I was such an old fool as to weep over Clarissa Harlowe, like any milkmaid of sixteen over the ballad of the Lady’s Fall. To say truth, the first volumes softened me by a near resemblance of my maiden days; but on the whole it is miserable stuff.… Clarissa follows the maxim of declaring all she thinks to all the people she sees, without reflecting that, in this mortal state of imperfection, fig leaves are as necessary for our minds as our bodies, and ’tis as indecent to show all we think as all we have. 78
The women of England now importuned the triumphant Richardson to depict for them an ideal man, as he had, they thought, portrayed an ideal woman in Pamela. He hesitated before this ensnaring task, but he was goaded on by Fielding’s satire of Pamela in Joseph Andrews, and Fielding’s full-length portrait of a man in Tom Jones. So, between November, 1753, and March, 1754, he sent forth in seven volumes The History of Sir Charles Grandison. The blasé mood of our time finds it hard to understand why this third novel had as great a success as the other two; the twentieth-century reaction against Puritanism and the Mid-Victorian compromise has closed our hearts to pictures of ideal goodness, at least in the male; we have found good men, but none without redeeming faults. Richardson tried to embellish Sir Charles with some minor shortcomings, but we still resent the impassable distance between him and ourselves. Moreover, virtue loses charm when it is put on parade. Grandison barely escaped canonization.
Richardson was so intent on preaching that he allowed some flaws into his literary art. He was almost devoid of humor and wit. His attempt to tell a long story through letters involved him in many improbabilities (remembering such reams of conversation); but it allowed him to present the same events from a variety of views, and it gave the narrative an intimacy hardly possible in a less subjective form. It was quite in the custom of the time to write long and confiding letters to trusted relatives or friends. Furthermore, the epistolary method gave scope to Richardson’s forte—the display of feminine character. There are faults here too: he knew men less than women, nobles less than commoners; and he seldom caught the variations, contradictions, and development in the soul. But a thousand details show his careful observation of human conduct. In these novels English psychological fiction was born, and the subjectivism that came to a fever in Rousseau.
Richardson took his success modestly. He continued his work as a printer, but he built himself a better home. He wrote long letters of advice to a wide circle of women, some of whom called him “dear Papa.” In his later years he paid with nervous sensitivity and insomnia the price of concentrated thought and diffuse art. On July 4, 1761, he died of a paralytic stroke.
His international influence was greater than that of any other Englishman of his time except Wesley and the elder Pitt. At home he helped to mold the moral tone of Johnson’s England, and to raise the morals of the court after George II. His ethical and literary legacy shared in forming Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield (1766) and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1811). In France he was considered without a rival in English fiction; “In no language whatsoever,” said Rousseau, “has a novel the equal of Clarissa, or even approaching it, ever been written.” 79 Richardson was translated by the Abbé Prévost; Voltaire dramatized Pamela in Nanine; Rousseau modeled La Nonvelle Héloïse on Clarissa in theme, form, and moral aim. Diderot rose to an ecstatic apostrophe in his Éloge de Richardson (1761); if, he said, he had to sell his library, he would keep, of all his books, only Homer, Euripides, Sophocles, and Richardson. In Germany Gellert translated and imitated Pamela, and wept over Grandison; 80 Klopstock went into raptures over Clarissa; Wieland based a play on Grandison; Germans made pilgrimages to Richardson’s home. 81 In Italy Goldoni adapted Pamela to the stage.
No one reads Richardson today except through the compulsions of scholarship; we have no leisure to write such letters, much less to read them; and the moral code of an industrial and Darwinian age flees impatiently from Puritan cautions and restraints. But we know that these novels represented, far more than the poetry of Thomson, Collins, and Gray, the revolt of feeling against the worship of intellect and reason; and we recognize in Richardson the father—as in Rousseau the protagonist—of that Romantic movement which, toward the end of the century, would triumph over the classical artistry of Pope and the lusty realism of Fielding.
2. Henry Fielding: 1707–54
When he came upon London in 1727 everyone admired his tall figure, stalwart presence, handsome face, jolly speech, and open heart; here was a man equipped by nature to enjoy life in all its relish and disreputable reality. He had everything but money. Forced, as he put it, to be a hackney coachman or a hackney scribe, he harnessed himself to a pen, and buttered his bread with comedies and burlesques. His second cousin, Lady Mary Montagu, used her influence to have his play Love in Several Masques produced at the Drury Lane Theatre (1728); she went twice to see it, graciously conspicuous; and in 1732 she helped his Modern Husband to a good run. He persisted with one mediocre play after another, and struck a vein of good-natured satire in The Tragedy of Tragedies, or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great (1731).
