The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  There are so many passages in Fielding which describe the ways in which the author looked at actual life—and he saw more than just the life on the Bath Road—that one is sometimes left wondering whether any novelist before or since has seen it quite full face. Such expressions as the “vast authentic doomsday-book of nature,” from which he tells us he learned his material, announce, in a world that was still cluttered with Clelias and Astræas and other polite and pretty riff-raff of formal romance, a new method of literary craftsmanship.

  The method was the new and revolutionary one of using a sitter for every portrait, even though this entailed rather obviously posing the sitter. It was poles apart from the old romantic method of turning one’s back on life, to limn features of unearthly pallor and more than human loveliness.

  But Fielding’s was a deceptive method. It led him to believe that he was a realist. The truth is that nothing but Fielding’s flow of high spirits has concealed for so long the fact that he was a hopeless romantic. The later breed of romantics has so rarely been high-spirited, that one is to be forgiven for not having immediately recognised Fielding as one of their company. But try to fit his glowing Sophia Western, or ill-treated but victorious Adams, or Fanny waiting at the altar clad in a white dimity nightgown, into the world of reality, and we can see at once that they stand out like a bunch of bright toy-balloons. Fielding’s characters, by giving false details of their parents—though the author was honest enough about his debt to Don Quixote: which despite the general opinion to the contrary has done more to preserve the romantic tradition in the popular mind than to destroy it—have succeeded in getting through the frontiers of realism on the passports of romance. If Henry Fielding had been a character in fiction we should say that he had been conceived by a mind more anxious about art than about humanity. After his first success he described the downward drooping curve of tragedy. To compare the Fielding of youth who made those vulgar, purple splashes of ostentation that most truly vivacious young men make in trying to squeeze from life more than life is ordinarily prepared to give, with the Fielding of middle age—which is as far as we can follow him—trying to make three hundred pounds per annum do the work of five, and feeling life slipping through his sick fingers, not rendering even its natural dues, is to compare Success with Failure.

  The biographer of Fielding is fortunate if he has preceded and not succeeded good Miss Godden. Her patient and laborious researches have stuck up the stock stories that concern Fielding like so many vermin on a wire. The best stories come from his first biographer, Murphy, who did not know what a lynx higher criticism was to be. But many of the apocryphal stories even if they do not bear the stamp of truth at least contain the spirit of it. And we may reassure ourselves that there is no man of genius who left no letters, of whom we know more and have a fairer general impression.

  It is no part of our work to give a complete and concise biography of Fielding. It will serve our purpose far better merely to plot a few points on the ascending curve. We catch the first, vivid, unmistakable glimpse of Fielding almost in schoolboyhood, a rakish Etonian abducting an heiress “on a Sunday, when she was on her way to church,” and assaulting her guardian so that the aid of the Law had to be invoked; then we see him living the life in town, the poor but successful, practising dramatist of twenty-one, declaring that he must be “hackney writer or hackney coachman”; a man who could write eighteen plays in nine years, and those so casually that when Garrick begged him to revise a scene he refused, and remarked when the crowd hissed the frantic Garrick, who had the misfortune to be acting in the piece, “Oh, damn ‘em. They have found it out, have they? ”

  During all this time, like the unfortunate young man in Joseph Andrews, he

  met with smart fellows who drank with lords they did

  not know, and intrigued with women they never saw.

  Covent Garden was now the farthest stretch of my amb

  ition; where I shone forth in the balconies of the play

  houses, visited whores, made love to orange-wenches,

  and damned plays.

  Next we see Fielding married to an heiress of most modest fortune, setting up a showy equipage in extravagant yellow, and running through his wife’s fortune in three years. After that he is to be seen more in the Temple than in Covent Garden—first obvious pathetic sign of a man of moods trying to become a man of substance—leading a lawyer’s life, and writing plays that were suppressed by the censor.

