G. M. Godden

“ We love Adams, as Fielding intended that we should, for his single-hearted goodness, his impulsiveness, his boundless generosity, his muscular courage; we are never allowed to forget the dignity of his office however ragged be the cassock that displays it; we admire his learning; we delight in his oddities. But above all he reflects honour on his creator by the inflexible integrity of his goodness. A hundred tricks are played on him by shallow knaves, and the result is but to convince us of the folly of knavery. ”

“ But to the majority of readers Amelia is, assuredly, something more than the most charming of heroines. She is the delightful companion; the wise and tender friend; a woman whose least perfection was that dazzling beauty which shone with equal lustre in the 'poor rags' lent her by her old nurse, or in her own clothing, just as the happy purity of her nature only glows more brightly for the dark scenes through which she moves. In the whole range of English literature there is surely no figure more warmly human, and yet less touched with human imperfection ”

“ But to neither Swift nor Steele was it given to raise so perfect and imperishable a memorial of the women loved by them, as that reared by the passionate affection and grief of Fielding for Charlotte Cradock. To this day the beautiful young figure of Sophia Western, all charm and goodness, is alive in his immortal pages. And if, as her friend Lady Bute asserts, Amelia also is Mrs Fielding's portrait, then we know her no less intimately as wife and mother. We watch her brave spirit never failing under the most cruel distresses and conflicts ”

“ This capacity of Fielding for relegating circumstance to its true level, the detached idealism that moulded his genius, are, indeed, shown once for all in the fact that the exquisite picture of virtue, the whole-hearted attack on vice, the genial humour, the sunny portraits of humanity, the splendid cheerfulness of Tom Jones, that 'Epic of Youth,' came from a man in middle age, immersed in disheartening struggles, and fighting recurrent ill health. ”

“ The names of those reformers, of the men and women who swept away the pestilential horrors of eighteenth century prisons, of the statesmen who abolished laws that hung a man for stealing a handkerchief, and destroyed the public gallows that gave the mob their Tyburn holiday, of the creators of our temperance legislation, of our poor-law system, of our model dwellings,--all these are held high in honour. Because Henry Fielding was above all things a great creative genius his wise and strenuous efforts to raise social conditions, and to eradicate social sores, have been unduly forgotten. ”

“ Round the single figure of Amelia all the other characters revolve; and it was of Amelia that Fielding himself has told us, in words that are a master key to his own character "of all my offspring she is my favourite Child." As surely as a man may be known by his choice in a friend, so is the nature of the artist betrayed when he avows his partiality for one alone among all the creations of his genius. ”

“ That Henry Fielding should have been born among buildings raised by Benedictine hands is not incongruous; for no man ever more heartily preached and practised the virtue of open-handed charity; none was more ready to scourge the vices of arrogance, cruelty and avarice; no English novelist has left us brighter pictures of innocence and goodness. And it was surely a happy stroke of that capricious Fortune to whom Fielding so often refers, to allot a Harlequin Chamber for the birth of the author of nineteen comedies ”

“ We read of the gaiety and quickness of his fancy; the wild flow of his spirits; the brilliancy of his wit; the activity of his mind, eager to know the world. To the possession of genius allied to the happiest temper, a temper "for the most part overflowing into wit, mirth, and good-humour," young Fielding added a handsome face, a magnificent physique (he stood over six feet high) , and the fullest vigour of constitution. "No man," wrote his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "enjoyed life more than he did." ”

“ This is the sweetest ingredient in Power, and I solemnly protest I never wished for Power, more than a few days ago for the sake of a Man whom I love, and that more perhaps from the esteem I know he bears towards you than from any other Reason. This Man is in Love with a young Creature of the most apparent worth, who returns his affection. Nothing is wanting to make two very miserable People extremely Blessed but a moderate portion of the greatest of human Evils. ”

“ The hand that exposed evil in its native loathsomeness in a Blifil and a Wild has not lost its cunning in depicting Mrs Humphreys; the eye that delighted in the green fields of England saw in the southern sunset that which made human creations 'almost below the regard of children.' And to the last the patriotic energies of the author of Pasquin and of the Champion, of the whole hearted social reformer, of the tireless magistrate, knew no relaxation. ”

“ Smollett affirmed that his predecessor painted the characters, and ridiculed the follies, of life with equal strength, humour and propriety. The supreme autocrat of the eighteenth century, Dr Johnson himself, though always somewhat hostile to Fielding, read Amelia through without stopping, and pronounced her to be 'the most pleasing heroine of all the romances.' "What a poet is here," cries Thackeray, "watching, meditating, brooding, creating! What multitudes of truths has that man left behind him: what generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly." ”

“ Hypocrisy and vanity, he says, appearing in the form of affectation; "Great Vices are the proper Object of our Detestation, smaller Faults of our Pity: but Affectation appears to me the only true Source of the Ridiculous." Such is Fielding's sensitive claim for the decent limits of ridicule; and such the consciously avowed subject of his work. But the force of his genius, the depth of his insight, the warmth of his detestations and affections, soon carried him far beyond any mere study in the ridicule of vain and hypocritical affectation. ”

“ The curtain that, in Fielding's case, hangs so closely over all the pleasant intimate details of life, lifts once or twice during this year of incessant activity, and discloses just those warmhearted acts of kindness that help us to think of Harry Fielding with an affection almost as warm and personal as that we keep for Dick Steele or Oliver Goldsmith. Fielding, we know, had "no other use for money" than to help those even less fortunate than himself; and several incidents of this year show how he turned his opportunities, both as journalist and magistrate, to like generous uses. ”

