This dissertation has been 64—1305 microfilmed exactly as received

STEVICK, Philip Thayer, 1930- FIELDING: THE NOVELIST AS PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY.

The Ohio State University, Ph.D., 1963 Language and Literature, modern

University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan Copyright by

Philip Thayer Stevick

1964 FIELDING: THE NOVELIST./

AS PHILOSOPHER OF HISTORY

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Philip Thayer Stevick, B. A., M. A.

v v v u u t/ w

The Ohio State University 1963

Approved by

AviA/reuJ Adviser Department of English "The Mahometans think a picture an unholy thing, hut it is a long time since any Christian did, and it is therefore the more odd that in the Christian mind the traces (dissimulated though they may be) of a suspicion of the sister art should linger to this day. The only effectual way to lay it to rest is to emphasize the analogy to which

I just alluded---to insist on the fact that as the picture is reality, so the novel is history. That is the only general description (which does it justice) that we may give of the novel."

.{? --Henry James, "The Art of Fiction"

ii TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page INTRODUCTION 1

Chapter I. LIES IMMORTALIZED: FIELDING AND HISTORICAL TRUTH ...... 15

II. OUR BROTHER HISTORIANS: FIELDING'S ANALOGY . . 66

III. BY NATURAL MEANS: FIELDING AND CAUSATION 114 HISTORY...... 118

IV. HOW THINGS ARE AND HOW THINGS WERE: HISTORI­ CAL CHANGE AND THE MEANING OF HISTORY ... 173

BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 238

AUTOBIOGRAPHY ...... 2^9

iii Textual Note

References to Joseph Andrews are to the Riverside Edition, edited hy Martin C. Battestin, Boston, 1961. For the main body of

Fielding’s works, I have used The Complete Works of Henry Fielding,

Esq., edited by W. E. Henley and others, 16 volumes, New York, 1902.

There is some ambiguity in the volume numbering in the Henley Edition,

Tom Jones, for example, being in three numbered volumes which are volumes III, IV, and V of the consecutive numbering. In all refer­ ences to the Henley Edition, I have used the consecutive volume numbers. Thus a reference to Volume I of Tom Jones appears as

Henley, III. I have used G. E. Jensen's edition of the Covent-

Garden Journal, 2 volumes, New Haven,*-1915, and Battestin’s edition of Shamela, which appears as an appendix to the Riverside Joseph

Andrews mentioned above. For other works of Fielding not contained in these modern editions, I have used eighteenth-century editions for which I have given full citations. ■ *L These abbreviations I have used in my documentation: Joseph

Andrews: JA; Tom Jones: TJ; Amelia: A;-Covent-Garden Journal: CGJ.

The Henley Edition I refer to as "Henley." I have, whenever pos­ sible, incorporated references to Fielding's novels into my text. INTRODUCTION

In the eighteenth century, a writer who used the word history to describe an obviously fictional narrative must have used the word with a sense of its connotative weight, a connotative weight that the word could not have carried in a previous age. History was an account of what had happened, or, as Samuel Johnson defined O it, "a narration of events and facts delivered with dignity."

Most eighteenth-century histories begin with a scrupulous statement of respect for fact; probably most eighteenth-century historians, whatever their philosophical premises, felt themselves in some way participators in the tradition of Bayle, felt it, that is, the

The word history was used to designate\narratives of all kinds, whether or not they purported to be true,"'at least since the fourteenth century. (OED) . And indeed the Greek phrase which is customarily rendered in English "true history" (TAA.7t0#s i 6 T o f >) is as old as Lucian. By the eighteenth century, however, such substantial achieve­ ments as those of Clarendon and Burnet had established the dignity and stature of English historiography; the civil war and the Common­ wealth had received a fuller and more diverse treatment than had any previous period of English history; and England was entering the period of intense historical consciousness that was to produce the works of Hume, Robertson, and Gibbon, not to mention the antiquarian research of men like Hearne and Bishop Percy.

2A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London, 1755), s. v * history.

1 2 mission of their enlightened century to separate truth from false­ hood. A title, then, like The History and Remarkable Life of the

Truly honorable Colonel Jaeque borrows something of the raison

d ’etre of history, something of its dignity and seriousness of pur­ pose, something of its respectability and authority.3

3as I use the word fiction, it means works of the kind treated in Ernest Baker's History of the English Novel; history means works of the kind treated in J. W. Thompson’s History of Historical Writing. I use this rough classification simply because I know of none better. Northrop Frye has made some stimulating attempts at a re­ definition of prose fiction /Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957)> p. 303 ttj, However, he has argued against a distinction that seems to me both obvious and sanctioned by long usage. His argu­ ment runs thus: "In assigning the term fiction to the genre of the written word, in which prose tends to become the predominating . rhythm, we collide with the view that the real meaning of fiction is falsehood or unreality. Thus an autobiography coming into a library would be classified as non-fiction if the librarian believed the author, and as fiction if she thought he was lying. It is difficult to see what use such a distinction can be to a -literary critic. Surely the word fiction, which, like poetry, means etymologically something made for its own sake, could be applied in criticism to any work of literary art in a radically continuous form, which almost always means a work of art in prose." (p. 303) Frye goes on to argue - that Sartor Resartus and Anatomy of Melancholy are prose fictions. If one must be unremittingly taxonomic, it is, I concede, as useful to call these prose fictions, specifically anatomies, as anything else. The trouble is that Frye does not pursue his classification into those areas which he has left most confused. If one were to be entirely strict in the application of the passage I have quoted, Cibber’s Apology is a prose fiction. So is Walton’s Donne. And so is The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. The librarian's instinct, which seems ingenuous befuddlement to Frye, seems to me wholly justi­ fied, resting as it does on the perception that the mimetic premises of "the novel and the autobiography differ. Authors of history and biography and autobiography presume to imitate "what it was that actually happened"; they do this of course in various ways and with varying degrees of success. But writers of novels invent and imagin­ atively, construct, not with reference to what has actually happened in time and space but with reference to the general conditions that 3 and sociological background of what Ian watt has called "formal realism.— Novels were histories for much the same reasons that they contained non-traditional plots, precisely rendered physical settings, finely divided time schemes, and character names taken from ordinary life. That is, for the eighteenth-century novelist the use of the word history for his fiction was not only an honorific convention but a useful device of formal realism, useful when a large part of the novelist's effort was directed toward inducing his readers to believe in the literal truth of his narrative.

Still, of all the devices of formal realism, the device of calling a work' of the imagination a history must, by itself, have deceived nobody. If the reading public wept for Clarissa, they did so because of the imaginative power of Richardson, not because

affect man, with reference to the thematic unity which such writers wish to develop, and so on. Indeed this "is a distinction which Frye elsewhere recognizes by finding that "history" is a category which is "outside literature." (p.2^8) Obviously the two mimetic premises tend to merge in works like The Way of All Flesh or Look Homeward, Angel. But the fact that fictions may be more or less historic, histories more or less fictional, is hardly reason for throwing up one's hands. Thus, as I use the words, Robinson Crusoe is a fiction because it is an imaginary construction, what did not happen. If it could be shown that Alexander Selkirk had done what Robinson Cursoe did and that it was Defoe's intention to recount these events in the real Alexander Selkirk's life, the book would cease to be a fiction and would become broadly a history, specifi­ cally a biography.

^The Rise of the Novel (London, 1957)* Formal realism is defined on page 3 2 . k of the wording of his title page. The word history was, after all, only ^a small device in the formal realist's large bag of tricks.

Fielding, of course, follows the convention. His novels are, he claims, histories. < But for Fielding this device is more than a convention. It is a peculiarly specific indication of his intention.

To begin with, Fielding is not a formal realist! Ian Watt's

category, so brilliantly illuminating of Defoe and Richardson,

leads him to conclude that

Fielding's stylistic virtues tend to interfere with his technique as a novelist, because a patent selec­ tiveness of vision destroys our belief in the reality of the report, or at least diverts our attention from the content of the report to the skill of the reporter.5

Elsewhere he finds that "Fielding does not make an attempt to indi­ vidualise his characters."® And, "Fielding's interventions obviously

interfere with any sense of narrative illusion, and break with

almost every narrative precedent."7 Watt's irritation at Fielding's

failure to fit his categories suggests that he was doing something

quite different from Richardson; he was making fiction which the

category of formal realism distorts. And Watt's stretching of the

category into "realism of assessment"® only partly solves the prob­

lem of what Fielding's novels do. Quite far from the unbroken

5p. 3 0 . ®p. 272. 7p. 286.

®p. 28 8 . 5 illusion of Defoe and Richardson, Fielding wants the reader to remem­ ber that it is a fiction that he is reading, a fiction with, if not a constantly identifiable author, at least an author-persona, and he wants the reader to remember that art and life are not the same. Tom

Jones is The History of Tom Jones not because Fielding wished to borrow authority and compel belief; the novels themselves do not suggest such motives. The novels are histories because Fielding constantly sees the art of fiction in an analogical relation to the art of history.

Fielding's clearest expression of this intention to make novels that are like histories is in the chapter of Tom Jones "Showing what kind of a history this is: what it is like, and what it is not like

Though we have properly enough entitled this our work, a history, and not a life, nor an apology for a life, as is more in fashion; yet we intend in it rather to pursue the method of those writers who profess to disclose the revolutions of countries, than to imitate the painful and voluminous historian, who, to preserve the regularity of his series, thinks himself obligated to fill up as much paper with the detail of months and years in which nothing remarkable happened, as he employs upon those notable eras when the greatest scenes have been transacted on the human stage, (ill, 64)

Later, in "A wonderful long chapter concerning the marvelous; being much the longest of all our introductory chapters," Fielding writes:

To say the truth, if the historian will confine- himself to what really happened, and utterly reject any circumstance, which, though never so well 6

attested, he must be veil assured is false, he will sometimes fall into the marvellous, but nevef into the incredible....

But we who deal in private character, who search into the most retired recesses, and draw forth examples of virtue and vice from holes and corners of the world, are in a more dangerous situation. As we have no public notoriety, no concurrent testi­ mony, no records to support and corroborate what we deliver, it becomes us to keep within the limits not only of possibility, but of probability too. .(IV, 61-62)

A passage like this one belongs in two contexts. It is a late exam-, pie of a long tradition of protestations that the writer intends to make his fiction credible.9 Le Sage makes such protestations, even to the extent of comparing his fiction with history. "My purpose," he writes in Gil Bias,"was to represent human life historically as it exists."-*-® But the passage above is also an example of another tradition, this one originating in Cervantes. E. C. Riley distinguish­ es these two traditions thus:

When Cervantes contrasts the truth of the Quixote with the pseudo-historicity and the nonsensical lies of the novels of chivalry,.he is also in his way behaving like the epic poe^s of the sixteenth century, who took pains to point out the difference between . their poems and chivalresque or other fabulous inven­ tions. But there is an additional subtlety. Within Cervantes's fiction Don Quixote's exploits really—

9 For a comparison between Fielding's declarations of probability and similar statements, often prefatory to fiction which was quite im­ probable, in narrative writing before Fielding, see Arthur L. Cooke, "Henry Fielding and the Writers of Heroic Romance," PMLA, LXII (19^7), 98^-994.

-*-®The Adventures of Gil Bias, trans. Tobias Smollett (London, n. d.), p. v. 'historically'— occurred, while those of the chival- resque heroes did not. The historical certitude of the -former within the fiction is equivalent to their poetic truth, when viewed as part of that fiction, from outside it. The chivalresque romances, on the other hand, lack poetic truth from any point of view.11

The passage, that is, is an example of the means Fielding uses again and again, in the manner of Cervantes, to define the probability

and credibility of his fiction, and not only its credibility but

its subject matter, its artistic method, its authorial stance,

even its moral significance. His fiction is the kind of fiction

it is because it is like history when history is properly written.

And thus, unlike the casual comparison of Le Sage, Fielding's analogy between fiction and history is a way not only of defining and

defending his fiction but of defining proper history as well.

Most readers and critics of Fielding no doubt have noticed the frequency with which he refers to himself as historian and to his novels as histories. Ethel Thornbury, for example, remarks that

Fielding "time and again in his novels" "insists that he is the historian."12 But the significance of this habit of mind in Fielding has gone, for the most part, unnoticed. F. 0. Bissell's account is

11Cervantes's Theory of the Novel (Oxford, 1962), p. 171. See the entire chapter in which this passage'occurs, "The Truth of the Matter," pp. 161-199. o 12Henry Fielding's Theory of the Comic Prose Epic (Madison, Wis­ consin, 1931), P . 31-

\ 8

.useful as an example of the conventional explanation. "Fielding's use of the term 'history,'" writes Bissell,

indicates the lack, in his day, of fixed "boundaries between literary forms, and the consequent various uses of such terms. What he means by "history" we should call "fictitious biography." The term was commonly used in this sense in the eighteenth century, as in Smollett's History of an Atom, or the popular History of a Guinea. It carries with it the implication of verisimilitude, to distinguish such writings from the fantastic romances. There is doubtless a little burlesque and irony in Fielding's use of the term, in ridicule of the many eighteenth-century writers who used it to give their work dignity and apparent truth. He gives the term added significance by his distinction between the two sorts of political history, the selective and the inclusive, the former of which he proposes to imitate.-*-3

Bissell's position seems to be, alternately, that Fielding was joking and he was not. But fundamentally the use of the word "history" is a quaint relic, to Bissell, of eighteenth-century generic confusion.

The difficulty with this explanation is that, however uncertain the eighteenth century may have been concerning what a novel was, they agreed upon the generic province of history. For the Puritan critics of Clarendon the distinction between history and non­ history was perfectly clear, as it was for the royalist critics of

White Kennet, and as it was for the Tory critics of Oldmixon. As

^ Fielding's Theory of the Novel (Ithaca, N. Y., 1933), PP- ^1- k2. I have argued, in no previous period of English historiography had

"what actually happened," in this case the events of the Rehellion and the Revolution, been so critically scrutinized. If Robinson

Crusoe seemed more like history than romances did, it was not because the eighteenth century did not know what history was.

Besides, an explanation like Bissell's patronizes Fielding.

Wilbur Cross has described Fielding's library as "the largest working library possessed by any man of letters in the eighteenth century, surpassing even Dr. Johnson's."-^ It is a library exceptionally rich, in histories, ancient and modern. Robert Wallace quotes a statement of Fielding's, made in 17^0, and written "with entire seriousness, it would seem": "I have read most of the ancient and modern Histori­ ans. m15 And allusions to history and historians in Fielding's work number in the scores and stretch, in great lists, over pages of

Wallace's dissertation.^ Fielding's analogy between his fiction and history c3.early was not undertaken either ignorantly or lightly.

In addition to such oversimple explanations as Bissell's, Fielding critics have failed to give an account of what he means by history because of the nature of their critical enterprises. The Fielding

1**The History of Henry Fielding (New Haven, 1918), III, 77.

^"Fielding's Knowledge of History and Biography," SP, XLIV (19^7), 98. .. ~

1 / r "Henry Fielding's Narrative Method: its Historical and Biograph­ ical Origins," unpubl. diss., (North Carolina, 19^5). 10

"bibliography abounds in bland "appreciations," all of -which say

about the same things. And it abounds too in narrow, monographic

studies, many of which are exercises in special pleading and few

of which can take into account the richness and diversity of

Fielding's art. Ethel Thornbury, for example, recognizes the

frequency and complexity of Fielding's comparisons of his art to

history; but the premises of her work, that Fielding's description

of his fiction as "comic epic in prose" accounts for his technique,

prevent any attention to his far more frequent and instructive com­

parison of his novels to history.

Among Fielding scholars, only Robert Wallace has undertaken a

full-scale account of Fielding's use of history. But for all its

monumental labors, Wallace's study avoids the questions that really

matter. Historiography, Wallace finds, is the chief basis for

Fielding's narrative art. 17 And perhaps it is. ^ But not much illu­ :

mination is gained by insisting, for example, that Fielding's use

of the "character" derives from historiography rather than from the

Addisonian essay or the "character" of the tradition of Overbury and

Bishop Hall. And not much is added to Fielding scholarship by in­

sisting that since historians whom Fielding read and admired liked

to analyze psychologically and since Fielding liked to analyze psy­

chologically he must have learned his analytical technique from the

^"Henry Fielding's Narrative Method," pp. k, 5, and passim. 11 historians. What Wallace avoids, in short, is a consideration of what history means, what it means as an imaginative act and what it means, to jbhose who write it, as an account in which man's nature and man's condition are constantly demonstrated.

As I havfe suggested, Fielding's remarks on the art of history are intended as an illumination of the art of fiction. It is not what gets put into and left out of fiction and history that matter so much as why certain parts of experience should be worth recording and how these certain parts of experience should be made into art.

Fielding tells us, that is, not only that annalistic history is bad history; he tells us why it is bad. And it is the badness of annal­ istic history that helps him to define the nature of his own acts of selection. It is the tendentiousness of much history that enables

Fielding to define his own moral stance. And it is against the inter­ play of causes in history that Fielding defines cause in his fiction.

For if man makes his own fate in history, then he had better make his own fate in fiction too. And if providence intervenes in history, then it had better appear in fiction as well.

What is more, making sense of historiography becomes, inevi­ tably, an evaluation of the subject matter of history. Consequently

Fielding presents a more or less clearly articulated system of ideas regarding the nature of the present in relation to the past. And these ideas profoundly affect the novels. To be sure, all novels of any seriousness and social depth judge the matter of history, if 12 seldom so deliberately as Fielding. Hard Times, for example, rests on some obvious and deeply held assumptions about the course of

English history, though it certainly does not claim to be history.

As often as not, of course, the bases of these attitudes implicit in fiction lie not in intellection but in the commonly held assump­ tions of the author's time and class. And so it is in part with

Fielding. Wolfgang Iser quotes the following passage from Joseph O Andrews:

I would by no means be thought to comprehend those persons of surprising genius, the authors of immense romances, or the modern novel and Atalantis writers; who, without any assistance from nature or history, record persons who never were, or will be, and facts which never did, nor possibly can, happen.

"Mit dem Wort history," comments Iser, "ist der Roman entscheidend gegen die Epopoe." For the novel is, he writes, "die Kunstform der empirischen Welt." In a sense quite apart from conscious intentions, then, Fielding's fiction has to do with judgments of history because

Fielding's was an empirical world. And certain of the relations between history and Fielding's fiction would have existed even if

Fielding had never used the word history or read an historical work.

Accordingly, while history is a commonplace name for fiction in the eighteenth century, Fielding means something different from

iQoie Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings (Tilbingen, 1952), p. 157

O his contemporaries when he uses the word: insofar as history indi­ cates a work of formal realism, Fielding's use of the term is narrower than that of his contemporaries, for while the London of

Tom Jones is the real London, while Fielding would like us to believe in the possibility of a Blear-eyed Moll, the creation of an unbroken illusion and the appearance of authenticity is not

Fielding's purpose; insofar as the use of the word history is merely a convention, Fielding means vastly more than his contem­ poraries, since he uses the word most often metaphorically and analogically and brings to bear on the terms of the analogy the full extent of his considerable learning. For a writer with no fiction of the kind he wrote to draw upon, this analogy with history is a way of describing and defending his form. For a writer with little interest in epistemology, the analogy is a way of exploring the access to knowledge common to both the historian and the novelist.

For a writer with little interest in metaphysics, the analogy is a way of exploring the shape of the world. And for a writer with an insatiable interest in man, history is a way of knowing what man in fiction must be and how he must be judged. Finally, the comic vision of Fielding's novels is intimately related to his skepticism of the systematic, his refusal to sacrifice his own time to a philosophy of history; it is intimately related, despite his sensi­ tivity to suffering, to his exuberant delight in being alive at the particular point in history at which he was; and it is related to a Ik view of history in which the pathos and the tragedy are never over­

looked but subordinated, finally, to the vulgarity and hypocrisy, the splendid foolishness, of man in time.

