by Steven Moore
Adams is rather vain about his learning, as well as hypocritical—he counsels Joseph to submit to divine providence, but when he fears his son has drowned he ignores his own counsel—but he is not guilty of affectation, “the only source of the true ridiculous” according to Fielding’s preface. This is what distinguishes Adams from other learned fools in English literature such as Butler’s Sir Hudibras, Swift’s narrator of A Tale of a Tub, D’Urfey’s Gabriel John, and everyone’s favorite punching-bag pedant, Martinus Scriblerus. Unlike them, Adams’s learning has not eclipsed his humanity, especially with regard to charity. This quality—which Fielding, like Paul in his first epistle to the Corinthians, places above all others—is conspicuous in its absence both in those earlier pedants and in most of the other characters in Joseph Andrews, including Pamela when she shows up near the end. Adams never employs his erudition in impertinence or imposture, and though he’s occasionally guilty of tactlessness and insensitivity, such lapses are never the result of maliciousness or inhumanity. His innocence compensates for his foolishness, and his love of learning for its own sake—as opposed to the dubious uses to which other pedants put it—encourages to reader to forgive his trespasses. His erudition never overshadows his humanity, and though he may be a learned fool, he is a lovable one.
Fielding’s own erudition is everywhere on display, from his critifictional prefaces and digressions, to his satires of the law and theology (including the new sect of Methodists), and especially so in his comic use of the conventions of epic poetry. The latter, aimed at “the classical reader” mentioned in the preface, is always amusing, though Ian Watt goes too far when he suggests “Fielding’s novel surely reflects the ambiguous attitude of his age, an age whose characteristic literary emphasis on the mock-heroic reveals how far it was from the epic world it so much admired” (254). Instead, Fielding surely regarded classical epics not as depictions of a lost world but as literary constructs every bit as artificial and unrealistic as the voluminous French romances of the 17th century, and thus fair game for satire. Fielding realized the novel should be used as a vehicle for a realistic depiction of life, not an idealistic one as in Homer’s epics or Richardson’s Pamela. Consequently, he used realistic British names (even “Pamela” was exotically literary: early readers weren’t sure how to pronounce it), referred to real inns and people in the novel (Joseph recalls serving a dinner party that included Alexander Pope), and voiced realistic concerns like the socioeconomic dependency of the poor on the rich when he records Lady Booby’s return to her country parish:
She entered the parish amidst the ringing of bells and the acclamations of the poor, who were rejoiced to see their patroness returned after so long an absence, during which time all her rents had been drafted to London, without a shilling being spent among them, which tended not a little to their impoverishing; for if the Court would be severely missed in such a city as London, how much more must the absence of a person of great fortune be felt in a little country village, for whose inhabitants such a family finds a constant employment and supply, and with the offals of whose table the infirm, aged, and infant poor are abundantly fed with a generosity which hath scarce a visible effect on their benefactor’s pockets? (4.1)
What a remarkable thing to note, something one would expect to see in a serious, socially conscientious novel of the 19th-century, not a raucous, road-trip novel of the 18th century. Nor would one expect, amid all the bawdy seductions and rampant Three Stoogery, a textbook demonstration of the dominance of subjectivity over objectivity in the quotidian world (two lawyers give Adams diametrically opposed views of a local gentlemen, both of which are wrong according to Adams’s host [2.3]) and in historiography (“some ascribing victory to the one, and others to the other party; some representing the same man as a rogue, to whom others give a great an honest character” [3.1]).
On the other hand, one does expect some metafictional fun from an avowed disciple of Cervantes and Scarron—whose Comic Novel is as important an influence as Don Quixote—and Fielding doesn’t disappoint.185 As in their novels, there are facetious chapter titles (e.g., 3.8: “Which Some Readers Will Think Too Short, and Others Too Long”); phony assurances that the narrator based his “biography” on interviews with the principal characters; intrusive but always welcome digressions on various topics; an explanation for why he prefers dividing his novel into chapters (partly to deter dog-earing books); blasé refusals to narrate certain scenes that don’t interest him (such as Pamela’s first interview with Lady Booby, which, if anything like hers with Lady Davers, must have been a real catfight); his admission at one point that he included a “sarcastic panegyric” on vanity “for no other purpose than to lengthen out a short chapter” (1.15; not true, for vanity is a major contributor to ridiculousness, Fielding’s mock-epic theme); invitations to the reader to participate (“That beautiful young lady, the morning, now rose from her bed, and with a countenance blooming with fresh youth and sprightliness, like Miss* ― [*Whoever the reader pleases” (3.4)]); and technical asides (“Reader, we would make a simile on this occasion, but for two reasons: The first is, it would interrupt the description, which should be rapid in this part; but that doth not weigh much, many precedents occurring for such an interruption [in Homer and Virgil]. The second, and much the greater reason, is that we could find no simile adequate to our purpose” [3.6]). In a few instances Fielding followed his forebears too closely, such as the insertion of three interpolated stories—none of which is particularly interesting, and only one of which is germane to the plot—and in the hoary discovery processs by which Joseph’s true identity is revealed. And like Don Quixote, Joseph Andrews contains a number of minor inconsistencies that were not cleared up in Fielding’s subsequent revisions. (Unlike Richardson, Fielding made his novel better, but not perfect.) As with Parson Adams’s foibles, these are readily forgiven, for this vibrant, hugely entertaining novel is a spectacular achievement, the first British novel to match the sophistication of the best European fiction of the time, as continental readers would attest when Joseph Andrews was translated into French, German, Danish, and Italian later in the 1740s.
