MR. AUSTIN DOBSON'S FIELDING.* THE biographer of Fielding labours under

one fatal dis- advantage; he has very little to say about his hero. The novelist's reputation was far from being wholly posthumous. He won considerable fame in his life-time,—enough, indeed, to make Richardson exceedingly jealous and uncomfortable. The

author of Pamela never forgot Joseph Andrews, and he pre- tended that he could not find leisure to read Tom ,Tones. It was

apparently too immoral a book for the creator of Lovelace and Mr. B., and so he asked Aaron Hill's daughters, Astmea and Minerva, to read it for him. Their opinion was, on the whole, highly favourable, and probably would have been more so had they not been writing to Fielding's rival ; but they add that "it seems wantoner than it was meant to be," and has "bold, shocking pictures." Other ladies of the time passed a similar

judgment on Tom Jones, which was not ostracised on account of its grossness, but, like Clarissa Harlow°, gained ad-

mission into families, and appears to have been universally read. The correspondence between Hill's daughters and Richardson on the principal novel of the century has never hitherto been made public, and is printed from letters in the Forster Collection at South Kensington. This is not the only instance in which Mr. Dobson has lighted on fresh matter, and his new facts, although not separately of much value, are of use in sweeping away false impressions of a man who has hitherto been the victim of careless misrepresenta-

tions. He has been able to give the date and place of Fielding's second marriage, and the baptismal dates of all the children by that marriage, except the eldest ; to show that the novelist received £183 lls. for Joseph kulrews ; and to prove for the first time in a biography of Fielding—though the discovery is

due to Mr. Latreille—that the story of his having a booth at Bartholomew Fair is entirely false, the part of strolling player at the Fair having been undertaken by a publican named Field-

ing, whose Christian name was Timothy. Here, too, appears a burlesque "Author's Will," published in the Universal Spectator,

which, according to Mr. Dobson," seems to have hitherto escaped inquiry," and refers in all probability to Fielding in his early play-writing days.

• English Men of Letters: Fielding. By Austin Dobson. London : Macmillan and Co. 1883.

Possibly the general impression of the novelist will be changed by this monograph, although the work done by the writer is chiefly negative in character. He shows us what Fielding was not, rather than what he was ; and being gravelled for lack of matter, is forced to eke out his pages with abundant criticism. Following in the footsteps of Mr. Keightley, he has corrected several errors of earlier biographers. But in spite of all research, the life of Fielding forms in considerable measure a narrative of conjectures. These conjectures begin with his boyhood. We do not know when he went to Eton, what he did there, or at what age he left the school. Then there follows a love-affair with a Miss Andrew, date un- known, which does contain a fact or two characteristic of Fielding's youthful impetuosity, namely, that the young lady's guardian went in fear of his life, and that his charge was trans- ferred to another guardian in South Devon, and promptly married. The future author of Tom, Jones is supposed to have studied at Leyden ; he married Miss Cradock early, but the year is assumed and not proven, and the history of the marriage comes to us from Arthur Murphy, whose essay, in Mr. Dob- son's judgment, is misleading in its facts, and who in this instance, according to Mr. Keightley, has produced a "mere tissue of error and inconsistency." When, after his misadven- tures and comparative failure as a playwright, he became a student of the Middle Temple, Fielding was in his thirty-first year, and had a wife and, probably, a daughter depending on him for support. "Nothing," says Mr. Dobson, "is known with certainty respecting his life at this period," and we cannot say whether he was living alone in chambers, or whether his wife was with him, neither do we know how he obtained the means of livelihood. Two years after his admission to the Middle Temple, Fielding started the Champion, and his essays in that paper may be read in the recent edition of his works published by Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co. They contain little of signific- ance, and do not give their author a place among the British essayists. Mr. Leslie Stephen says truly that his performances in this line "can scarcely be reckoned on the same level with Johnson's, or even Goldsmith's, to say nothing of Steele and Addison." We should be inclined to say, on the other hand, that Fielding's essays are infinitely below the level of Gold- smith's or Johnson's; and that Mr. Dobson thinks so is evident, for not one of them appears in his selection of eighteenth- century essays.

