Joseph Andrews, vol 1 | Page 6

gigantic kind, either in dead or living.

Whether he did not like to have to look up too much, or was actually
unable to do so, it is certain that Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, and
Fielding, those four Atlantes of English verse and prose, all affected
him with lukewarm admiration, or with positive dislike, for which it is
vain to attempt to assign any uniform secondary cause, political or
other. It may be permitted to hint another reason. All Johnson's most
sharp-sighted critics have noticed, though most have discreetly
refrained from insisting on, his "thorn-in-the-flesh," the combination in
him of very strong physical passions with the deepest sense of the
moral and religious duty of abstinence. It is perhaps impossible to
imagine anything more distasteful to a man so buffeted, than the
extreme indulgence with which Fielding regards, and the easy freedom,
not to say gusto, with which he depicts, those who succumb to similar
temptation. Only by supposing the workings of some subtle influence
of this kind is it possible to explain, even in so capricious a humour as
Johnson's, the famous and absurd application of the term "barren
rascal" to a writer who, dying almost young, after having for many
years lived a life of pleasure, and then for four or five one of laborious
official duty, has left work anything but small in actual bulk, and fertile
with the most luxuriant growth of intellectual originality.
Partly on the obiter dicta of persons like these, partly on the still more
tempting and still more treacherous ground of indications drawn from
his works, a Fielding of fantasy has been constructed, which in
Thackeray's admirable sketch attains real life and immortality as a
creature of art, but which possesses rather dubious claims as a historical
character. It is astonishing how this Fielding of fantasy sinks and
shrivels when we begin to apply the horrid tests of criticism to his
component parts. The eidolon, with inked ruffles and a towel round his
head, sits in the Temple and dashes off articles for the _Covent Garden
Journal_; then comes Criticism, hellish maid, and reminds us that when
the Covent Garden Journal appeared, Fielding's wild oats, if ever sown
at all, had been sown long ago; that he was a busy magistrate and
householder in Bow Street; and that, if he had towels round his head, it
was probably less because he had exceeded in liquor than because his
Grace of Newcastle had given him a headache by wanting elaborate
plans and schemes prepared at an hour's notice. Lady Mary, apparently

with some envy, tells us that he could "feel rapture with his
cook-maid." "Which many has," as Mr Ridley remarks, from Xanthias
Phoceus downwards; but when we remember the historic fact that he
married this maid (not a "cook-maid" at all), and that though he always
speaks of her with warm affection and hearty respect, such "raptures"
as we have of his clearly refer to a very different woman, who was both
a lady and a beautiful one, we begin a little to shake our heads. Horace
Walpole at second-hand draws us a Fielding, pigging with low
companions in a house kept like a hedge tavern; Fielding himself,
within a year or two, shows us more than half-undesignedly in the
Voyage to Lisbon that he was very careful about the appointments and
decency of his table, that he stood rather upon ceremony in regard to
his own treatment of his family, and the treatment of them and himself
by others, and that he was altogether a person orderly, correct, and even
a little finikin. Nor is there the slightest reasonable reason to regard this
as a piece of hypocrisy, a vice as alien from the Fielding of fancy as
from the Fielding of fact, and one the particular manifestation of which,
in this particular place, would have been equally unlikely and
unintelligible.
It may be asked whether I propose to substitute for the traditional
Fielding a quite different person, of regular habits and methodical
economy. Certainly not. The traditional estimate of great men is rarely
wrong altogether, but it constantly has a habit of exaggerating and
dramatising their characteristics. For some things in Fielding's career
we have positive evidence of document, and evidence hardly less
certain of probability. Although I believe the best judges are now of
opinion that his impecuniosity has been overcharged, he certainly had
experiences which did not often fall to the lot of even a cadet of good
family in the eighteenth century. There can be no reasonable doubt that
he was a man who had a leaning towards pretty girls and bottles of
good wine; and I should suppose that if the girl were kind and fairly
winsome, he would not have insisted that she should possess Helen's
beauty, that