No More Learning

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. And every character in the book has been
thought out, not merely adumbrated. Fielding had used to the
full his opportunities of exercising his enormous interest in men
and women; his experience had brought him into contact with
nearly all kinds in nearly all circumstances; and the distinguishing


## p. 32 (#58) ##############################################

32
Fielding and Smollett
feature of Tom Jones is the solidity of thought and judgment with
which the numberless types included in it have been built together
into a coherent whole.
The question then arises : what use did the author of Tom Jones
make of his knowledge ? Reference has been made to his realism;
and, if by a realist is meant an artist conscientiously determined to
express life exactly as he sees it, then Fielding was one. But, if a
realist is one to whom all the facts of life and character, all aims
and emotions are of equal value, Fielding cannot be called by that
name. He is without the golden dream of what life should be
.
which shines through the work of nearly every other great artist;
but, in the place of that dream, his passionate sympathy with
certain human qualities supplies so much of direct moral as may
be found in his book, and, through it as a medium, he sees which
of these qualities are ugly, and which of them beautiful. Chastity,
to him, is not a thing of much account; but, in considering the
much-discussed licence of Tom Jones, it must be remembered,
first, that, in the episode of Nightingale, a line is shown over
which even Tom will not step ; next, that all Tom's lapses-even
the affair, painful as it is to modern feeling, of Lady Bellaston-
leave unimpaired the brightness of his prominent quality ; and,
last, that, in Fielding's eyes, those very lapses were caused by the
untrained excess of that very quality-his generous openness of
soul. If you have that quality, in Fielding's opinion, you cannot
go very far wrong; if you are mean, envious, cruel, you can never
go right. There is a strong spice of fatalism in the doctrine, if
pressed home--a reliance on instinct which the villains have as
much right to plead in excuse as have the generous-minded. But
a candid, steady view of so much of life as we can take in shows
generosity to be beautiful and meanness to be ugly. Tom Jones
is no hero; Fielding was concerned to draw, not heroes, which,
to him, were impossible abstractions or inventions, but men as he
knew them. Finally, a word should be added on Fielding's utter
absence of pretence. His own sturdy wisdom (often, to us of later
times, commonplace) is always at hand-and not only in those
introductory chapters to each book which tell us, in his manliest,
most humorous, prose, what he is thinking and what he is
trying to do. In every incident throughout the crowded story,
and in every character throughout the wonderful array of per-
sonages high and low, the force of his own knowledge and
conviction may be felt.
The years 1749 and 1750 found Fielding assiduous in his


## p. 33 (#59) ##############################################

Amelia
33
duties as magistrate. In May of the former year, he was chairman
of quarter sessions; and, in the following month, he delivered a
famous charge to the Westminster grand jury. His published
works for the two years consisted only of pamphlets: one, in defence
of his action in sentencing one Bosavern Penlez to death for
rioting and theft; the other, the weighty Enquiry into the Causes
of the late Increase of Robbers, which shows how earnestly he
studied and desired to remove the causes of crime. Hogarth’s
'Gin Lane' is supposed to have been inspired by this pamphlet.
Fielding was at work, meanwhile, upon his last novel, Amelia,
which was published in December 1751, and dedicated to his
benefactor, Ralph Allen. Fielding was now nearly forty-five; he
was a very busy man, and his health was breaking up. It is not
surprising that Amelia lacks some of the ebullience, the strengt)
and the solidity of the novel into which Fielding had packed all
his youth and prime of life. In form, the story is distinctly
inferior to Tom Jones. The writer had given further attention and
thought to the social evils with which his official position brought
him into daily touch. He had more to say about the evils of the
sponging-houses, about the injustice of the laws of debt, the
insolence and cruelty of the servants of justice, the blind cruelty
of punishments and similar topics. Instead of putting these
thoughts into such incidental essays as had enriched Tom Jones,
he attempted to incorporate them with the story, and thereby at
once dislocated his tale and roused the reader's impatience. The
course of the narrative, again, harks backward and forward more
often than that of Tom Jones. Miss Matthews, Booth, Mrs Bennet
must each have a separate narrative, and nearly a chapter must
be devoted to the previous history of Trent. There are signs,
also, of interruption, or of carelessness, in the work'.
In spite of these blemishes, Amelia has merits which Fielding's
other novels lack. In place of the huge and turbulent world of
Tom Jones, we have a much smaller canvas, and a more in-
timate revelation of shadows and depths in character. In losing
some of his ebullience, Fielding has gained insight into things
unknown to him before. The character of Amelia, Fielding's
'favourite child,' has been so fervently admired that, perhaps, it is
rash to miss in her the courage and the strength of the ever dear
Sophia. Booth, who lacked the excuse of Tom Jones's youth and
i One of these, as is well known, is the inconsistency of the statements as to
Amelia's nose—which Fielding himself practically admitted in The Covent-Garden
Journal.
E, L. X. CH. II.
3


