BOOKS OF THE WEEK
The Laughing Novelist
Henry Fielding: His Life, Works and Times. By F. Homes Dudden. (Clarendon Press, Oxford. Two vols. £5 5s.) Henry Fielding: His Life, Works and Times. By F. Homes Dudden. (Clarendon Press, Oxford. Two vols. £5 5s.) IT is the need of entertainment in the fullest sense of the word that sends us to Fielding. Not many now go to his angry rival for refreshment, which is the primary purpose of the novel. Richardson can claim as hard as he is able to be the father of the modern English novel, but he is a dreary parent. Except the determined literary student in search of origins, who today has time enough and stomach enough to tackle Sir Charles Grandison ? We gaze at that formidable array of volumes and pass on, a reflection un life's brevity losing half its wistfulness. And what are other claims compared with Fielding's supreme honour that he raised the novel to the rank won by poetry and drama in our literature ? And is he not enshrined in the lasting monument of Gibbon's massive prose : "The successors of Charles the Fifth may disdain their brethren of England ; but the romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the Palace of the Escurial and the imperial eagle of the house of Austria " ? Incidentally, Dr. Dudden insists on emphasising modern genealogy's damp discovery that the legend of Fielding's descent from the Habsburg family is without foundation—a piece of scholarship we could well be spared, though it cannot destroy the patent from oblivion awarded by Gibbon.
Not Fielding only but the whole panorama of eighteenth-century England witb its brilliance and brutality is portrayed in Dr. Dudden's stately volumes. He strolls through that landscape, as puzzling as Peter Breughel's, with the easy familiarity of an ancient in his village street. He says little to challenge, but there is at times a ceremonious solemnity in his elucidations that touches naivete and would draw a beam from the quizzical eyes of Henry Fielding, as when he says of Moliere, whose Le Midecin malgre lid Fielding rapidly adapted, "His masterpieces were distinguished by accurate observation and suterbly humorous presentation of the facts of hutrian nature and society " ; or when, in recording Fielding's second marriage, which took place on November 27th, 1747, and the birth of his son in the following February, he remarks that the proximity of these dates is significant." Dr. Dudden misses nothing in his desire to keep readers fully informed.
Fielding's fame as a novelist has so overshadowed his genius as a satirical playwright that it took long insistence by Bernard Shaw to reawaken modern criticism to its status. Tom Thuntb is now recog- nised, as it was when produced (except by its victims), as an astonish- ing theatrical achievement. Bathos in diction after that derision could persist only with those who could pract:sz nothing else ; worldly greatness," of course, survives centuries of contempt and is an ever-present target. Dr. Dudden gives detailed attention to Fielding's efforts in the theatre, and to their social and political background. They make an exciting narrative. Still, we are grateful that Robert Walpole's censorship revenge on satire turned Fielding to other enterprises, driving him out of the trade of Moliere and Aristophanes, as Shaw says, into that of Cervantes. The novels are very English in spirit, but two influences are clear : Don Quixote and classical studies.
Richardson could be added.- He was an irritant influence. As knight-errantry romance was to Cervantes so was Pamela's calculated innocence to Fielding. Joseph Andrews begins as a parody of the prudential insurance of Richardson's morality. It begins like that, but very soon Parson Adams and Joseph are carrying us across country on a rollicking sequence of adventures that banishes prob- lems of philosophy, though the author never forgot the problems. He could be coarse, but the candid wisdom of his outlook on life and letters embraced the principles by which he lived. Affectation, proceeding either from vanity or hypocrisy, was his bugbear. His credo is declared in the preface to Joseph Andrews : "Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller faults of our pity." The vices in the novels are "rather the accidental consequences of some human frailty or foible than causes habitually existing in the mind."
Laughter is his weapon and his entertainment. He is Dickens's equal in this. His humour serves every purpose in the immortal Tom Jones. The dedication declares his intention to laugh _mankind out of their favourite follies and vices. He is the laughing- novelist ; the human comedy is a jest. He is as prolific as Dickens in this panoramic novel in creating vital characters. He laughs at them all, good and bad (Blifil excepted, who was not even a bad joke). He even brings the author on the scene to twit at Harry Fielding discours- ing on the virtue of chastity.
His irony is genial, unlike Swift's, although in his story of Jonathan Wild, an indictment of human greatness, it turned as fierce and comprehensive in its sweep as Swift's. He had played a great part as magistraie in clearing the iniquitous cesspools of London, and he knew what a criminal was like. But in Jonathan Wild the Great common roguery was not the game he was after. It was the overturning of people on pinnacles. The statesman-robber was the chief character ; for Wild we read Sir Robert Walpole. And Walpole he does not distinguish as outstanding among statesmen for corruption. Throughout his journalism he seldom modifies his idea that great man and great rogue are synony- mous terms. In this matter only was his tolerance put out to grass, while wit took the place of humour. Amelia, too, is a sombre view of life, the human spectacle no longer a comedy. The story of the voyage to Lisbon was written by a dying man ; the geniality and loving-kindness of the young Fielding have returned, and shine through the ordeal recorded in that melancholy journal.
PHILIP TOMLINSON.
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