After four years’ courtship he married Charlotte Cradock (1734). Soon she inherited £1,500, and Fielding retired with her to ease as a country gentleman. He fell in love with his wife; he described her uxoriously as the shyly beautiful Sophia Western and the infinitely patient Amelia Booth. Lady Bute assures us that “the glowing language he knew how to employ did no more than justice to the amiable qualities of the original, or to her beauty.” 82
In 1736 he was back in London, producing unmemorable plays. But in 1737 the Licensing Act laid restrictions upon the drama, and Fielding withdrew from the stage. He studied law, and was admitted to the bar (1740). The course of his life was diverted in that year by the appearance of Richardson’s Pamela. All of Fielding’s propensity to satire was provoked by the conscious virtues of the heroine and her creator. It was as a parody of Pamela that he began The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes (1742). Joseph, who is introduced as Pamela’s brother, is as pure and beautiful a youth as Pamela was a maiden. Like her he is repeatedly tempted by his employer, and resists; and like her he details in his letters the insidious attempts upon his virginity. His letter to Pamela is almost, not quite, Richardsonian:
DEAR SISTER PAMELA:
Hoping you are well, what news have I to tell you! … My mistress has fallen in love with me—that is, what great folks call falling in love—she has a mind to ruin me; but I hope I shall have more resolution and more grace than to part with my virtue to any lady on earth.
Mr. Adams hath often told me that chastity is as great a virtue in a man as in a woman. He says he never knew any more than his wife, and I shall endeavor to follow his example. Indeed, it is owing entirely to his excellent sermons and advice, together with your letters, that I have been able to resist a temptation which, he says, no man complies with but he repents in this world and is damned for it in the next.… What fine things are good advice and good examples! But I am glad she turned me out of the chamber as she did; for I had once almost forgotten every word Parson Adams had ever said to me.
I don’t doubt, dear sister, but you will have grace to preserve your virtue against all trials; and I beg you earnestly to pray I may be enabled to preserve mine; for truly it is very severely attacked by more than one; but I hope I shall copy your example, and that of Joseph my namesake, and maintain my virtue against all temptation. … 83
He succeeds, and remains a virgin till he marries the virgin Fanny. Pamela, lifted a social notch as wife of her rich employer, condemns Fanny for presuming to marry Joseph, whose social status has been raised by Pamela’s genteel marriage. Richardson complained that Fielding had committed a “lewd and ungenerous engraftment” on Pamela.84
Fielding’s appetite for satire was not sated by parodying Richardson; he burlesqued the Iliad by invoking the Muses and making his book an epic. His f
ount of humor bubbled over in the various characters that Joseph and Adams meet on their way, and especially the innkeeper Tow-wouse, who is surprised by Mrs. Tow-wouse in flagrante delicto with Betty the chambermaid, is forgiven, and “quietly and contentedly bore to be reminded of his transgressions … once or twice a day during the residue of his life.” And since it was not in Fielding’s nature to make a hero, and a whole novel, out of an impeccable youth, he soon lost interest in Joseph, and made Parson Adams the central figure of his book. This seemed an unlikely choice, for Adams was an honestly orthodox divine, who carried with him a manuscript of his sermons in search of a reckless publisher. But his creator endowed Adams with a strong pipe, a tough stomach, and a hard pair of fists; and though the parson is against war, he is a good fighter, and lays low a succession of scoundrels in the wake of his tale. He is by all odds the most lovable character in Fielding; and we share the author’s pleasure in putting him through strange encounters with pigs, mud, and blood. Those of us who in youth were deeply moved by the Christian ideal must feel a warm affection for a clergyman who is utterly without guile and overflows with charity. Fielding contrasts him with the moneygrubbing Parson Trulliber, who was “one of the largest men you should see, and could have acted the part of Sir John Falstaff without stuffing.” 85
