Fielding had no illusions about the worth of his plays, and himself said that he left off writing for the stage when he should have begun. He wrote for money, and had no great respect for the understanding of an audience. ‘When he had contracted to bring on a play, or a farce,’ says Murphy, ‘it is well known by many of his friends now living, that he would go home rather late from a tavern and would, the next morning, deliver a scene to the players, written upon the papers which had wrapped the tobacco, in which he so much delighted.’ During the rehearsals of a comedy called The Wedding Day, Garrick, who was playing in it, objected to a scene and asked Fielding to cut it. ‘No, damn ’em,’ said Fielding, ‘if the scene isn’t a good one let them find it out.’ The scene was played, the audience noisily expressed their displeasure, and Garrick retired to the green-room, where his author was indulging his genius and solacing himself with a bottle of champagne. He had by this time drunk pretty plentifully; and cocking his eye at the actor, with streams of tobacco trickling down from the corner of his mouth, “What’s the matter, Garrick,” says he, “what are they hissing now?”
‘“Why, the scene that I begged you to retrench; I knew it would not do; and they have so frightened me, that I shall not be able to collect myself the whole night.”
‘“Oh, damn ’em,” replies the author, “they have found it out, have they?”’
This story is told by Arthur Murphy, and I am bound to say that I doubt its truth. I have known and had dealings with actor-managers, which is what Garrick was, and it does seem to me very unlikely that he would have consented to play a scene which he thought would wreck the play; but the anecdote wouldn’t have been invented unless it had been plausible. It at least indicates how Fielding’s friends and boon-companions regarded him.
If I have dwelt on his activity as a playwright, though it was after all not much more than an episode in his career, it is because I think it was important to his development as a novelist. Quite a number of eminent novelists have tried their hands at playwriting, but I cannot think of any that have conspicuously succeeded. The fact is that the techniques are very different, and to have learnt how to write a novel is of no help when it comes to writing a play. The novelist has all the time he wants to develop his theme, he can describe his characters as minutely as he chooses and make their behaviour plain to the reader by relating their motives; if he is skilful, he can give verisimilitude to improbabilities; if he has a gift for narrative, he can gradually work up to a climax which a long preparation makes more striking (a supreme example of this is Clarissa’s letter in which she announced her seduction); he does not have to show action, but only to tell it; he can make the persons explain themselves in dialogue for as many pages as he likes. But a play depends on action, and by action, of course, I don’t mean violent action like falling off a precipice or being run over by a bus; such an action as handing a person a glass of water may be of the highest dramatic intensity. The power of attention that an audience has is very limited, and it must be held by a constant succession of incidents; something fresh must be doing all the time; the theme must be presented at once and its development must follow a definite line, without digression into irrelevant bypaths; the dialogue must be crisp and to the point, and it must be so put that the listener can catch its meaning without having to stop and think; the characters must be all of a piece, easily grasped by the eye and the understanding, and however complex, their complexity must be plausible. A play cannot afford loose ends; however slight, its foundation must be secure and its structure solid.
When the playwright, who has acquired the qualities which I have suggested are essential to writing a play which audiences will sit through with pleasure, starts writing novels, he is at an advantage. He has learnt to be brief; he has learnt the value of rapid incident; he has learnt not to linger on the way, but to stick to his point and get on with his story; he has learnt to make his characters display themselves by their words and actions, without the help of description; and so, when he comes to work on the larger canvas which the novel allows, he can not only profit by the advantages peculiar to the form of the novel, but his training as a playwright will enable him to make his novel lively, swift-moving and dramatic. These are excellent qualities, and some very good novelists, whatever their other merits, have not possessed them. I cannot look upon the years Fielding spent writing plays as wasted; I think, on the contrary, the experience he gained then was of value to him when he came to writing novels.