Eight years after Fielding's death, Boswell recorded the follow­

ing conversation:

Lord Eglinton said that he knew nothing but men, women, and horses. Sir James said that the proper knowledge of mankind was to be gained from history. My Lord said that he who knew men only in this way was like one who had got the theory of anatomy perfectly, but who in practice would find himself very awkward and liable to mistakes. That he again who knew men by observation was like one who picked up anatomy by practice, but who like all empirics would .for a long time be liable to gross errors.

To this exchange, Boswell adds:

In my opinion, history is more useful for under­ standing the great lines of men's characters when united in great societies, although, to be sure, the hearts and understandings of individuals are there in some measure displayed. But to know men, a long experience of life and manners is most useful. History and that together render the knowledge complete.-*-9

If Fielding might have been tempted to smile at the ripeness of the

twenty-two year old Boswell, he would have agreed enthusiastically with his statement of the close and complementary relation between

history and the "experience of life and manners."

■Roswell's London Journal, 1762-1763, ed. F. A. Pottle (New York, I95O), pp. 56-57. CHAPTER I p LIES IMMORTALIZED: FIELDING AND HISTORICAL TRUTH

I

The twelfth number of the Covent-Garden Journal^- investigates the historian as liar. Fielding quotes Juvenal, Pliny, Herodian, and Dr. South, all of whom charge historians with wild irresponsi­ bility. Dr. South is worth quoting here:

'Most of those Things...that have the mightiest and most controuling Influence upon the Affairs and Course of the World, are downright Lies. What is common Fame, which sounds from all Quarters of the World, and resounds back to them again, but gener­ ally a loud, rattling, impudent, overbearing Lye? What are most of the Histories of the World but Lies? Lies immortalized, and consigned over as a perpetual Abuse and Flam upon Posterity! 1

To this, Fielding adds:

There is, I am afraid, too much Justice in the Charge on History in general.

Some historians lie inadvertently, some deliberately, he continues.

Geoffrey of Monmouth, one of the latter, contains "scarce any Thing besides Lies." Indeed, if we were to consign all the lying histori­ ans to the flames, we would have to burn Matthew Paris, Livy,

Tacitus, Suetonius, Dion Cassius, and, "indeed almost every

1I, 205-210. 15 16

History." Fielding considers the causes for the historians’ per­

petrating such "Hummers" as Dion Cassius’s story of the apparition

of Alexander the Great: superstition, credulity, the fact that the

truth is short-lived,falsehood persistent. And the essay ends with

a very funny piece of mock history, in the manner of Sir Richard

Baker, in which much exuberant nonsense is solemnly attested to by

many great writers and thousands of eye witnesses.

Fielding's essay, and the impulse to uncover the historical

lie which provides its basis, is representative of a central theme

of most of the historical thought of his time. Of course history Q ' Q was broadly useful; it was pleasurable;-’ and it sought the truth.

But prior to fulfilling these ends, it was obliged to discover

lies, for the truth was not simply there, to be discovered, but buried under vast accretions of historical misinformation. Cassirer

observes of Bayle that "his first idea was not to write an encyclo­

paedia of knowledge but rather a record of errors."^ Bayle himself

charges of the ancient historians: "Not finding the Facts plain

^See Dorothy A. Koch, "English Theories Concerning the Nature and Uses of History: 1735-1791/ 1 unpubl. diss. (Yale, 1946).

3 One conspicuous claim for the pleasures of history is Addison's tenth paper "On the Pleasures of the Imagination," The Spectator, No. 420, Wed., July 2, 1712.

^Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Princeton, 1951), p. 206. 17

and beautiful according to their Fancy, they extended and dress'd

them as they pleas'd; and at this Day we take this for History."5

- It was often argued that the source of historical lies lay in

qualities deep and ineradicable in human nature and that, in any

case, some of the most persistent historical lies were socially

useful. But more often it was argued that truth was accessible,

and that lies, being lies, could not be useful. The latter is

obviously Fielding's position, a position which reflects one of the *j - '' central articles of faith in the Enlightenment.

If the English eighteenth century lacked the passion of Bayle

and the French Enlightenment, it shared their concern with lying

history. Shaftesbury speculates on the possibilities for error,

corrupted texts, the uncritical acceptance of testimony.^ Bolingbroke

finds that "history has been purposely and systematically falsified

in all ages, and that partiality and prejudice have occasioned both O voluntary and.involuntary errours even in the best," adding, a few

pages later, that "there are few histories without some lies, and

^Historical and Critical Dictionary, 4 vols. (London, 1710), s. v. .Abimelech.

^For a full discussion, though for the most part limited to the French Enlightenment, see Lester G. Crocker, "The Problem of Truth and Falsehood in the Age of Enlightenment," JHI, XIV (1953), 575- 603-

7characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols. (London, 1732), I,15S-7-

^Letters on the Study and Use of History, in Works, 8 vols. (London, 1809), III, 391. 18 none without some mistakes."9 James Ralph, Fielding's friend and collaborator on The Champion, begins his history, complaining:

"When I took a nearer Survey of the Period before me, I found it so ill understood by some, and so much misrepresented by others, that I was forc'd to confute and relate together."10 And Bishop

Burnet, beginning his History of his Own Times, writes: "For I reckon a lie in history to be as much a greater sin than a lie in common discourse, as the one is like to be more lasting and more generally known than the other."11

This dismay over the historians of the past and the determina­ tion to set the record straight is hardly confined to the eighteenth century. Such feelings provide a chief motive for all historians.

As F. J. Teggart has written:

In any age the activity of the historian arises from the perception that, judged by his standards, the histories previously written are unreliable and misinformed. The background of historical inquiry is, therefore, the existence of these earlier accounts, and, with implied reference to this background, the historian defines his purpose as being to set forth what it was that actually happened. The decision to tell the truth about what had taken place in the

9p. 401.

10The History of England during the Reigns of K. William, Q. Anne, and K. George I.. By a Lover of Truth and Liberty (London, 1744), p. ii.

1-*-2 vols. (London, 1724), I, 3 . 19

past was not arrived at for the first time in the nineteenth century.-^

Yet no twentieth-century historian could possibly duplicate the sense of awe at the monstrousness of historical lies that the eighteenth century amply displays, its passion for exposing them, and'the easy conviction that historical truth could be found once the lies had been shown.

Fielding's attitude toward history, as expressed in The Covent-

Garden Journal and elsewhere, is more than a conventional stance which he assumes along with most of the historical thinkers of his age; it is a manifestation of a pervasive habit of mind. His non- fictional and non-dramatic works, for example, reflect Fielding’s critical skepticism although they are seldom-directed toward the explicit exposure of historical lies in the way that the Covent-

Garden Journal paper is. Underlying "A Journey from This World to the Next" is the assumption that the historians have somehow got history all wrong. And if we could see history from the valet's, or the fool's, point of view, our judgments of historical personages would change. Underlying Jonathan Wild is the assumption that historians and biographers have somehow confused greatness and goodness; and the implication of Jonathan's lineage, a point that

•^Theory and Processes of History (Berkeley, i960), p. 15. f

20

is made by Fielding, ironically or directly, again and again, is

that historians and biographers have confused noble family with

intrinsic worth. Tom Thumb is a direct response to heroic tragedy, heroic history, and irresponsible editing. And the pamphlets dealing with the Jacobite uprising of 17^5"^ assume not so much a difference

in principle— only the most insane.Jacobite argues from the premise

of divine right— as a difference in the reading of history; the

Jacobite either ignores or has had concealed from him the fact that

the Stuarts ruled badly.

The True Patriot, a political journal of 17^5-^6, begins by

summarizing the faults, "two or three little Imperfections" Fielding

calls them, of current newspapers. "The first little Imperfection

in these Writings, is, that there is scarce a Syllable of TRUTH in lli any of them." Likewise, the first issue of The Jacobite's Journal

begins with a rationale for the periodical. Fielding writes:

I do not therefore scruple to declare, that I conceive myself to be much better qualified for the Task of instructing and entertaining my Countrymen than any of these Writers; who by their Productions, have villified and degraded the Office of Censor as well as that of Histor­ ian . 15

-*-3A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain (17^5)> A Dia­ logue Between the Devil, the Pope, and the Pretender (17^5); see also A Dialogue Between a Gentleman of London, Agent for Two Court Candi­ dates , and an Honest Alderman of the Country Party (lf^T*

1^No• 1, Tues., Nov. 5, 17^5.

l5no. 1, Sat., Dec. 5, 17V 7. 21

Most of The Jacobitefs Journal is ironic; Fielding of course was no Jacobite. The tone of arrogant swagger at the beginning of the first number is consistent with the ironic espousal of the cause of the Pretender. But the irony of the opening paragraphs lies pre­ cisely in the fact that a plea for the sweeping away of journalistic and historical lies is followed by Jacobitical casuistry. Since the body of the paper patently fails to supply that truth which the invocation calls for, the reader is made all the more urgently aware of the need for truth; the plea for a fresh assault on the truth, rather than being undercut by the irony of the paper as a whole, is reinforced by it.

Finally, there is the well-known passage from the Journal of a

Voyage to Lisbon:

I am far from supposing that Homer, Hesiod, and the other ancient poets and mythologists, had any settled design to pervert and confuse the records of antiquity; but it is certain they have effected it; and for my part I must confess I should have honoured and loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in humble prose, than those noble poems that have so justly collected the praise of all ages; for, though I read these works with more admiration and astonishment, I still read Herodotus, Thu- cydes, and Xenophon with more amusement and more satisfaction.^

And once again, the introduction to the Journal continues with a \

l6Henley, XVI, 182. 22 with a discussion of historical lies. Pliny lies deliberately,

for his own malicious pleasure. Livy, Sallust, and Thucydides

generally only elaborate, inventing speeches for events that are basically true.

Thus throughout his productive career Fielding shares with his

age its passion for exposing historical lies, and he shares with

historians of all ages an impulse to set the record straight by writing against a background of previous works that are erroneous.

But different men find lies in different ways. The historical

Pyrrhonism of Descartes, for example, is a denunciation of historical

knowledge in terms so thoroughly skeptical as to make all history

impossible. At another extreme, the amplitude and sweep of The

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a response not so much to •

of inadequacies an historian finds are intimately related to the

kinds of corrections he offers. It is significant of the nature of

Fielding's response to previous works that he wrote almost no history

in the conventional sense of the word; and the little history that

he wrote is a melange, an uncritical assembling of existing accounts.^

i7Mabel Seymour's article "Fielding's History of the Forty-Five," PQ, XIV (1935)^ 105-25 treats Fielding's use of dispatches in The Gazette in making his own history. Of the many closely related histories of the '^5, the problem of identifying those written by Fielding is still disputed. Since this is hardly the place to adjudicate the various textual arguments on the problem, I would refer the reader to Miss Seymour's .study, an article by A. LeRoy 23

But Fielding's responses to the inadequacies of past accounts are part of the complex motives that led him to produce a Lucianic

dialogue of the dead, a burlesque tragedy, large amounts of journal­

ism, and an enduring body of prose fiction.

II

Readers of inadequate history may make two basic kinds of

objections: documentary and philosophic. That is, a given history

is unreliable because a fresh look at the documents which inform

the history or a discovery of new documents leads to new judgments

and condemnations of old ones. Or a group of histories on a common

subject matter are compared and some are found to make more or less

responsible inferences from common documents. A fresh survey of

•primary documents or a discovery of new ones may indicate mistaken

emphases in existing histories, failures of proportion, an organization

that obscures essentials. Or an historian may find a widely held,

frequently repeated body of assumptions about an historical subject

Greason entitled "Fielding's The History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland," PQ XXXVII (1958), 119 -123, and the series of articles by Rupert C. Jarvis all entitled "Fielding and the Forty-Five" in Notes and Queries:CCI (1956), 391 -39^; CCI (1956), 1*79-^82; CCII (1957), 19-2^ All of these articles amend the basic Fielding bibliography in Volume III of Wilbur Cross's The History of Henry Fielding. F. Homes Dudden's biography, Henry Fielding: His Life, Works, and Times, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1952), is unreliable on these complex questions of attribution. 2k which a rigorous view of historical evidence will not support.

The philosophical objections to existing histories, on the other hand, have little to do with documentary evidence. Such objections arise from certain values man and manners," as Boswell put it, that the reader brings to history.

On rational grounds, the reader may find history unbelievable, however convincing the documentation, because the events reported are contrary to his view of the normal operation of cause and effect, or contrary to his view of a lawful universe, or contrary to his view of the limits of possibility. On psychological grounds, the reader may find history unconvincing because the historical char­ acters violate his sense of the range of possible motives for a given act, or exceed the range of inconsistency which he believes possible in a single human being. On moral grounds, the reader may

find that the historian, in his explicit judgments, or his tone,

or his emphasis, has presented good acts as if they were reprehensible, unworthy acts as if they were good. On rhetorical grounds, the

reader may find an historian stylistically inept, or tediously prolix

in all the wrong places. These categories, of course, tend to merge

into one another; a given episode may violate both the reason and the

sense of psychological probability of the reader; or an historian

may be morally culpable because of his stylistic opacity. Still, it

was possible in the eighteenth century, as it is in the twentieth, 25 to object to a given history cogently and forcefully without troubling

at all about its documentary basis.

The consequences of finding a history unreliable on documentary

grounds are two: one either writes a new history or one writes a

piece of criticism. Both responses flourished in the eighteenth

century, not only the writing of histories but the writing of

extended historical critiques, called by the eighteenth century

"examens." The consequences of finding a history unreliable on

philosophic grounds, however, are varied and unpredictable, if,

indeed, there are consequences at all. For the philosophic critic

is in no position to write a new history. No doubt a good many

eighteenth-century readers of history found Oldmixon dull, for example,

as Fielding himself did.*-® But once one has charged an historian

with inconsequence because of his undiscriminating prolixity, there

is not much else to be done. Philosophic reactions to history are

likely to lead either to a kind of incidental polemical grumbling or

to developed responses that are themselves philosophic.

Fielding almost never makes objections to history on strictly

documentary grounds. Although he owned a good many histories which

conflicted among each other on common subject matters, especially

l®See Jensen's note, CGJ, II, 196. 2 6 those dealing with the civil war, there is no extended comparison, in any of his works, of these conflicting accounts. Nor is there evidence that Fielding, outside of his duties as magistrate and his interests as legal theorist, had any concern with primary documents.

*V.. Even A Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough is not so much a re-examination of primary data as it is a reinterpretation of the inferences that can legitimately be drawn from them.

Fielding frequently objects to history on logical grounds, as in the Covent-Garden Journal paper cited at the beginning of this chap­ ter. Obviously the reason that Dion Cassius's account of the appar­ ition of Alexander is unbelievable is not that it has been disproved but simply that it is unacceptable to a rational mind. The mock history in the same paper tells of a woman who bore nineteen rabbits at one lying in, a burlesque way of making the same point. Fielding often objects to history on psychological grounds, most often in the novels but frequently too in A Journey from This World to the Next.

He delights, again and again, in inferring the nature of the human personality from history, an inference which the historian, by his closeness to his subject and his aim of documentary scrupulousness, is unable to make. In short, history presents a singularly stiff, remote collection of great men, totally unlike one's own psychological experience; and historians, with all of the evidence necessary for wise judgments about human nature, consistently stop short of those judgments. 27

In The Temple Beau, one of Fielding's earliest plays, Lady Lucy

Pedant speaks: "Your eyes should first conquer the world, and then weep, like Alexander's, for more worlds to conquer." To this,

Bellaria replies: "I rather think he should have wept for those he had conquered. He had no more title to sacrifice the lives of men to his ambition than a woman has their ease."1^ This theme of the morality of heroic greatness, most fully developed in Jonathan

Wild, recurs throughout Fielding's writings. To see the theme as

Fielding's outraged response to vaguely adulatory criminal biography and to the power of Walpole is surely too narrow a view. The theme is an implicit criticism of the moral obtuseness of historians, who cannot distinguish legitimate political power from the self- seeking abuse of it.

Finally, in the "Author's Preface" to The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon Fielding sets down a general rule which not only serves to govern his own writing but forms the basis of his rhetorical criti­ cism of others'' writing too. The reader, he writes, should "never forgive any observation of the former /the "relator// which doth not convey some knowledge that they are sensible they could not 20 possibly have attained’themselves." This strict rule of relevance

19Henley, VIII, 124.

20Henley, XVI, 180. 28

and utility is applied again and again to history, especially in the

novels, but incidentally throughout Fielding's writings. In Rape

upon Rape Squeezum says: "Come, now let us hear the story how you were first debauched.— Come— that I may put it down in my history

at home. I have the history of all the women's ruin that ever I

lay with, and I call it, The History of My Own Times."21 The joke

is not, as the title might suggest, on Bishop Burnet, whom Fielding

admired, but on rhetorical principles of inclusion so undiscriminating

as to permit trivialities.

History lies, then, by being incredible, psychologically

inept, morally blind, and rhetorically dull and undiscriminating.

No doubt Fielding was fascinated by documentary evaluations of

history. That a man who was never wealthy and sometimes desperately

close to poverty should have owned so large and varied a collection

of histories of the wars of the seventeenth century is evidence

enough that he found their conflicting testimony endlessly intriguing.

But he chose to protest against history on philosophic grounds. He

was aware that most histories misrepresented, say, the character of

Prince Rupert. But what he consistently protested against was the

misrepresentation of the nature of man. Obviously rescuing Prince

Rupert from the partisan historians would do nothing to correct the

2lHenley, IX, 129-30. 29 fundamental lies of history. What corrects a dull or gullible or distorted view of man is a new view of man, the new one clear, consistently relevant/ and morally acute. The best way to effect this correction of vision was by a narrative that was broad and inclusive and probable, that was consistently concerned with cause and effect, by a narrative, in short, like history, yet a narrative not true to events but true to the nature of man.

Ill

Shamela is a threefold parodic response to Pamela: of a spurious morality; of a muddled, undiscriminating style; and of the affront which the novel offered to Fielding's sense of probability, though to be sure these three responses are not mutually exclusive; each one tends to reinforce the other two. If any one of these is the % chief motive for the parody, it is surely the first. Fielding annihilates the moral pretensions of Richardson almost as thoroughly as Dryden had annihilated the reputation of Shadwell. One cannot begin to defend Pamela without coming to grips with the moral argument implicit in Shamela. But the style is brilliantly parodied too.

"To be short, this book will live to the age of the patriarchs."22

22p. 305. 30

The sententiousness of the introductory matter is reduced to absur­ dity, as is the triviality of the circumstantial detail. "And Mrs.

Jewkes and I supped together upon a hot buttered apple-pie; and about ten o'clock we went to bed."23 "After breakfast we drest ourselves, he in a blue paduasoy waistcoat, laced with silver...."2^

Both the moral and the stylistic aspects of the parody are related to the charges which Fielding so often leveled at history; but in another sense, these parodic criticisms have to do with the subject matter of history itself. Douglas Knight has observed how Pope's concern with standards of writing, a concern he shares with Swift and

Fielding, is both a moral and an historical concern; "bad poetry," for Pope, is "the reminder of a potentially ruined society.

Herbert Davis notes the extent to which the roles of satirist and historian tend to become blurred in Augustan writing. Just as history, properly written, was a kind of punishment for the wicked, so satire described contemporary history in order to judge, implicitly, its moral weaknesses. And thus the definitions which the Augustans 26 offer for satire and history become, at times, almost interchangeable.

23p. 323. 2V 330.

23Pope and the Heroic Tradition (New Haven, 1951), p. 108.

26"ihe Augustan Conception of History" in Reason and the Imaigination; Studies in the History of Ideas, 1600-1800, ed. J. A. Mazzeo (New York, 19^2), pp. 218 ff. 31

But this dual function of the writer of conscience as historian and satirist, involving, as it usually does, a view of the Republic of

Letters in decay, is a question of the meaning of history, matter for another chapter. It is in the parody of Richardson's sense of probability that we encounter the familiar charge, that the history of Pamela is a lie. The ostensible compiler of Shamela's letters writes, of Pamela, "The whole narrative is such a misrepresentation of facts, such a perversion of truth, as you will, I am persuaded, agree, as soon as you have perused the papers I now inclose to you.