  Then in 1742 came Joseph Andrews and in the words of his first biographer: “Fielding’s genius broke forth at once in an effulgence superior to all the rays of light it had before emitted like the sun in his morning glory,” which is to say that he found himself.

  There are few writers who have tasted success more frequently, yet have ended their lives so near to failure, as Fielding. At the very moment when his genius was breaking forth Fielding himself was living in the valley of the shadow of death, or in that worse darkness, the thick shadow of the sick-room. His wife was wasting away, and Fielding discovered how much of his vitality she was carrying with her. He could not write; though his need was greater than before. The hackney writer who had been able to toss off two acts of a play in a morning writing on the paper his tobacco had been wrapped in, now had to apologise to a public that was being kept waiting for his miscellanies.

  And when these did appear it seemed as though the embittered blood of the harassed anxious husband had been transfused into the veins of the mischievous, mercurial writer. Where in Joseph Andrews he had hit and left no bruise, in Jonathan Wild he carefully broke the skin, and not only the thin skin, of his readers every time. This polite, satirical eulogy of a cut-throat highwayman stung like a wasp; or like Swift. And the sting hurt because there was poison behind it. Then came The Journey from This World to the Next, which fairly reeks of sick-rooms and which offered yet more release for a whole load of hatreds that he was carrying; hatred of misers, cruel men, hypocrites, ungrateful men and traitors. And all the while his wife was growing sicker and more wasted on her thin diet of Bath Waters, and Fielding more racked by anguish in the mind, and gout in the body. This, indeed, is one of the moments in his life when it must have appeared to him as though the hounds of a malicious Fate were on the point of closing round him.

  In 1744 his wife died. And three years later he married her maid. Here there is a conspiracy of Fate to distort the truth. Any normally imaginative reader will reconstruct the marriage as a sordid affair, simply a righting of the wrong side of the sheet. But Lady Wortley Montagu’s granddaughter, speaking from family hearsay, where she would have picked up the worst, had there been any, assures us that the second Mrs. Fielding was “an excellent creature devotedly attached to her mistress and almost broken-hearted by her loss.”

  It is hard to imagine what Henry Fielding, descendant of the Earls of Denbigh, found to talk about with a housemaid; probably the first Mrs. Fielding was the topic of their conversation. And with all her deficiencies the second Mrs. Fielding must have been a good wife. She soothed her husband’s mind out of satire into sympathy, and gave the world Tom Jones and Amelia in place of more Jonathan Wild.

  And since Tom Jones is our objective we will press on to it across hot acres of Jacobite politics. In February 1749 it appeared. By May of the same year Walpole had written, “Millar the bookseller has done very generously by him (Fielding). Finding Tom Jones, for which he had given him six hundred pounds, sell so greatly he has since given him another hundred.”

  Just a year later, Fielding was begging the Duke of Bedford to arrange easy terms for him to rent one hundred pounds’ worth of property that was needed to qualify for a magistrateship. And Dukes were Dukes then: patronage had not yet been killed by a democratic budget. The Duke arranged for Fielding to have his property. Fielding got on to the Bench and London got her best magistrate. But Fielding seems to have been designed by nature to repel money as well as need it. For by living honestly in a wicked world he straightway cont
rived to halve the income he had striven so hard for. He dolefully records:

  I will confess that my private affairs, at the beginning of the winter, had but a gloomy aspect; for I had not plundered the public, or the poor, of those sums which DF men, who are always ready to plunder both as much as they can, have been pleased to suspect me of taking; on the contrary by composing, instead of inflaming, the quarrels of porters and beggars (which, I blush when I say, hath not been universally practised) and by refusing to take a shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not have had another left, I had reduced an income of about five hundred a year of the dirtiest money upon earth, to little more than three hundred, considerable portion of which remained with my clerk.