## p. 34 (#60) ##############################################

34
Fielding and Smollett
a
vitality, seems a weakling and a fool rather than a man of generous
impulse ; and, while the reader is touched-as no sensitive reader
can fail to be touched—by the pathos of which Fielding here, for
the first time, shows himself a master, the doubt may arise whether
Sophia would have endured so much from her husband without a
hearty trouncing. There is, in fact, just a dash in Amelia Booth
of that other Amelia who married George Osborne ; and such
women help to bring their troubles on themselves. For all that,
there is no resisting the beauty of Amelia's character, which is drawn
with a depth of understanding far in advance of Fielding's time.
There are novelty and daring, too, in the study of Miss Matthews;
and colonel Bath, with his notions of honour, is an admirable
piece of comedy. The story, as a whole, is the work of a mellower,
soberer Fielding than the author of Tom Jones—a Fielding
touched with tears, yet as much in love as ever with nobility
and generosity of character, and equally full of interest in men
and women. The novel rouses a wonder as to what he would
have gone on to achieve, had time and health been granted
him.
'I will trouble the World no more with any Children of mine
by the same Muse. ' So he wrote in an early number of The
Covent-Garden Journal, a Tuesday and Saturday paper which he
started, under the pseudonym Sir Alexander Drawcansir, in
January 1752, a month after the appearance of his last novel.
The Covent-Garden Journal contains the best of Fielding's
occasional writing. He takes a rather gloomy view of letters,
manners and morals; he has forsworn Aristophanes and Rabelais;
but his irony is still awake, and his earnestness unabated. In-
cidentally, the Journal is interesting, inasmuch as it involved him
in several literary quarrels, among others with Smollett. Smollett
had attacked Fielding and Lyttelton in Peregrine Pickle; Fielding,
in return, had a fling at that novel and at Roderick Random ;
and Smollett retorted with the savage pamphlet about ‘Habbakuk
Hilding, Justice and Chapman ’ which will be mentioned again later.
The Covent-Garden Journal came to an end in November 1752. In
April of that year, Fielding issued his Examples of the Interposi-
tion of Providence, in the Detection and Punishment of Murder.
In January 1753 appeared his Proposal for Making an Effectual
Provision for the Poor, which included Proposals for Erecting
a County Work-house previously referred to. In March 1753,
he published a pamphlet in which he espoused (wrongly, as it
appears) the cause of one Elizabeth Canning, whose accusation


## p. 35 (#61) ##############################################

Fielding's Voyage to Lisbon and Death
35
of kidnapping had nearly brought an old gipsy-woman to the
gallows and a procuress to punishment.
By the middle of 1753, Fielding was very ill. He was just
setting out for Bath, when he was commissioned by the duke of
Newcastle to frame a plan for checking the prevalence of robbery
and murder. This he prepared, in the midst of his heavy work as
magistrate. He stayed in London, and succeeded in breaking up
a gang of ruffians. His illness, now, had become a combination of
dropsy, jaundice and asthma, and he was unfit to take the journey
to Bath. The winter of 1753—4 was long and severe. In May,
he betook himself to his house, Fordhook, at Ealing, where he
found some relief in drinking bishop Berkeley's tar-water, though
his dropsy grew worse. He was ordered to Lisbon; and, on
26 June 1754, he left Fordhook, never to return.
Of his voyage to Lisbon, in the company of his wife and daughter,
on The Queen of Portugal, he has left an account which has more
in it of the quality of charm than anything else that he wrote.
It shows his courage and his zest for life undiminished by the
sufferings that had wasted his great frame, and mellowed by a
manly patience; his courtesy and consideration for others; his
sound sense and sincerity. Neither his eye for character nor
his power of ironical expression had deserted him; and the
portraits of captain Veale, and others, are as shrewd and
complete as any in his novels. The book was published in
February 1755, in a version which omitted portions of the manu-
script; the whole text being issued in December of that year.
But, before the earlier issue appeared, the author had passed
away. Fielding died at Lisbon on 8 October 1754, and lies buried
in the English cemetery there. He had lived hard. A self-
indulgent youth had been succeeded, after his first marriage, by a
manhood crammed with arduous work in literature and in the law.
As justice of the peace, he had seen further than his contem-
poraries into the causes of crime, and into the remedies for it; as
writer, he had poured ridicule and contempt on meanness, on
pretence and on vanity, and had fixed the form of a new branch
of literature. Poverty, sorrow, ill-health and detraction could
not quench his delight in life ; and he used his energies, his good-
sense and his knowledge of the world consistently in the service
of what he saw to be the right.
In speaking of Smollett, we have to deal with a man of very
different character from Fielding, though of scarcely less ability.
3-2