And thus, insofar as Pamela presumes to be a history, it is a record of improbable people acting inconsistently. Pamela is either a conniving wench or an ingenuous, high-minded servant girl, Fielding argues. Richardson cannot have it both ways. So Fielding corrects the history by making her a bawd from the start. Either Mr. B-- is earnest and discerning, though sometimes passionate beyond control, or he is a lecherous fool. For Fielding he cannot be both, so Squire

Booby becomes consistently the latter. In short, Pamela presumes to be a history, a fiction in which the normal conditions which govern man may be expected to govern the characters as thoroughly as if the events had happened; and Fielding, who knew good history from bad, found it bad.

2?pp. 307-8. 32

Shamela, however/is the least useful of Fielding's fictions in demonstrating the relation between the novel and history. The analogy which Fielding develops between history and fiction does not apply to Shamela. Besides being a parody, it simply lacks the scope to be, in Fielding's sense, historical. Northrop Frye writes:

The soundness of Fielding's instinct in calling Tom Jones a history is confirmed by the general rule that the larger the scheme of a novel becomes, the more obviously its historical nature appears. As it is creative history, however, the novelist usually prefers his material in a plastic, or roughly contemporary state, and feels cramped by a fixed historical pattern.28

With Joseph Andrews, Fielding freed himself from the limitations of parody, and developed scope enough to justify his analogy.

In "The Author's Preface" the analogies come thick and fast.

Joseph Andrews is like an epic because it is "extended and compre­ hensive"; (7) it is unlike an epic because it is comic. It is like romance because it is an extended action; it is unlike romance because it is, as Northrop Frye would put it, "low mimetic."^9

It is like burlesque in certain passages of diction; it is unlike burlesque in the intention to "confine ourselves strictly to nature, from the just imitation of which will flow all the pleasure we

^Anatomy of Criticism, p. 306.

^9"iow Mimetic: A mode of literature in which the characters exhibit a power of action which is roughly on our own level, as in most comedy and realistic fiction." p. 366. can this way convey to a sensible reader." (8 ) It is unlike Carica- tura, which aims at painting "the Monstrous"; it is instead comic, a mode which aims at describing "the Ridiculous." (9-10) The author's motives are unlike those of a man who laughs at a cold and starving family; they are like those of a man who laughs at such a family when he finds "there a grate, instead of coals, adorned with flowers." (ll) The novel is like nature since there is

"scarce a character or action produced which I have not taken from my own observations and experience." Yet it is not a transcript of experience because these identities have been subtly concealed and altered. (12) In Chapter I the voice of Fielding becomes less authoritative, more ironically shallow and genial, and the analogies resume. The novel is like a biography, specifically like those of

Plutarch, Nepos, "and others which I heard of in my Jfouth." It is like "the history of John the Great, who, by his brave and heroic actions against men of large and athletic bodies, obtained the glorious appellation of the Giant-killer." It is like "the history of those seven worthy personages, the Champions of Christendom."

It is like Cibber's autobiography; and it is like Pamela. It is like all these because it instructs and delights at the same time, and because it is an "authentic history." (13-14)

In retrospect this is an amazing introduction, like nothing so much as Polonius on the players— "either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-

comical-historical-pastoral, scene individihle, or poem unlimited."

Still, it is hard to imagine what else Fielding could have done,

having no broad tradition of realistic prose fiction with which to

come to terms. Richardson has nothing of the literary response of

Fielding. Had he read more and been more self-conscious, he might

have written anti-romances. One of the major miracles of the

creative imagination is that Richardson, out of the scant traditions

of the sentimental play and the conduct book, was able to write

Clarissa; and it is no less miraculous that Richardson's fiction was

so different from what had come before, so implicitly damning of

heroics and the improbable conventions of seventeenth-century fiction—

all of this with comparatively little awareness by Richardson of how

genuinely new he was. Likewise Defoe shows rather little interest

in his own novelty; remarks in Defoe about the inadequacies of previous

prose fiction are vague and perfunctory. And though the differences

between, say, Deloney and Defoe are great in the perspective of the

twentieth century, it is unlikely that they would have seemed very

great to Defoe. Fielding alone found himself faced with the need to

express a kind of truth for which no genre existed; and, unlike Defoe

and Richardson, Fielding intimately knew how the genres of romance

and history and philosophy had attempted his truth and failed.

Thus. Fielding's corrective impulse, an impulse that is initially 35 and primarily directed toward history, tends to expand, in Fielding's critical theory, so as to include any work which presumes to reveal man as he is. Romance he dismisses because it is not true. He dis­ misses Caricatura because it is unnatural. He dismisses pure epic because it is "high mimetic"; and besides, it is serious. For a work of the extent and inclusiveness of an epic to remain serious is to rule out the inclusion of vanity and hypocrisy and affectation; if these qualities appear in an epic at all, the genre will not permit that they be treated with the comic illumination which Fielding thought they deserve; and they are qualities so ubiquitous for

Fielding that their elimination leaves the reader with, at best, a partial truth. Elements of romance and epic and Caricatura remain in Joseph Andrews and in the two novels that follow it; but the creative impulse in these novels is always directed toward the true and the natural, a mode which none of the three forms can consis­ tently contain. And if we define the true and the natural, we arrive again at the qualities of a work which are capable of correcting lying history. For a work to be true and natural, it must be con­ sistently believable, psychologically realistic, morally relevant and responsible, and rhetorically discriminating.

The ironies of the first chapter are tangled but transparent enough. Joseph Andrews is not at all like the history of John the

Great; brave deeds are performed not by a giant killer but by a 36 finger-snapping parson with a crahstick. It is certainly not like

Pamela or Cibber's Apology. Even if the reader should assume the comparisons to be direct statement, the irony becomes patent before the novel has progressed very far. Since, for Fielding, Cibber's

Apology is the embodiment of vanity, Pamela the embodiment of hypocrisy, the reader must re-examine what Fielding really means.

And once again the answer must be that Joseph Andrews is true and natural, a fiction which is like history and which is conceived as a corrective of all those preceding accounts of men and events, including history, which mislead.

Still, if the novel is, at least in part, an attempt to set the record straight, the ironic indirection is puzzling. Telling a story through an amiably befuddled narrator is certainly a strange way of correcting. However an activity of Fielding's shortly before the writing of Joseph Andrews provides if not a source at least an analogue for this aspect of the novel's form. In 17^0 Fielding trans­ lated from the French Gustavus Adlerfeld's three volume Military

History of Charles XII, King of Sweden.3° it is the official history,

3®The case for attributing the translation to Fielding appears first in John E. Wells's "Henry Fielding and the History of Charles XII," JEGP, XI (1912), 603-13• Wilbur Cross reviews the evidence and con­ cludes that the translation "was probably Fielding's either in whole or in part." (I, 286) In the four decades of Fielding scholarship since Cross, his conclusion has been widely accepted and on no occasion disputed. 37

"Written by the express Order of his Majesty," a solemn, pompous

■work, complete with battle diagrams. Probably the translation of three volumes of such tedium was the single labor of a very produc­ tive career that was least enjoyable to Fielding.31 Yet he must, at times, have been greatly amused by it. A passage early in the work, which must be quoted at length, reveals why.

The King of Sweden was diverting himself with hunting bears at Kongsohr, when he heard the news of the irruption of the Saxon troops into Livonia. He was not at all moved at this, but said smiling to Count Guiscard the French Ambas­ sador, We shall soon oblige them to return back the same way they came. This Prince did not leave off his hunting, which he performed in a very uncommon manner, exposing himself every moment to the danger of his life. Instead of pursuing the bears and killing them with a fusee, as was the ordinary manner, he endeavoured to take them alive. Every one followed his example, and armed themselves with forked sticks, by the assistance of which they pushed the bears on all sides, till those animals were so spent, that they were to be taken and bound. The King feared not to attack one of a prodigious size with only a stick in his hand: he found himself exposed to the most imminent danger; the bear had already torn off his peruke, and was going to trample on him, when he found means to escape from his clutches, and convey himself out of danger; he did not however abandon his

3■'-Cross speculates on the possibility of Fielding's boredom with the job of translating Adlerfeld, and from the decline in the com­ petence of the translation it seems likely to Cross that the first of the history was done by Fielding, the end by someone else. I, 286- 288 . 38

purpose, but with the help of the hunters, who accompanied him, he overcame the bear, and himself assisted at binding him. They took fourteen alive in this manner, which were all transported to Kongsohr, all fast bound upon sledges to the sound of hunting-horns. The King diverted himself with this dangerous exercise during the month of February, being the depth of winter.32

In a particular aspect, the scene is worthy of the Marx brothers:

an apparently proud king, unmoved by potential military reversal,

loses his peruke to a bear whom he is chasing with a stick. Unsatis­ fied with having captured fourteen bears, he continues to chase them through the month of February. To be sure Adlerfeld must have found nothing amusing in the episode, nor is it likely that very many of his readers did. But the modern imagination is likely to

react differently. The absurdity of Charles's heroics coupled with Adlerfeld's tone of numbed admiration is, to a reader of a

certain temperament, amusing. And there is every reason, short of

Fielding's having told us so directly, to suspect that Fielding's

anti-heroic imagination, an imagination that found vanity one of the

sources of the true ridiculous, found the episode amusing too. The

same sober opacity governs the narration of the entire history, from

the editor's preface containing biographical sketches of Gustavus,

his brother Peter, his brother Charles-Albrecht, and his son Charles

Maximilian Emanuel; through countless massacres ("We had a hundred

32 (London, 17^0), I, 21-22. 39 killed, besides certain Captains, and about a hundred more wounded....

We likewise lost a pair of kettle-drums."33); through precise counts

of the number of bombs thrown by each side (On May 22, 1704, the

enemy threw 3^2 bombs though on the day before Adlerfeld had lost

count at 500. ); to the battle of Pultowa where the historian him­

self was killed.

Now any history which presumes to treat the character of Charles

XII is obliged to acknowledge his vanity in one way or another. But vanity is not intrinsically ridiculous. What makes Adlerfeld's

history now and then comic to a reader predisposed to distrust

neroics and to demand moral discriminations is the obtuse narration.

In a similar though quite deliberate way, Fielding's history, which

is to be a history in part of vanity and hypocrisy, begins with a

chapter in which the author seems to have forgotten the classical

biographers, except for Plutarch and Nepos, in which he confuses

nursery tale, romance, and biography, in which he pronounces Cibber

virtuous, Pamela authentic, and finds both works morally instructive;

finally he announces that the subject of the narrative to come will be male chastity. Fielding's mask is remarkably like Adlerfeld's

narrative self, as R. M. Jordan puts it, though perhaps too strongly,

"an amiable simpleton."35 Jordan cites the metaphor in the chapter

33II, 71. 34I, 333.

35"The Limits of Illusion: Faulkner, Fielding and Chaucer," Criti­ cism, II (i960), 290. 4o

"Of divisions in authors": dividing a book into chapters is like butchering meat. A few pages before, the narrator has commented, on Betty’s near seduction of Joseph,

How ought man to rejoice, that his chastity is always in his power; that if he hath sufficient strength of mind, he hath always a competent strength of body to defend himself, and cannot, like a poor weak woman, bp ravished against his will! (71 )

The mask is not maintained with absolute consistency; and at times it is dropped altogether. But it is used consistently enough to provide a kind of rhetorical center for the novel. The reader is obliged to exercise his own judgments since he can never allow himself to be lulled into taking as direct statement the observations of so fatuous an historian. And the very lack of moral and rhetorical discrimination which Fielding objected to in much history is insisted upon in Joseph Andrews by a narrator who provides the reader with all the materials for such discriminations but who is often blind to such discriminations himself.

All this is not to say that Fielding must have derived his narrative method from Adlerfeld. The narrator of Lucian's True

History is certainly duller than the' author; and Fielding knew and loved Lucian. But the subject matter of Lucian is not true and natural in the sense that Fanny and Parson Trulliber and Betty the chambermaid are true and natural. Only Cervantes, before Fielding, 1*1 narrates a fictional subject matter that is like Fielding's by means of an ironic persona. As E. C. Riley writes,

By presenting Benengeli as a historian Cervantes respects the obligation the novelist has towards history. By discrediting him because he is a Moor he makes it plain that the novel is not something to be believed literally. By treating him as an enchanter he recognizes the novelist's right to operate in extra-historical regions. He makes us sensible of the nature of truth in the novel and of the novel's fictional quality.

In any case, it is not too much to conclude that the translation of

Adlerfeld less than two years before the writing of Joseph Andrews in all likelihood reinforced Fielding's belief in the usefulness of an ironic narrative stance.

Joseph Andrews provides the paradigm for the three great novels.

Each is set against a background of works which are untrue: romances, epics, biographies, histories, all of which deny and distort the facts of experience and the nature of man, as Fielding sees them.

This corrective impulse, directly analogous to the historian's motive, is not merely the starting point of the three novels but is insisted upon again and again through each of them. In each, Fielding asserts himself to be an historian, the maker of an artifact which, while remaining an artifact, an invention, is still consistently like

•^Cervantes1s Theory of the Novel, p. 212. k2 history. Within the framework of a realistic and probable fiction, traditional narrative materials are turned up-side down, exposing the old genres, both in style and subject, in all their inadequacy for telling the truth about Fielding's world. And, in all three novels, the reader's perception of the truth is sharpened by the irony.

All of these qualities and narrative gestures appear within the first four chapters of Tom Jones. Almost immediately the reader is told that existing works misrepresent nature; "true nature," the narrator tells him, "is as difficult to be met with in authors as the Bayonne ham, or Bologna sausage, is to be found in the shops."

(ill, 18-19) At the beginning of the narrative proper, in Chapter ii, the reader encounters a device of the formal realists: the narrator is not sure whether Allworthy still lives in Somersetshire.

This is authentic, a true history, the narrator seems to say; and how can the narrator of a true history be in possession of all the facts? Yet Chapter i has assured the reader that while Tom Jones is like history, it is still an invention. And the irony of Chapter i warns the reader that he must constantly test for himself the truth of the narrative against the sometimes swaggering claims of its author. For the narrator first insists that he pursues true nature and then insists that his function is that of the cook who dresses and garnishes the ox. U3

In Chapter iii the reader finds the first of dozens of analogies with history. Although Allworthy lived a life of sober benevolence,

Matters of a much more extraordinary kind are to be the subject of this history, or I should grossly misspend my time in writing so voluminous a work; and you, my sagacious friend, might with equal profit and pleasure travel through some pages which certain droll authors have been facetiously pleased to call The History of England. (Ill, 22-23)

Also in Chapter iii the reader is entertained with the hypocrisy of

Mrs. Deborah Wilkins, a hypocrisy made ridiculous by an ironic narration reminiscent of the narrator of Joseph Andrews and of the unintentional opacity of Gustavus Adlerfeld.37 And in Chapter iv the reader is treated to a long passage of mock sublime, the effect of which is to permit the reader to retain his impression of the magnificence of Allworthy's estate while forcing him to discredit the absurd orotundity with which it is described. In short, the reader of a dozen pages of Tom Jones finds himself in what self­ consciously claims to be a new species of writing, one which is historical and true but which is at the same time invented.

Likewise though with a great difference in tone, Amelia estab­ lishes very quickly its claim to the truth. Previous histories err,

3?The ironic narration of the episode involving Allworthy and Mrs. Wilkins is analyzed skilfully by Dorothy Van Ghent in The English Novel: Form and Function (New York, 1953), PP* 73-76. kb

Fielding tells us in the first chapter, by claiming too much for

Fortune, either blaming it for ill luck or attributing success to it. The present history, however, will tell the truth by dealing with human responsibility, the causes and components of happiness and misery. The familiar air of authenticity is established by the apparent inability of the narrator to remember the parish over which Justice Thrasher presides, a realistic device found throughout .

Defoe, and, for that matter, Aphra Behn. But lest the reader take the narrative as a direct transcript of experience, Fielding enters to defend the character of Miss Matthews from anticipated criticism and, in effect, to remind the reader that the narrative is an invention. The irony is not so flamboyant as that of Tom Jones; nevertheless, the offenses of those brought to justice by Mr.

Gotobed are "diverse outrages"; (VI, 17) Blear-eyed Moll is "of no very comely appearance"; (VI, 22) Robinson is not "of the most inviting aspect"; (VI, 2k) and Booth, lying in prison, robbed of his coat, "summoned his philosophy, of which he had no inconsiderable share, to his assistance, and resolved to make himself as easy as possible under his present circumstances." (VI, 22) The reader is invited to look beyond the rather flat understatements of the narrator, with their insistent negation, to the depravity of the subject. Should the shape of the early books of Amelia remind the reader of Dido and Aeneas, he must be reminded as well of the inadequacies of Virgil's form to contain the grubby realities of eighteenth-century prison life. And should the reader bring to the book certain facile lies concerning justice under the English

Constitution, he must find the summary arrest and conviction of

Booth unendurably true history.

Criticism of Fielding in his own time is notoriously shabby.

However, two contemporaries recognized the novelty of Fielding, his confrontation of the great mass of works which he found deficient in the truth, and thejjrelation between his new attempt at the truth and the genre of history. The anonymous author of An Essay on the

New Species of Writing Founded by Mr . Fielding writes:

As this Sort of Writing was intended as a Contrast to those in which the Reader was even to suppose all the Characters ideal, and every Circumstance quite imaginary, 'twas thought necessary, to give it a greater Air of Truth, to entitle it an History; and the Dramatis Personae (if I may venture to use the Expression) were christened not with fantastic high-sounding Names, but such as, tho' .they sometimes bore some Reference to the Character, had a more modern Termination.*'

And the anonymous author of the interpolated matter in An Apology for the Life of M r . Bampfylde-Moore Carew, a work as abusive of

3®ed. Alan D. McKillop, Augustan Reprint Society publ. #95 (Los Angeles, 1962), p. 18. k6

Fielding as the Essay on the Mew Species of Writing is laudatory, writes:

Notwithstanding all, you are an Author of Authors still; for you draw Characters after Nature, while others draw them after their own wicked Imaginations: For it seems, Sir, Homer, Virgil, Horace, and the other little Authors of Antiquity, were stupid enough to think there were many Characters in every Station of Life, unfit to he drawn at full Length, as "being unworthy of the Dignity of their Pens, or the Sight of their Readers...

To you, Sir, the Honour belongs of presenting Characters to the Reader's Sight, that they would otherwise never have seen; for it is without all Dispute, a noble Thought of your own, that ignorant, stupid, low, vicious Characters, are as worthy the Reader's Attention as wiser and more virtuous ones, and make full as good Pictures, and there­ fore ought to be drawn at full Length.

The bland fastidiousness of the Essay and the heavy-handed irony of Bampfylde-Moore Carew count for rather little as criticism.

But they convey with a certain contemporary immediacy an awe at the same premises of Fielding’s fiction that I have been attempting to describe--the audacious assertion that his novels are true in a way that previous attempts at such truth are not.

39sixth edition (London, n. d.), p. xix.

top. xxi. ^7

IV

All novelists are concerned with the disparity between symbol and referent--the relation between the symbols of authority and the capacity to administer, between the symbols of class and real social differences, between the symbols of wealth, skill, intellect and the realities for which the symbols stand. Fielding, of course, displays these concerns, particularly by means of his irony. But appearance and reality is not simply a question of the novelist's techniques of presentation; just as the novelist must publicly examine how we know what wa know, just as he must engage his readers in this investigation, his characters too must live through the complexities of a world of seeming and being.

In Fielding, the quest of the characters for truth is like that of no other novelist's. The characters of Fielding almost never ask who they are. They seldom ask what kind of person X is.

What they most often ask is: What was it that happened? If the question which the characters constantly pose sounds like the question of the historian, it is because Fielding, like any other novelist, transferred the burden of his own curiosities to his characters. Although Fielding is a moralist, the characters seldom ask how they may know goodness when they find it; goodness is end­ lessly investigated by Fielding, but when it is encountered it is J+8 plain enough. Goodness, in any case, is never hidden either from the narrator or the reader. The disturbingly difficult questions involve knowledge that is essentially historical, difficult because such knowledge must be pursued through great mazes of inadequate records, short memories, bias, falsification, and human guile in every form, disturbing because we base so much of our action upon what we believe to have happened. Besides, as Fielding insists, we have no direct knowledge of minds other than our own; the only means of judging others that we have is by observing action. The novelist, to be sure, may know the motives of the characters he has made; but he can hardly expect his characters to know each others' motives.