“ And if the picture of the poor wretch, driven to highway robbery by the sight of his starving family, whom Tom Jones relieved from his own scanty purse, be not proof enough of the compassion that tempered Justice Fielding's sternness, we have his own express pleading for these unhappy victims of circumstance: "what can be more shocking," he cries, "than to see an industrious poor Creature, who is able and willing to labour forced by mere want into Dishonesty, and that in a Nation of such Trade and Opulence." ”

“ These then, are some of the figures that Fielding loved to create, breathing into their simple virtues a vigorous human life, fresh as Coleridge said, as the life of a Spring morning. In these joyous creations of his heart and of his genius, the great novelist assuredly gives us a perfectly unconscious revelation of his own character. And among the changing scenes of this human comedy one incident must not be forgotten. ”

“ Under the spell of Fielding's power of painting the devil in his native blackness, we feel that for such as Wild hanging is too handsome a fate. It is easy for his Newgate chaplain to assert that "nothing is so sinful as sin"; it takes a great genius and a great moralist to convince us, as in this picture, that nothing is so deformed or so contemptible. The dark places of Jonathan Wild receive some light in the character of the good jeweller, in the tender scenes between that honest ruined tradesman and his wife and children, and in the devoted affection of his apprentice. ”

“ To Fielding this revolution, from the buskin'd heroics of the Alexanders and Clelias to the living and natural pathos of the tragedy of a poor London apprentice, must have appealed with extraordinary force; for it is the especial glory of his own genius that, throwing aside all the traditions of his age, and 'adventuring on one of the most original expeditions that ever a writer undertook,' 2 he was to discover a new world for English fiction, the world of simple human nature. ”

“ Here, in language of pure symbolism, he contends that the ideal virtues such as goodness and innocence, may most effectively be presented to men in a figure, for "an Example is a Kind of Picture, in which Virtue becomes as it were an Object of Sight, and strikes us with an Idea of that Loveliness, which Plato asserts there is in her naked Charms." 4 To the man who could write thus, and, who, in later pages of his great 'Epic,' could humbly desire of Genius "do thou kindly take me by the Hand, and lead me through all the Mazes, the winding Labyrinth of Nature. ”

“ For such pictures we have but to think of Sophia Western, and of that final page of Tom Jones, than which no more charming representation of mutual affection, esteem, and well doing can be imagined. But besides this means of reaching his audience Fielding adopted, he tells us, a second method. He argues that no acquisitions of guilt can compensate a man for the loss of inward peace, for the attendant horror, anxiety, and danger, to which he subjects himself; thus endeavouring to enlist man's self-interest no less than his admiration, on the side of virtue. ”

“ Fielding in his habit, as he lived, is for ever eluding us. His tall figure vanishes behind the prolific playwright, the exuberant politician, the truculent journalist, the indefatigable magistrate, the great creative genius. But at no point does the wittiest man of his day, and a lawyer of some repute--'Mr Fielding is allowed to have acquired a respectable share of jurisprudence'--escape us so completely as during these years of 'punctual assiduity' at the Bar. ”

“ Fielding never allows us to forget for any length of time one or another of his contrasting activities, however absorbed he may seem to be in some one field of action. Now, when he is plunged in a hand-to-hand struggle with the criminal conditions of London, when he is admonishing the gayer end of the Town with his weekly censorial satire and ridicule, and while he is watching the enactment of new legislation for which he had so strenously pleaded,--he suddenly reappears in his earlier rôle of classical scholar. ”

“ That a man endowed with Fielding's intense joy in living--he was "so formed for happiness," wrote his cousin Lady Mary, "it is a pity he was not immortal"--should eagerly taste all the pleasures of life as a country gentleman, and that in 'the highest degree,' is entirely consonant with his character. At the very end of his life, when dying of a complication of diseases, his happy social spirit was still unbroken; for we find him even then writing of his inability to enjoy an agreeable hour "without the assistance of a companion which has always appeared to me necessary to such enjoyment." ”

“ For Jonathan Wild, with its disclosure of the active spirit of 'diabolism,' of naked vice, is little else than the exploration of those darkest recesses of human nature which can be safely entered only by the sanest and healthiest of intellects. Fielding's strength was equal to his exploit; and from this, his second adventure, he brought back a picture of the deformity and folly of vice, drawn with a just and penetrating scorn unequalled, perhaps, by any English moralist. ”

“ But it may be doubted whether, except in the pages of his three great novels, Henry Fielding ever revealed himself more completely than in these his last informal 'lucubrations.' Here, the active Justice, the accomplished scholar, the lawyer, and man of the world, the first wit of his day, talks to us of a hundred topics, chosen indeed on the spur of the moment, but discussed in his own incomparable words, and with the now mature authority of one, who had "dived into the inmost Recesses of Human Nature." ”

“ To Sir Walter Scott, Fielding is the "father of the English novel"; to Byron, "the prose Homer of human nature." The magnificent tribute of Gibbon still remains a towering monument, whatever experts may tell us concerning the Hapsburg genealogy. "Our immortal Fielding," he wrote, "was of the younger branch of the Earls of Denbigh, who drew their origin from the Counts of Hapsburg. The successors of Charles V. 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 Austria." ”

“ The preface to Joseph Andrews shows that Fielding was perfectly conscious of the greatness of his adventure. Such a species of writing, he says, "I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language." We can but wonder at, and admire, the superb energy and confidence which could thus embark on the conscious production of this new thing, amid want, pain, and distress. And wonder and admiration increase tenfold on the further discovery that this fresh creation in literature, fashioned in circumstances so depressing, is overflowing with an exuberance of healthy life and enjoyment. ”