I noted in chapter 2 that French writers in the 17th century had two paths open to them: D’Urfé’s way (earnest, moral romance) and Sorel’s way (worldly, iconoclastic comedy). Richardson and Fielding now offered similar avenues to 18th-century English novelists, for both spoke of introducing a new “species of writing.” In a letter explaining his motive for writing Pamela, Richardson wrote, “I thought the story, if written in an easy and natural manner, suitably to the simplicity of it, might possibly introduce a new species of writing, that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous, with which novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and virtue” (Selected Letters, 41). Using the same phrase, and likewise distancing himself from “romance-writing,” Fielding boasts near the end of the preface to Joseph Andrews of his new “species of writing, which I have affirmed to be hitherto unattempted in our language.”186 Henceforth, most English novelists would follow either Richardson’s way (which most ladies preferred) or Fielding’s way (for the lads). This choice is similar to the one that faced English novelists at the beginning of the 17th century, that between the high road of romance and the low road of comedy, and of course these are roughly the same options the Greeks and Romans left behind: as I wrote in my previous volume,
Ancient Greek fiction would lead to medieval romances—especially those satirized at the beginning of Don Quixote—and Elizabethan love stories, the moral novels of Samuel Richardson and Frances Burney (and even the “immoral” ones of Sade), Gothic thrillers, Sir Walter Scott’s historical sagas, eventually degenerating in our day into paperback romances, formulaic sci-fi and fantasy novels, and the soap operas of daytime television, telenovelas as they’re aptly called in Spanish. Ancient Roman fiction, on the other hand, would l
ead to Rabelais and Don Quixote itself, to Sorel, Swift, Sterne, and Fielding (Joseph Andrews begins as a parody of the romance novel before changing horses), to Voltaire, Huysmans, and Wilde, and eventually to Ulysses, to Céline and the Beats, culminating in the ambitious meganovels of Gaddis, Barth, Pynchon, Coover, Theroux, Vollmann, and Wallace. (100)
But leave it to a woman to mess up this tidy male scheme.
Fielding’s younger sister Sarah (1710–68) was a friend of Richardson, and in her first novel, The Adventures of David Simple (1744), she attempted a hybrid of the two novelists. Like Pamela, her novel is a Christian allegory about moral rectitude, practically a Sunday-school homily on benevolence; and like Joseph Andrews, it is a scathing satire on British society, a bitter sermon on hypocrisy, envy, selfishness, class prejudice, and mean-spiritedness. “A kind of secularized Pilgrim’s Progress,” as Jerry Beasley calls it in Novels of the 1740s (183), Fielding’s novel concerns a good but naïve man allegorically named David Simple, who is cheated out of his heritage by a scheming brother (shades of Jacob and Esau in Genesis); disgusted by this betrayal, Simple goes out into the wilderness of this world (central London) in search of a true friend. Like Diogenes in search of an honest man, he is disappointed in most people he meets, beginning with crooks in a gambling den (the London stock exchange), where he is offered insider-trading tips. Many of those he encounters have Bunyanesque names as allegorical as his: Mr. Splatter besplatters others in ridicule (à la Sarah’s brother Henry), while Mr. Varnish conceals his ill-will beneath a veneer of politeness. (Actually these names owe as much to the tradition of comedic Restoration stage names.) A younger, less accident-prone Parson Adams—in a later novel called The Cry (1754), Fielding criticizes readers who focus on the clownish pastor’s pratfalls and “overlook the noble simplicity of his mind” (prologue to part 5)—noble Simple is easily taken in by people, and is so disappointed in them that at one point he wonders “whether he should not go to some remote corner of the earth, lead the life of a hermit, and never see a human face again.”187 Fortunately, he wins back his financial estate and uses the money to rescue three good gentry from poverty: a woman named Cynthia, and a brother and sister named Valentine and Camilla. Turns out Cynthia and Valentine are old flames, and after the brother and sister are reconciled with their father (who had been led astray by their evil stepmother), a double wedding follows, along with a concluding sermon on tolerance and benevolence.
