibly, were in the mind of Fielding's friend
Hogarth when he designed his election prints. With the year
1735, in which were brought out a successful farce and an un-
successful comedy, we come to a break in Fielding's activity as
a playwright. As a writer of comedy, Fielding suffered under
three disabilities-inexperience of the human heart; the haste
of a young man about town in urgent need of money to relieve
him of duns or provide him with pleasures ; and the prevalence
of the decaying form of comedy inherited from Congreve. He is
at his best when exhibiting the external features of the life of bis
time; his characterisation is neither deep nor interesting. In
farce and burlesque, he was far happier. Here, his high spirits,
his gift for amusing extravagance, had free play.
On 28 November 1734, at St Mary Charlcombe, near Bath,
Fielding was married to Charlotte Cradock, of Salisbury, whom
See, as to Fielding's dramatic burlesques and satires, and their significance in the
history of the English drama and stage, chap. IV, post.


## p. 23 (#49) ##############################################

23
Marriage. The Champion
he appears to have been courting, by poems (afterwards pub-
lished) and in other ways, since 1730 or an earlier date. In
February 1735, Charlotte Fielding's mother died, leaving one
shilling to her daughter Catherine (we think of Amelia and her
sister, and their mother's will) and the residue of her estate to
Charlotte. It was probably this legacy that enabled Fielding
to take his wife away from the ups and downs of an author's life
in London, to the house at East Stour, where he had spent his
boyhood. Here, he seems to have lived a jolly, and rather
extravagant, life; it is not improbable that Booth’s experiences
on his farm in Amelia are taken partly from Fielding's own,
and partly, perhaps, from those of his father. In something less
than a year, he was back in London and again hard at work.
Early in 1736, he took the Little theatre in the Haymarket,
formed a company of actors, and in this and the following year
produced Pasquin and The Historical Register for the year 1736.
Of these celebrated dramatic satires something will be said else-
where, as well as of the share which the second of them had
in bringing about the Licensing act of 1737. For Fielding, the
passing of this act meant, practically, the end of his career as
a dramatist. Two or three plays, written by him in whole or in
part, were, indeed, produced in 1737 ; but, in the same year, he
dismissed his company and turned to other fields of work. Of
himself, he said, later, that he ‘left off writing for the stage
when he ought to have begun? ' He resumed his legal studies,
and, in the month of November, became a student of the
Middle Temple. There is evidence that he worked hard—without,
apparently, ceasing to live hard-and he was called to the
bar in June 1740. Meanwhile, he had not given up author-
ship altogether. An 'Essay on Conversation,' published in
the Miscellanies of 1743, was probably written in 1737. In
November 1739 appeared the first number of The Champion,
a newspaper published thrice a week, and written mainly by
Fielding (whose contributions, signed C. or L. , are the most
numerous) and his friend James Ralph. He adopted the not
uncommon plan of inventing a family or group as supposed
authors or occasions of the various essays—in this case, the
Vinegar family, of whom captain Hercules, with his famous club, is
i See chap. 19, post.
? He afterwards produced The Wedding Day in 1743). The Good-Natured Man
appeared posthumously.
3 Some of Fielding's papers in The Champion were collected in book-form in 1741.


