17 HENRY FIELDING 1707-1754 THEY are not few that have dealt with Henry His work Fielding's work and fame; but not too many of and fame. them have done the best by him. The most of his life is, and must ever remain unknown to us; and in the absence of accredited facts, men have had to make inferences, and the most of these have failed to stand the tests of reflection and time. Was our premier Novelist an habitual bulker': a party, that is, who slept on public benches, or butcher's stalls, or the like open air conveniences, among thieves, and buttocks, and beggars, for the sole reason that he had nowhere else to sleep? 1 Did he play Bilkum in fact, and tap a real Stormandra for his share of her fees in the service of a living, breathing Mother Punchbowl? Was he used to blow a trumpet at a booth in Bartlemy Fair? All these villainies were laid to his charge (for a frantic Scotchman is no respecter of God, or Man, or History), and all are demonstrably false. Smollett (the aforesaid frantic Scotchman), who wrote of him 1 Of course, he may have bulked it once and again for fun, I myself But who has not? AMBOTILIAD in his lifetime, wrote in so violent a passion that, his humour being for the moment in abeyance, he could not see that, in dealing as he did with a superior, he was simply revealing himself for a person sick with envy and vanity; and Richardson, who also wrote of him in his lifetime, wrote also as a megalomaniac, and with a feminine acidity in his madness, a sort of elderly-maiden-lady ruffianism in intention and effect, which admirers of Clarissa are at some pains to dissemble. There are glimpses of him in his cousin, the Lady Mary Montagu, and these, if they be kindly on the whole, are on the whole contemptuous;1 there are others in Horace Walpole, that Faddle of genius, whom God and his opportunities made the best letter-writer in EighteenthCentury England; there is one magnificent reference, as it were a leaf from Apollo's laurel bough, in Gibbon. Comes Arthur Murphy, the Editor of the first collected Edition (1764), an excellent creature, but one not well acquainted with Fielding's life, nor able, had he been so acquainted, Mr. Boswell's inimitable performance being still undone, to make use of his knowledge to any particular advantage; comes Sir Walter, who writes as your right Scot will, and frankly prefers his countryman above the Englisher,' though in the 1 Cf. her taunt that he was capable of 'sharing a rapture with his maid.' Mr. Saintsbury's comment on this takes the shape of a quotation:- Which many has.' 'Tis but three words long; yet is it long enough. Her Ladyship, by the way, had a mortal contempt for Mr. Pope, the poet; but she nowhere goes so far as to reproach him with his capacity for sharing a rapture with a tainted harlot. (See post, pp. 29-31, my note on Colley Cibber.) But then, you see, Mr. Pope had begun by solemnly, even ardently, making love to her; and, so far as we know, her cousin had not. long-run, being Sir Walter, he is constrained to write Fielding down the Father of the English Novel '; comes Thackeray with that achievement in portraiture of his, a piece of work delightful as literature but wholly disloyal to letters; come Lawrence and Keightley, who want to learn whatever may be learned, and in their need go far to redeem our world from the reproach of knowing nothing of one of its greatest men; comes Sir Leslie Stephen, a good man, good at many things,' who knows and loves his Fielding, and says the wisest and the most affectionate things of him, yet cannot refrain from making comparisons, and finding resemblances, between Fielding, the immitigable Ironist, and Thackeray, the unmitigated Sentimentalist, which make you wonder how and why in the world he contrives to be so affectionate and so wise as he is. Meanwhile the Figure The figure itself remains legendary, vague, obscure. Was itself. there a Lady Bellaston in his life? Who knows? Yet the chances are that there was. Who cares? Did he smoke so furiously that he needed nothing but the wrappings of his tobacco for the manuscript paper of his very solid Five Volumes of Théâtre? Was he commonly drunk, always begrimed with snuff, and ever bending the stiles along his path up Parnassus Hill with no better dunnage than a yard of clay and a flask of champagne? Thackeray's charming but (in the circumstances) really rascally discovery of him made strongly for these last conclusions; for Thackeray, you see, knew all about the Eighteenth Century, and was good at Grub Street, and had all but published with Lintot and |