Technically, it’s a jejune effort, somewhat at odds with itself as the author tries to meld Richardsonian romance (but without the melodrama) with Fieldingesque satire (but without the bawdiness and political barbs). She effectively conveys the desperation of a certain class of women who find themselves without money or a husband (like Fielding herself), untrained to support themselves, and thus dependent on the kindness of others, who mistreat them with smiling condescension and emotional blackmail. But her apologues lose something due to Fielding’s decision to report them secondhand rather than dramatize them firsthand: everything is filtered through David Simple, who reduces everything to “malignity” on the part of others. Like Galesia in Barker’s Lining of the Patchwork-Screen, he spends most of his time merely listening to stories about Britons behaving badly, shaking his head after each recital and then moving on. (There’s a novella-length one in the second half, set in France, that really drags down the novel.) Effeminately sympathetic and quick to cry, Simple is a bland, sexless character—the “true friend” he seeks could be of either gender—and largely passive despite his occasional acts of generosity. After a while, the reader becomes as annoyed as Spatter “to find him always going on with his goodness,—usefulness,—and morality” (2.2), as though his simple appeals to those virtues will solve the problems entrenched in a class-bound patriarchal society like England’s in the 1740s.188 By relating this material secondhand, Fielding seems to want to shield her readers from her dark materials; like the distressed “companion” to a touchy old lady, Fielding wants to speak her mind, but not to offend. Early on, she shies away from reporting a lower-class domestic argument “for, as I hope to be read by the polite world, I would avoid everything of which they can have no idea” (1.3). Her high-mindedness also causes her to withhold the details of Simple’s proposal to Camilla, “as I have too much regard for my readers to make them third persons to lovers” (4.8), and she doesn’t even provide physical descriptions of her protagonists: since “the writers of novels and romances have already exhausted all the beauties of nature to adorn their heroes and heroines, I shall leave it to my readers’ imagination to form them just as they like best: It is their minds I have taken most pains to bring them acquainted with” (4.9)—a defiant departure from both Richardson and her brother, but one that leaves her novel in the realm of Christian allegory rather than that of the realistic novel. At best, it resembles the sort of conte philosophique Voltaire was about to embark upon.
Fielding pulls her punches in David Simple, but takes off the gloves in a sequel she published nine years later, subtitled Volume the Last (1753).189 Instead of distracting readers with stories of others, Fielding keeps the focus on Simple as she subjects him to a variety of calamities in this grim adaptation of the book of Job (to which there are several allusions). After a decade of happiness in which Simple and his wife Camilla, along with Valentine and Cynthia (plus their quickly multiplying offspring) live together in the country at his expense, he is swindled out of his estate, which plunges them into poverty. They are surrounded by selfish, perfidious characters who pile on further indignities until death carries most of them off at an early age, which the survivors endure with Christian fortitude. In Simple’s deathbed soliloquy—which Fielding pieces together from “what, at various times, passed in his mind, and some part of which fell from his lips”—he admits his idealistic pursuit of friendship was his undoing, yet “there are some pleasures with which friendship pays her votaries that nothing in this world can equal” (7.10). There is no Job-like reversal at the end in reward for Simple’s unshakable faith in his god and benevolence, and the author concludes her dour story with an expression of relief (shared by the weary reader) that Simple has “escaped from the possibility of falling into any future afflictions, and that neither the malice of his pretended friends, nor the sufferings of his real ones, can ever again rend and torment his honest heart.”
Simple is too much of a Christian automaton, and his tormentors too cartoonishly despicable, for any of this to affect the mature reader, nor does Fielding win us over with her ill-disguised resentment of readers “who sit round a warm fireside, their minds unshaken by any accident from fortune and free from affliction,” who are thus “very little qualified to judge of the actions” of her protagonist (4.3). Volume the Last can be read as a modern martyrdom, a parable of Christian forbearance, or even as a realistic account of what would probably happen to people as naïve as Simple and his friends. (If Fielding wanted to expose Christian meekness as a losing strategy in this world, she couldn’t have done a better job.) The novel’s goody-goody characters and sickeningly sweet children also anticipate that gooiest of British genres, the sentimental novel. Like the first volume of David Simple, the sequel is at odds with itself, a clenched-teeth effort to put a happy face on a relentlessly gloomy situation, and like its predecessor, it is “a disturbing indictment of the principles of 18th-century society.”190 Intending to write no further sequels herself, the author concludes morbidly: “if any of my readers choose to drag David Simple from the grave, to struggle again in this world and to reflect, every day, on the vanity of its utmost enjoyments, they may use their own imaginations” (7.10). As it happens, one wag decided to take her up on that invitation, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Back in 1744, buoyed by the success of Pamela but nettled by the mockery Henry Fielding and lesser talents made of it, Samuel Richardson began drafting a novel that would steamroll his detractors: the enormous, inexorable Clarissa (1747–48), the longest novel in English lite
rature until recently.191 Although some of Richardson’s readers still had even longer French romances in their family libraries, he was self-conscious about its length and defends it in both his preface and postscript to the novel; in the latter, he claims “there was frequently a necessity to be very circumstantial and minute in order to preserve and maintain that air of probability which is necessary to be maintained in a story designed to represent real life,” and then concludes by arguing that bigger is better as long as the author is entertaining:
In a word, if in the history before us it shall be found that the spirit is duly diffused throughout; that the characters are various and natural, well distinguished and uniformly supported and maintained; if there be a variety of incidents sufficient to excite attention, and those so concluded as to keep the reader always awake; the length then must add proportionately to the pleasure that every person of taste receives from a well-drawn picture of nature. But where the contrary of all these qualities shock the understanding, the extravagant performance will be judged tedious though no longer than a fairy tale.