## p. 24 (#50) ##############################################

24
Fielding and Smollett
6
the most prominent. Among the best papers are the four called
'An Apology for the Clergy. ' Fielding had attacked the clergy in
Pasquin; in 'An Apology, his ironical method exposes even
more clearly the vices of place-hunting and want of charity then
prevalent among them, while he reveals the deep admiration and
reverence for the qualities which were afterwards to glow in his
portrait of parson Adams. In an essay on Charity, again, the
Fielding of the future is evident in the warm-hearted common
sense with which the subject of imprisonment for debt is treated.
The personal interest in these papers is strong. One of them
has high praise for the humour and moral force of Hogarth's
‘Rake's Progress' and 'Harlot's Progress. Another furnishes a
glimpse of Fielding's own personal appearance, familiar from
Hogarth's drawing. Yet others continue the persistent attacks on
Colley Cibber which Fielding had begun in his plays. Cibber,
when, in his Apology (1740), noticing the Licensing act, retorted
by an opprobrious reference to Fielding. Thereupon, Fielding
vented all his humour, all his weight and all his knowledge of
the law and of the world in slashing replies, in which Colley
and his son Theophilus are successfully held up to ridicule. The
last paper in the essays collected from The Champion is dated
Thursday, 12 June 17401, just before Fielding was called to the
bar. He went the western circuit.
Perhaps, in spite of himself, writing must have been still
necessary to him as a means of subsistence. In any case, accident
had something to do with his finding his true field. In November
1740, Samuel Richardson had published Pamela. Fielding had
had some experience in parody: and he set to work to parody
Pamela. But, just as Pamela had grown under its author's
hands into something much larger than the original conception, so
the parody grew beyond Fielding's first intention till it became
his first published novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph
Andrews, and of his Friend Mr Abraham Adams. As Pamela
was tempted by her master, squire Booby (the full name given
by Fielding is concealed by Richardson under the initial B. ), so
her brother, Joseph Andrews, is tempted by his mistress Lady
Booby, another member of the family. Clearly, the fun of the
inverted situation would soon be exhausted ; and Fielding would
speedily tire of a milksop. Thus, before he had composed his title-
page and his preface, his whole design had changed. Of Lady
Booby, we hear practically nothing after the tenth chapter.
1 He seems, however, to have continued to write for the paper till June 1741.


## p. 25 (#51) ##############################################

Parson Adams
25
Andrews himself, though transformed into a hearty and vigorous
youngster, has slipped into the second place, and the chief
character in the story is the poor clergyman, parson Adams.
Twice in the book, Fielding defends himself against the charge of
drawing his characters from living originals ; but, among others,
Richardson (who was much hurt at the 'lewd and ungenerous
treatment of his Pamela, and, henceforth, never lost an opportunity
of carping at Fielding) declared that parson Adams was drawn
direct from William Young, a clergyman of Gillingham, in Dorset,
who (curiously enough) witnessed Fielding's signature to the
assignment of the copyright in Joseph Andrews for £183. 118. Od. ,
and who, also, later, intended to join him in a translation
of Aristophanes, which was never completed. If so, William
Young must have been a fascinating character; but it is more
important to notice that, with all the contradictions in his nature,
parson Adams does not show any of those lapses from verisimilitude
which are usually the result of a slavish imitation of life. He
is, in truth, one of the immortal characters in fiction. Something
of him appears in the vicar of Wakefield, something in my uncle
Toby; and, wherever in fiction simplicity, self-forgetfulness, charity
and hard riding of a hobby are combined in one person, there will
be found traces of parson Adams. He is often ridiculous ; the
absurdest accidents happen to him, for Fielding, though he was
nearly thirty-five when the book was published, had not yet lost
his love of farce. But, just as Cervantes preserved the dignity of
Don Quixote, so this novel (“written in imitation of the manner of
Cervantes,' as the title-page tells us), hy preserving the spirit of
comedy through all the episodes of farce, preserves the dignity of
one of the most loveable of men. In the preface, Fielding explains
that the only source of the ridiculous is affectation, springing
either from vanity or from hypocrisy. Vanity and hypocrisy were
the objects of Fielding's life-long enmity ; but it is unsafe to trust
too much to his own explanation of his motives. For parson
Adams is, certainly, free from affectation; and it is this very
freedom which gives rise to all his misfortunes. In this novel, we
find, for the first time, the distinguishing characteristic of Fielding's
attitude towards life—his large-hearted sympathy. Hypocrisy he
hated, together with all cruelty and unkindness; but, when he
comes to exhibit a hypocrite, a scold, or a rogue of any kind, he
betrays a keen interest, sometimes almost an affection, rather than
hatred or scorn. Mrs Slipslop, that wonderful picture of a sensual,
bullying, cringing lady’s-maid; Peter Pounce, the swindling
,