## p. 36 (#62) ##############################################

36
Fielding and Smollett
Born in the spring of 1721 at Dalquhurn, Cardross, in the vale of
Leven, Dumbartonshire, Tobias George Smollett was the grandson
of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, judge and member of the Scottish
and the united parliaments. Tobias's father, Sir James's youngest
son, died in the future novelist's childhood. The account of
Roderick Random's childhood and youth, Smollett afterwards said,
was not autobiographical ; but the main outlines were the same.
He was educated at the school at Dumbarton, and, in 1736, went
to Glasgow university. In the same year, he was apprenticed to a
surgeon and apothecary in Glasgow, by name Gordon, whom, though
he ridiculed him as Potion in Roderick Random, he honoured in
Humphrey Clinker. He came to London at the age of eighteen;
obtained a commission as surgeon in the navy, and, in 1740, sailed
on The Cumberland, to join the fleet in the West Indies under
admiral Vernon, whose previous expedition against Porto Bello
had been celebrated in a poem by Fielding. Smollett's object in
coming to London was not, it seems, to obtain an appointment in
connection with his profession. Like Johnson, a year or two
before, he had in his pocket a tragedy-The Regicide. He was
not, however, a dramatist; and no manager was found to put The
Regicide on the stage. This disappointment Smollett never
forgot or forgave. In boyhood, he had shown a disposition for
savage sarcasm ; and the rejection of The Regicide was to
lead to fierce attacks on Garrick, Lyttelton and others. After
Vernon's disastrous expedition to Cartagena, Smollett sailed with
the fleet to Jamaica. There, he left the service in disgust, and
in Jamaica he stayed till 1744, when he returned to London,
betrothed to Anne Lascelles, a Jamaican lady of some fortune,
whom he married in or about 1747. On his return to London, he
set up as a surgeon in Downing street, and seems to have had no
thought of literature as a profession, for he wrote but little. The
suppression of the rising in 1745 drew from him a poem, The
Tears of Scotland. In 1746, he published Advice, a satire; in
1747, Reproof, another satire; both in the heroic couplet, both
characteristic in spirit and diction. In the same year, the fate of
The Regicide still rankling, he made a brutal attack on Lyttelton
in A Burlesque Ode on the Loss of a Grandmother, a parody of
Lyttelton's monody on the death of his wife. None of these
works is of any importance to literature; but, in 1748, they were
succeeded by a work of very high importance, The Adventures of
Roderick Random.
Smollett admitted that he modelled his story on the plan of


