双语·聪明的消遣：毛姆谈英国文学 亨利·菲尔丁与《汤姆·琼斯》 1

Henry Fielding and Tom Jones 1

The difficulty of writing about Henry Fielding, the man, is that very little is known about him. Arthur Murphy, who wrote a short life of him in 1762, only eight years after his death, as an introduction to an edition of his works, seems to have known him, if he knew him at all, only in his later years, and had so little material to work with that, presumably to fill the eighty pages of his essay, he indulged in long and tedious digressions. The facts he tells are few, and subsequent research has shown that they are not always accurate. The last writer to deal at length with Fielding is Dr. Homes Dudden, Master of Pembroke, Oxford. The two stout volumes of his work are a monument of painstaking industry. By giving a lively picture of the political circumstances of the times, and a vivid account of the Young Pretender's disastrous adventure in 1745, he has added colour, depth and substance to the narrative of his hero's checkered career. I don’t believe that there is anything to be said about Henry Fielding that the eminent author has left unsaid.

Fielding was a gentleman born. His father was the third son of John Fielding, a Canon of Salisbury, and he in turn was the fifth son of an Earl of Desmond. The Desmonds were a younger branch of the family of Denbigh, who flattered themselves that they were descended from the Habsburgs. Gibbon, the Gibbon of The Decline and Fall, wrote in his autobiography: “The successors of Charles the Fifth may disclaim their brethren of England; but the romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escorial, and the imperial eagle of the House of Austria.”The phrase has a fine resonance, and it is a pity that the claim of these noble lords has been shown to have no foundation. They spelt their name Feilding, and there is a well-known story that on one occasion the then Earl asked Henry Fielding how this came about; whereupon he answered: “I can only suppose it is because my branch of the family learnt to spell before your lordship's.”

Fielding's father entered the army and served in the wars under Marlborough“with much bravery and reputation.”He married Sarah, the daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a Judge of the King's Bench; and at his country seat, Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, our author was born in 1707. Two or three years later the Fieldings, who by this time had had two more children, daughters, moved to East Stour in Dorsetshire, a property which the judge had settled on his daughter, and there three more girls and a boy were born. Mrs. Fielding died in 1718, and in the following year Henry went to Eton. Here he made some valuable friends and, if he did not leave, as Arthur Murphy states, “uncommonly well versed in the Greek authors and an early master of the Latin classics, ”he certainly acquired a real love for classical learning. Later in life, when he was ill and poverty-stricken, he found comfort in reading Cicero's De Consolatione; and when, dying, he set out in the ship that took him to Lisbon, he carried with him a volume of Plato.

On leaving Eton, instead of going up to a university, he lived for a while at Salisbury with his grandmother, Lady Gould, the judge being dead; and there, according to Dr. Dudden, read some law and a good deal of miscellaneous literature. He was then a handsome youth, over six feet tall, strong and active, with deep-set eyes, a Roman nose, a short upper lip with an ironical curl to it, and a stubborn, prominent chin. His hair was brown and curly, his teeth white and even. By the time he was eighteen, he gave promise of the sort of man he was going to be. He happened to be staying at Lyme Regis with a trusty servant, ready to“beat, maim or kill”for his master, and there fell in love with a Miss Sarah Andrews, whose considerable fortune added to the charm of her beauty, and he concocted a scheme to carry her off, by main force if necessary, and marry her. It was discovered, and the young woman was hurried away and safely married to a more eligible suitor. For all one knows to the contrary, Fielding spent the next two or three years in London, with an allowance from his grandmother, engaging in the gaieties of the town as agreeably as a well-connected young man can do when he has good looks and charm of manner. In 1728, by the in fluence of his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, and with the help of the charming, but not particularly chaste, actress, Anne Oldfield, a play of Fielding's was put on by Colley Cibber at Drury Lane. It was called Love in Several Masques and was given four performances. Shortly after this, he entered the University of Leyden with an allowance from his father of two hundred pounds a year. But his father had married again and either could not, or would not, continue to pay him the allowance he had promised, so after about a year Fielding was obliged to return to England. He was in such straits then that, as in his light-hearted way he put it himself, he had no choice but to be a hackney coachman or a hackney writer.