In 1734 Fielding married Charlotte Cradock. She was one of the two daughters of a widow who lived in Salisbury, and nothing is known of her but that she was beautiful and charming. Mrs. Cradock was a worldly, strong-minded woman, who apparently did not approve of Fielding’s attentions to her daughter, and she can hardly be blamed for that, since his means of livelihood were uncertain and his connection with the theatre can hardly have inspired a prudent mother with confidence; anyhow, the lovers eloped, and though Mrs. Cradock pursued, ‘she did not catch up with them in time to stop the marriage.’ Fielding has described Charlotte as Sophia in Tom Jones and again as Amelia in the novel of that name, so that the reader of those books can gain a very exact notion of what she looked like in the eyes of her lover and husband. Mrs. Cradock died a year later and left Charlotte fifteen hundred pounds. It came at a fortunate moment, since a play that Fielding had produced early in the year was a disastrous failure, and he was very short of cash. He had been in the habit of staying from time to time on the small estate which had been his mother’s, and he went there now with his young wife. He spent the next nine months lavishly entertaining his friends and enjoying the various pursuits which the country offered, and on his return to London with what, it may be supposed, remained of Charlotte’s legacy he took the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, and there presently produced the best (they say) and the most successful of his plays – Pasquin; a Dramatic Satire on the Times.
When the Licensing Act became law, and so put an end to his theatrical career, Fielding had a wife and two children and precious little money to support them on.
He had to find a means of livelihood. He was thirty-one. He entered the Middle Temple, and though, according to Arthur Murphy, ‘it happened that the early taste he had taken of pleasure would occasionally return upon him; and conspire with his spirit and vivacity to carry him into the wild enjoyments of the town’, he worked hard, and he was in due course called to the Bar. He was ready to follow his profession with assiduity, but he seems to have had few briefs; and it may well be that the attorneys were suspicious of a man who was known only as a writer of light comedies and political satires. Moreover, within three years of being called, he began to suffer from frequent attacks of gout which prevented him from regularly attending the courts. In order to make money he was obliged to do hack work for the papers. He found time, meanwhile, to write Joseph Andrews, his first novel. Two years later his wife died. Her death left him distracted with grief. Lady Louisa Stuart wrote: ‘He loved her passionately, and she returned his affection; yet led no happy life, for they were almost always miserably poor, and seldom in a state of quiet and safety. All the world knows what was his imprudence; if ever he possessed a score of pounds nothing could keep him from lavishing it idly, or make him think of tomorrow. Sometimes they were living in decent lodgings with tolerable comfort; sometimes in a wretched garret without necessaries, not to speak of the sponging-houses and hiding places where he was occasionally to be found. His elastic gaiety of spirit carried him through it all; but, meanwhile, care and anxiety were preying upon her more delicate mind, and undermining her constitution. She gradually declined, caught a fever, and died in his arms.’ This has an air of truth, and is in part confirmed by Fielding’s Amelia. We know that novelists habitually make use of any little experience that they have had, and when Fielding created the character of Billy Booth, he not only drew a portrait of himself and of his wife as Amelia, but utilized various incidents in their married life. Four years after his wife??
?s death he married her maid, Mary Daniel. She was at the time three months’ pregnant. The marriage shocked his friends, and his sister, who had lived with him since Charlotte’s death, left the house. His cousin Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu was haughtily scornful because he could ‘feel rapture with his cook-maid’. Mary Daniel had few personal charms, but she was an excellent creature and he never spoke of her but with affection and respect. She was a very decent woman, who looked after him well, a good wife and a good mother. She bore him two boys and a girl.