In the month of June, 1740, Fielding was called to the Bar, and it is conjectured that he applied himself steadily to the practice of his profession, "if, indeed," as Mr. Dobson adds, "that weary hope deferred which forms the usual probation of legal preferment can properly be so described." He travelled the Western Circuit, but his briefs, if he had any, did not de- prive him of leisure. The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham, Adams appeared in February of the year following, and must have been rapidly written, for Pamela, to which the novel owes its inspiration, had only been in print two months. That once famous story is, in the judgment of most modern readers, immoral in conception, and in execution by no means free from indelicacy. Yet this was not the impression of Richardson's contemporaries, and the author professed, no doubt with sincerity, to have written the book "in order to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the minds of the youth of both sexes." This was not Field- ing's design in his travesty, and yet his novel, despite some gross scenes, is the wholesomer book of the two. In point of genius, too, it stands on a higher level, and has added at least one im- mortal character to the literature of fiction. Parson Adams, like his successor and younger brother, Dr. Primrose, may be called an eighteenth-century worthy, and is as much alive as any character of Shakespeare's. We laugh at Mr. Abraham and his eccentricities, but never lose our respect for him. Truly does Mr. Dobson say :—

" If be is not the real character of the book, he is undoubtedly the character whose fortunes the reader follows with the closest interest. Whether he is smoking his black and consolatory pipe in the gallery of the inn, or losing his way while he dreams over a passage of Greek, or groaning over the fatuities of the men of fashion in Leonora's story, or brandishing his famous crabstick in defence of Fanny, he is always the same delightfal mixture of benevolence and simplicity, of

pedantry and credulity and ignorance of the world Not all the discipline of hog's blood and cudgels and cold water to which he is subjected can deprive him of his native dignity ; and as he stands before us in the short great-coat, under which his ragged cassock is continually making its appearance, with his old wig and battered bat, a clergymen whose social position is scarcely above that of a foot. man, and who supports a wife and six children upon a cure of twenty-three pounds a year, which his out-spoken honesty is continu- ally jeopardising, he is a far finer figure than Pamela in her coach and six, or Bellarmine in his cinnamon velvet."

Joseph Andrews was not at first so successful as Pamela, and Gray, the first critic of the age, expresses no enthusiasm for the story ; yet he allows that the characters have a great deal of nature, and that Parson Adams and Mrs. Slipslop are "perfectly well." Pope may have read Joseph Andrews, which was pub- lished two years before his death, and as to Fielding's relations to Pope, we are left again very much to conjecture. There had been a little sparring between them in earlier years, but the novelist had since praised the poet generously, and Mr. Dobson judges upon good ground that the attempt made to connect Fielding with the controversy that arose out of Cibber's famous letter to Pope was simply ridiculous.

The biographer comments pretty fully on the novelist's three volumes of miscellanies, and transcribes some forcible passages from A Journey from, this World to the Next, which appeared in the second volume. One of these passages is the meeting with Virgil, Addison, and Steele; in another Shakespeare comes upon the scene, and "foreseeing future commentators and the 'New Shakespeare Society,' declines to enlighten Betterton and Booth as to a disputed passage in his works, adding, 'I marvel nothing so much as that men will gird themselvs at discovering obscure beauties in an author. Certes, the greatest and most frequent beauties are ever the plainest and most evidently striking, and when two meanings of a passage can in the least balance our judgments which to prefer, I hold it matter of unquestionable certainty that neither is worth a farthing." This straight- forward opinion is characteristic of Fielding, and is not without pertinency in the present day, when the plain meanings of some poets are made abstruse by their commentators, and when a profound purpose is frequently discovered in the most careless phrase of a Shakespeare or a Browning.