Although knowledge of motives is essential to final ethical judgments,

Fielding was preoccupied with the inaccessibility of these motives.^

Thus characters in Fielding do not ask: Why did you do this? and,

How do you like that? The way that characters in Fielding arrive at

^The Champion: Containing a Series of Papers, Humourous, Moral, Political, and Critical, 2 vols. (London, 17^1), I, 79*- '*The only Ways by which we can come at any Knowledge of what passes in the Minds of others, are their Words and Actions; the latter of which, hath by the wiser Part of Mankind been chiefly depended on, as the surer and more infallible Guide. As to the Doctrine of Physiognomy, it being somewhat unfortunate in these latter Ages, I shall say nothing of it." See also "An Essay on the Knowledge of the Charac­ ters of Men," Henley, XIV, for a view largely similar though much more trustful of physiognomy. Henry Knight Miller /Essays on Fielding1s Miscellanies: A Commentary on Volume One (Princeton, 1961), pp. 191-99/ comments usefully on the matter, relating Fielding's position regarding physiognomy in the essay to his position else­ where. 1*9 knowledge of others is to ask first: What happened? And from the answer they make inferences.

Joseph Andrews is the first of Fielding's series of contrasting modes of pursuing the truth. Joseph is stripped and robbed; and, after much resistance by the passengers, he is taken into a coach.

Significantly none of the passengers ask him the most obvious question under the circumstances— What happened?— except the lawyer, who makes it quite clear that it is self-interest that prompts him to ask the question. Joseph is deposited at the inn where Betty the chambermaid soon finds out the circumstances of the robbery, an inquiry prompted by spontaneous sympathy for Joseph's plight.

Next morning "Tow-wouse and the surgeon went to pay a visit to poor Joseph, and inquire into the circumstances of this melancholy affair." (1*7) But their curiosity is satisfied the moment it becomes clear that Joseph has no worldly goods. One of the thieves is cap­ tured; the parson and the surgeon take the lead in seeking evidence against him. But once again, it is self-interest that prompts this ostensible quest for the truth. "As this parish was so unfortunate as to have no lawyer in it, there had been a constant contention between the two doctors, spiritual and physical, concerning their abilities in a science, in which, as neither of them professed it, they had equal pretensions to dispute each other's opinions." (56) 50

The inquiring acts of Parson M a m s provide a hind of standard against which those of the other characters can he judged. For comic and deficient as Adams' inquiry is, his sole motive is to arrive at wise judgments. "Pray, madam," he asks the narrator of the history of Leonora, "who was this squire Horatio?" (85) And later, "You are here guilty of a little mistake...which, if you please, I will correct: I have attended at one of these quarter-

sessions, where I observed the counsel taught the justices, instead of learning anything of them." (89) And again, "Madam,...if it be not impertinent, I should be glad to know how this gentleman was drest." (89) Here, and in the counterpoint between Pafcson Adams

and Wilson, Parson M ams is always ingenuous and often irrelevant, t but he is spontaneously curious and spontaneously moral. And

Fielding, who had a scholar's knowledge of all the hatred, all the desperate exercises in vindication in the history of the preceding

century would have insisted that the historical inquiry demands a moral judgment before it demands an intellectual one.

Allworthy, however, is the best example of the pursuit of a truth which is peculiarly historical. He finds the infant Tom in his bed, as the novel begins, and responds immediately by planning for his care. But almost as soon he finds himself obliged to seek

out the child's mother, not out of a priggish curiosity and least of all out of vindictiveness but because Mrs. Deborah Wilkina has 51

asserted that a "wicked slut" had "laid" the child to Allworthy.

Mrs. Deborah settles on Jenny Jones. And Fielding comments:

Though Mrs. Deborah was fully satisfied of the guilt of Jenny, from the reasons above shown, it is possible Mr. Allworthy might have required some stronger evidence to have convicted her; but she saved her accusers any such trouble by freely confessing the whole fact with which she was charged. (Ill, 35)

Allworthy's responsibility then is to determine the father. But

since Jenny is. honor bound to conceal him, he accepts her word and

drops the inquiry,

for as she had disdained to excuse herself by a lie, and had hazarded his further displeasure in her present situation, rather than she would forfeit her honour or integrity, by betraying another, he had but little apprehensions that she would be guilty of falsehood towards himself. (Ill,

The next chapter begins with a picture of Miss Bridget listening

through the keyhole of the Squire's study, and the following chapter

reveals the vicious conclusions of the town gossips who are, by

nature, incapable of a dispassionate inquiry into what happened.

Meanwhile Allworthy fades from the foreground as Jenny is sent away

and the brothers Blifil appear. However, the squire's function is

never quite lost sight of. Through the courtship of Bridgit, "Mr.

Allworthy must have had the insight of the devil (or perhaps some of

his worse qualities) to have entertained the least suspicion of

what was going forward." (ill, 56) The second book opens with the 52 birth of young Blifil, followed by Mrs. Partridge's farcical pursuit

of the truth about her husband's alleged paternity. Fielding inci­

dentally interrupts this episode with the following observation:

Mankind have always taken great delight in knowing and descanting on the actions of others. Hence there have been, in all ages and nations, certain places set apart for public rendezvous, where the curious might meet and satisfy their mutual curiosity. Among these, the barbers' shops have justly borne the pre-eminence. (IV, 7^-5)

The Partridge episode resumes, but Mrs. Partridge's beating of her

husband, comic enough in itself, is not resolved until the neighbors

gather to ask what happened. The allegation of Partridge's paternity

is temporarily withheld from Allworthy as he resumes his place in

the foreground of the narrative; and when he comes once again to

dominate a chapter after a lapse of some pages, we find him engaged

in finding out what happened, this time taking evidence against

Partridge, (ill, 85-90)

And so it goes in book after book. Tom is caught poaching with

Black George. And as Allworthy returns to dominate the action, it is

for purposes of finding out what happened. Tom sells the horse which was a gift from Allworthy; and Allworthy appears to ask him if

he did. Blifil allows Sophia's bird to escape; and Allworthy,

arriving on the scene, asks, "Pray, child, what is the reason of all this disturbance?" (ill, 151) He hears Tom's confession of having

sired Molly's child, Square's revelation of Tom's aid to the family 53 of Black George, and finally the overwhelming evidence that prompts him to send Tom out of his house. Allworthy disappears from the action of the novel for the ten books that follow although he is referred to again and again; and there is sometimes the feeling, voiced on occasion by Partridge, that if the characters could somehow let Allworthy know what had happened, everything would work out.

When Allworthy reappears in Book XVII, Chapter ii, Mrs. Miller addresses him: "'Good Lord? my dear uncle, what do you think hath happened?*" (V, 2^9) In fairly rapid succession, Allworthy is obliged to hear what has happened from Mrs. Miller (several times),

Sophia, Blifil, Dowling, Mr. Nightingale, Partridge, Mrs. Waters, indirectly from Square, and finally from Tom himself.

Tom Jones is, as more than one critic has insisted and as

l i p Fielding himself says, a structure of contrasts: contrasts of differing styles of life, contrasts of differing moral stances, contrasts of action and reflection. It is also a structure of contrasts in ways of getting at such truth as that at which "history" aims. As nearly every character in the novel asks the question,

What has happened?, he is contrasted with the earnest, dispassionate, but naive search of Allworthy. It is significantly analogous with

Fielding's own historical skepticism that, although the truth of

^2TJ, III, 207-210. what has happened is ultimately made known, almost nobody, when he asks what happened, finds out.

Amelia begins with Justice Thrasher's disastrous inquiry into what happened, followed by the minor variations on the themes of hypocrisy, perjury, and violated innocence of the prison scene.

Booth and Miss Matthews meet, and "at last Miss Matthews reminding her companion of his promise of relating to her what had befallen him since the interruption of their former acquaintance, he began as is written in the next book of this history." (VI, 65) Miss

Matthews follows with her history; and midway through the novel

Amelia hears Mrs. Bennett's history. In each case the motives of the listener are developed to some extent by Fielding. And once again, there is a standard of wise and sympathetic inquiry, this time in Dr. Harrison.

It should be added, finally, that the narrator himself partici­ pates in the theme of getting at the truth of what has happened.

Joseph Andrews begins with an ostensible quest for Joseph's genealogy.

"As to his ancestors, we have searched with great diligence, but little success." (15) And the narrator indulges in some rather silly antiquarianism which Arthur Johnston has identified as a guying of the antiquarian Hearne, but which is in any event well precedented

^"Fielding, Hearne, and Merry-Andrews," N and Q, CCV (Aug., i960), 295-96. 55 in the journalistic claims to fidelity in Defoe and his imitators.

At one point Adams "eat either a rabbit or a fowl, I never could with any tolerable certainty discover which." (56) At another point Fanny and Joseph have been left alone by Parson Adams; on his return the narrator comments, "I have been often assured by both, that they spent these hours in a most delightful conversation; but as I never could prevail on either to relate it, so I cannot communicate it to the reader." (142) This kind of narratorial fussing gives a solid reality to the person of the narrator and an air of authenticity to the tale; but, more important, it ironically forces the reader to re-examine the criteria for distinguishing important from unimportant history, credible from incredible.

Though the character of the narrator changes somewhat in Tom Jones,

Fielding continues his ironic play with what the narrator has been able to find out. Sophia has had a pleasant dream; "but, as she never revealed this dream to any one, so the reader cannot expect to see it related here." (IV, 290) Again and again, the narrator declares himself to be ignorant of motives. "Whether fear or courage was the occasion of his firing, or whether he took aim at the object of his terror, I cannot say." (IV, 50) And frequently when one of the characters is unable to penetrate the lies that keep him from knowing the truth, the narrator comments in his own person on the frequency with which this kind of lie is perpetrated on even the 56 keenest of observers. In Amelia there is still, though less fre­ quently, the implicit assertion that the events of the narrative have been told to someone vho has taken pains to verify them, and vho is nov telling them. As Book XI begins, the narrator says: "We vill now look back to some personages who, though not the principal characters in this history, have yet made too consider­ able a figure to be abruptly dropped." (VII, 238) And as the novel ends, the narrator recalls, "Amelia declared to me the other day that she did not remember to have seen her husband out of humour * these ten years." (VII, 3^1)

The impression intended by some critical accounts of Fielding, especially the hostile ones— Taine's and Ford’s, is of a great blustering oaf who insists on telling the reader in his own person what he thinks of the events he is relating. The advantage in

44 HLppolyte Taine, History of English Literature, trans. Henry Van Laun, 3 vols. (New York, 1900)7 II, 430j "At every step he suggests moral conclusions; he wants us to take sides; he discusses, excuses, or condemns." And II, 432: "You /I. e. Fielding/ are only aware of the impetuosity of the senses, the upvelling of the blood, the effusion of tenderness, but you are unacquainted with nervous exaltation JTJ and poetic rapture. Man, such as you conceive him, is a good buffalo; and perhaps he is the hero required by a people which gives itself the nickname 'John Bull.'" Ford Madox Ford, The English Novel from the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (Philadelphia, 1929)> P* $3* Fielding is here described as "a dreadful example of how not to do things" and "the begetter of Thackeray and the product that it is convenient to call the n u w l e as opposed to the novel." 57 seeing Fielding's historical curiosity transferred to his narrator and characters is that it presents Fielding as a subtle analyst of the process of knowing: the reader is invited to judge the probable historicity of the retrospective accounts which the characters give of themselves; he is invited to judge the probable historicity of the events which the narrator himself relates; he is invited to judge the motives of the persons who seek to know what happened; he is invited to judge the reasonableness of the interpretation the characters make from what they believe to have happened. The reader is presented with information which Fielding expects him to judge gratuitous; he has withheld from him information which would clarify great areas of confusion if it were known. Finally the reader is invited to judge the narrator's historiographic skill, by the narrator's own implicit criteria, by Fielding's prefatorial criteria, by the reader's own sense of his efficiency in getting the story told, and by the reader's own criteria for judging respon­ sible historiography.

V

So far I have tried to show Fielding in the act of clearing away a great body of works which had attempted what he was doing but had done it ineptly or mendaciously or not at all. Such a stance is certainly not a frequent one for a novelist to take, but it is a compelling one for a novelist vho was, indeed, doing something new and especially for one vho imagined his creative act to be analogous to the historian's. Nevertheless it is a dangerous stance, one suggesting an inexcusable arrogance, even an anti-intellectualism, if it is not handled with a certain measure of generosity and tact and discrimination. For not all books lie.

.And an enlightened critic had better make sure that in throwing out Pliny he is not throwing out Cervantes as well.

Fielding's narrator does make clear that Lucian and Cervantes,

Swift and Pope, Barrow and Tillotson are, for him, supremely true.

But the relation between men and books is a good deal more subtle than the separation of the true from the false. It is in part what a reader brings to a book that makes it, quite apart from its intrinsic truth, a true or a false book. That is one reason that

Fielding engages his reader at so many levels. It is a result of his desire that the reader of his novels should engage in the kind of discriminating dialogue with their narrator that would make them more than passively true, would make them operatively true.

I have argued above that Fielding's historical curiosity and skepti­ cism are mirrored in the inquiring acts of his characters. In a similar way his initial act as historian, the separation of good books from bad, is mirrored in his characters. That is, those characters who are predisposed to vanity and hypocrisy frequently 59 find their way to the very books which Fielding, as historian, must clear away. But all this is complicated by the fact that some books which are true enough are made into forces for hypocrisy and even active evil by the distorting minds that read them.

Early in Joseph Andrews the narrator gives an account of

Joseph's education. Besides the Bible, the Wiole Duty of Man, and

Thomas a Kempis,

as often as he could, without being perceived, he had studied a great good book which lay open in the hall window, where he had read, 'as how the devil carried away half a church in sermon­ time, without hurting one of the congregation'; and 'as how a field of corn ran away down a hill with all the trees upon it, and covered another man's meadow.1 This sufficiently assured Mr. Adams that the good book meant could be no other than Baker's Chronicle. (l8)

Thus the ostensible hero of Fielding's true history, an earnest, simple, provincial, rather ingenuous young man, is introduced by showing him being educated by— a lying history. The reader's first encounter with Mrs. Slipslop follows shortly; and though her own pretensions are the primary objects of the satire, her pretensions clearly derive from her imperfectly acting out the hollow jargon of learned prose. The doctor who treats Joseph acts on the basis of Galen and Hippocrates and pronounces Joseph a dead man, whereupon

Joseph recovers and goes on his way. There is the classic instance of Parson Adams advocating Christian stoicism yet succumbing immedi­ ately after to grief on the news of the supposed death of his son. 60

Finally the question of books versus experience is neatly focused in the passage in vhich Joseph describes to a shocked and ingenuous

Adams vhat masters and servants in London are really like. To

Adams1 expression of disbelief, Joseph replies, "It is not for me... to give reasons for what men do, to a gentleman of your learning."

"You say right," Adams answers. "Knowledge of men is only to be learnt from books; Plato and Seneca for that; and those are authors,

I am afraid, child, you never read." (150)

In Tom Jones Fielding introduces the character of Mrs.

Western: „

She had lived about the court, and had seen the world. Hence she had acquired all that knowledge which the said world usually com­ municates; and was a perfect mistress of manners, customs, ceremonies, and fashions. Nor did her erudition stop here. She had considerably im­ proved her mind by study; she had not only read all the modern plays, operas, oratorios, poems, and romances— -in all which she was a critic— but had gone through Rapin’s History of England, Eachard's Roman History, and many French M^moires pour servir & l'Histolre. (Ill, 274)

To the reader it would be obvious, even if Fielding did not tell him (which he does), that the character whom he is meeting is capa­ ble of making a consistent and monstrous fool of herself. Before long Mrs. Western comes upon Sophia, who is reading a sentimental novel. Defending her reading, Sophia says, "I love a tender sensa­ tion... and would pay the price of a tear for it at any time." (ill,

288) Sophia's defense is slightly incongruous, in contrast to her 61 usual strength of character. For in the next chapter she cries, to be sure, at the proposed marriage with Blifil; but the tears very soon give way to professions of determination and detestation that forcibly contrast with the pathos which Sophia enjoys for a fictional character. Mrs. Western replies to Sophia’s defense of her reading with: "Ah] child, you should read books which would teach you a little hypocrisy, which would instruct you how to hide your thoughts a little better." (ill, 288) Although Mrs.

Western is by no means the most vicious character is Tom Jones, this speech is perhaps the ultimate debasement of the difficult attempt to find the truth of experience in books: reading as an education in hypocrisy.

Partridge is re-introduced into the narrative as the barber,

Mr. Benjamin. The English books which he owns, we find, are: "a great part of Stowe's Chronicle; the sixth volume of Pope's Homer; the third volume of the Spectator; the second volume of Echard's

Roman History; the Craftsman; Robinson Crusoe; Thomas S Kempis; and two volumes of Tom Brown's Works." (IV, 82) That the collection is fragmentary is clue enough that Partridge's learning is suspect.

But the nature of the collection, with its undifferentiated historical fact, historical lie, and pseudo-historical fiction, prepares the reader for that scene, many books later, when Partridge is unable to distinguish the art of Hamlet from the realities of life. Mrs. Fitzpatrick's reading is conspicuously unsuccessful in providing

her with wisdom, (she has read Daniel's English History of France,

Plutarch, "the Atalantis," Dryden, Pope, "the Countess B'Anais,"

Locke's Human Understanding.) (IV, 27 6 ) And in Thwackum and

Square, of course, their active evil is intellectually rationalized

so that they are able to defend, from books, their own viciousness.

In Amelia, Chapter v of Book VIII is primarily a satire on

Grub Street, the immediate object being a hack who proposes to trans

late Ovid but who can not distinguish Lucan from Lucian. Still,

Booth, who disputes with the hack, offers an exegesis of a passage which ironically displays the patent lack of any relationship between Booth's considerable learning and his management of his own

life.

"Pardon me, sir," cries Booth; "I do not conceive that to have been Lucan's meaning. If you please to observe the context; Lucan, having commended the temperance of Cato in the instances of diet and clothes, proceeds to venereal pleasures; of which, says the poet, his principal use was procreation; then he adds, Urbi Pater est, urbique Maritus; that he became a father and a husband for the sake only of the city." (VII, 86)

To the reader of Fielding who is, by now, familiar with this pattern

Mrs. Bennet's display of erudition— she cites Petrarch, St. Jerome,

and Virgil at one point (VI, 310)— is prima facie evidence of her

pathetic incompetence at the art of life. 63

I have suggested several sides to the relation between men and books in Fielding, a breadth of vision that prevents the image of widely-read people acting stupidly from becoming anti-intellectualism

Fielding's narrator does not find all books insidious and neither do his characters. It is certainly not his Aeschylus that makes Parson

Adams foolish; in fact there is an implicit assumption that his qualities of goodness and sympathy are reinforced by his knowledge of scripture and the classics. Tom is widely read, and he would be a less estimable person if he were not. And Booth's reading of Or. Barrow's sermons confirms him in the kind of Christianity that Fielding approved of. What Fielding presents is a spectrum in which all possible relations between man and books are contained: the lying books whose lies are taken seriously, the book good or bad whose effect upon an unresponsive mind is negligible, the good book turned to evil, and finally the good book whose effect is that which

Fielding wished, for his own books— a tempering of the character of the reader by making him wiser and better than he was before. Wisdom for Fielding as novelist as well as for his characters, comes both from direct experience and from books; experience enables one to sort out the lies in books and to retain the aspects of books which enlarge and enrich the knowledge one already has; and books in turn enable one to evaluate wisely one's experience.