Austin Dobson, who wrote his life for The English Men of Letters Series, says that“his inclinations as well as his opportunities led him to the stage.”He had the high spirits, the humour, the keen-witted observation of the contemporary scene, which are needed by the playwright; and he seems to have had besides some ingenuity and a sense of construction. The“inclinations”of which Austin Dobson speaks may very well mean that he had the vicarious exhibitionism which is part of the playwright's make-up, and that he looked upon writing plays as an easy way to make quick money; the“opportunities”may be a delicate way of saying that he was a handsome fellow of exuberant virility and had taken the fancy of a popular actress. To please a leading lady has ever been the surest way for a young dramatist to get his play produced. Between 1729 and 1737 Fielding composed or adapted twenty-six plays, of which at least three greatly pleased the town; and one of which made Swift laugh, a thing that to the best of the Dean's recollection he had only done twice in his life before. Fielding did not do very well when he attempted pure comedy; his great successes seem to have been in a genre which, so far as I know, he devised himself, an entertainment in which there were singing and dancing, brief topical sketches, parodies and allusions to public figures: in fact, something indistinguishable from the revues popular in our own day. According to Arthur Murphy, Fielding's farces“were generally the production of two or three mornings, so great was his facility in writing.”Dr. Dudden looks upon this as an exaggeration. I don’t think it is. Some of these pieces were very short, and I have myself heard of light comedies that were written over a week-end and were none the worse for that. The last two plays Fielding wrote were attacks on the political corruption of the times, and the attacks were effective enough to cause the Ministry to pass a Licensing Act which obliged managers to obtain the Lord Chamberlain's licence to produce a play. This act still obtains to torment British authors. After this, Fielding wrote only rarely for the theatre and, when he did, presumably for no other reason than that he was more than usually hard up.

I will not pretend that I have read his plays, but I have flipped through the pages, reading a scene here and there, and the dialogue seems natural and sprightly. The most amusing bit I have come across is the description which, after the fashion of the day, he gives in the list of Dramatis Person? in Tom Thumb the Great: “A woman entirely faultless, save that she is a little given to drink.”It is usual to dismiss Fielding's plays as of no account, and doubtless no one would give them a thought if he were not the author of Tom Jones. They lack the literary distinction (such as Congreve's plays have) which the critic, reading them in his library two hundred years later, would like them to have. But plays are written to be acted, not to be read; it is certainly well for them to have literary distinction; but it is not that which makes them good plays, it may (and often does) make them less actable. Fielding's plays have by now lost what merit they had, for the drama depends very much on actuality and so is ephemeral, almost as ephemeral as a newspaper, and Fielding’ plays, as I have said, owed their success to the fact that they were topical; but light as they were, they must have had merit, for neither a young man's wish to write plays, nor pressure brought to bear by a favourite actress, will induce managers to put on play after play unless they please the public. For in this matter the public is the final judge. Unless the manager can gauge their taste, he will go bankrupt. Fielding's plays had at least the merit that the public liked to go to see them. Tom Thumb the Great ran for“upwards of forty nights, ”and Pasquin for sixty, which was as long as The Beggar's Opera had run.

Fielding had no illusions about the worth of his plays, and himself said that he left off writing for the stage when he should have begun. He wrote for money, and had no great respect for the understanding of an audience.“When he had contracted to bring on a play, or a farce, ”says Murphy, “it is well known by many of his friends now living, that he would go home rather late from a tavern and would, the next morning, deliver a scene to the players, written upon the papers which had wrapped the tobacco, in which he so much delighted.”During the rehearsals of a comedy called The Wedding Day, Garrick, who was playing in it, objected to a scene and asked Fielding to cut it.“No, damn ’em, ”said Fielding, “if the scene isn’t a good one let them find it out.”The scene was played, the audience noisily expressed their displeasure, and Garrick retired to the green-room where his author was“indulging his genius and solacing himself with a bottle of champagne. He had by this time drunk pretty plentifully; and cocking his eye at the actor, with streams of tobacco trickling down from the corner of his mouth, ‘What's the matter, Garrick, ’ says he, ‘what are they hissing now?’

“‘Why, the scene that I begged you to retrench; I knew it would not do; and they have so frightened me, that I shall not be able to collect myself the whole night.’

“‘Oh, damn ’em, ’ replies the author, ‘they have found it out, have they?’”