## p. 37 (#63) ##############################################

Roderick Random and the Picaresque Novel 37
Le Sage's Gil Blas. In the country of Defoe, the picaresque
novel—the realistic novel of travel and adventure—was not
absolutely new; nor was the device of stringing the episodes of
the story together along the thread of a single character. What
Smollett achieved in Roderick Random and, later, in Peregrine
Pickle, was to show how much could still be done with this form,
to introduce new life and new types, and to present them with
unequalled brilliance and energy. The new type for which he is
most famous is not the hungry and adventurous Scot, like Roderick
Random himself or Strap, his faithful attendant, but the British
sailor. The expedition to Cartagena had given great opportunities
for knowledge of the navy to a man who had great skill in ex-
pressing that knowledge. So vivid a picture of a certain kind of
life peopled with such clear-cut types as Morgan, the Welsh
surgeon, Bowling, Oakum, Mackshane, Jack Rattlin, had never
been presented before and has not been surpassed since. The
British tar was all but new to English literature, and, in this direction
alone, Smollett's influence has been as important as his achieve-
ment. Though he sees men and women chiefly from the outside,
he sees them with extraordinary clarity, and has a way of hitting
them off in the first few words which keeps the attention arrested
all through the rambling, ill-constructed book. Smollett was not
a moralist; he was even without a view of life and conduct such
as might have lent unity to his several works. Dickens, in boy-
hood, found Roderick ‘a modest and engaging hero’; to the adult
reader, he is one of the most shameless young scoundrels in
fiction. In his preface to the work, Smollett writes of Roderick's
modest merit,' and he may have been sincere. The truth is that he
did not care. He aimed almost exclusively at what he abundantly
secured-movement and variety; and his taste for farce, horse-
play and violence was inexhaustible. It should be added that
Smollett's study of medicine had doubtless inured him to the
contemplation of certain physical facts, and that he revels in
contemplating them.
The publication of Roderick Random brought Smollett imme-
diately into fame. The first advantage he took of it was to publish
his unfortunate tragedy The Regicide, with a preface full of railing
at the blindness, the jealousy and so forth, of those who would not
see its merits. He made-or revised and corrected-an English
translation of Gil Blas, which was published in 1749. Yet, just
as Fielding tried to live by the law, Smollett seems to have gone
on hoping to make a living by medicine. In 1750, he took the


## p. 38 (#64) ##############################################

38
Fielding and Smollett
a
degree of doctor of medicine in Marischal college, Aberdeen. In
the autumn of that year, however, he set out for Paris with
Dr John Moore, the author of Zeluco, in order to collect material
for another novel. The result of the tour was The Adventures
of Peregrine Pickle, published in 1751. In some respects, this is
the most remarkable of Smollett's novels ; it is, also, the longest,
and it maintains its vivacity and vigour throughout. In morality,
the treatment of the main theme (if such a book can be said to
have a main theme) shows scarcely any advance on Roderick
Random. Peregrine is a scoundrel with a very moderate sense
of shame; he is also, in his elegant and rather witty way, a bully
of the most refined cruelty, who is not content to feast on others'
folly, but likes to pay for the feast with all kinds of insult and
annoyance. It would be easier to insist on the fact that morality
and good taste have nothing to do with the effect that Smollett
wished to produce, were it not that the same novel contains
the finest character he ever drew. In a work of this kind, coherence
is of little moment; and, that Smollett clearly changed his mind as
he went on, not only about Pickle's mother, and his aunt Grizzle,
but about his aunt Grizzle's husband, commodore Trunnion, does
not lessen the beauty of the commodore's character in its final
form. A modern reader, by reason of a satiety that must have
been almost unknown in Smollett's day, wishes that Trunnion
could open his lips just once or twice without using a nautical
metaphor; but metaphor was never more finely used than in the
famous death-scene of that simple, wise, lovable old sea-dog. This
character alone (supposing that there had been no Matthew Bramble
or Lismahago to follow) would prove that Smollett had it in him to
be a humourist of a high order, if his savageness and brutality
had not stifled the humourist's qualities. In Peregrine Pickle,
much of the characterisation is on the highest level ever reached
by Smollett. The household at The Garrison,' where Hawser
Trunnion lived, included that “great joker,' lieutenant Hatchway,
and Tom Pipes, the silent and faithful, who is more attractive,
if not better fun, than Strap. Though Mrs Pickle is an impossible
person, her husband Gamaliel lives from the first line of the story;
and the adventures of the painter and the doctor, the banquet
in the manner of the ancients and the escape from the Bastille,
offer a concurrent development of farcical incident and oddity of
character hardly to be paralleled for vivacity and inventiveness.
In Roderick Random, many of the characters were taken from
life; so it was with Peregrine Pickle; and, in the first edition,
+
6
6