Flushed with success, Fielding issued in 1743 three volumes modestly entitled Miscellanies. Volume III contained a masterpiece of sustained irony in The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. It was not a factual biography of the famous eighteenth-century Fagin; “my narrative is rather of such actions which he might have performed.” 86 In its first form it was a hit at Sir Robert Walpole as a dealer in stolen votes; after Walpole’s death it was reissued as a satire of “greatness” as usually rated and achieved. Most “great men,” Fielding held, had done more harm than good to mankind; so Alexander was called “the Great” because, after “he had with fire and sword overrun a vast empire, had destroyed the lives of an immense number of innocent wretches, had scattered ruin and desolation like a whirlwind, we are told, as an act of his clemency, that he did not cut the throat of an old woman and ravish her daughters.” 87 The thief should have an easier conscience than the “statesman,” since his victims are fewer and his booty less. 88
In the style of a political biography Fielding gives Jonathan a lofty ancestral tree, tracing his lineage to “Wolfstan Wild, who came over with Hengist.” His mother “had a most marvelous glutinous quality attending her fingers.” 89 From her Jonathan learned the art and ethics of thievery. His superior intelligence soon enabled him to organize a gang of brave youths dedicated to separating superfluous people from their superfluous goods or a meaningless life. He took the lion’s share of their gains, and rid himself of disobedient subalterns by surrendering them to the forces of law and order. He failed to seduce the chased Laetitia, who preferred to be ruined by his assistant Fireblood, who “in a few minutes ravished this fair creature, or at least would have ravished her, if she had not by a timely compliance, prevented him.” 90 Thereafter she married Wild. Two weeks later they indulge in “a dialogue matrimonial,” wherein she explains her natural right to promiscuity; he calls her a bitch; they kiss and make up. He rises higher still and higher in the grandeur of his crimes, until his wife has the satisfaction of seeing him condemned to death. A clergyman attends him to the gallows; Wild picks his pocket en route, but gets only a corkscrew, for the dominie was a connoisseur of vintages. And “Jonathan Wild the Great, after all his mighty exploits was—what so few GREAT MEN can accomplish—hanged by the neck till he was dead.” 91
Toward the end of 1744 Fielding lost his wife; the event darkened his mood until he purged his grief by portraying her fondly, through the pathos of distance, as Sophia and Amelia. He was so grateful for the loyal devotion of his wife’s maid, who remained to take care of his children, that in 1747 he married her. Meanwhile he suffered both in health and in income. He was rescued by appointment (1748) as justice of the peace for Westminster, and shortly thereafter for Middlesex. It was a laborious office, precariously paid by the fees of the litigants who came to his court in Bow Street. He called the aggregate three hundred pounds a year “the dirtiest money upon earth.” 92
During these troubled years, 1744–48, he must have been working on his greatest novel, for in February, 1749, it appeared in six volumes as The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. The book was composed, he tells us, in “some thousands of hours” salvaged from law and hack writing; and no one could tell, from its robust humor and virile ethic, that these were years of grief and gout and thinning purse. Yet here were twelve hundred pages of what many consider the greatest English novel. Never before in English literature had a man been so fully and frankly described in body and mind, morals and character. Famous are the words of Thackeray introducing Pendennis:
Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN. We must drape him, and give him a certain conventional simper. Society will not tolerate the Natural in our Art.… You will not hear … what moves in the real world, what passes in society, in the clubs, colleges, mess-rooms—what is the life and talk of your sons.
Tom makes his debut as an illegitimate infant found in Mr. Allworthy’s virtuous bed. Between this and Tom’s concluding marriage Fielding squeezed a hundred episodes, apparently in picaresque and unconnected succession; but the reader is surprised, if he persists to the end, to find that nearly all those incidents were necessary to the skillfully woven plot, or to the exposition and development of the characters; the threads are unraveled, the knots are untied. Several of the personnel are idealized, like the almost Grandisonian Allworthy; some are too simplified, like the unfailingly despicable Blifil, or the Reverend Mr. Thwackum, the pedagogue “whose meditations were full of birch.” 93 But many of them show the sap of life. Squire Western, of all things in this world, “held most dear … his guns, dogs and horses,” 94 then his bottle, then his incomparable daughter Sophia. Here is a Clarissa who knows her ways among the snares of men, a Pamela who snares her man without ado about his premarital experiments.
