Henry Fielding and Tom Jones 2
When I consider Fielding's life, which from inadequate material I have briefly sketched, I am seized with a singular emotion. He was a man. As you read his novels, and few novelists have put more of themselves into their books than he, you feel the same sort of affection as you feel for someone with whom you have been for years intimate. There is something contemporary about him. There is a sort of Englishman that till recently was far from uncommon. You might meet him in London, at Newmarket, in Leicestershire during the hunting season, at Cowes in August, at Cannes or Monte Carlo in midwinter. He is a gentleman, and he has good manners. He is good-looking, good-natured, friendly and easy to get on with. He is not particularly cultured, but he is tolerant of those who are. He is fond of the girls and is apt to find himself cited as a co-respondent. He is not one of the world's workers, but he sees no reason why he should be. Though he does nothing, he is far from idle. He has an adequate income and is free with his money. If war breaks out, he joins up and his gallantry is conspicuous. There is absolutely no harm in him and everyone likes him. The years pass and youth is over, he is not so well-off any more and life is not so easy as it was. He has had to give up hunting, but he still plays a good game of golf and you are always glad to see him in the card-room of your club. He marries an old flame, a widow with money, and, settling down to middle age, makes her a very good husband. The world to-day has no room for him and, in a few years, his type will be extinct. Such a man, I fancy, was Fielding. But he happened to have the great gift which made him the writer he was and, when he wanted to, he could work hard. He was fond of the bottle and he liked women. When people speak of virtue, it is generally sex they have in mind, but chastity is only a small part of virtue, and perhaps not the chief one. Fielding had strong passions, and he had no hesitation in yielding to them. He was capable of loving tenderly. Now love, not affection, which is a different thing, is rooted in sex, but there can be sexual desire without love. It is only hypocrisy or ignorance that denies it. Sexual desire is an animal instinct, and there is nothing more shameful in it than in thirst or hunger, and no more reason not to satisfy it. If Fielding enjoyed, somewhat promiscuously, the pleasures of sex, he was not worse than most men. Like most of us, he regretted his sins, if sins they are, but when opportunity occurred, committed them again. He was hot-tempered, but kind-hearted, generous and, in a corrupt age honest; an affectionate husband and father; courageous and truthful, and a good friend to his friends, who till his death remained faithful to him. Though tolerant to the faults of others, he hated brutality and double-dealing. He was not puffed up by success and, with the help of a brace of partridges and a bottle of claret, bore adversity with fortitude. He took life as it came, with high spirits and good humour, and enjoyed it to the full. In fact he was very like his own Tom Jones, and not unlike his own Billy Booth. He was a very proper man.
I should, however, tell the reader that the picture I have drawn of Henry Fielding does not at all accord with that drawn by the Master of Pembroke in the monumental work to which I have often referred, and to which I owe much useful information.“Until comparatively recently, ”he writes, “the conception of Fielding which prevailed in the popular imagination was that of a man of brilliant genius, endowed with what is called‘a good heart’ and many amiable qualities, but dissipated and irresponsible, guilty of regrettable follies, and not wholly unstained even by graver vices.”And he has done his best to persuade his readers that Fielding has been grossly maligned.
