A Dramatic Satire on the Times.' The piece had a great run; and Fielding, always sanguine, no doubt hoped that at last he was getting his feet upon solid ground. But Walpole was a dangerous enemy. He obtained the passage of an Act of Parliament which made it necessary to obtain a license for plays.

Fielding's occupation was gone. It was quite plain that no license would be given to farces aimed at the prime minister. He gave up the theatre and made another effort.

He entered at one of the Inns

of Court and began to study the law. He was still only thirty-two, and full of abundant energy. He would leave his tavern (perhaps it would have been better not to have gone to it) to go home and pore over "abstruse authors" till far into the night. He was called to the bar in 1740, and duly attended the quarter-sessions. Briefs, however, did not come. Then, as now, attorneys looked with some suspicion upon men distracted by literary aims. Fielding, in fact, was obliged to support himself during his legal studies by working at his old trade. He tried the usual schemes of a professional author of those days. He brought out a periodical on the Spectator model, called the Champion. He wrote a 'Vindication' of the old Duchess of Marlborough, for which the duchess paid five guineas,- only, we will hope, an installment. During the rebellion of 1745, he published a journal intended to arouse John Bull out of his apparent apathy. He had already struck out another and more fruitful line. In 1742 he brought out 'Joseph Andrews'-to indulge in a great guffaw at Richardson's sentimental Pamela. As he developed the story he fell in love with his characters as Dickens fell in love with Pickwick, and became more serious in his aims. By this book he made about £200, and his success encouraged him to publish by subscription in 1743 three volumes of 'Miscellanies.' In those days a subscription was a kind of joint-stock patronage, and showed chiefly that the author had friends among "persons of quality." Fielding probably made £400 or £500, which was no doubt a welcome transient help. The Miscellanies' include one of his most remarkable if not pleasantest performances, Jonathan Wild the Great.' 'Joseph Andrews' had shown his true power, and it is perhaps rather remarkable that 'Tom Jones' did not follow until 1749. Whatever Fielding's anxieties, it is noticeable that he did his work as thoroughly as if he had been independent of the pay. Before speaking of his literary performance, however, I will continue the story of his life.

His wife died at the end of 1743. His grief, it is said, was so great that his friends feared the loss of his reason. He had however children to care for, and was too brave a man to relax in his fight with the fates. He had still some hopes of success at the bar, and at one moment, probably on some gleam of success, declared

that he would write no more. In 1747 he married Mary Daniel, who had been an attached servant of his first wife. He did not know, he said, where to find a better mother for his children or nurse for himself; and she seems to have justified his anticipations:

A patron or two had helped him during his struggles. Ralph Allen, who had made a fortune by farming the posts, was a lover of literature and a friend of Pope and Warburton. To Fielding, and to Fielding's children after their father's death, he was a steady benefactor, and Fielding showed his gratitude characteristically by portraying his friend as "Allworthy” in Tom Jones.' Another patron, by whom Fielding declared himself to have been mainly supported during the composition of Tom Jones,' was his old schoolfellow Lyttelton; and it was through Lyttelton that in 1748 Fielding was appointed justice of the peace for Westminster. The office was a singular one. In those days, and for at least two generations more, London, though a large town even upon our present scale, was merely an aggregation of villages. It had no systematic police. Dogberry and Verges were still represented by decrepit watchmen and stupid parish constables. They were ruled by magistrates who were often of the family of Shallows and Silences. The chaos which prevailed had at last induced Parliament to provide a paid and professional magistrate. But according to the custom of those days, he was to be paid by fees. The consequences are indicated by the name of "trading justices" applied to these officials. Impartial and speedy administration of justice was not the way to get fees. Fielding threw himself into his duties with characteristic energy. He tried to be honest, and thereby reduced "£500 of the dirtiest money on earth" to £300, most of which went to his clerk. He did his best to call attention to abuses. He wrote a remarkable pamphlet proposing a reform of the corrupting poor-laws. Another pamphlet upon gin-drinking had great influence in producing the first Act which attempted to discourage intemperance. He took up, perhaps with more zeal than discretion, some of the strange tragedies which illustrated the squalor and misery of the London slums.

The queerest case was that of Betsy Canning, with which all Eng land rang for a year or two, and which is still worth reading in the State Trials. A servant-girl in London had accounted for a month's absence by inventing a story about having been kidnapped by gip sies. A gipsy was actually condemned for this imaginary offense: but the girl herself was ultimately convicted of perjury and sent to America to improve the morals of the colonists. Fielding believed her story, took up her case with more than judicial warmth, and exposed himself to some sharp criticism. He exerted himself, again, to put down the highwaymen who flourished in the absence of police,

and bedwere regarded by Englishmen with a certain perverted pride all xuberant products of British liberty. Fielding, while very ill, setmer work to devise a system for limiting their energies. Practically, thfear, it meant simply the employment of "trepans" whe betrayed the other members of their gangs. Fielding says however that for the time he succeeded in putting down robbery, and sacrificed his health in the effort. His constitution had in fact been breaking down, from gout and an irregular life. His sanguine disposition led him to believe in one pretense of quackery after another: in the great Bishop Berkeley's tar-water; in the treatment of the Dr. Thompson who had already, it was said, killed Pope; and even in the miraculous virtues of a well at Glastonbury. He was always being "cured" without improving his health. At last he was sent to Lisbon as a last hope. He sailed in the summer of 1754, and kept a journal which remains to testify to his indomitable gallantry, buoyant spirits, and flow of good-humor to the last. He died at Lisbon on the 8th of October, 1754, leaving his widow and children to the care of the kindly Allen and of his half-brother Sir John Fielding, who had succeeded him as justice of the peace. The trust was worthily discharged.