Tom is a little loose in the loins, but otherwise he is almost too good to survive. Adopted by Allworthy, schooled and thrashed by Thwackum, he grows into a sturdy manhood disturbed only by malicious reminders of his mysterious parentage. He robs an orchard and steals a duck, but his adoptive father forgives these pranks as in the best Shakespearean tradition. Sophia admires him from a chaste distance, but Tom, conscious of his illegitimacy, never dares to fall in love with a lady so remote from him in status and means. He contents himself with Molly Seagrim, the gamekeeper’s daughter, and confesses himself as possibly the father of her child; he is much relieved to find that he is only one of several such possibilities. Sophia suffers when she learns of this liaison, but her admiration for Tom is only transiently cooled. He catches her in his arms as she falls from her horse while hunting; her blushes reveal her feeling for him; and now he loses no time losing his heart. Squire Western, however, has set his purse on marrying her to Mr. Blifil, who is the legitimate nephew and heir of the wealthy and childless Allworthy. Sophia refuses to marry this young hypocrite; the Squire insists; and the battle between father’s will and daughter’s tears saddens several volumes. Tom shies away, and lets himself be discovered in a grove with Molly in his arms; Sophie comes upon the scene, and faints. Tom is reluctantly dismissed by Allworthy, and begins those episodic travels without which Fielding, still apparented to Cervantes and Lesage, found it difficult to write a novel. His heart remains with the brokenhearted Sophia, but, thinking her forever lost to him, he slips into Mrs. Waters’ bed. After many tribulations, and complications surpassing all belief, he is pardoned by Allworthy, replaces Blifil as heir, clears up matters with shy but forgiving Sophia, and is heartily welcomed as son-in-law by Squire Western, who a week before had been ready to slay him. The Squire is now all haste for consummation:
“To her, boy, to
her, go to her.… Is it all over? Hath she appointed the day, boy? What, shall it be tomorrow or the next day? I shan’t be put off a minute longer than the next day.… Zoodikers! she’d have the wedding tonight with all her heart. Wouldst not, Sophy? … Where the devil’s Allworthy? Harkee, Allworthy, I’ll bet thee five pounds to a crown we have a boy tomorrow nine months.” 95
Not since Shakespeare had anyone depicted English life so abundantly or so frankly. It is not all there; we miss the tenderness, devotion, heroism, civilities, and pathos that can be found in any society. Fielding preferred the man of instinct to the man of thought. He scorned the bowdlerizers who in his time were trying to fumigate Chaucer and Shakespeare, and those poets and critics who supposed that serious literature should deal only with the upper class. He interpreted love between the sexes as physical love, and relegated other aspects of it to the world of delusion. He despised the money madness that he saw in every rank, and he abominated humbug and hypocrisy. He made short shrift of preachers; but he loved Parson Adams, and the only hero in Amelia is Dr. Harrison, an Anglican clergyman; Fielding himself preached at every opportunity.
After publishing Tom Jones he turned his pen for a while to the problems that he faced as a magistrate. His experience was bringing him daily into contact with London’s violence and crime. He suggested methods of tightening the guard of public order and the administration of justice. Through his efforts, and those of his half brother Sir John Fielding, who succeeded him as magistrate in Bow Street, one of the gangs that had terrified London was broken up, and nearly all its members were hanged. An optimist reported in 1757 that “the reigning evil of street robberies has been almost wholly suppressed.” 96
Meanwhile (December, 1751) Henry had published his last novel, Amelia. He could not forget his first wife; he had forgotten any faults she may have had; now he raised a monument to her as the faultless mate of an improvident soldier. Captain Booth is kind, brave, and generous; he adores his Amelia; but he gambles himself into debt, and the book opens with him in jail. He takes a hundred pages to tell his story to another inmate, Miss Matthews; he expounds to her the beauty, modesty, fidelity, tenderness, and other perfections of his wife, and then accepts Miss Matthews’ invitation to share her bed. He continues “a whole week in this criminal conversation.” 97 In these and later prison scenes Fielding displays, with perhaps some exaggeration, the hypocrisies of men and women, the venality of constables and magistrates, the brutality of jailers. Here already are the debtors’ prisons that will linger on for a century more to stir Dickens’ ire. Justice Thrasher can tell a prisoner’s guilt from his brogue. “Sirrah, your tongue betrays your guilt. You are an Irishman, and that is always sufficient evidence with me.” 98 The number of villains rises with every chapter, until Amelia cries out to her pauperized children, “Forgive me for bringing you into the world.” 99