My purpose has been to show how complicated are the initial acts 61* of Fielding the novelist as historian. To simplify is a legitimate aim of criticism. Finnegans Wake, being Finnegans Wake, justifies a skeleton key. With Fielding I think criticism must work in the opposite direction. For his simplicity is what is obvious, so obvious in fact that to call him simple and external has seemed, to

F. R. Leavis, to have rendered a definitive judgment of him. The art of life, for Fielding, was complex, and the art of writing about 46 it more complex still. And thus I would insist again that while

Fielding's novels are intended to be like history, they are at the same time anti-history: their relationship to history is subtle and evasive. I would insist again that the category illuminates the novels. But too much happens at too many levels in Fielding for me

^5"He is credited with range and variety and it is true that some episodes take place in the country and some in Town, some in the churchyard and some in the inn, some on the high-road and some in the bed-chamber, and so on. But we haven't to read a very large propor­ tion of Tom Jones in order to discover the limits of the essential interests it has to offer us. Fielding's attitudes, and his concern with human nature, are simple, and not such as to produce an effect of anything but monotony (on a mind, that is, demanding more than external action) when exhibited at the length of an 'epic in prose.'" The Great Tradition (London, 1948), p. 4.

^^The articles of Eleanor N. Hutchins seem to me notable examples of the attempt I speak of to give an account of Fielding's complexity. She shows, for example, how the word "prudence,11 which generations of critics have taken to be a facile moral epithet, undergoes changes in different contexts so as to make the word and the quality carry connotations that vary from unqualified approval to ironic condemnation. "' Prudence' in Tom Jones: A Study in Connotative Irony,11 PQ, XXXIX (i960), 496-507; "Verbal Irony in Tom Jones," FMLA, LXXVII (1962), 46-50. 65 to belie his complexity by insisting that seeing the novels from the point of view of history can give more than a partial account of their richness. CHAPTER II

OUR BROTHER HISTORIANS: FIELDING'S ANALOGY

I

In Tom Jones, Chapter i, Book II, Fielding's analogy between fiction and history is more explicit than elsewhere. The chief bases for comparison throughout the chapter are principles of inclusion, principles which make Tom Jones like history when history is properly written but unlike inferior history.

Though we have properly enough entitled this our work, a history, and not a life, nor an apology for a life, as is more in fashion; yet we intend in it rather to pursue the method of those writers who profess to disclose the revolutions of countries, than to imitate the painful and voluminous historian, who, to pre­ serve the regularity of his series, thinks him­ self obliged to fill up as much paper with the detail of months and years in which nothing remarkable happened, as he employs upon those notable eras when the greatest scenes have been transacted on the human stage, (ill, 6k)

These annalistic histories are like newspapers, which print the same number of pages each day, whether .-there is any news or not; or they are like a stage-coach, "which performs constantly the same course, empty as well as full."

66 67

In Fielding's history, on the other hand, "any extraordinary scene" will he developed at large; hut, "if whole years should pass without producing anything worthy" the reader's notice, these periods will pass unobserved. Some chapters will he very short, some long. Some will contain a single day, some years. And anyone who objects to such principles is assured that "as I am, in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein." (ill, 65-66)

What should he included in a novel, when a novel aspires to the breadth and scope of history, is a question that Fielding is always conscious of. Lady Booby tosses and turns in her bed, uttering many soliloques, "which, if we had no better matter for our reader, we would give him." (JA, 2j) Of a conversation between the justice and Squire Booby, "It would be unnecessary, if I was able, which indeed I am not, to relate the conversation between these two gentlemen, which rolled, as I have been informed, entirely on the subject of horse-racing." (JA, 2^+9) The narrator of Tom Jones promises "not to tire the reader, by leading him through every scene of this courtship." (ill, 56) And of Mrs. Western, "But as she was hardly articulate, we cannot be very certain of the identical words; we shall therefore omit inserting a speech which at best would not greatly redound to her honour." (ill, 366) The narrator of Amelia, finally, in imitation of the governor who locks up Miss

Matthews and Booth, locks up "likewise a scene which we do not 68 think proper to expose to the eyes of the public." (VI, 17*0 Much,

in short, is omitted from Fielding’s novels because it is offensive to good taste, because it is dull, because it is unimportant, and because it is irrelevant to the central concerns of the narrator.

These explanations of the narrator for what he has omitted are

sometimes ironic. The narrator's reason for not giving Mrs.

Western's speech— so as to preserve her honor— is not the real

reason. Fielding has already shown her to be violent and vindictive.

Continuing her dialogue in full, a dialogue "hardly articulate,"

simply would serve no novelistic purpose. The suggestion that the

narrator should properly delete part of a conversation to preserve

the honour of one whom he has already pictured "thundering" and with

"a countenance so full of rage that she resembled one of the furies

rather than a human creature" is patently Fielding's ironic stance

again. In similar ways, when the narrator tells us that what he

omits is dull, or offensive to good taste, Fielding is sometimes

playing off his narrator's perception of dullness and good taste

against the reader's. And Fielding's narrator often requires the

reader to re-examine his own criteria for inclusion; to agree with

the narrator sometimes, and sometimes to laugh at him.

But underlying all Fielding's remarks on inclusion, especially when the analogy jaith history becomes most explicit, is an obvious

seriousness. There was, apparently, expectation enough by Fielding 69 that his readers would anticipate criteria of inclusion other than those he used that he found it necessary to explain and examine and, on occasion, to play ironically with those criteria which governed his form.

Unfortunately the remarks of historians and theorists of history in the eighteenth century are of little help in determining what governed inclusion in historical writing. Probably any histor­ ian of any age who has ever had occasion to theorize however per­ functorily has claimed that he has included the relevant and omitted the irrelevant. But to Cecil Woodham-Smith in the twentieth century, the Irish potato famine is relevant to the charge of the Light

Brigade in the Crimean War, a matter that would doubtless have struck most eighteenth-century historians as being wildly irrelevant.

John Strype's Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of

Religion, and other Various Occurrences in the Church of England, during Queen Elizabeth's Happy Reign (1709-31) is annalistic history

loosely united by its generally ecclesiatical subject matter, a work not without a certain immediacy that comes from the undigested historical materials— letters, anecdotes, legal documents— -that it contains. Still Strype is often ludicrously indiscriminate in his inclusions. For example,

I have one note to insert before I take my leave of this year, concerning one of the chief divines of these times, viz. Dr. Gabriel Goodman, dean of Westminster, shewing his conscientious care in a matter of religious charity, wherein by his place he was concerned. 70

An exchange was now in hand, of some lands belonging to the hospital of the Savoy, London, with other lands belonging to Mr. Fanshow, remembrancer of the treasury; the dean, who was visitor there, fearing some good bargain for that gentleman, but some ill one for the hospital, (as in those exchanges, common in those times, it usually happened,) wrote an earnest letter to the secretary, that no wrong might be done to so charitable a foundation; which ran to this tenor.

The letter follows and the chapter ends, illustrating precisely that compulsion Fielding speaks of— to fill up an account of a year, whether anything worth recording happened or not.

Other readers of history in the eighteenth century besides

Fielding often found history minute and particular to the point of irrelevance. Lord Deerhurst, for example, writes to Sanderson

Miller: "I am now very busy in reading Mezeray's History of France which I think very entertaining tho1 sometimes the Author is a p little too trifling and circumstantial." And Shaftesbury at one point compares certain poets and painters to "the mere Historian" who "copys what he sees, and minutely traces every Feature and odd

M a r k . Perhaps the most consistent expression in the century of the need for distinguishing the relevant from the irrelevant appears

■*•4 vols. (Oxford, 1824), I (part 2), 201.

2An Eighteenth-Century Correspondence, ed. Lilian Dickins and Mary Stanton (London, 1910),p. 113*

^Characteristicks, I, 144-45. 71

in Hume’s History. Near the beginning he -writes: "We shall hasten through the obscure and uninteresting period of Saxon annalsj And

shall reserve a more full narration for those times when the truth

is both so well ascertained and so complete as to promise entertain-

ment and instruction to the reader."^ Of the remaining accounts

written by the Monks, he comments: "The history of that period

abounds in names, but is extremely barren of events; or the events

are related so much without circumstances and causes, that the most

profound or most eloquent writer must despair of rendering them

either instructive or entertaining to the reader.And of the

point in his history at which Henry VIII ascends the throne, he

writes:

Here, therefore, commences the useful, as well as the more agreeable part of modern annals; certainty has place in all the considerable, and even most of the minute parts of historical narration; great variety of events, preserved by printing, give the author the power of selecting, as well as adorning, the facts which he relates; and as each incident has a reference to our present manners and situation, instructive lessons occur every moment during the course of the narra- tlon.^

In spite of such widespread consciousness of the possibility of

irrelevant minuteness, however, historians of the second rate con­

tinued to write history which was circumstantial and annalistic

both by our standards and by theirs.

History of England, 8 vols. (London, 1782), I, 2

5l, 28. 6III, 407 72

Abel Boyer describes a visit of Charles III, King of Spain, to Queen Anne thus:

He supp'd that Night with the Queen; who gave his Majesty the Right Hand at Table, which he, with great Difficulty, admitted; the Prince sitting at the End of the Table, on the Queen's side. The next Day, his Majesty hearing notice that the Queen was coming to make him a Visit, he met her at her Drawing-Room Door, endeavouring to have prevented her; but her Majesty went on to his Apartment, from whence he led her Majesty to Dinner.^

The significance of this royal maneuvering about is certainly lost to a twentieth-century reader; and it is difficult to believe that the episode was ever significant to any but Boyer himself. And the fact that in 1566 there was "a great dearth of corn, by reason of the unseasonable winter before; but there was a prospect of plenty g the year ensuing" is significant only insofar as it leads somewhere— to an account of famine, to a relation between the lack of corn and the development of another food, to the political consequences of economic distress. But in John Strype the detail leads nowhere but ends the chapter instead.

Thomas Lediard prefaces his Naval History of England (1735) thus:

I have taken all possible Care to be exact in my Chronology, and, to that End, have reduced this Work in a great measure into Annals, and

%The History of Queen Anne (London, 1735), P» 101.

8Annals of the Reformation, I (part 2), 228. 73

kept up a regular Historical and Chronological Connection, by an Abridgment of the most remark­ able Occurrences, not only of every Reign, but of every Year.

But not all annalistic historians were so candid about what they were doing. Bulstrode V/hitelock's Memoirs of the English Affairs from the Beginning of the Reign of Charles the First to the Happy

Restoration of King Charles the Second is dull and undiscriminating and annalistic. Yet Whitelock's prefatory remarks, as Robert

Wallace has shown,10 are rather similar to Fielding's animadversions on annalistic history.

It is not every period of time, not every king's or Caesar's reign, that furnishes matter sufficient for an history. Tacitus in one place professes he cannot meet with any thing unless he should stuff out a volume in commending the foundation, or the huge timber that Caesar em­ ployed at the building of his amphitheatre. Else­ where he complains of his being straitened and kept down, the times affording nothing notable besides the corruption of judges, the encouragement of informers, subornations and malicious prose­ cutions, treachery, and trepannings....11

It is this confusion between ostensible purpose and actual histori­ ography which is exemplified in Whitelock that makes Fielding's differentiation between the kind of history Tom Jones is like and the kind it is not like necessary. And it is the anticipation of

9Quoted in Bonamy Dobree, English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, 1700-17^0 (New York, 1959), P* 379*

•^"Henry Fielding's Narrative Method," p. 370.

11 Quoted in Wallace, idem. 7k his eighteenth-century readers that a work called a history would more often than not tend toward the annalistic, whatever its author's professions, that made necessary Fielding's constant comments and frequent ironic play concerning what he had included.

W. H. Walsh in the twentieth century explains the difference between chronicle and history in a way that would be perfectly clear to the eighteenth. History is properly intelligent and 12 intelligible: it shows why. Peter Whalley in the eighteenth century defined the difference in similar terms.

The true Difference between History and Annals, appears to consist in this; that these last point out only the Actions per­ formed, and the Time of their Performance; but the former endeavours to explain to us the Motives and Consequences, with other Matters of equal Importance.... 3

Walsh goes on to make an analogy between history and literature.

History, like the drama or the novel, is an "orderly development" in which is evident "a certain unity of plot or theme." A history which lacks this unity of design is felt by the reader to be unsatis­ factory in the way that bad novels are unsatisfactory. The reader of a scrappy, disconnected history feels a failure of understanding on the part of the historian. It is likely that Whalley would have approved of Walsh's point. Certainly Bolingbroke would have,

12An Introduction to Philosophy of History (London, 1951), pp. 32-3.

^ A n Essay on the Manner of Writing History, ed. Keith Stewart ARS publ. #80~(Los Angeles, i960), pT 75

since for him one of the chief values of history was its capacity

to show a coherent, intelligible account of actions that are com­

plete, whereas experience always confronts us with incompleteness

and partial views.^ It is certain that Fielding had these qualities

of completeness and intelligibility and thematic unity in mind when he wrote Tom Jones. In Chapter i of Book X he writes:

First, then, we warn thee not too hastily to condemn any of the incidents in this our history as impertinent and foreign to our main design, because thou dost not immediately conceive in what manner such incident may conduce to that design. This work may, indeed, be considered as a great creation of our own; and for a little reptile of a critic to presume to find fault with any of its parts, without knowing the manner in which the whole is connected, and before he comes to the final catastrophe, is a most presumptuous absurdity. (IV, 193)

And when, in the passage cited at the beginning of this section,

Fielding proposes to follow the method of historians who trace

"the revolutions of countries," the phrase suggests a kind of

historical cognition which sees large and complex events through

to their resolutions.

To the twentieth-century reader, the idea that history should be proportionate in its development to the importance of the events

it relates, that it should be intelligible, coherent, unified,

consistently significant--to the twentieth-century reader these

•^Letters on the Study and Use of History, III, 3 ^ * 76

ideas seem rather dull truisms. But in order to imagine the force which these ideas had for Fielding and his contemporaries it is

necessary to realize that in the half-century before Hume's History

far more than two hundred historical works appeared in England,1^

not to mention the examens, rebuttals, and pamphlets that followed

in their wake or the numerous new editions of older works that

appeared in the period; yet of this mass of historical writing,

only Clarendon's History of the Rebellion has any claim to permanent

interest (and though it was first published in 1702-04, Clarendon's work belongs in style and spirit to the preceding century); Bishop

Burnet, Oldmixon perhaps, and Echard are readable for the specialist;

and the rest is undistinguished for the very reason that it is

disproportionate, incoherent, disunified, and insignificant. For

Fielding, the qualities by which he limits his analogy were qualities which he believed in but seldom found; it is impossible for another

age to read Tom Jones as a lesson in what history should be; but that,

in part, is its intent.

•^CBEL, which is selective, lists well over 200 historical works in English during the period; but even with a complete bibliography there are so many works which are only marginally historical or are spuriously historical that anything like a precise count would be impossible. 77

II

It is not quite fair to the eighteenth-century historians, however, to condemn them for their lack of unity, nor is it entirely fair to condemn all details in eighteenth-century history that cannot he fitted into a causal pattern. Ernst Cassirer, describing Taine's historical method, quotes that historian's fondness for "de tout petits faits significatifs." "These facts were not significant with respect to their effects," Cassirer explains, "but they were 'expressive'; they were symbols by which the historian could read and interpret individual characters or the character of a whole epoch.Eighteenth-century historians, without being so deliberate or so self-conscious as Taine, included facts of dubious significance to the effects in their histories, yet facts which were, in Taine's sense, expressive. Preoccupied as they were with human cause, yet lacking the psychological resources to treat human personality with internal intensity, eighteenth-century historians were frequently anecdotal. And though many of the anec­ dotes must seem irrelevant, aspects of undiscriminating, annalistic history, just as surely many were intended to be and still seem expressive. Bishop Burnet, for example, relates the following incident concerning the restoration.

^ A n Essay on Man; An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (New Haven, 19*&), p. 197* 78

As soon as it was fixed that the King was to be restored, a great many went over to make their court: Among these Sharp, who was employed by the resolutioners of Scotland, was one. He carried with him a letter from the Earl of Glencairn to Hide, made soon after Earl of Clarendon, recommending him as the only person capable to manage the design of setting up Episcopacy in Scotland: Upon which he was received into great confidence. Yet, as he had observed very carefully the success of Monk's solemn protestations against the King and for a Commonwealth, it seems he was so pleased with the original that he resolved to copy after it, without letting himself be diverted from it by scruples: For he stuck neither at solemn protestations, both by word of mouth and by letters, (of which I have seen many proofs,) nor at appeals to God of his sincerity in acting for the Presbytery both in prayers and on other occasions, Joining with these many dreadful imprecations on himself in which he did prevari­ cate. He was all the while maintained by the Presbyterians as-their agent, and continued to give them a constant account of the progress of his negotiation in their service, while he was indeed undermining it. This piece of craft was so visible, he having repeated his protestations to as many persons as then grew Jealous of him, that when he threw off the mask, about a year after this, it laid a foundation of such a character of him, that nothing could ever bring people to any tolerable thoughts of a man, whose dissimulation and treachery was so well known, and of which so many proofs were to be seen under his own hand. '

Now of all the people who took part in negotiating the restoration, certainly Sharp was one of the least significant. Nothing in the scale of Burnet's history demands the inclusion of Sharp; certainly nothing Justifies devoting nearly a folio page to Sharp when the

•^History of His Own Time, I, 92. 79 whole complex events of the restoration take only several pages in all. Yet there is justification for including the anecdote. Burnet is concerned, as he writes immediately before the passage quoted, with the "errours" in setting up and continuing the episcopacy in

Scotland, concerned both as a clergyman and a native Scot. And thus the affair of Sharp comes to stand for a basing of an ecclesi­ astical organization upon guile and sycophancy; the anecdote becomes a commentary on the Scottish church quite beyond the significance of Sharp himself. Also, the marginal note beside the paragraph quoted reads: "Many went over to the Hague," a topical designation that the incident of Sharp is obviously meant to illus­ trate. The incident thus is expressive of the opportunism, the vast range of grubby motives, involved in negotiating Charles’s return. In a similar way Fielding, like the historians of his time, includes narrative details that are immediately and obviously relevant, narrative details that are seemingly irrelevant but become relevant as the narrative develops,1® and narrative details that

1 A James J. Lynch, "Structural Techniques in Tom Jones," Zeitschrift fur Anglistlc und Americanistic, VII (1959), 5-1&. One of the struc­ tural techniques which Lynch isolates is "the blurred consequence." One such blurred consequence he describes thus: "When Sophia is riding along a lane on her way to London, her horse stumbles and she is thrown to the ground. The author at once assures us that she has received no physical injury, and then at greater length he explains that because of the narrowness of the lane and the darkness of the night her modesty was also protected from prying eyes. Since there is apparently no other consequence of the fall, the reader may con­ clude that the incident is merely a gratuitous addition to the narra­ tive of her journey, or that, as one critic pigeon/ believes, Fielding 80 are relevant in Taine's sense as expressive details, relevant, that is, largely as symbols.

The squire whose hounds have attacked Joseph, Fanny, and

Parson Adams is, we are told, a bachelor. And there is a certain causal relevance to the fact that he is unmarried. "A little dispute arose on the account of Fanny, whom the squire, who was a bachelor, was desirous to place at his own table." (205) That is, if he were not a bachelor he would be less eager to have Fanny, who is of low rank, to sit at his table. But we are told a second time that he is a bachelor. "The master of this house, then, was a man of very considerable fortune; a bachelor, as we have said, and about forty years of age." (206) It would seem that his bachelorhood, though it has a certain causal relevance to his recep­ tion of the travelers, has a considerable "expressive" value as well, even though the detail has nothing to do with his keeping hounds, his subsequent "roasting" of Adams, and so on. As Rebecca

West has pointed out, "Joseph Andrews would be nothing if he were not true to his Fanny; Tom Jones would be a brute and a boor if he proved unworthy of Sophia Western; Billy Booth would sink down into the world of Jonathan Wild were it not for his Amelia." A faithful

has taken this means of gently ridiculing her extreme delicacy. It is not until seven chapters later that Sophia (and the reader) dis­ cover that she has lost her pocketbook.. . (pp. 12-1 3 ) 81 wife, in Fielding, is a means to salvation, the active embodiment

of the principle of "good nature."1^ Making the squire a bachelor

qualifies his character in a way that can be described by Taine's

category of the nearly insignificant but expressive detail.