## p. 26 (#52) ##############################################

26
Fielding and Smollett
skinflint; Mrs Towwouse, the scolding virago, parson Trulliber, the
boor and brute-all are satirised genially, not savagely. Perhaps
the one character invented by him for whom he shows hatred pure
and simple, the one character at whom we are never allowed to
laugh, is Blifil in Tom Jones.
By stating on his title-page that Joseph Andrews was written
in imitation of the manner of Cervantes,' Fielding meant more
than that parson Adams was a Quixotic character. He meant
that he was writing something new in English literature, though
familiar to it from translations of Cervantes's work. Scott traced in
Joseph Andrews a debt to Scarron's Roman Comique ; Furetière's
Roman Bourgeois, Marivaux's Paysan Parvenu and Histoire
de Marianne have, also, been mentioned as possible origins of
the novel. Fielding himself, in the preface, explains that he has
written a comic epic poem in prose,' with a 'light and ridiculous'
fable instead of a 'grave and solemn' one, ludicrous sentiments
instead of sublime and characters of inferior instead of superior
rank. It is necessary to disentangle his motives (which may have
been after-thoughts) from the facts of his novel's descent. The
author of Tom Thumb began Joseph Andrews as a burlesque;
and burlesque—not of Pamela but of older works—he allowed it
to remain, so far as some parts of the diction are concerned. But
the origin of Joseph Andrews, as we have it, is not to be found in
Scarron, or Cervantes, or any parody or burlesque. In spirit, it
springs from the earlier attempts, made by Bunyan, by Defoe, by
Addison and Steele in The Spectator, to reproduce the common
life of ordinary people. Until Joseph Andrews came out, that
life had never been exhibited in England with so much sense
of character, so clear an insight into motives, so keen an interest.
What the book owes to Cervantes is its form, in which the loosely-
knit plot follows the travels and adventures of Adams, Andrews
and Fanny, and is summarily wound up when the author pleases.
Fielding's achievement in the construction was not yet equal to
his achievement in the spirit of fiction ; nor could he yet be
called “the father of the English novel. '
Seven years were to pass before the novel which justly earned
him that title was published. Meanwhile, Fielding, who appears
to have been still attempting to gain a practice at the bar, had
not relinquished writing. In or about April 1743, a little more
than a year after the publication of Joseph Andrews, he issued by
subscription three volumes of Miscellanies. The first volume
contains a preface, largely autobiographical, followed by some
>
ܕ


## p. 27 (#53) ##############################################

Jonathan Wild
27
poems. Fielding's poetry is almost negligible in view of his other
work, though the songs in his plays have plenty of spirit. The
poems included in the Miscellanies are mainly early compositions,
'productions of the heart rather than of the head,' as he calls
them. They include love poems and light verse, addressed to
Charlotte Cradock and others, and epistles, together with some
pгoвe essays. The second volume contains more interesting
matter : the long Lucianic fragment, A Journey from this World
to the Next', which begins with some of Fielding's happiest satire
in the coach-driver of the spirits from earth. The judgment of
Minos affords more excellent fun; and the talk of Homer (with
Mme Dacier in his lap), Addison, Shakespeare, Dryden and others
is good. Then come sixteen less interesting chapters on the
migrations of the soul of the emperor Julian, the tale of which
remains incomplete; and, in a final chapter, Anne Boleyn relates
her life.
In the third volume of the Miscellanies, Fielding printed the
most brilliant piece of work that he had yet achieved, The Life of
Mr Jonathan Wild the Great. Hitherto, his irony had but flashed.
In Jonathan Wild, it burns through the book with a steady light.
The point of view is a familiar one with Fielding, who was a sworn foe
of pretentious appearances. The confusion of greatness with good-
ness is common. 'Bombast greatness,' therefore, is to be exposed
by dealing with its qualities as if, indeed, they were the qualities
of goodness; and, since all these ingredients glossed over with
wealth and a title have been treated with the highest respect and
veneration' in the splendid palaces of the great,' while, in Newgate,
'one or two of them have been condemned to the gallows,' this
kind of greatness shall be taken as it is seen in Newgate, glossed
over with no wealth or title, and written of as if it were the
greatness of Alexander, Caesar or—as we of a later time might
add-Napoleon. So we have Jonathan Wild, thief, 'fence'
and gallows-bird, steadily held up before us throughout fifty-six
chapters as a hero, a great man ; while Heartfree, the simple,
affectionate, open nature—the good man-is treated as 'silly,
'low' and 'pitiful. The book has distressed many, including
Scott, whose recollection of it was not very exact; but not even
Swift has produced so remarkable a piece of sustained irony, so
full of movement, so various, so finely worked in its minutest
particulars, or so vivid in its pictures of 'low' life. Its humour is
1 A paper in The Champion (Saturday, 24 May 1740) contains the germ of the idea
fitfully elaborated in this fragment.
6


