Journal of A Voyage to Lisbon | Page 4

author of Joseph Andrews, of Tom Jones, of Amelia,
of Jonathan Wild, of the Journal. His plays, his essays, his miscellanies
generally are interesting, first of all, because they were written by
Fielding.
Yet of these works, the Journey from this World to the Next (which, by
a grim trick of fortune, might have served as a title for the more
interesting Voyage with which we have yoked it) stands clearly first
both in scale and merit. It is indeed very unequal, and as the author was
to leave it unfinished, it is a pity that he did not leave it unfinished
much sooner than he actually did. The first ten chapters, if of a kind of
satire which has now grown rather obsolete for the nonce, are of a good
kind and good in their kind; the history of the metempsychoses of
Julian is of a less good kind, and less good in that kind. The date of
composition of the piece is not known, but it appeared in the
Miscellanies of 1743, and may represent almost any period of its
author's development prior to that year. Its form was a very common
form at the time, and continued to be so. I do not know that it is
necessary to assign any very special origin to it, though Lucian, its
chief practitioner, was evidently and almost avowedly a favorite study
of Fielding's. The Spanish romancers, whether borrowing it from
Lucian or not, had been fond of it; their French followers, of whom the

chief were Fontenelle and Le Sage, had carried it northwards; the
English essayists had almost from the beginning continued the process
of acclimatization. Fielding therefore found it ready to his hand, though
the present condition of this example would lead us to suppose that he
did not find his hand quite ready to it. Still, in the actual "journey,"
there are touches enough of the master--not yet quite in his stage of
mastery. It seemed particularly desirable not to close the series without
some representation of the work to which Fielding gave the prime of
his manhood, and from which, had he not, fortunately for English
literature, been driven decidedly against his will, we had had in all
probability no Joseph Andrews, and pretty certainly no Tom Jones.
Fielding's periodical and dramatic work has been comparatively seldom
reprinted, and has never yet been reprinted as a whole. The dramas
indeed are open to two objections--the first, that they are not very
"proper;" the second, and much more serious, that they do not redeem
this want of propriety by the possession of any remarkable literary
merit. Three (or two and part of a third) seemed to escape this double
censure--the first two acts of the Author's Farce (practically a piece to
themselves, for the Puppet Show which follows is almost entirely
independent); the famous burlesque of Tom Thumb, which stands
between the Rehearsal and the Critic, but nearer to the former; and
Pasquin, the maturest example of Fielding's satiric work in drama.
These accordingly have been selected; the rest I have read, and he who
likes may read. I have read many worse things than even the worst of
them, but not often worse things by so good a writer as Henry Fielding.
The next question concerned the selection of writings more
miscellaneous still, so as to give in little a complete idea of Fielding's
various powers and experiments. Two difficulties beset this part of the
task--want of space and the absence of anything so markedly good as
absolutely to insist on inclusion. The Essay on Conversation, however,
seemed pretty peremptorily to challenge a place. It is in a style which
Fielding was very slow to abandon, which indeed has left strong traces
even on his great novels; and if its mannerism is not now very
attractive, the separate traits in it are often sharp and well-drawn. The
book would not have been complete without a specimen or two of
Fielding's journalism. The Champion, his first attempt of this kind, has
not been drawn upon in consequence of the extreme difficulty of fixing

with absolute certainty on Fielding's part in it. I do not know whether
political prejudice interferes, more than I have usually found it interfere,
with my judgment of the two Hanoverian-partisan papers of the '45
time. But they certainly seem to me to fail in redeeming their dose of
rancor and misrepresentation by any sufficient evidence of genius such
as, to my taste, saves not only the party journalism in verse and prose
of Swift and Canning and Praed on one side, but that of Wolcot and
Moore and Sydney Smith on the other. Even the often-quoted journal
of events in London under the Chevalier is overwrought and tedious.
The best thing in the True