gift of laughing it to scorn. His wit is wonderfully wise and detective; it flashes upon a rogue and lightens up a rascal like a policeman's lantern. He is one of the manliest and kindliest of human beings: in the midst of all his imperfections, he respects female innocence and infantine tenderness, as you would suppose such a great-hearted, courageous soul would respect and care for them. He could not be so brave, generous, truth-telling as he is, were he not infinitely merciful, pitiful, and tender. He will give any man his purse - he can't help kindness and profusion. He may have low tastes, but not a mean mind; he admires with all his heart good and virtuous men, stoops to no flattery, bears no rancour, disdains all disloyal arts, does his public duty uprightly, is fondly loved by his family, and dies at his work." 1

But is not the man who repents his disordered youth and toils earnestly to support his family by means of a laborious profession, who writes great novels and wise essays, and who in the face of physical decay gives himself heart and soul to the suppression of vice and the care of the poor, is not such a man, after all, something of a hero? At his worst he was never so bad as he has been pictured. In his vice he was never mean, and his hatred of hypocrisy is as manifest in his early satires as in his great novels. He never was prudent, it is true, and he learned wisdom in a bitter school. Yet he had all the larger virtues. He loved his family, was loyal to his friends and generous to his enemies, was fond of little children, and did his work manfully. To be sure, he would have laughed merrily at any characterization of himself as a hero, but what real hero would not? As Mr. Austin Dobson says:

2

"If any portrait of him is to be handed down to posterity, let it be the last rather than the first - not the Fielding of the green-room and the tavern, of Covent Garden frolics and

'Modern conversations'; but the energetic magistrate, the tender husband and father, the kindly host of his poorer friends, the practical philanthropist, the patient and magnanimous hero of the Voyage to Lisbon."

In person he was more than six feet in height, and exceptionally robust. In the Champion he refers to himself playfully as a "tall man "who refuses to part with "half his chin " at the request of Mercury. This is an allusion to his length of nose and chin, which were unusually pronounced, as is evident from the only authentic portrait which we have of him, a sketch made by his lifelong friend Hogarth, from memory, when a frontispiece was wanted for his collected works. This represents him at a time when he had lost his teeth and was in every way altered from the handsome youth who came to London in 1728. Yet the face of the picture is a striking one, with the fine forehead and rather deep-set eyes, the strong lines of the nose and jaw, and the faintly ironical curl of the short upper lip — the face of a man who, to quote the motto of Tom Jones, 66 saw the manners of

many men."

"1

II

FIELDING'S WORKS

The dates and subjects of Fielding's works have been mentioned briefly in the account of his life. It is necessary, however, to consider the more important ones in greater detail, to describe their contents, and to show how and where the author succeeded in reaching an achievement worthy of his powers. The fact that until he was thirty years of age he was known entirely as a poet and dramatist makes it natural to discuss first his efforts in these two directions.

1 Horace, Ars Poetica, v, 142.

POEMS AND PLAYS

Though they were not published in collected form, and, indeed, though many of them never saw the light at all till the appearance of the three-volume Miscellanies in 1743, Fielding's poems were almost all the work of his early manhood. They are chiefly interesting from the fact of their authorship, possessing of themselves little intrinsic worth. Though sometimes graceful and almost always vivacious, they are of their time, the work of a young man who wrote verse in the prevailing style for the same reason, generally obscure, that causes most young men of literary tendency to turn poets for a little. He himself characterizes 1 the verses which he chose to print as "Productions of the Heart rather than of the Head." That being so, it is scarcely worth our while to examine them very closely or criticise them very severely. In his prologues and the occasional verses found in his plays he is happier, though this success was perhaps due rather to high spirits than to poetic inspiration. It was seldom that he compassed such a line as that which begins the hunting song in Don Quixote in England:

The dusky night rode down the sky.

With his plays the case is far different. All of them were hasty productions, to be sure, and some were as ephemeral as the work of the sorriest playwrights of the time; yet a few deserve reading for their own sake, and several cannot properly be neglected in any adequate account of Fielding's career. They are all satires, whether comedies, farces, or burlesques, for young Harry Fielding was not less alive to the follies of his kind - to say nothing of himself than was the creator of Jonathan Wild and the despicable Captain Booth. These

1 Preface to Miscellanies.

plays, it must be remembered, were the work of his early manhood, — of a time when he had neither found his proper field of work nor taken up the reins of self-government. They are full of high spirits, of slashing criticism, of broad humor, and of rollicking parody. They are marred by a hundred defects of carelessness, coarseness, and bad taste. Yet at their best and their best is in burlesque they are very good indeed. According to their kind and in the way of their kind, Tom Thumb and Pasquin have scarcely been excelled.

Fielding's first two plays, Love in Several Masques (1728) and The Temple Beau (1730), are nothing more than imitations of Van Brugh and Congreve, - pale reflections of that "comedy of manners" which was only excellent when polished of phrase and delicate of wit. Indeed, they bear more resemblance to the "wit-traps" of the laureate Colley Cibber than to The Way of the World. They show surprisingly little observation of life, even though one remembers that the author was not much past his majority.

The two plays next produced, however, evidence a decided advance in every way. These were The Author's Farce and The Pleasures of the Town (March, 1730), which together made up the bill at the Haymarket Theatre. The latter is described as a "puppet-show,” — apt name for a clever farce which portrays and satirizes the pantomime makers and nostrum venders of the metropolis. The former piece, however, was the better and in its revised form will be described below. Similar in general character to these farces was The CoffeeHouse Politician, which appeared in the same year. As in most such pieces the whole interest of the reader - if not of the spectator is absorbed by one figure, the tradesman who busies himself with matters that are too weighty for him, with ludicrous results.

It is a clear indication of the rapidity with which Fielding could turn out these satirical dramatic sketches for the pieces above named are little more that he was able in the same year to produce a play which was at once even less serious than they and yet his most important contribution to drama. I refer, of course, to Tom Thumb the Great. Its merit was at once recognized, indeed, and in the following year an altered form appeared. After having a successful run, this was published, with an admirable preface and notes by "H. Scriblerus Secundus," one of those delightful pedants whom authors have been creating as foils to their own imaginations from the seventeenth century down to Scott and Lowell. If the writers of mock-heroic tragedy were well ridiculed in the text, the scholars of the day were as well laughed at in the annotations. In the preface, in praise of the "tragedy," he says: "It hath, among other languages, been translated into Dutch, and celebrated with great applause at Amsterdam (where burlesque never came) by the title of Mynheer Vander Thumb, the burgomasters receiving it with that reverent and silent attention which becometh an audience at a deep tragedy." Or witness his erudite remarks on the final scene, where all the important characters are successively killed: "No scene, I believe, ever received greater honours than this. It was applauded by several encores, a word very unusual in tragedy. And it was very difficult for the actors to escape without a second slaughter. This I take to be a lively assurance of that fine spirit of liberty which remains among us, and which Mr. Dryden, in his essay on Dramatick Poetry,1 hath observed: 'Whether custom,' says he, hath so formed them to fierceness, I know not; but they will scarcely suffer combats and other objects of horror to be taken from them.'

1 Of Dramatick Poesie, An Essay, 1668. Fielding's quotation is not altogether accurate, but it gives the sense of the passage.