## p. 28 (#54) ##############################################

28
Fielding and Smollett
>
a
6
often broad—especially in the passages relating to Miss Laetitia
Snap, afterwards Mrs Jonathan Wild; but its merciless exposure
of hypocrisy, meanness and cruelty, even more than the difference
between the rewards ultimately meted out to greatness and to
goodness, makes it a work of excellent morality. The way to true
honour, the book claims, lies open and plain, the way of the trans-
gressor is hard.
About this time, Fielding's own way became hard; and, if the gout
which was taking an ever firmer hold on him was partly due to his
own transgressions in youth, fate had in store for him a blow which he
had not done anything to bring upon himself. After the publication
of the Miscellanies, he devoted himself to the law as closely as his
gout would permit. Literature, he forswore : partly, perhaps, by
reason of the precarious nature of its rewards, partly because, as
we learn from his preface to his sister Sarah's novel, David Simple
(1744), he was disgusted at being ‘ reputed and reported the author
of half the scurrility, bawdry, treason, and blasphemy, which these
few last years have produced'-especially that infamous, paltry
libel,' The Causidicade. Six months later, in November 1744, his
wife died at Bath, after a long illness. Fielding had loved her
passionately. Sophia Western is one portrait of her; Amelia is
another-even to the broken, or scarred, noge.
The passage
describing Allworthy's feelings about his dead wife? has, no
doubt with justice, been described as autobiographical. No
disproof of his affection for his Charlotte is to be found in the fact
that, in November 1747, he married her maid, Mary Daniel, a good
soul, who made him a good wife. Their son, William, was born in
February 1748.
Fielding's efforts to break away from writing were spasmodic
and never successful for long. In November 1745, the expedition
of the young pretender sent him to journalism again. He started
a paper, The True Patriot, in which he tried to rouse the nation
out of the sluggish indifference and the acquiescence in bad
government, that were a greater danger than the advance of the
Highlanders on Derby. It was for this purpose, probably, that he
let his robust humour and his hatred of what he considered the
affectations of the Jacobite party find free play in a series of
violently overdrawn pictures of what would happen if the rebels
took London. Almost the sole interest of the journal for modern
readers lies in the reappearance of parson Adams, who is made to
trounce, with effect, a young English fribble, more fond of French
1 Tom Jones, bk 1, chap. II.


## p. 29 (#55) ##############################################

29
The Jacobite's Journal. Magisterial Work
wine than adverse to French government. Fielding, though less
insular than Smollett, was a thorough John Bull. In December
1747, he engaged once more in political journalism, with The
Jacobite's Journal, a paper conducted on the same lines as The
True Patriot, in one number of which he generously praises the
first two volumes of his detractor Richardson's Clarissa. The
writing of these journals brought on Fielding the reproach of
being a 'pensioned scribbler,' and may have helped to obtain his
commission as justice of the peace for Westminster. The last
number of The Jacobite's Journal is dated 5 November 1748. A
commission as justice of the peace for Westminster had been
granted him on the previous 25 October; and a similar commission
for Middlesex was, apparently, granted to him soon afterwards. The
duke of Bedford had become secretary of state early in the year.
From the terms in which he is mentioned in the preface to
Tom Jones and from Fielding's letter to him of 13 December
1748', it seems clear that his 'princely benefactions included
something besides the present of leases enabling Fielding to
qualify for the office in Middlesex by holding landed estate of
£100 a year.
When Fielding took the magistrate's post, it was one of small
honour, and of only such profit as could be made out of one or both
parties to the cases brought before him. Squeezum and Thrasher
were probably only too faithful portraits of the trading justices,
as they were called. Fielding, however, took his work very
seriously ; considerably reduced its emoluments by his honesty ;
and endeavoured to remedy at the root the appalling evils due to
ignorance, poverty, drink and the lack of an efficient police force.
His Proposals for erecting a county work-house may, to modern
ideas, seem repellently brutal; to his own age, they seemed
sentimentally humane.
Within four months of his Westminster appointment, that is,
in February 1749, there appeared in six duodecimo volumes The
History of Tom Jones, A Foundling. When Fielding began to
write his masterpiece, there is no evidence to show. The years
preceding his appointment as magistrate seem to have been years
of pecuniary, as well as of other troubles, relieved by the generosity
of Lyttelton, and of Ralph Allen of Prior park, Bath. In the
letter dedicating Tom Jones to Lyttelton, Fielding acknowledges
his debt to both these friends, and says that the character of
Allworthy is taken from them. The book, then, was probably
i Godden, p. 196.