This story is told by Arthur Murphy, and I am bound to say that I doubt its truth. I have known and had dealings with actor-managers, which is what Garrick was, and it does seem to me very unlikely that he would have consented to play a scene which he thought would wreck the play; but the anecdote wouldn’t have been invented unless it had been plausible. It at least indicates how Fielding's friends and boon-companions regarded him.

If I have dwelt on his activity as a playwright, though it was after all not much more than an episode in his career, it is because I think it was important to his development as a novelist. Quite a number of eminent novelists have tried their hands at playwriting, but I cannot think of any that have conspicuously succeeded. The fact is that the techniques are very different, and to have learnt how to write a novel is of no help when it comes to writing a play. The novelist has all the time he wants to develop his theme, he can describe his characters as minutely as he chooses and make their behaviour plain to the reader by relating their motives; if he is skilful, he can give verisimilitude to improbabilities; if he has a gift for narrative, he can gradually work up to a climax which a long preparation makes more striking (a supreme example of this is Clarissa's letter in which she announced her seduction); he does not have to show action, but only to tell it; he can make the persons explain themselves in dialogue for as many pages as he likes. But a play depends on action, and by action, of course, I don’t mean violent action like falling off a precipice or being run over by a bus; such an action as handing a person a glass of water may be of the highest dramatic intensity. The power of attention that an audience has is very limited, and it must be held by a constant succession of incidents; something fresh must be doing all the time; the theme must be presented at once and its development must follow a definite line, without digression into irrelevant bypaths; the dialogue must be crisp and to the point, and it must be so put that the listener can catch its meaning without having to stop and think; the characters must be all of a piece, easily grasped by the eye and the understanding, and however complex, their complexity must be plausible. A play cannot afford loose ends; however slight, its foundation must be secure and its structure solid.

When the playwright, who has acquired the qualities which I have suggested are essential to writing a play which audiences will sit through with pleasure, starts writing novels, he is at an advantage. He has learnt to be brief; he has learnt the value of rapid incident; he has learnt not to linger on the way, but to stick to his point and get on with his story; he has learnt to make his characters display themselves by their words and actions, without the help of description; and so, when he comes to work on the larger canvas which the novel allows, he can not only profit by the advantages peculiar to the form of the novel, but his training as a playwright will enable him to make his novel lively, swift-moving and dramatic. These are excellent qualities, and some very good novelists, whatever their other merits, have not possessed them. I cannot look upon the years Fielding spent writing plays as wasted; I think, on the contrary, the experience he gained then was of value to him when he came to writing novels.

In 1734 Fielding married Charlotte Cradock. She was one of the two daughters of a widow who lived in Salisbury, and nothing is known of her but that she was beautiful and charming. Mrs. Cradock was a worldly, strong-minded woman, who apparently did not approve of Fielding's attentions to her daughter, and she can hardly be blamed for that, since his means of livelihood were uncertain and his connection with the theatre can hardly have inspired a prudent mother with confidence; anyhow, the lovers eloped, and though Mrs. Cradock pursued, “she did not catch up with them in time to stop the marriage.”Fielding has described Charlotte as Sophia in Tom Jones and again as Amelia in the novel of that name, so that the reader of those books can gain a very exact notion of what she looked like in the eyes of her lover and husband. Mrs. Cradock died a year later and left Charlotte fifteen hundred pounds. It came at a fortunate moment, since a play that Fielding had produced early in the year was a disastrous failure, and he was very short of cash. He had been in the habit of staying from time to time on the small estate which had been his mother's, and he went there now with his young wife. He spent the next nine months lavishly entertaining his friends and enjoying the various pursuits which the country offered, and on his return to London with what, it may be supposed, remained of Charlotte's legacy he took the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, and there presently produced the best (they say) and the most successful of his plays—Pasquin; a Dramatic Satire on the Times.