Chapter x, Book III, of Joseph Andrews is "A discourse between

the poet and the player; of no other use in this history, but to

divert the reader." The reader, however, who has become adjusted to

the ironic stance of Fielding is likely to assume that the scene

is relevant, although its relevance may not be immediately apparent.

The chapter before has seen Fanny abducted while Joseph and Parson

Adams are tied, back to back, to a pair of bedposts, a reversal that

leads no one to expect disastrous consequences. But Chapter x begins, "Before we proceed any farther in this tragedy, we shall

leave Mr. Joseph and Mr. Adams to themselves, and,imitate the wise

conductors of the stage, who in the midst of a grave action entertain

you with some excellent piece of satire or humour called a dance."

(220) To the reader it is clear both that what he is reading is not

a tragedy and that the mechanical interruption of the events because

of a need for "comic relief" is not dramatically necessary. Thus

the beginning of Chapter x makes a connection with Chapter ix, a

connection, however, which is ironic and elusive. Chapter x is

•^T h e Court and the Castle (New Haven,1961), pp. 99-101* 82 connected with Chapter xi as well. For the chapter following the discussion between the poet and the player contains Parson Mams' advocacy of stoicism to Joseph, who is grieving over Fanny, the chapter ending with Joseph’s quoting of a soliloquy followed by this paragraph:

M ams asked him what stuff that was he repeated? To which he answered, they were some lines he had gotten by heart out of a play.— "Ay, there is nothing but heathenism to be learned from plays," replied he.— "I never heard of any plays fit for a Christian to read, but Cato and the Conscious Lovers; and, I must own, in the latter there are some things almost solemn enough for a sermon." But we shall now leave them a little, and inquire after the subject of their conversation. (226)

Now the substance of Chapter x is as absurd as the narrator tells us it is. The poet heartily dislikes modern actors and the actor heartily dislikes modern playwrights. Their mutual raillery diminishes them both as speakers and as recipients of abuse. But their conversation involves not the substance of dramatic art but its surface, its use of conventions to achieve meretricious success.

The player's main complaint is that playwrights write lines that do not enable him to succeed as an actor; the poet's main concern is that his lines are spoken badly. And the reader is finally amused that so much talk should be so violent without the slightest pene­ tration by either participant of the capacity of art to achieve a significant correspondence with life. What happens, then, in the succession of Chapters ix, x, and xi is a succession of variations on the relation between art and life, with history mediating between the two: a potentially melodramatic scene interrupted by a narrator who unwittingly reminds us that the scene is comic and that it is art by absurdly describing it as "tragedy"; a justification of the interruption by the narrator in terms so as to mock the exasperation of the reader who wishes Fielding would get on with what happened to Fanny, the reader, in other words, who fails to maintain the proper aesthetic distance, reading Chapter ix as if it were life; and a justification of the interruption that mocks the act of interrupting as well, that mocks the convention of "comic relief," a convention that is often spurious because it is based not upon an internal necessity of the art but upon certain dubious assumptions about the nature of the audience; a protracted scene in which the conventions by which art succeeds with an audience are discussed as if they were the whole of art; a scene of sermonizing which plays upon the disparity between the rhetoric of stoicism and the reality of human response; a quotation from a play that belies the honest anxiety it is meant to represent by its inflated sublimity; and finally a condemnation of art for its failure to promote Christian doctrine. Chapter x is in a sense gratuitous, as the narrator tells us; but in the sense which

I have attempted to describe it is expressive, a link in an amazingly complex and ingenious series of commentaries on life and art. 8U

There are very few details, perhaps none at all, in Fielding’s three novels that are neither causally relevant nor expressive.

Parson Supple gives his account of Molly Seagrim's fight in the churchyard, "where, amongst other mischief, the head of a travelling fiddler was very much broken. This morning the fiddler came to

Squire Allworthy for a warrant, and the wench was brought before him." (TJ, III, l8l) Most readers doubtless find pleasure in the irony of seeing the events recounted by the sober and obsequious

Supple. And the ironic pleasure is doubled by imagining the fiddler, whose head "was very much broken"— presumably a compound fracture of the skull— , appearing the next morning before Allworthy. But why a fiddler? Fielding's mock heroic muse gives this account.

"First, Jemmy Tweedle felt on his hinder head the direful bone /±. e. the thigh bone with which Molly is defending herself/. Him the pleasant banks of sweetly-winding Stour had nourished, where he first learnt the vocal art, with which, wandering up and down at wakes and fairs, he cheered the rural nymphs and swains...." (ill, 171-2 )

Molly has clearly got the better of the battle by the time she encounters Jemmy Tweedle. It is significant that her blow catches him on "his hinder head," a difficult matter unless Jemmy Tweedle is turned and in full retreat. Besides, he is a "travelling fiddler," passing through the parish and now especially eager to be gone. That he is a traveling fiddler is expressive of the 85 ferociousness of Molly and the cowardice of her combatants. And the designation draws too on the tradition, in the eighteenth century, of choosing, for the butt of a good many jokes, a tailor (incidentally a tailor is also felled by Molly), a fiddler, or a dancing master. In short, the fact that Jemmy Tweedle is a traveling fiddler is trivial and insignificant by most criteria of causal relevance; but the detail does matter by reason of its expressive quality, a quality that enhances the comic incongruity of the churchyard scene by making one of Molly's chief opponents grotesquely inadequate to the combat.

The tendency in Fielding criticism in the past, to apologize for what has seemed irrelevant or to excuse it by saying that irrelevance was customary in prose fiction, shows signs of decline.

There are, after all, different ways of being relevant. If one considers the two ways in which eighteenth-century historiographic practice judged relevance— strict causal relevance, and the kind of relevance for which I have borrowed Taine's category of the expressive detail— there is little in Fielding that is gratuitous, certainly not Leonora's tale, nor the Old Man of the Hill, nor Partridge at the play, nor Booth and the Grub Street hack, f

In another sense Fielding's idea of what history is belongs

20Martin C. Battestin, for example, in The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art (Middletown, Conn., 1959)> again and again finds apparent digres­ sions and irrelevancies in Joseph Andrews to be expressive of Fielding's morality. 86 to his age. Since history most often deals with great events and eminent figures, it would seem to be another example of Fielding's irony to have given the name of history to three books, one about a simple parson, another about an imprudent bastard, a third about a profligate husband. However, it is entirely appropriate that these three novels, which are "historical" in so many ways, should not be denied their analogous relation with history because many of the characters are, as the eighteenth century would put it,

"low," many of the scenes are provincial, and the consequences of the events involve only the participants in them.

Willhelm Dilthey has distinguished four stages of maturity in the history of historiography. The first stage is simply narration, exemplified in Herodotus. The second stage adds explanation to the simple narration, a stage exemplified in Thucydides. The third stage Dilthey describes in this way’i

Only in the eighteenth century was a new stage of historiography reached. Two great principles were then introduced successively; the concrete pattern of interactions lifted by the historian as subject matter from the great stream of history was divided up into individual contexts like those of law, religion, poetry, embraced by the unity of an age. This presupposes that the eye of the historian looks beyond political history to that of culture, that the function of each sphere of culture has been understood by the systematic human studies, and that an understanding of the cooperation of such cultural systems has grown. ^

ai H. P. Rickman, ed., Meaning in History: W. Dilthey1s Thoughts on History and Society (London, 1961), pp. 1T2 -1M+. ~ 87

Dilthey's fourth stage he calls "development." A given series of historical events "traverses a series of changes each of which is only possible on the basis of the previous one."

Dilthey*s fourth category is beyond the historical vision of the eighteenth century though Fielding's critique of historiography in his time points, in certain ways, toward the nineteenth-century fulfillment of Dilthey1s fourth stage. But the third category makes fiction of the kind Fielding wrote peculiarly analogous with history in the eighteenth century. A survey of Fielding's library indicates something of the tendency Dilthey speaks of to divide up the stream of history into individual contexts. Aside from the standard political histories, Fielding owned History of the Devils of London

(1703), Ashmolefs History of the Order of the Garter (l715)> Salmon1s

Antiquities of Surrey (1736), Dale's Antiquities of Harwich and

Dover Courts (1732), Bacon on the Laws and Government of England

(1739)> Fuller's Church History of Britain (1656), and dozens of pp legal histories. 1 From mid-seventeenth to mid-eighteenth century there are scores of such specialized histories, the most significant of which is Sprat's History of the Royal-Society of London (1667,

"corrected" ed., 1702). No doubt a good many of these specialized histories do not look "beyond political history to that of culture"; some of the more atomistic antiquarian studies are not broader in

pp The auction catalog of Fielding's library is reprinted on pp. 171- I89 of Ethel M. Thornbury's Henry Fielding's Theory of the Comic Prose Epic. their understanding than conventional political history but narrower.

Still, the widespread reaction against antiquarianism is a reaction

on just such grounds, that antiquarian studies are atomistic and

unrelated to the larger concerns of a culture.23 Many of the

specialized histories of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

are, no doubt, as tentative and limited and unsatisfactory as their

critics found them to be. But they establish a precedent; it is no

longer possible to give the name of "history" to political history

alone; Conyers Middleton's A Dissertation Concerning the Origin of

Printing in England (1735) can claim to be history too. And so,

likewise, can the events in the life of a Somersetshire bastard

claim, with considerable legitimacy, to be "history."

Karl Popper, in the twentieth century, has stated the position

to which Fielding would have subscribed, a position both intellectual

and moral and a position, moreover, so strongly anti-heroic as to be

especially appropriate as a modern analogue to the historical view

of the author of Jonathan Wild.

There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind.

23For an account of some characteristic eighteenth-century animad­ versions on the irrelevance of antiquarianism, see Keith Stewart, "Ancient Poetry as History in the Eighteenth Century," JHI, XIX (1958), 335-3^7. 89

It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international mass murder (including, it is true, some of the attempts to suppress them). This history is taught in schools, and some of the greatest criminals are extolled as its heroes.

History, in short, for Fielding and for his age, could include

the narrow events in the lives of politically inconsequential people,

excluding the individual events of national importance, without

forfeiting its claim to be history.

Ill

k The eighteenth century most often answered the question of what

history is by first asking what history is for. Peter Whalley*s

An Essay on the Manner of Writing History (17^6) provides a kind of

least common denominator of this aspect of eighteenth-century histor- 25 ical thought. ' The work deserves notice because it claims to be

and probably was the first separate treatise in eighteenth-century 26 England on the writing of history. Though probably not very

oli "Has History Any Meaning" /pp. ^ 9-63 of The Open Society and Its Enemies, one vol. ed. (Princeton, 1950^7 The Philosophy of History in our Time, ed. Hans Meyerhoff (Garden City, 1959), P» 305*

25pages references in the text are to the Augustan Reprint Society edition, cited earlier.

^Stewart introduction, p. i. 90

influential and certainly undistinguished by any intellectual bril­

liance, Whalley's treatise, by its sober eclecticism, embodies the

received ideas of its age. In direct response to a remark by

Eustace Budgell in The Guardian (Stewart intro., iii), Whalley begins by claiming essential differences between the qualifications

of the poet and the historian. Though Whalley does not enlarge on

the point, his peremptory rejection of Budgell's position sets

quite early a utilitarian tone to his remarks, a tone he confirms

shortly by writing'^

Now, I think, it is generally agreed, that Improvement and Instruction, should be the chief Point of View of an Historian. It is not expected from him to fill the Fancy with agreeable Entertainment of his Readers, with such Ideas as more peculiarly belong to the greater Kinds of Poetry. (4-5^

History is compared with annals: history shows motives and consequences

while annals show only time and event; and it is compared to romance:

it is not the historian's responsibility to surprise by adding the

marvelous. (4-6) Whalley demands of the historian that he be

"exact, honest, and impartial," that he display "a perfect Know­

ledge of his Subject; accompanied with Impartiality and Truth." (11-12)

But the center of the essay is the series of remarks on how to

insure "uniformity" and "design." The historian should supply "apt

and graceful Transitions"; (l6 ) he is free to offer "reflection,"

but it "should seem to be inlaid, not embossed upon the Work; and

be couched in the strongest and concisest Terms"; (17) he should 91 avoid "Prettinesses of Style" since they interfere vith the true business of history "which is not to give us lessons in Philosophy, but to inform us of such Events as may be Matter of Reflection to us afterwards." (17) "An Historian should endeavour to give us the most engaging view of Mankind; to set them in the most amiable

Light; that his Readers may be induced, by a Spirit of Benevolence, to the Practice of the same Virtues." (18) Finally Whalley remarks on the avoidance of the trivial, restraint in description, simplicity and strength of style, avoidance of "the counterfeit sublime" and the tempering of all the rules he has offered with good sense.

What is most striking about Whalley's work is its pragmatic 27 emphasis. His theory is sometimes incidentally mimetic; the word

2?I have adopted the categories of M. H. Abrams /The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 195317 because they seem to me useful. Abrams finds four elements in the total work of art: the work itself, the artist, his universe, and his audience. "Although any reasonably adequate theory takes some account of all four elements, almost all theories... exhibit a discernible orientation toward one only. That is, a critic tends to derive from one of these terms his principal categories for defining, classifying and analyzing a work of art, as well as the major criteria by which he Judges its value." (6 ) Criticism that is primarily mimetic Abrams defines as "the explanation of art as essen­ tially an imitation of aspects of the universe." (8 ) Criticism that is oriented toward the relation between work and audience Abrams calls pragmatic, "since it looks at the work of art chiefly as a means to an end, an instrument for getting something done, and tends to Judge its value according to its success in achieving that aim." (15 ) An orientation "in which the artist himself becomes the major element generating both the artistic product and the criteria by which it is to be Judged, I shall call the expressive theory of art." (22) Finally, criticism "which on principle regards the work of art in isolation from all these external points of reference, analyzes it as a self-sufficient entity constituted by its parts in their internal 92

"mirror,"for example, is used of the historian’s function. He is sometimes incidentally expressive, concerned with how the historian’s materials get transformed by his imagination into a meaningful accoun ost frequently and predominantly the work is a set of recipes ror instructing and edifying readers. The raw facts of history and the mind of the historian are consistently less important than the relation between the historical work and its audience. It is hardly surprising that, with such an emphasis, much is left out.

French historical thought, for example, had wrestled with historical

Pyrrhonism since Descartes; both Locke and Borne had settled the problem of historical knowledge within the context of their own epistemological thought. But for Whalley the question of whether historical truth is possible does not exist. Neither do the more practical questions of documentary reliability. History is primarily a rhetorical discipline. And a good many basic questions are begged by Whalley's casual and confident use of such words as "exact" and

"honest" and "impartial."

relations and sets out to judge it solely by criteria intrinsic to its own mode of being," this criticism Abrams calls objective. (26 ) I assume that objective criticism is impossible for the critic of his­ tory. But the mimetic, pragmatic, and expressive orientations seem to me roughly as valuable categories in historiographic theory as in literary theory. The pragmatic category is especially useful in the present discussion. Eustace Budgell and Whalley would seem at first to be at opposite poles, one proposing an aesthetic function for history, the other an anti-aesthetic, utilitarian,=educational function. Both theories, however, are pragmatic, the emphasis being on the relation between history and reader and the criteria for judgment being the efficacy of the history in achieving th& desired effects. 93

The fact that Whalley's announced subject is the manner of writing history does not necessarily dictate a pragmatic approach.

Whalley's essay derives, at least in part, from Lucian's The Way 28 to Write History. But Lucian's essay focuses largely on the personality of the historian, his integrity, his clarity of per­ ception, his freedom from servility and bias, his sense of order 29 and lucidity of style. Lucian's criticism is expressive and mimetic.

If an historian performs well, Lucian assumes he will please and

instruct both his immediate audience and posterity; but the reason he pleases is self-evident he has told the truth. The pragmatic

character of Whalley's essay is there, in short, because it was a characteristic way of looking at writing in the eighteenth century.^

Addison, for example, writes that the historian

describes everything in so lively a manner, that his whole history is an admirable picture, and touches on such proper circumstances in every story, that his reader becomes a kind of spectator, and feels in himself all the variety of passions which are correspondent to the several parts of the relation.31

28Whalley, p. 2 3 .

2% o r k s , trans. H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, U vols. (Oxford, i90577~ii, 109-136 .

3®See Abrams, pp. 17-21. For a survey of the pragmatic emphasis in historical theory from the Greeks to the eighteenth century, see D. T. Starnes, "Purpose in the Writing of History," MP, XXIII (1922-23), 281- 30 0 .

3^The Spectator, ed. H. Chalmers, 4 vols. (New York, l88l), No. 420. 9k

And Rollin1s The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Lettres, a French work first translated in 173*+ and widely published in eighteenth-century England, indicates its pragmatic emphasis by its title. The difference between good and bad history, for Rollin, is that good history enables the reader to learn, bad history obscures the lessons that are latent in events. French history, he writes,

supplies us with great examples of virtue, and abundance of beautiful actions, which remain for the most part buried in obscurity, either through the fault of our historians, who have wanted the talent of setting them out to advantage, like the Greeks and Romans, or in consequence of a bad taste, which leads us to admire highly what passes at a distance from our own age and country, whilst we remain cold and indifferent to such actions as are wrought under our view, and in the age we live.32 4

It would be an oversimplification to call Bolingbroke chiefly pragmatic, despite his title Letters on the Study and Use of History.

He is concerned to refute historical pyrrhonism, condemn antiquari­ anism, and advocate a broadened scope for history which would include more than the political alone, all of these being primarily mimetic emphases. Still, for all the breadth of his interests, it is to the theme of utility that he returns again and again. The study of history

will contribute extremely to keep our minds free from a ridiculous partiality in favour

324 vols. (London, 173*0, III, 8 . 95

of our own country, and a vicious prejudice against others; yet the same study will create in us a preference of affection to our own country.33

Furthermore,

the examples which history presents to us, hoth of men and of events, are generally complete: the whole example is before us, and consequently the whole lesson. (337)

Bolingbroke's definition of history— "I think, that history is

philosophy teaching by examples" (323)— has earned him the

contempt of generations of historians of history, the definition

seeming to relegate the historian to the position of lackey for

an a priori philosophical system. That the definition need not

mean this is shown by its very recent appearance in Herbert J.

Muller's The Uses of the Fast: "This book is based on the ancient

conception of history as 'philosophy teaching by experience.' It

is also based on the 'new history,' the contribution of this century, ojj. which ultimately involves new philosophies of history." And

Dorothy Koch defends Bolingbroke's use of the definition as being,

in fact, both more complex and more responsible than its epigrammatic

statement would make it seem.But that it is pragmatic is

33III, 333-33^. •all J (New York, 1953), P* 2 9 .

English Theories Concerning the Nature and Uses of History, 1735-1791," unpubl. diss. (Yale, 19^6), pp. 2*1-32. 96 indisputable. At one point Bolingbroke enlarges on the idea of the definition in this way.

There are certain general principles and rules of life and conduct, which always must be true, because they are conformable to the invariable nature of things. He who studies history as he would study philosophy, will soon distinguish and collect them, and by doing so will soon form to himself a general system of ethicks and politicks on the surest foundations, on the trial of these principles and rules in all ages, and on the confirmation of them by universal exper­ ience. (353-if)

And implicit in Bolingbroke's arguments for the immediate application of history are critical principles the use of which enable the historian to write immediately applicable history. Finally,

Bolingbroke writes an analogy between fable and history containing a position which Fielding, though he disapproved of Bolingbroke on philosophical grounds, himself expresses.

What may have happened, is the matter of an ingenious fable: what has happened, is that of an authentic history: the impressions which one or the other makes are in proportion. When imagination grows lawless and wild, rambles out of the precincts of nature, and tells of heroes and giants, fairies and enchanters, of events and phaenomena repugnant to universal experience, to our clearest and most distinct ideas, and to all the known laws of nature, reason does not connive a moment; but, far from receiving such narration as historical, she rejects them as unworthy to be placed even among the fabulous. Such narrations therefore cannot make the slightest momentary impressions on a mind fraught with knowledge and void of superstition. (389-90) 97

Thus the eighteenth century, though it was acutely conscious of errors and distortions in history, theorized rather little about the acts of selection and arrangement, the problems of how masses of historical information, much of which is of dubious authenticity, get made into a coherent account. Though it was conscious of the personal failures and narrow visions of individual historians, it theorized little about the transforming mind of the historian.