But this conception, which Dr. Dudden tries to refute, is that which prevailed in Fielding's lifetime. It was held by persons who knew him well. It is true that he was violently attacked in his own day by his political and literary enemies, and it is very likely that the charges that were brought against him were exaggerated; but if charges are to be damaging they must be plausible. For example: the late Sir Stafford Cripps had many bitter enemies who were only too anxious to throw mud at him; they said that he was a turncoat and a traitor to his class; but it would never have occurred to them to say that he was a lecher and a drunkard, since he was well-known to be a man of high moral character and fiercely abstemious. It would only have made them absurd. In the same way, the legends that gather round a famous man may not be true, but they will not be believed unless they are specious. Arthur Murphy relates that on one occasion Fielding, in order to pay the tax-collector, got his publisher to give him an advance and, while taking the money home, met a friend who was in even worse case than himself; so he gave him the money and, when the tax-collector called, sent him the message: “Friendship has called for the money and had it; let the collector call again.”Dr. Dudden shows that there can be no truth in the anecdote; but if it was invented, it is because it was credible. Fielding was accused of being a spendthrift; he probably was; it went with his insouciance, his high spirits, his friendliness, conviviality and indifference to money. He was thus often in debt and probably on occasion haunted by“duns and bumbailiffs”; there is little doubt that when he was at his wit's end for money he applied to his friends for help and they gave it. So did the noble-minded Edmund Burke. As a playwright, Fielding had lived for years in theatrical circles, and the theatre has in no country, either in the past or the present, been regarded as a favourable place to teach the young a rigid continence. Anne Oldfield, by whose influence Fielding had his first play produced, was buried in Westminster Abbey; but since she had been kept by two gentlemen, and had had two illegitimate children, permission to honour her with a monument was refused. It would be strange if she did not grant her favours to the handsome youth that Fielding then was; and, since he was pretty well penniless, it would not be surprising if she had helped him with some of the funds she received from her protectors. It may be that his poverty, but not his will, consented. If in his youth he was much given to wenching, he was no different from most young men in his day (and ours) who had his opportunities and advantages. And, doubtless, he spent“many anight drinking deep in taverns.”Whatever philosophers may aver, common sense is pretty well agreed that there is a different morality for youth and age, and a different one according to the station in life. It would be reprehensible for a doctor of divinity to engage in promiscuous fornication, but natural for a young man to do so; and it would be unpardonable for the master of a college to get drunk, but to be expected on occasion, and not really disapproved, in an undergraduate.
Fielding's enemies accuse him of being a political hireling. He was. He was quite ready to put his great gifts at the service of Sir Robert Walpole and, when he found they were not wanted, he was equally ready to put them at the service of his enemies. That demanded no particular sacrifice of principle, since at that time the only real difference between the Government and the Opposition was that the Government enjoyed the emoluments of office and the Opposition did not. Corruption was universal, and great lords were as willing to change sides when it was to their advantage as was Fielding when it was a question of bread and butter. It should be said to his credit that when Walpole discovered he was dangerous, and offered to give him his own terms if he would desert the Opposition, he refused. It was also intelligent of him, for not so long afterwards Walpole fell! Fielding had a number of friends in the higher ranks of society, and friends eminent in the arts, but from his writings it seems certain that he enjoyed the company of the low and disreputable. He was severely censured for this, but it seems to me that he could not have described with such wonderful vivacity scenes of what is called low-life unless he had himself taken part in them, and enjoyed it. Common opinion in his own day decided that Fielding was licentious and profligate. The evidence that he was is too great to be ignored. If he had been the respectable, chaste, abstemious creature that the Master of Pembroke would have us believe, it is surely very unlikely that he would have written Tom Jones. I think what has misled Dr. Dudden, in his perhaps meritorious attempt to whitewash Fielding, is that it has not occurred to him that contradictory, and even mutually exclusive, qualities may exist in the same man and somehow or other form a tolerably plausible harmony. That is natural enough in one who has led a sheltered, academic life. Because Fielding was generous, good-hearted, upright, kindly, affectionate and honest, it has seemed to the Master impossible that he should have been at the same time a spendthrift who would cadge a dinner and a guinea from his rich friends, who would haunt taverns and drink to the ruin of his health, and who would engage in sexual congress whenever he had the chance. Dr. Dudden states that, as long as his first wife lived, Fielding was absolutely faithful to her. How does he know? Certainly Fielding loved her, he loved her passionately, but he would not have been the first loving husband who, when the circumstances were propitious, had a flutter on the side; and it is very probable that after such an occurrence, like his own Captain Booth in similar circumstances, he bitterly regretted it; but that did not prevent him from transgressing again when the opportunity offered.
In one of her letters Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu wrote: “I am sorry for H. Fielding's death, not only as I shall read no more of his writings, but I believe he lost more than others, as no man enjoyed life more than he did, though few had less reason to do so, the highest of his preferment being raking in the lowest sinks of vice and misery. I should think it a nobler and less nauseous employment to be one of the staff officers that conduct the nocturnal weddings. His happy constitution (even when he had, with great pains, half demolished it) made him forget everything when he was before a venison pasty, or over a flask of champagne; and I am persuaded he has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth.”