Till the age of twenty-eight, we see, Fielding had been a reckless and impetuous pleasure-hunter. From that time till his death at the age of forty-seven, he was engaged in a hard struggle to support himself and his family and in an energetic attempt to do his duty in a thankless office. The stains of the earlier period have injured his memory, and it cannot be denied, imply serious moral defects; but here I must touch the inevitable argument. It is most true that to judge any man justly you must allow for the moral standard of his time. Advantage, however, is often taken of this truth to draw questionable consequences. Whenever it is proved that a man broke one of the Ten Commandments, it is roundly replied that in his day there were only nine. Therefore, it is inferred, his want of honesty or decency ceases to be a defect. Both fact and inference are often doubtful. Fielding, for example, makes Tom Jones guilty of taking money from a woman under circumstances which we all feel to be degrading. Nobody, it is replied, thought such conduct degrading then. utterly disbelieve the fact. A similar story is told of Marlborough, and perhaps it was true; but it was certainly told by a malicious libeler, and was meant to injure him. I feel sure that not only Richardson and Johnson, who were obtrusively moralists, but such men as Addison or even the easy-going Steele, would have thought of Tom Jones just what Colonel Newcome thought. Some of our ancestors were gentlemen, with feelings of delicacy, and should not be libeled even to save a novelist's reputation. And in any case,

5700

us.

who

anielit for as et kny men

I

je fc imply

such a statement would explain the fact but does Coarseness is rightly disgusting, though we may came to be coarse, and perhaps show too that it did n to all that it would imply in the present day. Nothing, indeed, is more difficult than to compare the 1 5.al standard of a distant time with that of our own. That vice was common in England under Anne and the Georges, is undeniable; but I do not know that it is altogether extinct to-day. I fancy that a modern police magistrate could still tell us stories which would prove that the world, the flesh, and the Devil have not yet been renounced by everybody. M. Zola's world does not seem to be purer than Fielding's. Look beneath the surface anywhere and you can find ugly things enough, especially if you have a taste for the revolting.

It is easier, no doubt, to judge of the surface; and there we may find an explanation, though not a justification, of Fielding's obtuseness on certain points. He was in the world of fiction what Walpole was in the world of politics. Both of them were men of strong common-sense, and of great qualities which were strangely mixed with much that is coarse and repulsive. They were both given to boisterous conviviality, to vast consumption of "the roast beef of old England," and to tremendous post-prandial sittings over their bottles, at which the talk was no more delicate than the fare. They indulged in cock-fighting, and cudgel-playing, and rough practical joking, till we fancy that only a pugilist or a rough of to-day could find such an atmosphere congenial. Such tastes however could be combined with a real love of art and literature: Walpole, for example, collected a great picture gallery; and he and his like often studied the classics like men of the world, if not like scholars. Neither can it be said that in the days when the British Empire was being built up, there was a want of public spirit or energy, though some of the accepted modes of political warfare were base enough. We are liable to misunderstandings if we argue from the want of refinement to the want of some high mental and moral qualities; though undoubtedly we find a strange obtuseness upon some points of the moral code, where higher views and more delicate sensibilities are required.

Fielding's novels illustrate this as clearly as his friend Hogarth's pictures. Both of them portray scenes now and then which grate upon our nerves, and show a coarseness of fibre which would to-day have to be sought in the lower haunts of debauchery. What we have to remember is that such faults were then not inconsistent with some excellences which they would now exclude. In the case of Fielding, we can have no difficulty in recognizing many of the highest qualities. In the first place, his novels are a genuine extract of hardbought experience. They are conspicuous for absolute veracity. He

speaks because he has thought and felt. We are conscious that he paints all from the life. As novel-writing became a profession, this is the merit which became rare. A young gentleman can easily give himself the airs of knowledge of the world by picking up a few smart epigrams in reproducing the stock characters of his predecessors. He does not write because he has "studied men and cities," but appropriates second-hand experience because he wants to write a novel. His "art, as he is proud to call it, may be admirable, his style unimpeachable, his plot carefully constructed; but after all, he cannot atone for the one great defect of having nothing to say by trying to say it gracefully. One cannot read Fielding without perceiving the contrast: he has really been "through the mill»; he has bought his knowledge at a heavy price; and even if it sometimes results in rather commonplace observations, a commonplace which has been hammered into a man by hard facts is very different from a commonplace which has been learnt from a book. It comes with a certain momentum, with a weight and force, which can redeem even occasional triteness. His words have the intensity of thorough conviction. The first impression made by the world upon a man of great shrewdness and vigor is naturally the prevalence of humbug. Society, he observes, is a great masquerade. To see things as they are, you must strip men of their disguises: you will then often find a strange likeness between heroes and highwaymen, patriots and pickpockets, priests and jugglers, and discover selfishness in Protean forms at the bottom of the most pretentious qualities. "All virtue," said Fielding's clever contemporary Mandeville, "is a sham." "All men," said Swift, soured by failure, "are Yahoos."

It is Fielding's characteristic merit that he could take a completer and saner view. His brave, generous nature could never give up a belief in virtue or in the substantial happiness of a good heart. could see, as he proved by Jonathan Wild, into the very soul of a thorough villain, the depth beyond depth of treachery and sensuality that can be embodied in human form. His moral is, as he puts it, that a man may "go to heaven with half the pains which it cost him to purchase hell." The villain, even as things go, naturally overreaches himself. Knowledge of the world takes the gloss off much; but it properly leads to a recognition of the supreme advantage of unworldly simplicity. Parson Adams, one of the great humorous creations, is the embodiment of that sentiment. He represents the conviction of the observer who has seen life in its ugliest phases, that the most lovable of human beings is the man who from sheer simplicity and kindliness remains comically unconscious of the trickery and selfishness of his neighbors. It is not the less characteristic because Adams appears to have been the portrait of a real friend,