## p. 39 (#65) ##############################################

Ferdinand Count Fathom
39
Smollett attacked several of those whom he considered his
enemies—Lyttelton (under the name Sir Gosling Scrag), Garrick,
Rich and Cibber, his rancour against whom, on account of the
rejection of The Regicide, was continuous, besides Akenside and
Fielding. At this date, he cannot have had any cause of complaint
against Fielding, unless it were the belief that Partridge in Tom
Jones was imitated from Strap in Roderick Random; and, in the
main, the secret of his dislikes seems to have been jealousy.
Fielding's retorts, in two numbers of The Covent Garden Journal,
drew from Smollett one of his most savage and indecent perform-
ances: A Faithful Narrative of the Base and Inhuman Acts
that were lately practised upon the Brain of Habbakuk Hilding,
Justice, Dealer and Chapman. . . (1752). In the second edition
of Peregrine Pickle, however, which was issued before the end
of 1751, the attacks on Fielding were withdrawn. It remains to
add that the form of the book is still the picaresque novel; but
even this loose construction is disturbed by the interpolation of
the immoral but vivacious Memoirs of a Lady of Quality.
Smollett had not yet given up all idea of practising as a doctor.
He took up his abode in Bath; but, failing to meet with success,
he wrote a pamphlet to prove that Bath water was but little
more efficacious than any other water, and, returning to London,
definitely took up literature as his profession. He settled in
Chelsea, at Monmouth house, where he was visited by Johnson,
Garrick, Goldsmith, Sterne and others; and here he held those
Sunday dinners which he was to describe later in Humphrey
Clinker, for the benefit of the hacks who worked in the 'literary
factory' established by him. His next novel, published in 1752,
was The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom. If Partridge
owed something to Strap, Fathom undoubtedly owed something
to Jonathan Wild; but Smollett's book lacks the unity to
which Fielding attained by his consistent irony and by the
intellectual conception of the relations of goodness and greatness.
And Smollett betrays his half-heartedness by leaving Fathom
converted and repentant, in which not very convincing or edifying
condition he is found again in Humphrey Clinker. Yet, if the
book, as a whole, be unsatisfactory, it is, like all Smollett's fiction,
vivacious and brilliant, and its influence may be traced in Pelham,
in Dennis Duval and in other works.
After Ferdinand Count Fathom, Smollett did not write any
more novels for some years. He was constantly in need of money, for
he was always overspending his income, considerable as it was. Of
>


## p. 40 (#66) ##############################################

40
Fielding and Smollett
his wife's fortune, only a small part ever reached him; but Smollett
was practically the first man to conduct a literary factory' with
success; and, at one time, his profits came to about £600 a year.
After the publication of Ferdinand Count Fathom, the factory
and the trade of book-making absorbed him. In 1755, he published
a translation of Don Quixote, which critics have declared to be
only a réchauffé of Jervas's translation (published, posthumously,
in 1742), Smollett not having Spanish enough to be capable of
making an entirely new version. In 1756, Archibald Hamilton,
formerly an Edinburgh printer, put Smollett at the head of the
contributors to his new monthly paper, The Critical Review, started
in opposition to Ralph Griffiths's Monthly Review. Smollett, as we
have seen, was trenchant in attack; and his writings in The Critical
Review involved him in quarrels with Grainger, Joseph Reed,
Churchill, Shebbeare and several others. To digress for a moment
from the chronological order of his doings, in January 1757, Garrick
brought on the stage at Drury lane Smolletts farce of life at sea,
The Reprisal, or the Tars of Old England, a rollicking play, full
of the oddities of national character and sure of popularity because
of its attacks on the French Garrick having gone out of his way
to see that Smollett was well remunerated, Smollett has praise
for him in The Critical Review, and, later, more of it in 'a work
of truth,' his History of England. In 1759, Smollett was fined
£100 and suffered three months' not uncomfortable imprisonment
in the king's bench prison (which he was afterwards to describe in
Sir Launcelot Greaves) for impugning, in The Critical Review,
the courage of admiral Sir Charles Knowles.
Meanwhile, at the close of 1757, he published the first four
volumes of his History of England, bringing it down to the treaty
of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748. The work seems to have been a mere
bookseller's venture. Hume had already published two volumes
on the Stewart period, and was known to be at work on the
Tudors? In order to take the wind out of his sails by bringing
out a complete history before him, Smollett worked very hard,
reading, he said, 300 volumes; and, in twenty months, com-
pleted a work written, though in haste, with his usual clearness
and force. What he really thought of public affairs was not to
become evident till the publication of The History of an Atom,
some years later. Between 1761 and 1765, he added five more
volumes to his History of England, bringing the story down to
the moment of publication, and taking opportunities, by the way,
1 Cf. chap. xii, post.
5