When the century sought to define history, it defined in relation to the audience; and when it sought to describe how history should be written, it described how effects could be obtained.

A pragmatic emphasis in literary criticism is as legitimate an emphasis as any other, however out of fashion such an emphasis may have been for the last 150 years, as the criticism of Johnson testifies. But historiographic criticism is another matter. History is not literature; and the critic and theorist of history cannot, as the literary critic can, afford to concern himself chiefly with producing effects, with pleasing and instructing. For to do so is to subordinate "what it was that actually happened" to "how it shall be told."

Fielding, to be sure, was no less interested than any other novelist has ever been in "how it shall be told." Nevertheless, the justification which he offers for his fiction, as I have suggested, is not that it is pleasing (although he intends it to be), not that 98 it is morally edifying (although, he intends it to be), but that it is true, that it is as true to human nature as properly written history is true to events. And thus the peculiarly misapplied emphasis of pragmatic historiographic theory in Fielding's time provides one of the few striking contrasts between Fielding and his age. It would be a mistake to represent Fielding as rebelling against the idea of history current in his time; it took many more histories and an epistemological revolution to provide the back­ ground for such a revolt. What Fielding implicitly suggests is a correction of emphasis. Insofar as his fiction is like history, it is true. And insofar as it is true, it is pleasing and instruc­ tive. The idea that pleasure and instruction should be the primary aims of the novelist or the historian, rather than being the solemn article of faith which it so often was in the eighteenth century, is, for Fielding, an object for endless ironic play.

The historian of a good man, writes the narrator of Joseph

Andrews, by communicating his knowledge of his subject, "may perhaps do a more extensive service to mankind than the person whose life originally afforded the pattern." (13) But in the next paragraph the author enumerates his models: Plutarch, Nepos, "and others which I heard of in my youth," the histories of Jack the

Giant Killer, the seven worthy Champions of Christendom, Cibber's

Apology, and Pamela. For in these, "delight ia mixed with instruc­ tion, and the reader is almost as much improved as entertained." (13) 99

That is, the first chapter announces Joseph Andrews as being anti-

didactic by ironic comparison with works which are ostentatiously

improving.

It is not only the reader who expects his history to be

ostentatiously improving who is taken in by Fielding's irony.

"Nor will it give me any pain," Fielding writes, addressing Vanity,

is if thou shouldst prevail on the reader to censure this digression as arrant nonsense; for know, to thy confusion, that I have introduced thee for no other purpose than to lengthen out a short chapter; and so I return to my history. (57)

The reader who has expected utility is told that the passage he is

reading is useless and irrelevant. The reader who expects instruc­

tion is mocked by being told: "I shall refer it to my reader to

make what observations he pleases on this incident." (l4h) The

reader who expects of the historian a stance of insistent moral

seriousness is mocked by being told that "Joseph made a speech

on charity which the reader, if he is so disposed, may see in the

next chapter; for we scorn to betray him into any such reading, without first giving him warning." (197) And the reader who expects

Fielding's history to appeal to his Addisonian pleasure of the

imagination is mocked by being addressed thus:

Reader, we would make a simile on this occasion, but for two reasons: the first is, it would interrupt the description, which should be rapid in this part; but that doth not weigh much, many precedents occurring for such an interruption: 100

the second, and much greater, reason is, that we could find no simile adequate to our purpose. (202-03)

In Book II, Chapter i, "Of divisions in authors," the ironic pretense of catering to the aesthetic wishes of the reader is carried to its greatest length. It would seem, the narrator says, that chapter divisions are for the convenience of the author. "But in reality the case is otherwise, and in this, as well as all other instances, we consult the advantage of our reader, not our own." (73)

Again, as in the first chapter, the apparent seriousness of the informal essay style induces the reader to suspect that Fielding's discussion of the aesthetics of chapter construction is serious.

Indeed the description of the advantages of chapter division "begins seriously enough; the chapter break gives the reader a rest and induces him to make retrospective reflection on what he has read.

But before long, the reader is told that chapter divisions keep the book from being dog-eared. And finally the reader is told that "it becomes an author generally to divide a book, as it does a butcher to joint his meat, for such assistance is of great help to both the reader and the carver." (75) Again the apparent seriousness of the pragmatic theory with which the chapter begins is undercut by the foolishness of Fielding's ironic narrator. And the reader is forced to conclude that, though Joseph Andrews may or may not be entertain­ ing or instructive, the pragmatic pursuit of these aims is regarded 101 by the author not as serious business but as the object of play.

In Tom Jones Fielding's analogy between fiction and history is developed more fully and explicitly than in Joseph Andrews. And almost without exception the analogy heightens the mimetic concern of the novelist as historian and ironically diminishes his pragmatic concerns. Chapter x of Book V relates the incident of Tom's retiring with Molly Seagrim "into the thickest part of the grove" after being interrupted in his meditations on Sophia.

There, whilst he renewed those meditations on his dear Sophia which the dangerous illness of his friend and benefactor had for some time interrupted, an accident happened, which with sorrow we relate, and with sorrow doubtless it will be read; however, that historic truth to which we profess so inviolable an attachment obliges us to communicate it to posterity, (ill, 250)

The same diminution of pragmatic values occurs again in one of the episodes at Upton.

But so matters fell out, and so I must relate them; and if any reader is shocked at their appearing unnatural, I cannot help it. I must remind such persons that I am not writing a system, but a history, and I am not obliged to reconcile every matter to the received notions concerning truth and nature. (IV, 337)

Once again the value of Fielding's fiction as entertainment and instruction is self-deprecated, its value as imitation is insisted upon.

Fielding of course intends to entertain, as he writes in the last prolegomenous chapter: "If I have been an entertaining companion s 102 to thee, I promise thee it is what I have desired." (V, 2$h) And if "instruction" is not quite the right word, it is certain that

Fielding intends to offer serious moral evaluations throughout his fiction.The pragmatic values are never denied, only subordinated.

When the narrator tells the reader that what is to follow will be tedious or pointless or disturbing or in bad taste, what Fielding i often means is something roughly the opposite. Of Lady Bellaston, the narrator writes: "This behavior, therefore, in the lady, may, by some, be condemned as unnatural; but that is not our fault; for our business is only to record truth." (V, 115) "But that is not our fault" seems almost to endorse the judgment of "some" that Lady

Bellaston's behavior unnatural; behind the ironic mask lies the obvious conviction of Fielding himself, however, that Lady Bellaston's behavior is quintessentially natural, given the premises of her character. By making his narrator at times a bit dull and a bit priggish, Fielding subtly condemns the easy adjustment of a narrative to preconceived notions of what is improving and pleasurable.

Fielding is the historian, the historian of human nature; and he conceives in himself the same obligations to truth that he conceives for the historian of past events. If the historian tells the truth,

^ T h e most influential study of Fielding's morality has been James A. Work's "Henry Fielding, Christian Censor," in The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker (New.Haven, 19^9)> PP* 139-148. There have been a good many such studies since the late Professor Work's, the most ambitious of which is Martin C. Battestin's The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art: A Study of "Joseph Andrews.11 103 then the truth Is more pleasurable and instructive than the narrative would be if the historian had set out to subordinate all his material to pragmatic aims.

The same ironic playing with the pragmatic aims of pleasure and instruction is evident in the episode cited above of Tom's retirement, with Molly, into the grove. It is told with sorrow and will be read with sorrow, the narrator tells us. And after the episode is completed, the narrator seems to apologize again.

"Some of my readers may be inclined to think this event unnatural.

However, the fact is true." (ill, 258) This time the narrator goes on to analyze Tom's character and circumstances in such a way as to make his submitting to the temptation of Molly seem entirely natural. Needless to say there is nothing sorrowful about the technique of narrating the incident; nor can the incident be read with sorrow. It is told with zest and intended to be read with \ pleasure. Similarly, though the episode might seem to be anything but morally instructive, Fielding goes to great pains to show us that it is true to human nature. And thus the reader who concludes that the episode is morally corrupting is forced into the awkward position of preferring to receive his instruction by being told lies.

Amelia I have saved for a kind of footnote to the present dis­ cussion, not because it is an exception, but because the terms of 104

Fielding's analogy there are so much less insisted upon and because the analogy is less explicit in matters of purpose. In the novel's first chapter Fielding makes a fervent defense of his mimetic purpose; he is to show life as it is lived, and will account for human

catastrophe by natural, wholly human means. And the chapter ends with a statement of pragmatic purpose: insofar as Fielding succeeds

as mirror, he necessarily succeeds as teacher; the second purpose follows from the first.

As histories of this kind, therefore, may properly be called models of HUMAN LIFE, so, by observing minutely the several incidents which tend to the catastrophe or completion of the whole, and the minute causes whence those incidents are produced, we shall best be instructed in this most useful of all arts, which I call the ART OF LIFE. (VI, 14)

George Sherburn quotes the passage from the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon in which Fielding confesses he "should have honoured and

loved Homer more had he written a true history of his own times in

humble prose," adding, "in this spirit Fielding undertook in Amelia to write a sober, faithful history of his own times in humble prose.

Perhaps it is the earnestness of Fielding's mimetic purpose in

Amelia that makes purpose in historiography scarcely a subject for the narrator's ironic comments. The one scene above all others Which would have provoked the narrator of Tom Jones to ironic play with the

37 "Fielding's Amelia: An Interpretation," in Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ronald Paulson (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), p. w . 105 ideas of the reader's pleasure and instruction, Booth's submission to the seductive talents of Miss Matthews, is accompanied this time by a sober defence of its psychological credibility. Insis­ tently pragmatic theories of history were probably as inadequate for Fielding in 175^ as they were in Ijby; but they were no longer a subject for subtle joking.

I have said that by his analogy Fielding redefines both fiction and history. In that kind of fiction that professes the same fidelity to the conditions of human life that the historian professes to past events, the pragmatic ends are satisfied indirectly. The direct pursuit of pragmatic ends is dangerously likely to produce fiction which is fraudulently pious or fraudulently sublime. As

Hazlitt puts it,

The most moral writers, after all, are those who do not pretend to inculcate any moral. The professed moralist almost unavoidably degenerates .into the partisan of a system; and the philosopher is too apt to warp the evidence to his own purpose. But the painter of manners gives the facts of human nature, and leaves us to draw the inference: if we are not able to do this, orRdo it ill, at least it is our own fault.^

In short, Fielding's redefinition of the use of fiction properly complicates concepts that were often too facile and too simple.

^"Lectures on the English Comic Writers," in Works, Centenary Edition, ed. P. P. Howe (London, 1931), VI, 107. 106

And his redefinition of history implicitly insists upon the same readjustment of emphasis. If the historian will tell the truth he need not worry about entertaining and instructing.

IV

In two more ways, finally, Fielding intends his analogy between fiction and history to express and limit the kind of fiction he writes. They can both be treated briefly. The first is Fielding's intention to describe the limits beyond which his fiction would become incredible. The second is his intention to suggest the stance of his narrator, his technical point of view.

Fielding delights in playing off a supernatural explanation against a rational one. The following is an example of what happens dozens of times.

Sophia was charmed with the contemplation of so heroic an action, and began to compliment herself with much premature flattery, when Cupid, who lay hid in the muff, suddenly crept out, and, like Punchinello in a puppet-show, kicked all out before him. In truth (for we scorn to deceive our reader, or to vindicate the character of our heroine by ascribing her actions to supernatural impulse) the thoughts of her beloved Jones, and some hopes (however distant) in which he was very particularly concerned, immediately destroyed all which filial love, piety, and pride had, with their joint endeavours, been laboring to bring about. (TJ, IV, 19) 107

In another similar example, Fielding shows how his analogy with the historian works both ways: he is rational because he is an historian; but he is more rational, that is, more credible, than most historians because he is dealing in probabilities and is under no compulsion to relate "what hath been confidently asserted."

Reader, I am not superstitious, nor any great believer of modern miracles. I do not, therefore, deliver the following as a certain truth, for, indeed, I can scarce credit it myself: but the fidelity of an historian obliges me to relate what hath been confidently asserted. The horse, then, on which the guide rode, is reported to have been so charmed by Sophia's voice that he made a full stop, and expressed an unwillingness to proceed any farther.

Perhaps, however, the fact may be true, and less miraculous than it hath been represented, since the natural cause seems adequate to the effect: for, as the guide at that moment desisted from a constant application of his armed right heel (for, like Hudibras, he wore but one spur), it is more than possible that this omission alone might occasion the beast to stop, especially as this was very frequent with him at other times. (TJ, IV, 235)

The two central theoretic passages in which Fielding defines the credibility of his fiction are the chapters "Matter prefatory in praise of biography" in Joseph Andrews and "A wonderful long chapter concerning the marvellous; being much the longest of all our introductory chapters" in Tom Jones. In the first of these, the analogy works against the historian. Clarendon and Whitlock,

Echard and Rapin get the dates and the places right, Fielding says, 108 but they represent the "actions and characters of men" rather badly. Certainly no two agree precisely on whether a given man was honest or a rogue. Fielding contrasts biographers with these historians, including himself among biographers; but "biographers," it soon becomes clear, includes Cervantes and LeSage; it is, in fact, prose fiction which Fielding is writing about and not biography at all. "Is not such a book," he writes, "as that which records the achievements of the renowned Don Quixote more worthy the name of a history than even Mariana? for, whereas the latter is confined to a particular period of time, and to a particular nation, the former is the history of the world in general, at least that part which is polished by laws, arts, and sciences; and of that from the time it was first polished to this day; nay, and forward as long as it shall so remain." (158-59) Fielding proceeds to that well-known sentence:

"I declare here once for all, I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species." And he follows with an explanation

of the correspondence between his typical human characters and the

real human beings of every reader's experience. His characters are,

in a sense, copied from life; yet they are not identifiable characters, copied with the same fidelity to the actual that one expects to find in the historian. Joseph Andrews is a history; but in the Aristotelian sense, it is truer than history. Implicitly, it is Fielding's rational faculty for generalizing and abstracting that earns him the oxymoronic title of historian not of individuals but of a species. 109

The chapter in praise of biography clearly fascinated Hazlitt, as did Fielding's analogy in general. "In looking into any regular history of that period," he writes,

into a learned and eloquent charge to a grand jury or the clergy of a diocese, or into a tract on controversial divinity, we should hear only of the ascendancy of the Protestant succession, the horrors of Popery, the triumph of civil and religious liberty, the wisdom and moderation of the sovereign, the happiness of the subjects, and the flourishing state of manufacture and commerce.

But if we wonder what all of this means, we turn to works of the imagination. "Fielding," Hazlitt concludes,

in speaking on this subject, and vindicating the use and dignity of the style of writing in which he excelled against the loftier pre­ tentions of professed historians, says, that in their productions nothing is true but the names and dates. If so, he has the advantage on his side.^^

The limits of credibility in Fielding's fiction are worked out in similar ways in the chapter on the marvelous in Tom Jones though the discussion is much fuller and historians, in the usual sense of the word, are not treated so cavalierly. Some readers, Fielding begins, will believe anything, some will believe only what they have seen. Since the first kind of reader will be pleased by elves and fairies and the second kind will be upset by any events that he finds

^"Lectures 0n the English Comic Writers," VI, 107. remotely improbable, it is necessary to define the proper limits of any narrative, historical or pseudo-historical. Supernatural agents are clearly impossible in a narrative purporting to tell the truth to a Christian, enlightened audience. "Man, therefore, is the highest subject (unless on very extraordinary occasions indeed) which presents itself to the pen of our historian, or of our poet; and, in relating his actions, great care is to be taken that we do not exceed the capacity of the agent we describe." (IV, 60)

The historian is sometimes compelled to record extraordinary events, simply because extraordinary events sometimes happen. "But there are other facts not of such consequence nor so necessary, which, though ever so well attested, may nevertheless be sacrificed to oblivion in complacence to the skepticism of a reader." (IV, 6l)

Such a dubious historical event is the appearance, which Clarendon relates, of the ghost of George Villiers.

To say the truth, if the historian will con­ fine himself to what really happened, and utterly reject any circumstance, which, though never so well attested, he must be well assured is false, he will sometimes fall into the marvellous, but never the incredible. (IV, 6l)

Still, it is not the historian's fidelity to fact that makes him believable alone; public records, concurrent testimony, and, for more recent historians, recollection and tradition all bear out the truth of what he has said, if he has told the truth.

But we who deal in private character, who search into the most retired recesses, and draw forth Ill

examples of virtue and vice from holes and corners of the world, are in a more dangerous situation. As we have no public notoriety, no concurrent testimony, no records to support and corroborate what we deliver, it becomes us to keep within the limits not only of possibility, but of probability too; and this more especially in painting what is greatly good and amiable. Knavery and folly, though never so exorbitant, will more easily meet with assent; for ill-nature adds great support and strength to faith. (17, 6l)

John Butt places Fielding at the beginning of one tradition and at the end of another. Fielding is obviously a great originator, as legitimate a claimant to that hoary and rather silly title "the father of the English novel" as anyone. But he is also at the end

IjO , of a long reaction to the marvelous. Butt quotes de Scudery, who prefaced Ibrahim (l64l) by claiming to have observed

the Manners, Customs, Religions, and Inclinations of People: and to give a more true resemblance to things I have made the foundations of my work Historical, my principal Personages such as are marked out in the true History for illustrious persons.

De Scudery succeeds in his professed aim quite badly, to judge by his romances. Yet he gives evidence that the impulse to write what Fielding hi eventually wrote had been present for a hundred years before him.

^Fielding (Writers and their Work #57) (London, 1959)# PP* 5-8*

^Arthur L. Cooke in "Henry Fielding and the Writers of Heroic Romance," FMLA, LXII (19^7)# 98h-9h, has compared the stated aims of Fielding with those of a number of writers of romance, finding them remarkably similar; Cooke of course acknowledges vast differences in practice. The disparity between de Scudery's professions and practice suggests a chain of mimetic categories. First is prose fiction for which the marvelous is appropriate; there is no compulsion to find aesthetic expression for the manners of ordinary life; and there is no critical antipathy toward such art which displays acts clearly impossible for its immediate audience. Secondly, art of de Scudery's kind is marvelous but uneasy about its own lack of truth-to-life.

Third is the art of Defoe, art so devoid of the marvelous and so self-conscious of its obligation to truth-to-life that it ostensibly forfeits its claim to be art at all, claiming to be history instead.

Fielding's fiction represents a fourth category. It is art which defines its own limits of credibility by analogy with history, not by identification with it, art which accounts in part for its capacity to tell the truth by its imposing of limits even more rigorous than those of the historian upon material which is not historical but imagined, not particular but generic.

In one final way Fielding means his analogy to define and express the kind of fiction he is writing. Defoe's novels are histories in the sense that they are ostensibly not "written" at all; they are made to appear as the raw facts of memoir, unmediated by an historian.

Fielding's novels are histories with an historian. Fielding's very act of explaining to the reader how his novels are like or unlike history is a qualification of the kind of historian he wishes to present himself as being. 113

After all the positivist and idealist theory of the last hundred years, historians now are more self-conscious than those of the eighteenth century about the role of the historian in his work and about the legitimacy of his appearance, in his own work, hs judge. Still, if the eighteenth century lacked a theoretical basis for its diversity, its historiography was diverse all the same. When the historian was participant in the events he described, as were Burnet and Clarendon, his history tended toward memoir; it would have taken a great act of will for Burnet and Clarendon to have submerged their explicit judgments, an act of will they probably felt no obligation to make. In a good many historians,

Abel Boyer for example or James Ralph, explicit judgments are rare; the historical narrative may be prejudiced here and there, implicitly governed by the author's predilections, but seldom does he enter the narrative in his own person. The eighteenth-century annalist, of course, could afford to maintain a kind of objectivity since his principles of inclusion were so undiscriminating as to demand little judgment. For Fielding it is obvious that his fiction

is like those histories in which the historian comments, feeling no obligation to suppress that part of his intellect which judges the events he relates.