The Miscellanies appeared in 1743, Tom. Jones in 1749, and the author's personal history in the interval between those dates is "exceedingly obscure." It is probable that his wife died towards the close of 1743, and Mr. Dobson is "in- clined to suspect" that this was the most trying period of his career. He was troubled with gout, and it is pro- bable that his married life was one of continual shifts and privations. As we all know, Fielding never understood "the great bread-and-butter question ; " and his reckless generosity, when he had a few pounds to spare, left him always in difficulties. He was one of those men whom it is im- possible to help. With him, the sensibility of the moment out- weighed all sense of prudence and of justice. "Once, so runs the legend, Andrew Miller _made him an advance to meet the claims of an unfortunate tax-gatherer. Carrying it home, he met a friend in even worse straits than his own, and the money changed hands. When the tax-gatherer arrived, there was nothing but the answer,—' Friendship has called for the money, and had it; let the collector call again.' Justice, it is needless to say, was satisfied by a second advance from the bookseller. But who shall condemn the man of whom such a story can be told ?" Mr. Dobson asks the question, and the answer is that Fielding's impulsive virtue is very nearly allied to vice. He was something better than a reckless spendthrift. He had qualities deserving of warm praise, both as a man and as a citizen, but his impe- cuniosity and extravagance, his incapacity to see the difference between what was pleasant to his feelings and what was just to others, not only brought trouble on himself, but, what was of more importance, upon the woman dearest to him and upon the children dear to them both. Steele acted in the same way, and suffered the same consequences ; and if we praise Oliver Goldsmith for his charity to the fallen and to the poor— and such tenderness of nature always claims our sympathy—we ought not to forget that others suffered from his sincere but careless kindness, and that he died two thousand pounds in debt.

The paucity of biographical information about Fielding forces Mr. Dobson, as we have said already, to play the part of a critic ; and this, no doubt, he does, on the whole, admirably. He treats too lightly, perhaps, the faults of Tom ,Tones, but admits that "one of the wisest and wittiest books ever written cannot, without hesitation, be now placed in the hands of women or very young people." The truth is, as Mr. Stephen has pointed out, Fielding's moral standard is far from elevated. His heroes are not only unheroic, they are ignoble. Booth is contemptible, and Tom Jones has the vices of a coarse man and the virtues of a common-place one. He is

free from hypocrisy, it is true, and is so far manly, but the absence of one vice which he hated is no apology for the sins he " had a mind to." Fielding as a novelist stands at the head of our fiction in the eighteenth century. In spite of Scott and Jane Austen, of George Eliot and Thackeray, he is still one of our greatest novelists, and might be one of the most popular, had not the grossness of his pictures banished him from "the best society in the world." He was apparently unconscious of this gross- ness, and that his purpose in the main was moral need not be questioned ; but the grain of his mind was of a coarse texture. "Poor Fielding," as his biographers and critics love to call him, is not to be classed with men who have few redeeming qualities. He had many, both as an author and a citizen. Every one who has read Tom. Jones would like to endorse in its fulness the genial criticism of Coleridge, and if he cannot do this, he will prefer the broadish humour of the tale to the "hot, day- dreamy sentimentality" of Richardson. As a man, too, Fielding sinned and suffered ; but as a magistrate and philan- thropist, his conduct, if not always wise, gave evidence throughout of a generous, self-denying nature. In a good cause he was not the man to shirk labour, and his fresh and cheerful spirit in spite of pain and poverty and disease, his love of children, and his charity in judgment should not be forgotten, either by moralist or critic. Mr. Dobson's narrative is, we think, more painstaking than attractive. He has set right, or tried to set right, a number of trifling details ; but he is con- scious throughout that his hold upon the subject is uncertain, possibilities and probabilities having often to be substituted for facts. This is no fault of the writer, but it makes the story bald. Why the passages extracted from Fielding's works should be copied in the original form, every noun being, as in German, printed with a capital, we are at a loss to understand. Happily, no such folly is committed in the principal editions of the novels. Neither is Mr. Dobson always consistent in the practice, some extracts being printed after the modern fashion.