## p. 41 (#67) ##############################################

Miscellaneous Work.
Sir Launcelot Greaves 41
ชา
of praising Fielding, Hume and others whom he had attacked in
earlier days.
The work of these strenuous years included, also, the prepara-
tion of Dodsley's Compendium of Voyages in seven volumes, among
which appeared Smollett's own account of the expedition against
Cartagena; the compiling of a Universal History, in which he com-
posed the histories of France, Germany and Italy, besides painfully
revising the contributions of his hacks ; eight volumes entitled The
Present State of the Nations; a translation, with Thomas Francklin,
of the works of Voltaire; and two further excursions into journalism
-one of them as editor of The North Briton, a tory paper started
in May 1762, in support of Lord Butel. While Smollett was in the
king's bench prison, in 1759, Newbery, the bookseller, secured his
services for his new monthly paper, The British Magazine. Its first
number, published in January 1760, contained the first instalment
of Smollett's fourth, and feeblest, novel, The Adventures of
Sir Launcelot Greaves. Sir Launcelot is an eighteenth century
gentleman who rides about the country in armour, attended
by his comic squire, Timothy Crabshaw, redressing grievances.
When one remembers their originals, Don Quixote and Sancho
Panza, it is impossible to feel much interest in this pair; and the
fun of the story, almost entirely, is horse-play. Some of the
lesser characters, however, are well done, including the sour
and crafty rogue, Ferret, said to be a caricature of Shebbeare.
Though the talk of captain Crowe, the naval man, whose
adventures as knight-errant are a burlesque of the hero's, in
the main resembles that of commodore Trunnion, it is very
suggestive, at times, of Alfred Jingle; and to Mrs Gobble, the
justice's wife, Bob Sawyer's landlady unquestionably owed her
indignation at being addressed as 'woman. ' Another feature of
note in the book is that it begins straight away with an admirable
piece of description, in the manner of Scott, leaving out the
exordium which had till then been usual.
By 1763, Smollett's health was broken by incessant overwork,
disappointment in his hopes of aid from Bute, and the excesses
of his own systema nervosum maxime irritabile. And, in April
of that year, the violent, affectionate man suffered the heaviest
of blows in the loss of his only child, Elizabeth, at the age of
fifteen. For the sake of his own health and his wife's spirits, he
left England in the month of June, and travelled across France
to Nice. In the autumn of 1764, he visited Genoa, Rome, Florence
+ Ct. chap. xvky post.
IL


## p. 42 (#68) ##############################################

42
Fielding and Smollett
1
and other towns of Italy; for the winter, he returned to Nice, and,
by June 1765, he was back in London. In the following year,
he published an account of his Travels through France and Italy,
one of the most entertaining books of travel extant, and a mine
of information, on the whole remarkably accurate, concerning
the natural phenomena, history, social life, economics, diet and
morals of the places described. Smollett had a lively and perti-
nacious curiosity, and, as his novels prove, a very quick eye. He
foresaw the merits of Cannes, then a small village, as a health-
resort, and the possibilities of the Corniche road. The chief
interest of the book, however, for the general reader, lies in its
unsparing revelation of the author's character. In place of the
bravery, serenity and sweetness of the dying Fielding, we have here
little but spleen, acerbity and quarrelsomeness. Smollett's fierce
engagements with innkeepers, postillions and fellow-travellers ;
his profound contempt for foreigners, now fortified by first-hand
observation; his scorn of the Roman catholic faith and ceremonies,
of duelling, of such domestic arrangements as the cicisbeo, of
petty and proud nobility, of a hundred other French institutions
and ways; and the shrewd sense and the keen eye (keener than
Carlyle's) for shams which fortify all his violent prejudices, combine
to make the book a masterpiece in description and ironic
criticism of men and manners. Not that he was wilfully blind to
merit or beauty; he has good words, now and then, even for a
foreign doctor. But he was determined to see everything with
his own eyes; and, being a sick man and splenetic, he saw every-
thing, from politics to statues and pictures, with an eye more or
less jaundiced. Sterne, who met Smollett in Italy, hit off the
truth, with his usual pungency, in the portrait of Smelfungus in
A Sentimental Journey.