  At this period there strays upon the scene a cad with a camera, Walpole, who leaves us with this snapshot of the magistrate‘s ménage. He was banqueting, writes Walpole, with a “blind man and three Irishmen on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth.” It is a falsifying photograph: Fielding’s company may have been poor, and his food bad, and his cloth dirty. But his mind was rich, his intentions good, and his official life immaculate. Indeed, in the fine vigour and human comprehension of his magistrature we can detect the first advertisement of those qualities that made Fielding a novelist of more than common energy and more than common compassion.

  He made London a place where a man might walk along the Strand without molestation from footpads; and gangs were then almost as destructive to human life as traffic in the same locality is to-day. Fielding, indeed, ranks with Peel and Lord Byng as one of the great reformers of the corps of public safety. He found a watch that was, he says, “chosen out of those poor old decrepit People who are from their want and bodily Strength rendered incapable of getting a livelihood.”

  “These men armed only with a pole which some of them are scarce able to lift ” were his troops for a punitive expedition against the massed rogues and vagabonds of London. For Fielding came of hot-headed and military stock. He had Hapsburg blood in his veins, or thought he had. And Mr. Justice Fielding, with spectacular indiscretion, led the army of the watch himself. And won. Such an action is a piece of the whole man.

  Six years after the publication of Tom Jones came Amelia. And here the pot-house roaring of the former had died down to a melancholy domestic plaint. The object of Amelia was to “Promote the cause of virtue ”—words that won the immediate attention and respect of Johnson for the whole work—“and to expose some of the glaring evils as well public as private which at present infest the country.”

  In short, it was the production of a moralist rather than of a novelist; it elevated rather than excited. And the publisher, with that unflattering estimate of human nature that is the safeguard of his kind, knew that the public would not like it, and that the booksellers would not buy. He had paid a thousand pounds for it, and with more than common cunning he withheld his usual trade discount from Amelia. The trade was first angry, then interested, then completely deceived. And finally bought the whole impression to show that they knew a bargain.

  After the publication of Amelia Fielding showed the first alarming signs that he was feeling the pace. His body sagged in dropsy. His mind still lively was now denied life. He grew spiteful like a hornet. He antagonised everyone, including Smollett, who was always ready to come forward when two were wanted to make a quarrel. He drank the Bath Waters and grew worse. He was tapped by surgeons and grew desperate in health. When finally he took a trip to Lisbon his emaciated face and swollen body drew jeers from a quayside crowd.

  Once on board the ship he dicovered that the sea can be a most uncomfortable element for a sick man. His temper was always on the point of discharge. He abused a custom’s house officer for not removing his hat in the presence of Mrs. Fielding, the risen lady’s maid, cursed the captain because he was deaf, and later threatened to prosecute him because he was a thief.

  Four months after Fielding arrived in Lisbon he was dead.

  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote the best short memorial account of him:

  I am sorry for Henry Fielding’s death, not only as I shall read no more of his writings, but because I believe he lost more than others, as no man enjoyed life more than he did; though few had less occasion to do so, the highest of his preferment being the raking in the lowest sinks of vice and misery. I should think it a nobler and less nauseous employment to be one of the staff officers that conduct the nocturnal weddings. His happy constitution (even when he had, with great pains, half demolished it) made him forget every evil when he was before a venison pasty, or over a flask of champagne; and I am persuaded he has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth. His natural spirits gave him rapture with his cookmaid, and cheerfulness when he was starving in a garret. There was a great similitude between his character and that of Sir Richard Steele. He had the advantage both in learning and, in my opinion, genius; they both agreed in wanting money in spite of all their friends, and would have wanted it, if their hereditary lands had been as extensive as their imagination; yet each of them was so formed for happiness, it is a pity he was not immortal.

  In our present age when we have almost forgotten how life should be enjoyed, the loud laughs and huge gusto of Fielding make him loom out strange and gigantic like a man seen in a mist. Indeed, in spirit, Richardson, the analyst of the emotions, the man with his eye for ever on the sensitive, shrinking, human mind, comes far nearer to the modern novelist than Fielding. It is only in the irresistible ease of his method that Fielding steps so easily across the century and three-quarters that divide him from us.