## p. 30 (#56) ##############################################

30
Fielding and Smollett
है
i
written slowly (it took, Fielding says, 'some thousands of hours ')
in the intervals of other occupations, during sickness and trouble ;
and the circumstances only make the achievement more surprising.
Fielding had called Joseph Andrews a comic epic poem in
prose; the title is better deserved by Tom Jones. His debt to
the great epics is patent in such passages as the fight in the
churchyard, where he indulges in open burlesque. A greater
debt becomes evident when a perusal of the whole book
shows the coherence of its structure. The course of the main
theme is steadily followed throughout; and to it all the by-
plots, all the incidents in the vast and motley world which
the story embraces, are carefully related. It is true that the art
is lower at some points than at others. Into Joseph Andrews,
Fielding introduced two independent stories, those of Leonora and
of Mr Wilson, which are excusable only on the ground of the
variety obtained by the insertion of scenes from high life. Tom
Jones contains its independent story, that of the Man of the
Hill; and, though this story forms part of the book's theme, its
introduction violates the laws of structure more forcibly than
could be the case with the earlier and more loosely built novel.
The episode of the widow, again, which occurs in the eleventh
chapter of the fifteenth book, is so grave a fault in construction
that even the need of proving that Tom could say no to a woman
scarcely reconciles us to believing it Fielding's work. But, in
spite of these and other blemishes of form, Tom Jones remains
the first English novel conceived and carried out on a structural
plan that secured an artistic unity for the whole. It set up for
prose fiction a standard which nearly all its great writers have
followed, and which is to be found practically unchanged in
Thackeray.
The question of the ‘morality' of Tom Jones is so closely
bound up with the realism which is another of its main
characteristics, that it is almost impossible to treat them apart.
In Jonathan Wild, Fielding had a double object--to carry on his
lifelong war against humbug, and to show how poorly vice rewarded
its votaries. Both these aims underlie Tom Jones ; but both are
subdued to a wider aim—to show life as it is. The provision
which we have here made is Human Nature. The implication is
that, if we can see the whole of human nature, we shall find that
some of it is, in itself, ugly, and some, in itself, beautiful. That
which is ugly makes people unhappy; that wbich is beautiful
makes them happy. Fielding was content to leave to Richardson


## p. 31 (#57) ##############################################

Tom Jones
31
>
the conventions of society, of 'good form,' as it is called—the code
of Sir Charles Grandison. Its place is taken in Tom Jones, if at
all, by that 'prudence' which Allworthy preached to Jones, and
which is no more than the moderation that keeps a man out of
reach of what is ugly in human nature, and of those who practise
it. The gist of the book's moral purpose is to show human nature,
ugly and beautiful alike, raised to a high power of activity, so that
the contrast between what is itself beautiful and what is itself
ugly shall be clearly perceived. Incidentally, meanness, cruelty,
hypocrisy, lasciviousness will be found to bring unhappiness in
their train; but it is a worse punishment to be a Blifil than to
suffer as Blifil ultimately suffered.
Since no man can see life whole, the question of the moral
value of Tom Jones—which has been considered a great moral
work and a great immoral work-resolves itself into the question
how much of human life Fielding could see. To much of it he was
blind. He could have understood a saint as little as he could
have understood an anarchist. The finer shades—such as were
clear to Richardson—were lost to him. Of love as a spiritual
passion, he shows himself almost entirely ignorant. He was wholly
in sympathy with the average morality of his time; and he takes,
;
quite comfortably, what would nowadays be considered a low view
of human nature. He had never known a perfect character;
therefore, he will not put one in his book; and even Allworthy,
who stands nearest to his ideal of a good man, comes out, against
Fielding's intention no doubt, a little cold and stiff. But, of human
nature that was not perfect, not exalted by any intellectual or
moral or religious passion, he knew more than any writer, except,
possibly, Shakespeare. In Tom Jones,
we shall represent human nature at first to the keen appetite of our reader,
in that more plain and simple manner in which it is found in the country,
and shall hereafter hash and ragoo it with all the high French and Italian
seasoning of affectation and vice which courts and cities afford.
True to his promise, he shows us the whole of life as he saw it,
in its extremes of poverty and luxury-from Molly Seagrim to
Lady Bellaston ; its extremes of folly and wisdom-from Partridge
to Allworthy; its extremes of meanness and generosity-from
Blifil to Tom Jones.