so far touches his friend as to produce a resolution to abstain from the pursuit of a married woman, though, characteristically enough, he collapses under a fresh temptation. This is really Fielding's theory. He objects to vice when it is complicated by selfishness and treachery; he does not exactly approve of it in any case; but he thinks it extravagant to insist upon any rigid. observance of chastity in a young man, and is rather offensively tolerant of the graver kind of indulgence. The deficiency is an offence in taste as well as in morality; and when, as in the plays which we have noticed, it is combined with crude and hasty workmanship, we certainly feel that there is little to be said for poor Fielding. To read him is to breathe a questionable atmosphere, heavy with the fumes of gin and tobacco, where we must put aside all scruples of delicacy, and forgive coarse jokes and broad insinuations in consideration of a certain rough manliness which never quite deserts him. He has not the cynicism of a refined cultivator of vice, but the coarseness of an indiscriminating young appetite for pleasure. There are signs, indeed, even at this period, that Fielding could be moved by higher aims. The most successful of his plays was the Miser, produced in 1732, which follows very closely the lines of Molière. The first three acts, indeed, are little more than a translation; though in the conclusion he departs widely from his original. Perhaps we may say that Molière's brilliancy is a little dimmed by transmission through the coarser medium of Fielding's English. Yet he has thrown himself thoroughly into the spirit of the writer; and, if he introduces needless complexity in compliance with the tastes of his audience, he must have credit for bringing about the catastrophe naturally without the violent introduction of a romantic incident, which seems rather incongruous in Molière. Indeed, the original as well as the borrowed part, is by far the most spirited of Fielding's dramatic writings, and might be taken to imply that he had found the true and right mode of employing his talents. The prologue, written by a friend, probably expresses Fielding's theories. "Our modern bards," it declares, are content to retail the quibbles which they have picked up at assemblies and in the park. "Thus, without characters from nature got, A dull collection of insipid jokes, Some stole from conversations, some from books, We call high comedy, and seem content." Fielding is going to give them Molière as a contrast to all this; Molière "who Nature's inmost secrets knew," and who, in short, drew real men and women. Undoubtedly Fielding could have done good service, if he could have substituted the bright, vivid presentation of character so admirably achieved in the Miser, for the confused huddle of would-be witticisms struck out by the perplexing collisions of the characters in the plays which represent the decline of the English artificial comedy. In fact, however, Fielding never succeeded in producing original dramas of any merit, though he showed the virtue, in which no man was ever more conspicuous, of appreciating really high excellence in his predecessors. He made, indeed, one attempt which deserves a moment's notice. The play called the Good-Natured Man-whose strange fortunes have been already noticed-and afterwards called the Fathers, the original title having been occupied by Goldsmith, is apparently one of his most careful pieces of work. It deals with one of his favourite themes. The worthy Hawkins sums up the merits of Fielding by saying that he was "the inventor of that cant phrase goodness of heart, which is every day used as a substitute for probity, and means little more than the virtue of a horse or a dog; in short, he has done more towards corrupting the rising generation than any writer we know of." Fielding certainly admired "goodness of heart," and this play is a study of one of its manifestations. The good-natured man is bullied by his wife and children in consequence of his weakness; and a designing neighbour tries to take advantage of him, and especially to trick him into a preposterous settlement upon a double marriage which is to take place between their children. The good-natured man, however, has real spirit; and with the help of a worldly-wise brother exposes the selfishness of his neighbour and his neighbour's son and daughter, and the comedy ends rather oddly, not by the arrangement of a marriage, but by a defeat of the schemes which were to have ended in marriage. This reversal of the natural dramatic order of things would, one supposes, have a rather odd effect upon the stage. The whole play, however, has the more fatal fault of being indisputably heavy; and raises more distinctly than any other the question of Fielding's capacity for dramatic writing. The situation in itself seems to be a striking one; and if the characters had been painted as forcibly as those in Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews, and the incidents skilfully devised, there are the materials for a really good comedy of character. But it seems that the method is uncongenial. Fielding cares too little for concentration; he likes to be didactic and to speak for himself instead of letting his characters speak for him. There is a certain clumsiness about his style, or, if clumsiness be too strong a phrase, a want of the dexterity which is able to give just the telling situations without setting forth at full length all the reflections which suggest themselves. At any rate, he does not appear to be at his ease; and the fetters of dramatic convention stiffen his gait and take the vivacity out of his portraits. The play, therefore, deserves notice only as