CHAPTER XXXIV

THE FAME OF FIELDING

DEFAMERS AND APOLOGISTS

Fielding's fame, in spite of detractors, thus steadily increased at home and abroad for a half-century after his death. English writers of the time who disapproved of his works had to admit that his fame had "not declined"; that Fielding's novels had maintained the great reputation they enjoyed during the author's lifetime. "Tom Jones," I still quote from those who professed to dislike the book, was "a consummate production," "a masterpiece of art, replete with the most striking delineation of manners"; and Mr. Fielding, though it may be lamented, was "the father of novel writing in England." His novels interested France; and they wrought a revolution in German fiction. International recognition so extensive as this was Matthew Arnold's definition of literary glory. Once attained, this glory could not be taken from Fielding; but attempts were made to remove all the bloom. For some years Murphy's essay, many times reprinted, seemed to satisfy public curiosity over the personality of Fielding. Not until after 1800 did anyone feel the need of a new biography. By that time a number of writers, as we have quoted them, had passed judgment upon the novels, several new anecdotes were in circulation, and Mrs. Barbauld collected in 1804 the correspondence of Richardson containing, while much else was omitted, nearly all that related to Fielding. If the letters about Fielding told the truth, he was a despicable character having the manners of a man bred in the stable.

These letters were published by Mrs. Barbauld, a clever Richardsonian, without comment and with evident satisfaction. They were accepted by her nonconformist brother Dr. John Aikin, who wrote of "Jonathan Wild" in his sketch of Fielding for his "General Biography" (1804): "It displays a familiarity with the scenes of low profligacies, which it is extraordinary a person in decent life should ever acquire. But there is no doubt that his [Fielding's] course of early licentiousness and extravagance had laid an unhappy foundation for too much knowledge of this kind." There was, we see, a sort of reversion through Richardson to the abuse that was heaped upon Fielding during his lifetime. The defamers, however, mainly relied upon Murphy whose sentences and phrases they lifted out of their context and then gave them a meaning never intended by the author. And when they had sufficiently degraded Fielding's character, it was quite easy to condemn all that the man had ever written. Literary dishonesty could go no further.

Fielding, whose first biographer had been an Irishman, now fell into the hands of a Scot named William Watson. This man, a Presbyterian still nourishing Jacobite prejudices, was employed in 1807 by some Edinburgh publishers to write "The Life of Henry Fielding, Esq., with Observations on his Character and Writings." The essay in question, besides forming an introduction to "The Select Works of Henry Fielding, Esq.," which they were then bringing out, was considered of sufficient importance to be enlarged and published separately the same year. This is the first biography of Fielding to appear in a volume by itself. In preparation for his task Watson read the novels but not the plays; he read two or three pamphlets more than Murphy reprinted, but he did not read the "Miscellanies," no copy of which, so far as he could discover, then existed; he sought to give the impression that he read

Fielding's newspapers, but his knowledge of them, and of the controversies they occasioned, was derived wholly from "The Gentleman's Magazine"; he read the preface to La Place's translation of "Tom Jones," but he did not look at the translation itself; he collected several of the hostile estimates of Fielding, but neglected most of those that were friendly; he searched the periodicals for some mention of Fielding's death, but could find none (though "The Gentleman's Magazine" and others had the usual notice), and so he concluded that Fielding was almost forgotten after his departure for Lisbon. "An estate at Stower," which Fielding squandered away, was placed in "Derbyshire." It was a simple undertaking to write a biography in those days. Watson's aim was to show "that Fielding, though immersed in pleasure and often enslaved by passion, possessed after all, a latent worth, which in a great measure redeems his character." Owing to his goodness of heart, the author of "Tom Jones" frequently performed, Watson declared, "actions that would have done honour to those who were more conspicuous for their virtue." It would be unfair, he thought, to infer from Fielding's works as a whole, however much some of them should be reprobated, that they were produced by a man "familiar with the last stages of vice."

Watson had no difficulty in developing and proving his thesis. With an air of perfect candour, he set out and went on to the end through a series of antithetical assertions, like those which I have just quoted and imitated; wherein one part of the sentence tends to neutralize or destroy the other. If it suited his purpose to reaffirm Murphy's statements, he reaffirmed them; if they were at variance with his thesis, he altered them by means of paraphrases that should say what he desired or he substituted others for them. Nor did self-contradiction have any terror for him. Eager to prove that Fielding's plays were unpopular as well as

worthless, he asserted that "not more than two or three of his farces continued long to be acted," though Murphy said in 1762 "that many of them are still acted every winter." Not satisfied with having the young playwright compose a farce in the course of two or three mornings, he added: "It is even said, that he was known, more than once, after passing the evening with his convivial friends, to have shewn them in the morning a farce of three Acts, that he had written during the hours they had devoted to sleep." From dramatic pieces so hastily constructed, it is clear, Watson went on to say, that Fielding "never derived any very substantial benefits." And yet when the biographer wished to describe the young man midway in an "unrestrained career of dissipation," he had to find the wherewithal for the spendthrift; accordingly Fielding's plays, we are then told, were "a source of great emolument to him."

Fielding's novels, it was admitted, were superior to Smollett's, but Smollett turned the laugh against his rival in the newspaper war. Fielding was probably sincere in his political opinions, but they were all erroneous: Watson declared that Amelia was a portrait of Fielding's second wife about whom nothing else could be ascertained, and afterwards quoted, without comment, Lady Mary's remark that the character was drawn from his first wife. In conceding an "amiable side" to Fielding's character, Watson paraphrased Murphy: "Every circumstance connected with the happiness of his family, seems to have warmly interested him. His wife and his children appear always to have been the first objects of his regard." But when it became necessary to explain the profligate's intense grief over the death of Charlotte Cradock, he devised a reason out of his own wicked heart. He then remarked of Fielding: "He could not but be alive to the justice of the reflections which must have been thrown on him by mankind, of

having, by his imprudent and irregular way of life, embittered, if not shortened, the days of his wife: . . . Every feeling of sympathy and regret, which was displayed by others for the object of his affection, must have served to awaken the recollection of his demerit, and to reproach him with having sacrificed, for the most contemptible gratifications, the welfare and happiness of one who should in a particular manner have been the object of his care and anxiety during life.”

Three years after Watson's infamous performance, appeared the well-known series of "British Novelists" edited by Mrs. Barbauld with a general essay on the "Origin and Progress of Novel Writing" and briefer essays on the various novelists. Of Fielding she chose "Tom Jones" and "Joseph Andrews," omitting "Amelia," which she held to be "inferior" to the others. Her "biographical and critical" essay on Fielding she prefixed to "Joseph Andrews." Mrs. Barbauld, the widow of a nonconformist clergyman, was a very refined and well-educated woman. She published poems and essays, popular in their day, and she is still remembered, not only for her edition of Richardson's letters but much more for her "Life," a noble poem found in most anthologies. She was one of the BlueStockings or "literary women" of the period. Like her brother Dr. Aikin, she was rather sceptical of the religious fervour of those who held to the Established Church and she accepted the tradition of her sect that Fielding was a very bad man. Evidence that he possessed some most admirable qualities rather puzzled her; and to be on the safe side she sometimes restated in more chastened phrases Murphy's eulogy of Fielding's merits. She could not understand, for example, how Fielding, being the wretch that he was, could have been constant to his wife. Murphy's words, as I have previously quoted them, were: "Though disposed to gallantry by his strong animal spirits, . . . he