Fielding | Page 9

who wrote
Love in Several Masques, and had Lady Mary Wortley Montagu for
patroness, might fairly be supposed to have expectations which
warranted the civilities of Messrs. Wilks and Cibber; but the "Luckless"
of two years later had probably convinced them that his dramatic
performances did not involve their sine qua non of success. Under
these circumstances nothing perhaps could be more natural than that
they should play their parts in his little satire.
We have dwelt at some length upon the Author's Farce, because it is
the first of Fielding's plays in which, leaving the "wit-traps" of
Wycherley and Congreve, he deals with the direct censure of
contemporary folly, and because, apart from translation and adaptation,
it is in this field that his most brilliant theatrical successes were won.
For the next few years he continued to produce comedies and farces
with great rapidity, both under his own name, and under the
pseudonym of Scriblerus Secundus. Most of these show manifest signs
of haste, and some are recklessly immodest. We shall confine ourselves
to one or two of the best, and do little more than enumerate the others.
Of these latter, the Coffee-House Politician; or, The Justice caught in
his own Trap, 1730, succeeded the Author's Farce. The leading idea,
that of a tradesman who neglects his shop for "foreign affairs," appears
to be derived from Addison's excellent character-sketch in the Tatler of

the "Political Upholsterer." This is the more likely, in that Arne the
musician, whose father is generally supposed to have been Addison's
original, was Fielding's contemporary at Eton. Justice Squeezum,
another character contained in this play, is a kind of first draft of the
later Justice Thrasher in Amelia. The representation of the trading
justice on the stage, however, was by no means new, since Justice
Quorum in Coffey's Beggar's Wedding (with whom, as will appear
presently, Fielding's name has been erroneously associated) exhibits
similar characteristics. Omitting for the moment the burlesque of Tom
Thumb, the Coffee-House Politician was followed by the Letter Writers;
or, A new Way to Keep a Wife at Home, 1731, a brisk little farce, with
one vigorously drawn character, that of Jack Commons, a young
university rake; the Grub- Street Opera, 1731; the farce of the Lottery,
1731, in which the famous Mrs. Clive, then Miss Raftor, appeared; the
Modern Husband, 1732; the Covent Garden Tragedy, 1732, a broad
and rather riotous burlesque of Ambrose Philips' Distrest Mother; and
the Debauchees; or, The Jesuit Caught, 1732--which was based upon
the then debated story of Father Girard and Catherine Cadiere.
Neither of the two last-named pieces is worthy of the author, and their
strongest condemnation in our day is that they were condemned in their
own for their unbridled license, the Grub Street Journal going so far as
to say that they had "met with the universal detestation of the Town."
The Modern Husband, which turns on that most loathsome of all
commercial pursuits, the traffic of a husband in his wife's dishonour,
appears, oddly enough, to have been regarded by its author with
especial complacency. Its prologue lays stress upon the moral purpose;
it was dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole; and from a couple of letters
printed in Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Correspondence, it is clear
that it had been submitted to her perusal. It had, however, no great
success upon the stage, and the chief thing worth remembering about it
is that it afforded his last character to Wilks, who played the part of
Bellamant. That "slight Pique," of which mention has been made, was
no doubt by this time a thing of the past.
But if most of the works in the foregoing list can hardly be regarded as
creditable to Fielding's artistic or moral sense, one of them at least

deserves to be excepted, and that is the burlesque of Tom Thumb. This
was first brought out in 1730 at the little theatre in the Hay-market,
where it met with a favourable reception. In the following year it was
enlarged to three acts (in the first version there had been but two), and
reproduced at the same theatre as the Tragedy of Tragedies; or, The
Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, "with the Annotations of H.
Scriblerus Secundus." It is certainly one of the best burlesques ever
written. As Baker observes in his Biographia Dramatica, it may fairly
be ranked as a sequel to Buckingham's Rehearsal, since it includes the
absurdities of nearly all the writers of tragedies from the period when
that piece stops to 1730. Among the authors satirised are Nat. Lee,
Thomson (whose famous
"O Sophonisba, Sophonisba, O!"
is parodied by
"O Huncamunca, Huncamunca, O!"),
Banks's Earl of Essex, a favourite play at Bartholomew Fair, the Busiris
of Young, and the Aurengzebe of Dryden, etc.