a proof that he could occasionally aim at a serious piece of work. So far we have had to do with the Fielding who was merely one amongst the hack playwrights of the day. Except in his first efforts, he is writing carelessly and therefore he is more or less writing against the grain. The great hearty youth has to affect the polished airs of the finished man of the world; to substitute a smart fire of witticisms for the downright humorous common sense which was his natural mode of utterance; and to put together complicated plots of intricate intrigue instead of dealing straightforwardly with the incidents of real life. We seem to see a jovial young squire come up to town and trying to force his big limbs into laced coats and high-heeled boots, whilst all the while half ashamed of his own affectation. He can imitate only too well the coarseness of his models, but the superficial veneering of epigram which sometimes induces us to forgive their cynicism, is with him too thin to conceal the natural man. To succeed upon the stage, he would have had to create a new dramatic style; and he was not independent enough in his position or serious enough in his ambition to make the necessary effort, even if he had possessed the intrinsic power which would have reconciled actors and spectators to a departure from the existing traditions. Here and there we come within sight of something like an attempt in that direction. In the play called the Coffee-house Politicians, we have a vigorous and realistic sketch of two or three genuine characters of the time. The politician who gives his name to the piece reminds us of some of Addison's portraits in the Spectator; and the corrupt justice has a certain interest as a degraded type of the class of which Fielding was himself to be a member. But personages which might be tolerated in the episode of a novel become too repulsive when made to appear as the principal actors in a comedy; and though we can see distinct traces of the future novelist, we feel that his hand is too heavy for the style in which he is attempting to utter himself. His sensual, brutal bullies, now strike us as too repulsive for what affects to be a light comedy, though portraits of a similar class are very effective in the downright satire of Jonathan Wild. In one direction, however, Fielding made a less equivocal success. If he was awkward in adopting the airs of contemporary comedy, he had at least a very hearty contempt for the tragedy. His laughter at the rant and the bombast of the style which then passed for fine writing was perfectly sincere and natural; and the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great is a huge guffaw-a jovial explosion of good-humoured contempt for an effete mass of affectation. I do not know that I can join unreservedly in the admiration which is sometimes expressed for this performance. Burlesque is apt to lose its savour unless the wit is exceedingly keen; and though Fielding's laughter is thoroughly genuine, pointed wit is not his strong point. The happy touches at dramatic absurdities in the Rehearsal and in the Critic seem to be beyond Fielding's capacity. Burlesque, in one form and another, was naturally popular in a time when common sense was triumphant; and anything like romantic extravagance was an easy mark for ridicule. The Beggar's Opera, which had made an unprecedented success in 1728, represents one expression of this feeling; and Carey's Chrononhotonthologos, which appeared in 1734, seems to me, I must confess, to show a lighter touch and to be, on the whole, more amusing than Tom Thumb. Undoubtedly, however, Tom Thumb is thoroughly good fooling. The rants of the old tragedians, made more ridiculous by the conventional mouthing of the generation of actors which preceded Garrick, are taken off with abundant vigour. The notes with which the play was published give a full collection of parallel passages, and may indicate to modern readers the object of Fielding's satire. Dryden's tragedies come in perhaps for the largest share of satire; his collaborator, Lee, has, of course, his turn; Addison does not quite escape, nor Rowe, though we are told that Rowe has the least resemblance of all the tragic writers to the dictions of Tom Thumb; poor Dennis, the enemy of all literary mankind, is ridiculed both as critic and dramatist; such forgotten writers as Banks and Johnson give a good many texts; and others, now forgotten in this capacity though remembered for other achievements; Young, of the Night Thoughts, for his Revenge and Busiris, and Thomson, of the Seasons, for that unlucky tragedy of which the only line now remembered is the famous, "O Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O !" The older dramatists are scarcely touched, or touched only through the sides of their modern adapters. "I have too great an honour for Shakespeare to think of burlesquing him," says the author in the Historical Register, and he apparently conveys Fielding's genuine sentiments. The other victims were legitimate food for laughter; and whilst they were still popular upon the stage, Fielding's fun was more easily appreciated than it can be by the modern reader. Tom Thumb deserved and enjoyed a great success. It appeared in one act in 1730, and enlarged to three acts in 1731. And here, again, we might ask the question why Fielding never succeeded in repeating his success. He wrote several other farces and burlesques; the Author's Farce, which gives amongst other things a spirited picture of the workshop of a Grub Street bookseller in those days; the Grub Street Opera, which has nothing particularly to do with Grub Street, and of which it may be noticed in passing that the plot, such as it is, VOL. I. e |