When still a struggling dramatist, Fielding had made advances to Sir Robert Walpole, then all-powerful; but though he dedicated to him with effusive compliments his play, The Modern Husband, the ungrateful Minister seems to have been disinclined to do anything for him. He therefore decided that he could do better with the party opposed to Walpole, and forthwith made overtures to Lord Chesterfield, one of its leaders. As Dr. Dudden puts it: ‘He could hardly have given a broader hint that he was ready to place his wit and humour at the disposal of the opposition, should they be willing to employ him.’ Eventually they showed themselves willing, and Fielding was made editor of a paper called The Champion, founded to attack and ridicule Sir Robert and his Ministry. Walpole fell in 1742 and, after a brief interlude, was succeeded by Henry Pelham. The party Fielding worked for was now in power, and for some years he edited and wrote for the papers which supported and defended the Government. He naturally expected that his services should be rewarded. Among the friends he had made at Eton, and whose friendship he had retained, was George Lyttelton, a member of a distinguished political family (distinguished to the present day) and a generous patron of literature. Lyttelton was made a Lord of the Treasury in Henry Pelham’s Government, and in 1784 by his influence Fielding was made Justice of the Peace for Westminster. Presently, so that he might discharge his duties more effectively, his jurisdiction was extended over Middlesex, and he established himself with his family in the official residence in Bow Street. He was well fitted for the post by his training as a lawyer, his knowledge of life and his natural gifts. Fielding says that before his accession the job was worth five hundred pounds a year of dirty money, but that he made no more than three hundred a year of clean. Through the Duke of Bedford he was granted a pension out of the public-service money. It is supposed that this was either one or two hundred pounds a year. In 1749 he published Tom Jones, which he must have been writing when he was still editing a paper on behalf of the Government. He received altogether seven hundred pounds for it, and since money at that period was worth five or six times at least what it is worth now, this sum was equivalent to something like four thousand pounds. That would be good payment for a novel to-day.
Fielding’s health by now was poor. His attacks of gout were frequent, and he had often to go to Bath to recuperate, or to a cottage he had near London. But he did not cease to write. He wrote pamphlets concerning his office; one, an Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Menace of Robbers is said to have caused the famous Gin Act to be passed; and he wrote Amelia. His industry was indeed amazing. Amelia was published in 1751 and in the same year Fielding undertook to edit still another paper, The Covent Garden Journal. His health grew worse. It was evident that he could no longer perform his duties at Bow Street, and in 1754, after breaking up ‘a gang of villains and cut-throats’ who had become the terror of London, he resigned his office to his half-brother, John Fielding. It looked as though his only chance of life was to seek a milder climate than that of England, and so, in the June of that year, 1954, he left his native country in The Queen of Portugal, Richard Veal, master, for Lisbon. He arrived in August, and two months later died. He was forty-seven years old.
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When I consider Fielding’s life, which from inadequate material I have briefly sketched, I am seized with a singular emotion. He was a man. As you read his novels, and few novelists have put more of themselves into their books than he, you feel the same sort of affection as you feel for someone with whom you have been for years intimate. There is something contemporary about him. There is a sort of Englishman that till recently was far from uncommon. You might meet him in London, at Newmarket, in Leicestershire during the hunting season, at Cowes in August, at Cannes or Monte Carlo in midwinter. He is a gentleman, and he has good manners. He is good-looking, good-natured, friendly and easy to get on with. He is not particularly cultured, but he is tolerant of those who are. He is fond of the girls and is apt to find himself cited as a co-respondent. He is not one of the world’s workers, but he sees no reason why he should be. Though he does nothing, he is far from idle. He has an adequate income and is free with his money. If war breaks out, he joins up and his gallantry is conspicuous. There is absolutely no harm in him and everyone likes him. The years pass and youth is over, he is not so well-off any more and life is not so easy as it was. He has had to give up hunting, but he still plays a good game of golf and you are always glad to see him in the card-room of your club. He marries an old flame, a widow with money, and, settling down to middle age, makes her a very good husband. The world to-day has no room for him and in a few years his type will be extinct. Such a man, I fancy, was Fielding. But he happened to have the great gift which made him the writer he was and, when he wanted to, he could work hard. He was fond of the bottle and he liked women. When people speak of virtue, it is generally sex they have in mind, but chastity is only a small part of virtue, and perhaps not the chief one. Fielding had strong passions, and he had no hesitation in yielding to them. He was capable of loving tenderly. Now love, not affection, which is a different thing, is rooted in sex, but there can be sexual desire without love. It is only hypocrisy or ignorance that denies it. Sexual desire is an animal instinct, and there is nothing more shameful in it than in thirst or hunger, and no more reason not to satisfy it. If Fielding enjoyed, somewhat promiscuously, the pleasures of sex, he was not worse than most men. Like most of us, he regretted his sins, if sins they are, but when opportunity occurred, committed them again. He was hot-tempered, but kind-hearted, generous and, in a corrupt age, honest; an affectionate husband and father; courageous and truthful, and a good friend to his friends, who till his death remained faithful to him. Though tolerant to the faults of others, he hated brutality and double-dealing. He was not puffed up by success and, with the help of a brace of partridges and a bottle of claret, bore adversity with fortitude. He took life as it came, with high spirits and good humour, and enjoyed it to the full. In fact he was very like his own Tom Jones, and not unlike his own Billy Booth. He was a very proper man.