When the Licensing Act became law, and so put an end to his theatrical career, Fielding had a wife and two children and precious little money to support them on. He had to find a means of livelihood. He was thirty-one. He entered the Middle Temple, and though, according to Arthur Murphy, “it happened that the early taste he had taken of pleasure would occasionally return upon him; and conspire with his spirit and vivacity to carry him into the wild enjoyments of the town, ”he worked hard, and he was in due course called to the bar. He was ready to follow his profession with assiduity, but he seems to have had few briefs; and it may well be that the attorneys were suspicious of a man who was known only as a writer of light comedies and political satires. Moreover, within three years of being called, he began to suffer from frequent attacks of gout which prevented him from regularly attending the courts. In order to make money he was obliged to do hack work for the papers. He found time, meanwhile, to write Joseph Andrews, his first novel. Two years later his wife died. Her death left him distracted with grief. Lady Louisa Stuart wrote: “He loved her passionately, and she returned his affection; yet led no happy life, for they were almost always miserably poor, and seldom in a state of quiet and safety. All the world knows what was his imprudence; if ever he possessed a score of pounds nothing could keep him from lavishing it idly, or make him think of tomorrow. Sometimes they were living in decent lodgings with tolerable comfort; sometimes in a wretched garret without necessaries, not to speak of the sponging-houses and hiding places where he was occasionally to be found. His elastic gaiety of spirit carried him through it all; but, meanwhile, care and anxiety were preying upon her more delicate mind, and undermining her constitution. She gradually declined, caught a fever, and died in his arms.”This has an air of truth, and is in part confirmed by Fielding's Amelia. We know that novelists habitually make use of any little experience that they have had, and when Fielding created the character of Billy Booth, he not only drew a portrait of himself and of his wife as Amelia, but utilized various incidents in their married life. Four years after his wife's death he married her maid, Mary Daniel. She was at the time three months pregnant. The marriage shocked his friends, and his sister, who had lived with him since Charlotte's death, left the house. His cousin Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu was haughtily scornful because he could“feel rapture with his cook-maid.”Mary Daniel had few personal charms, but she was an excellent creature and he never spoke of her but with affection and respect. She was a very decent woman, who looked after him well, a good wife and a good mother. She bore him two boys and a girl.

When still a struggling dramatist, Fielding had made advances to Sir Robert Walpole, then all-powerful; but though he dedicated to him with effusive compliments his play, The Modern Husband, the ungrateful minister seems to have been disinclined to do anything for him. He therefore decided that he could do better with the party opposed to Walpole, and forthwith made overtures to Lord Chesterfield, one of its leaders. As Dr. Dudden puts it: “He could hardly have given a broader hint that he was ready to place his wit and humour at the disposal of the opposition, should they be willing to employ him.”Eventually they showed themselves willing, and Fielding was made editor of a paper called The Champion, founded to attack and ridicule Sir Robert and his ministry. Walpole fell in 1742 and, after a brief interlude, was succeeded by Henry Pelham. The party Fielding worked for was now in power, and for some years he edited and wrote for the papers which supported and defended the government. He naturally expected that his services should be rewarded. Among the friends he had made at Eton, and whose friendship he had retained, was George Lyttelton, a member of a distinguished political family (distinguished to the present day) and a generous patron of literature. Lyttelton was made a Lord of the Treasury in Henry Pelham's Government, and in 1784 by his in fluence Fielding was made Justice of the Peace for Westminster. Presently, so that he might discharge his duties more effectively, his jurisdiction was extended over Middlesex, and he established himself with his family in the official residence in Bow Street. He was well fitted for the post by his training as a lawyer, his knowledge of life and his natural gifts. Fielding says that before his accession the job was worth five hundred pounds a year of dirty money, but that he made no more than three hundred a year of clean. Through the Duke of Bedford he was granted a pension out of the public-service money. It is supposed that this was either one or two hundred pounds a year. In 1749 he published Tom Jones, which he must have been writing when he was still editing a paper on behalf of the Government. He received altogether seven hundred pounds for it, and since money at that period was worth five or six times at least what it is worth now, this sum was equivalent to something like four thousand pounds. That would be good payment for a novel to-day.

Fielding's health by now was poor. His attacks of gout were frequent, and he had often to go to Bath to recuperate, or to a cottage he had near London. But he did not cease to write. He wrote pamphlets concerning his office; one, an Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Menace of Robbers is said to have caused the famous Gin Act to be passed; and he wrote Amelia. His industry was indeed amazing. Amelia was published in 1751 and in the same year Fielding undertook to edit still another paper, The Covent Garden Journal. Hishealth grew worse. It was evident that he could no longer perform his duties at Bow Street, and in 1754, after breaking up“a gang of villains and cut-throats”who had become the terror of London, he resigned his office to his half-brother, John Fielding. It looked as though his only chance of life was to seek a milder climate than that of England, and so, in the June of that year, 1754, he left his native country in The Queen of Portugal, Richard Veal, master, for Lisbon. He arrived in August, and two months later died. He was forty-seven years old.