INTRODUCTION

LEAVING Eton in 1725, at the age of eighteen, Henry Fielding, like Goldsmith, spent an enjoyable year or two in deciding upon a profession. When he was twenty-one his first comedy was produced at Drury Lane, and poverty and inclination combined to keep him writing for the theatres during the first decade of his literary life. In 1698 Jeremy Collier, in his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, had made an unanswerable attack on the Restoration drama, which was succeeded by a school of Sentimental Comedy that for the most part lacked the wit as well as the grossness of the plays it displaced. By the time of Fielding the Puritan reaction was losing force, and the young dramatist was content to pour out at astonishing speed a flood of farces and comedies remarkable neither for their refinement nor their wit. The exceptions are when Fielding fleshes the sword of his satire, as in The Tragedy of Tragedies, or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, where the absurdities of the Sentimentalists are mercilessly and wittily travestied. In 1737 Fielding attacked Walpole's administration in his Historical Register for the Year 1736, and the play was immediately followed

by the institution of a dramatic censorship. Some years later Mr Justice Fielding was assiduous in enforcing the law begotten of his own satirical misdemeanours.

Before his dramatic career was thus rudely interrupted Fielding had married Charlotte Cradock, whom he drew so charmingly in his novels that Johnson and Thackeray for once agree in reckoning her "the most pleasing heroine of all the romances.' Miss Cradock's dowry provided the means for one year of magnificent splendour, to be followed shortly by "decent lodgings with tolerable comfort; sometimes in a garret without necessaries." At the age of thirty Fielding essayed a new profession and entered the Middle Temple, where he was called in 1740. Eight years later, through the influence of Lyttelton, his old schoolfellow at Eton, he received his one step of preferment when he was appointed Justice of the Peace for Middlesex and Westminster. The office was neither lucrative nor held in high repute, and Fielding in this Journal speaks bitterly of having had to reduce "an income of about £500 a year of the dirtiest money upon earth to little more than £300; a considerable portion of which remained with my clerk; and indeed if the whole had done so, as it ought, he would be but ill paid for sitting almost sixteen hours in the twenty-four in the most unwholesome as well as nauseous air in the universe." Fielding has left many proofs of his zeal and ability as a magistrate, and one scathing presentment (Mr Justice Thrasher in Amelia) of the venal and incompetent "trading justice" who had brought the office into ridicule and contempt.

Fielding little dreamed that the year 1740 was to open for him the road not to legal but to new literary fame. Five months after he was called to

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the Bar a literary sensation was created by the appearance of Pamela, a novel, written in the form of letters, by a prosaic master-printer called Samuel Richardson. With no more ambitious intention at first than to compile a Complete Letter-Writer, Richardson proceeded to give his letters the unity of a plot by making them relate the persecution of the virtuous Pamela at the hands of her employer. The scheme of the book is best indicated by a fragment of its very voluminous sub-title which declares that the book is "Published in order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes." Almost by chance Richardson had stumbled on a new literary form, and Pamela is our first novel of character analysis. Its moral is not quite so self-evident as its novelty and ability, and many readers have felt that the passage we have quoted from its sub-title might well have contained the additional words "by showing that virtue pays best in the end." It was this aspect of the book that appealed to Fielding's keen sense of humour, and the result of his reflections appeared in 1742 in his first novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his friend Mr Abraham Adams. Fielding wittily parodied the scheme of Richardson's story by making his hero a brother of Pamela and by bringing him safely through a similar persecution at the hands of his mistress. From a parody, however, Joseph Andrews developed into a highly original novel, replete with wit and variety and shrewd insight, and presenting in Parson Adams one of the finest humorous creations in the range of English fiction. Within his own special province -the analysis of "the female heart"-Richardson could well afford to defy the wits. His eminence

has remained undisputed. Fielding's innovation is the novel of plot interest, in which kind his pre-eminence is equally secure. Like many other branches of eighteenth-century prose, the novel seemed to spring into life at once fully matured.

Fielding's next effort was a trenchant satire on the then prevalent glorification of the criminal. This is the motive of his Jonathan Wild, whose scandalous career he traces with mock solemnity from his baptism by the Rev. Titus Oates to the last glorious scene at Tyburn, where the "hero," the moment before he is hanged, robs the attendant chaplain of a cork-screw. Six years later, in 1749, our author, now Mr Justice Fielding, produced his admitted masterpiece, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. The traditional fame of this great novel has centred on the excellence of its plot construction, an excellence due in no small measure probably to its author's earlier practice in writing for the stage. But its plot is by no means the measure of its greatness. Fielding draws his characters from first-hand knowledge, and his wit, says Thackeray, "lightens up a rascal like a policeman's lantern." With equal skill and sureness of touch he paints the nobility of character of Sophia Western and Allworthy and exposes the hypocrisy and cupidity of Blifil and the "college of chambermaids." Fielding's two guiding principles in the novel are that affectation and hypocrisy are the truest objects of satire, and that "the various callings in lower spheres produce the greatest variety of humorous characters." The excellence of Fielding's style reached its full height in Tom Jones, especially in the celebrated prefatory discourses, in which with delightful urbanity and scholarship he talks with his readers concerning various aspects of his art.

After an interval of only two years, during which his pen had been busily engaged on more professional matters, particularly the valuable Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers in the Metropolis, came the last of his novels, Amelia. The fame of Tom Jones has served to obscure the reputation of this great novel which compensates by its pathos and its social satire for its undoubted but not surprising diminution of the gaiety of health and energy. For Fielding's constitution had broken down suddenly and irreparably, and in Amelia there is much of the sadness of retrospect. This element, however, is for the seeing reader to find. The author makes no pageant of his sorrows, and the wit flashes forth with its old brightness in describing the humorous irascibility of Colonel Bath. Fielding made effective use in the novel of his magisterial experience, and gives us many memorable sidelights on the London of the mid-eighteenth century. Amelia, a novel beginning and not ending with marriage, is also of supreme biographical interest. For many traits of the erring Captain Booth are the outcome of Fielding's remorseful retrospect of his own life, while to the drawing of Amelia he brought the gratitude of a noble nature and the maturity of a great genius. The result in the latter case is commensurate with the means expended, and Fielding succeeded, where so many who called him master failed, in describing without triviality or insipidity a heroine whose chief charm is her limitless forgiveness and who knew no ambitions beyond the reward promised to the ideal wife and mother commended by Solomon.

The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon tells with a fulness that leaves no need for addition the story of his miserable journey in quest of health,