  Thackeray, in the midst of misgivings, once almost exploded with affection for Fielding.

  What a genius! What a vigour! What a bright-eyed intelligence and observation! What a wholesome hatred for meanness and knavery! What a vast sympathy! What a cheerfulness! What a manly relish of life! What a love of human kind! What a poet is here—watching, meditating, brooding, creating!…

  That is all very well. But it has been quoted so often that a reader unacquainted with the novelist himself might not realise that there were faults besides. Fielding could not, for instance, with the single lovely exception of Amelia, draw a woman. Sophia Western is no more than a dutiful daughter with a naughty temper; and Fanny is merely healthy. Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa are both developed women—it is obvious that he spent more time in thinking about his characters than ever Fielding did—beside them.

  Thackeray was right when he said that the wit of Fielding “is wonderfully wise and detective; it flashes upon a rogue and lightens up a rascal like a policeman’s lantern.” And he was skilful in keeping women altogether out of the range of illumination. For Fielding had a jovial habit of making his women like men; and blackguardly men at that. His Jenny Jones and Molly Seagrim and Mrs. Slipslop, Mrs. Townsend and Mrs. Waters are eighteenth century characters in the accepted dissolute male tradition. Fielding’s women sin as artlessly as Moll Flanders; and in Tom Jones they sin almost as tediously. And that unfortunate sentence in Tom Jones: “though Sophia came head foremost to the ground, she happily received not the least damage ” may possibly explain their failure.

  And not on all the men who cheated and reeled and swore their way across his pages did Fielding leave the signature of creation. His Blifil, for example, whose author loathed him with imperfectly explained hatred, serves no purpose but to be so morally jet black that the dark shadows of Tom are forgotten. And Squire All-worthy, “a human being replete with benevolence, meditating in which manner he might render himself most acceptable to his Creator by doing most good to his creatures,” would be more nearly tolerable as a parody of Grandison than as an original character earning his own living in fiction.

  When Fielding used his wit as a bat to beat his characters over the head he produced the immortal army of caricatures, Adams, Trulliber, Western, and the rest. A caricaturist is perhaps the only artist who is honoured in his own country more than abroad; and Fieldi
ng’s talent for putting Hogarth into words explains Scott’s remark that “of all the works of imagination to which English has given origin the writings of Henry Fielding are perhaps most decidedly and exclusively her own.” The caricatures are perfect of their kind; human enough to be horrible, and brutish enough to be our brothers.

  Johnson made the remark that there is as much difference between Fielding and Richardson as “between a man who knew how a watch was made and one who could tell the hour by looking at the dial plate.” There is; and there are more people who need to know the time than want to set up as watch-makers. And in his best characters, even if he did not know much about their inner intricacies, Fielding at least wrote as though he did.

  Anyone who cannot enjoy Fielding will probably have a thin enough time in the rest of English fiction. Just as anyone who persists in calling Tom Jones the greatest novel in the language must have had a thin enough time already.

  Gibbon predicted that “Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escurial and the Imperial Eagle of the House of Austria.” In its day such a pronouncement was brave to the point of blasphemy. To-day the prophecy has been fulfilled, though History (which was probably under some sense of obligation towards Gibbon) has dragged in a world war and a revolution to justify him.

  Tobias George Smollett

  Smollett was a Scotsman. He was red-headed. He thought Scottish scenery better than English. And he had the natural Scottish talent for detecting and proclaiming the defects in English character. Out of the last he got his living and his reputation; and what we call English fiction got one of its best story-tellers.

  Smollett is one of those characters in whom the eighteenth century seems to have been richer than any other; men who contained in their brief but intense lives the whole essence of their time. His arrival in London, a surgeon’s apprentice, all rawness and r’s, with The Regicide, a tragedy in verse—an excellent name for it—under his arm; his search for a patron; his temporary failure; and his lasting bitterness, might be the picture of any literary aspirant of the period.