I should, however, tell the reader that the picture I have drawn of Henry Fielding does not at all accord with that drawn by the Master of Pembroke in the monumental work to which I have often referred, and to which I owe much useful information. ‘Until comparatively recently,’ he writes, ‘the conception of Fielding which prevailed in the popular imagination was that of a man of brilliant genius, endowed with what is called “a good heart” and many amiable qualities, but dissipated and irresponsible, guilty of regrettable follies, and not wholly unstained even by graver vices.’ And he has done his best to persuade his readers that Fielding has been grossly maligned.
But this conception, which Dr. Dudden tries to refute, is that which prevailed in Fielding’s lifetime. It was held by persons who knew him well. It is true that he was violently attacked in his own day by his political and literary enemies, and it is very likely that the charges that were brought against him were exaggerated; but if charges are to be damaging they must be plausible. For example: the late Sir Stafford Cripps had many bitter enemies who were only too anxious to throw mud at him; they said that he was a turncoat and a traitor to his class; but it would never have occurred to them to say that he was a lecher and a drunkard, since he was well-known to be a man of high moral character and fiercely abstemious. It would only have made them absurd. In the same way, the legends that gather round a famous man may not be true, but they could not be believed unless they are specious. Arth
ur Murphy relates that on one occasion Fielding, in order to pay the tax-collector, got his publisher to give him an advance and, while taking the money home, met a friend who was in even worse case than himself, so he gave him the money and, when the tax-collector called, sent him the message: ‘Friendship has called for the money and had it; let the collector call again.’ Dr. Dudden shows that there can be no truth in the anecdote; but if it was invented, it is because it was credible. Fielding was accused of being a spendthrift; he probably was; it went with his insouciance, his high spirits, his friendliness, conviviality and indifference to money. He was thus often in debt and probably on occasion haunted by ‘duns and bumbailiffs’; there is little doubt that when he was at his wits’ end for money he applied to his friends for help and they gave it. So did the noble-minded Edmund Burke. As a playwright, Fielding had lived for years in theatrical circles, and the theatre has in no country, either in the past or the present, been regarded as a favourable place to teach the young a rigid continence. Anne Oldfield, by whose influence Fielding had his first play produced, was buried in Westminster Abbey; but since she had been kept by two gentlemen, and had had two illegitimate children, permission to honour her with a monument was refused. It would be strange if she did not grant her favours to the handsome youth that Fielding then was; and, since he was pretty well penniless, it would not be surprising if she had helped him with some of the funds she received from her protectors. It may be that his poverty, but not his will, consented. If in his youth he was much given to wenching, he was no different from most young men in his day (and ours) who had his opportunities and advantages. And, doubtless, he spent ‘many a night drinking deep in taverns’. Whatever philosophers may aver, common sense is pretty well agreed that there is a different morality for youth and age, and a different one according to the station in life. It would be reprehensible for a doctor of divinity to engage in promiscuous fornication, but natural for a young man to do so; and it would be unpardonable for the master of a college to get drunk, but to be expected on occasion, and not really disapproved, in an undergraduate.