Fielding's KLstory of the Present Rebellion is a melange.

Still it represents Fielding’s compulsion to enter his narrative and to comment. At one point in the history a Presbyterian, who 114

remonstrates against the Pretender, is shot in his bed. "Such is

the Spirit of Popery and arbitrary Power," writes Fielding, "to Jlp which the Blood of so many Millions hath been shed for a Sacrifice."

After an account of a military engagement, he writes:

This Success, therefore, (to whatever Treachery it was owing) greatly elated the whole Party, especially the Priests, who failed not to ascribe it to the Favour of Heaven, as they deriv'd that Favour from the Prevalence of their own Prayers. These Persons little consider the horrid Impiety they are guilty of, by attributing to the immediate Interposition of the Supreme Being, the Consequences which are produced by the Iniquity and Villany of Men. 3

And finally, in his familiar role as ironic commentator on human motives, Fielding writes:

The Pretender, with his principal Followers and 500 of his Guards, were lodged in the Town, where he was treated with rather more Respect than Fear will well account for, though I am willing to attribute as much as possible to that Motive, as the Weakness of Human Nature will allow it, base as it is, some little Degree of Excuse preferable to those wicked Principles, which as they are more diabolical, so are likewise more voluntary and in our own Power.^

The History of the Present Rebellion, to be sure,is propaganda; but

it is impossible to imagine Fielding writing a history of the '^5 for

any purpose without entering the narrative. To pretend that the

ko The History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland with an Intro­ duction and Notes by Ifan Kyrle Fletcher ^Newport, Monmouthshire, 193*0, p. 18.

^3P . 29 . % ? • 30-31. 115 moral categories that operate upon one's thought in ordinary life could somehow be suspended when dealing with the activities of the

Pretender would have been as absurd to Fielding as it is to Isaiah

Berlin in the twentieth century.

There was, to be sure, ample precedent for a self-conscious narrator in prose fiction before Fielding. But I have tried to indicate from time to time how difficult it would have been for

Fielding to have defined his new species of writing by reference to the existing tradition of prose fiction. Insofar as Fielding regards his fiction as analogous with history, he regards his narrative stance as analogous with at least one such stance available to the eighteenth-century historian, analogous indeed to the two historians most admired in Fielding's time, Clarendon and Burnet, and the two historians of the time most readable today.

Both of the analogous correspondences I have treated in this section raise problems that I cannot pretend to have settled. The question of Fielding's limits of credibility immediately suggests

^^sir Isaiah defends the obligation of the historian to judge in the section from his Historical Inevitability reprinted as "Historical Inevitability" in The Philosophy of History in our Time, ed. Hans Meyerhoff (Garden City, 1959)* PP« 249-271. Also reprinted in the same section of Meyerhoff's anthology are passages from Herbert Butterfield and Jacob Burckhardt on the impossibility of moral judg­ ment in history.

^See Wayne C. Booth, "The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy," PMLA, LXVII (1952), I63-I8 5 . 116 the romance elements in his novels. If Fielding intends to impose upon himself limits even more rigorous than those of the rationalist historiographer, how does one account for the recognition by hrj strawberry birthmark in Joseph Andrews? 1 The question of Fielding's point of view, a point of view that presents him as critical commentator on his own narrative, raises questions regarding the ironic disparity between Fielding and pseudo-Fielding, questions that I have touched upon elsewhere. And it raises questions of fictional efficacy. How does the explicit presence of the historian

(or pseudo-historian) in the history enhance or detract from the bQ imaginative force of the fiction? But if Fielding's analogy between

^Sheridan Baker discusses romance elements in Amelia in his "Fielding's Amelia and the Materials of Romance," PQ, LXI (1962), 437-^9. He discusses these elements perceptively in relation to the general tone and structure of the novel but without raising the problem of how a novelist so conscious of his obligation to be credible as Fielding was should have found the materials of romance acceptable at all. kQ Ian Watt finds both the chief strength and the chief weakness of Fielding in his presence in his own narrative /The Rise of the Novel, pp. 260-2897* I have indicated in my introduction my distrust of Watt's conclusions because of his tendency to regard Fielding as deviating from formal realism, a category which Watt tends to hold up as a kind of norm not only for eighteenth-century fiction but for fiction in general. Wayne Booth in The Rhetoric of Fiction says so many things that are directly or indirectly in defense of Fielding's narrator that it is frustrating to attempt to select a representative opinion. The following quotation will have to do as an excerpt from an extremely rich and well-reasoned book. "For the reader who becomes too much aware of the author's claim to superlative virtues, the effect may fail. He may seem merely to be posing. For the reader with his mind on the main business, however, the narrator becomes a rich and provocative ehorus. It is his wisdom and learning 117

fiction and history is seriously intended, as I have argued it is,

and if the analogy indicates the main preoccupations of Fielding

as novelist and generic inventor, then an examination of the analogy

should raise large questions concerning Fielding's form without,

for the moment, resolving them.

and benevolence that permeate the world of the book, set its comic tone between the extremes of sentimental indulgence and scornful indignation, and in a sense Redeem Tom's world of hypocrites and fools.

"One can imagine, perhaps, a higher standard of virtue, wisdom, or learning than the narrator's. But for most of us he succeeds in being the highest possible in his world— and, at least for the nonce, in ours." (pp. 217-18) CHAPTER III

BY NATURAL MEANS: FIELDING AND

CAUSATION IN HISTORY

I

Clarendon's History of the Rebellion (1702-0*0 is probably the best example of a history near to Fielding's time in which human responsibility is both historically and structurally most important, but in which chance and providence operate as well. Despite his royalist convictions, his detestation of Cromwell and everything

Puritan, his patrician manner, qualities hardly conducive to earnest candor, Clarendon sees with remarkable clarity Charles's lack of *1 courage, procrastination, and general weakness of character; and he charges the king with incompetence with a depth of feeling that makes him sound, for the moment, like an historian of the other side.

^-References throughout are to The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray, 6 vols.”X0xford, 1888}. On Charles's weakness of character, see, e. g., I, 223 and IV, 2. See also the unpubl. diss. (Wisconsin, 1952) by Morton Rosenbaum, "Swift's View of History," pp. 52-53* I am indebted to Rosenbaum for certain of my conclusions regarding Clarendon and for certain references to the history.

118 119

"Upon the whole matter, we have often wondered, and rest still amazed, that any prince should care to govern a people against their nature, their inclinations, and their laws. What glory can it he to a prince of a great spirit, to subdue and break the hearts of his own subjects, with whom he should live properly as a shepherd with his flock? (I, xxiii) Clarendon, however much he wished to vindicate Charles, was obliged by his candid temper and his own view of history to see the revolution, not as a result of forces, or conditions, or ideas, but as a result of men, the chief of whom was Charles himself. Clarendon sums up this view as follows:

By viewing the temper, disposition, and habit, of that time, of the court and of the country, we may discern the minds of men pre­ pared, of some to do, and of others to suffer, all that hath since happened: the pride of this man, and the popularity of that; the levity of one, and the morosity of another; the excess of the court in the greatest want, and the parsimony and retention of the country in the greatest plenty; the spirit of craft and subtlety in some, and the rude and unpolished integrity of others, too much despising craft or art; like so many atoms contributing jointly to this mass of confusion now before us. (I, k)

It should be added that Clarendon's use of the character, in the

Theophrastan sense of the word, emphasizes the importance he placed on human responsibility. Morton Rosenbaum counts upward of a hundred formal characters in The History of the Rebellion and calls 120

2 them "the framework and chief structural feature of the History."

Nevertheless, Clarendon refers to "God's vengeance" (IV, 4) and he promises that his history will show how "the hand and judgment of God will be very visible...in these perplexities and distraction"

(I, 1 -2 ) though in the context of Clarendon's paragraph it is clear that the "hand and judgment of God" is worked through the folly of men. No royalist historian could afford to attribute too much to providence because, after all, his side had lost. But it is not expedience alone which led historians of the period to minimize what another age would have called providence; the interplay between an orthodoxy that tended to admit providence and a rationalism that tended to deny it is widely evident in late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century history. Bishop Burnet, for example, commenting on a fortunate development in the weather which aided the British troops, writes, "I know it is not possible to determine, when such

Accidents rise from a Chain of second Causes in the Course of Nature, and when they are directed by a special Providence: But my Mind has always carried me so strongly to acknowledge the latter, that I love to set these Reflections in the way of others, that they may consider them with the same serious Attention that I feel in myself."3

2p. 2 8 5 .

3HIstory of His Own Times, II, 38 8 . 121

"Accident" is always present in Clarendon; the tendency to

attribute events to chance increases throughout the volumes of the

History of the Rebellion until, by the latter stages of the pro­

tracted struggles of the commonwealth, much that might have been

attributed to human frailty or bad judgment is attributed to acci-

dent. But for the most forceful expression of the role of chance

in. eighteenth-century history, one must look to Voltaire. "Lord

Bolingbroke admits," he writes,

that the petty quarrels between the duchess of Marlborough and Lady Masham gave him his oppor­ tunity for making the private treaty between Queen Anne and Louis XIV: this treaty led to the peace of Utrecht; the peace of Utrecht confirmed Philip V on the throne of Spain. Philip V took Naples and Sicily from the house of Austria; the Spanish prince who is today king of Naples clearly owes his kingdom to Lady Masham; and he wouldn't have had it, perhaps he wouldn't even have been born, if the duchess of Marlborough had been more civil to the queen of England. His existence in Naples depended on a piece of nonsense, more or less, at the court of London. Examine the situation of all the nations in the universe: they are thus founded on a sequence of facts which seems to have no connection and which are connected in everything. In this immense machine, all is wheels, pulleys, c ords, springs.*

Voltaire, however, is careful to qualify this "chain of events."

Momentous events do arise from causes that are remote, apparently

insignificant, and accidental. All events must have causes, and

^Rosenbaum, pp. 9k-$Q.

^Philosophical Dictionary, trans. with an introduction by Peter Gay (New York, 19&2), I, l6k. 122 many such causes are of the kind Bolingbroke describes. However, not every event is itself a cause: "everything has a father— but every­ thing doesn't always have a child." The fact that sixty thousand

Russians are in arms near Pomerania is ultimately attributable to

Magog; the fact that sixty thousand Frenchmen are in arms near

Frankfort is ultimately attributable to Gomer, their remote ancestor.

"But whether Magog spat to the right or the left near Mount Cauca­ sus..., whether he slept on his left side or on his right side"-- these are irrelevant to the present military situation.

These three causes— human will, divine intervention, and chance— were, of course, subject to many modifications. To the philosophes and to Hume, providence was ludicrously inadequate as a causal explanation. Explicitly human cause tends to be less developed as the distance widens between historian and subject matter; Burnet and Clarendon, since their histories are in part memoirs, render "characters" and human cause with depth and immediacy; lesser eighteenth-century historians of seventeenth-century events are likely to present a view in which the immense force exerted upon history by individual men is somewhat dimmed. Chance is minimized by Hume, although it is not true, as J. B. Black maintains, that chance is eliminated entirely.^ The three principal historical

According to Black /The Art of History (New York, 1926), p. 9J?7 what historians attribute to chance Hume sees as the result of our ignorance; if we could see thoroughly and perceptively enough, we 123 causes were thus minimized in various ways; and they were supple­ mented. The same kinds of speculation that excited Montesquieu occurred to Temple, who guessed that climate, geography, and diet affected history.^ And for Hume, as for Voltaire, ideas were given a prominence beyond the general importance given them in eighteenth-century historiography. Still, granting exceptions and modifications, it is likely that any English historian of the first

would find that the universe is lawful and that chance is rationally and causally quite explainable. E. C. Mossner disputes Black's opinion. Chance, he finds, "does play a part in human affairs, although as the number of persons in a given action increases, chance seemingly becomes less and less influential." /"An Apology for David Hume, Historian," IMLA, LVI p. 663/- The difference between Black and Mossner, it must be said, is largely a semantic one: if chance in history is the imposition of causes which are irrational, miraculous, causes which defy conventional explanations, then Black is right; Hume does not believe in this kind of chance. But if chance is the imposition of events and circumstances which are dis­ proportionately small, which lie inconspicuously outside the broad lines of cause which the historian generally looks for, then chance in this sense Hume certainly believes in. I have taken chance to mean the latter; in other words, Voltaire's "Cleopatra's nose" theory, the theory of causation expounded in the paragraph regarding the quarrels of Lady Masham, is an example of chance in history although there is nothing irrational or miraculous in such a view. Mossner quotes a sentence from Hume in support of his contention that Hume believes in chance: "A very minute circumstance, overlooked in our speculations, serves ofgen to explain events, which may seem the most surprising and unaccountable." (p. 663) The same sentence could have been cited by Black in support of his contention that what is called chance is only ignorance of the lawful workings of an intelli­ gible universe. However, to say, as Black does, that Hume does not believe in chance is to place an unduly narrow limit on the word "chance" and ultimately to distort the kind of history which Hume wrote.

"^Rosenbaum, p. 126. 12b

half of the eighteenth century, insofar as he enlarged causally on the

bare annals at his disposal, would show cause primarily by showing

human motives, but that he would also consistently hold open the

possibility of both providence and chance.

Of course eighteenth-century historians, like historians of any

age, viewed cause and effect with reference to certain norms or stand­

ards or rational principles. Hume writes, of history,

Its chief use is only to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by shewing men in all varieties of circumstances and situa­ tions, and furnishing us with materials, from which we may form our observations, and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behavior. These records of wars, intrigues, factions, ajad_re_volutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moralftphilosopher fixes the principles of his science.

As Mossner properly observes of this passage, history, for Hume, is

not an end in itself, but a part of a larger study; history provides

the raw materials for ethical and psychological conclusions. And

thus the action of an individual human being upon the course of his­

tory is consistently seen in its reference to man in general; partic­

ular acts are measured against what is humanly "natural"; no motive is unique and discrete. Black states the suppositions which underlie

Hume's implicit position regarding history in.this way: l) "the mind

of man is the scene of a uniform play of motive"; and 2 ) "the motives

Q Philosophical Works, ed. T> H. Green and T. H. Grose, 4 vols. (London, 187^-75), IV, 68, as cited in Mossner, p. 666. 125

of men in the mass are quantitatively and qualitatively the same for

all times and all countries.if Black tends to overstate to Hume's

disadvantage, as he usually does, still it is basically true that

present in Hume's history is an implicit concept of "nature," that

ubiquitous catch-all for the eighteenth-century mind; and it is

obvious that "nature," in this case human nature as revealed in

history, implies what A. 0. Lovejoy calls "uniformitarianism."^

In addition to his uniformitarianism, Hume's taste and Tory tem­

perament provide another standard against which cause is judged.

"Hume's conception of civilization," as Black puts it, again some­ what prejudicially, "is simply the idealized picture of the Age

of Reason, with its salons, its humanitarianism, its hatred of the

'brute facts of the unspoiled universe. ' " To a temperament such

as Hume's, the motives and circumstances that lead to stability are

presented and judged differently from those that lead to revolution.

Morton Rosenbaum, surveying the historical thought of Clarendon,

Temple, Bolingbroke, and Swift, fiHcTs~that-each of the four, with

differing emphases, measures the forces that influence and change

history by reference to what each regarded the proper activity of

% o h n B. Black, The Art of History (New York, 1926), p. 95 .

^ T h e Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), pp. 288-293. The idea is also treated in Lovejoy's "Optimism and Romanticism," PMLA, XLII (1927), pp. 921-^5. In the essay, Lovejoy calls the concept "universalism."

13-p. 89. 126 reason. Clarendon tended to see the interplay of reason and anti­ reason in institutions and the law, Temple in customs and tradition,

Bolingbroke in the "spirit of liberty," and Swift in a personal {• 1 P synthesis of the rational standards of the other three. Each of the four shared certain aspects of Hume's uniformitarianism; each of them shared certain of his Tory habits of mind; and each of the four set against the operation of cause and effect in history a vision of the "natural" functioning of the human will in society.

There is scarcely a writer of the eighteenth century who did not have some thoughts on history, and every writer on history measured historical change against certain universal categories. A survey of such thought would have to determine the subtle combina­ tions of principles and predispositions that led the eighteenth- century historians to ratify the present, or damn the Jacobites, or distrust the mob, or glorify the rise of commerce. The present point, however, is simply that such categories exist. One must expect to find that human motives are judged, implicitly or explicitly, against what man in general is or should be; the oper­ ation of chance and providence is judged against the historian's extra-historical view of the operations of these forces in life.

It is, of course, a species of modern provincialism to accuse

Bishop Burnet of economic naivete when he died eight years before

12 p. 111. 127

Adam Smith and a half-century before Malthus -were born. And it is a provincialism of a different kind to accuse many eighteenth-century historians of being grimly suspicious of spiritual force in history when the results of all the fearful "enthusiasms" of the civil war were still immediate for them. However, if it can be said without patronizing an historical imagination quite different from our own, eighteenth-century history is never organized causally, and the kinds of broad causation which a modern reader expects to find are the result of certain specialized studies and certain organic views of culture which were unavailable to the eighteenth-century mind.1^

II

Chapter vii, Book VIII, of Tom Jones provides some character­

istic examples of Fielding's management of cause. The chapter is entitled "Containing better reasons than any which have yet appeared for the conduct of Partridge; and apology for the weakness of Jones;

and some further anecdotes concerning my landlady," a title suggesting

that the chapter is less narration than causal analysis. And indeed

^Even Gibbon has been widely accused of never really explaining why the Roman Empire declined and fell. A survey of these accusations along with an interesting attempt to define the causal unity of Gibbon's history appears in Gerald J. Gruman, "'Balance' and 'Excess' as Gibbon's Explanation of the Decline and Fall," History and Theory, I (I960), 75-85. the chapter begins by telling why Partridge really wished to accompany

Tom. In the preceding chapter Partridge has given as his reasons two dreams, both of them good omens. But, although Partridge is "one of the most superstitious of men," the prospect of good fortune provided by two dreams is hardly motive enough.

In fact, when Partridge came to ruminate on the relation he had heard from Jones, he could not reconcile to himself that Mr. Allworthy should turn his son (for so he most firmly believed him to be) out of doors for any reason which he had heard assigned. He concluded, therefore, that the whole was a fiction, and that Jones, of whom he had often from his correspondents heard the wildest character, had in reality run away from his father. It came into his head, therefore, that if he could prevail with the young gentleman to return back to his father he should by that means render a service to All­ worthy which would obliterate all his former anger; nay, indeed, he conceived that very anger was counterfeited, and that Allworthy had sac­ rificed him to his own reputation. And this suspicion indeed he well accounted for, from the tender behavior of that excellent man to the foundling child; from his great severity to Partridge, who, knowing himself to be inno­ cent, could not conceive that any other should think him guilty; lastly, from the allowance which he had privately received long after the annuity had been publicly taken from him, and which he looked upon as a kind of smart-money, or rather by way of atonement for injustice; for it is very uncommon, I believe, for men to ascribe the benefactions they receive to pure charity when they can possibly impute them to any other motive. If he could by any means, therefore, persuade the young gentleman to return home, he doubted not but that he should again be received into the favour of Allworthy, and well rewarded for his pains; nay, and should be again restored to his native country; a restoration which Ulysses himself never wished more heartily than poor Partridge. (IV, 88) 129

Fielding's analysis is surprisingly complex for an author with a reputation for externality. It shows Partridge making legitimate inferences from what he wrongly believes about Allworthy's character.

It shows him believing Allworthy to be good despite his treatment of Partridge, a treatment which must, surely, have raised doubts concerning his goodness. Yet it shows Partridge believing Tom to be wild and irresponsible on the basis of village gossip. It shows him assuming Allworthy's paternity of Tom on account of certain actions and from this assumption concluding that Allworthy would accept

Tom warmly. And it shows Partridge with his peculiar mixture of selfish and benevolent impulses, as if, in this passage, the idea of

Partridge had been compounded of a large portion of Hobbes with a smattering of Shaftesbury. The reason why Partridge goes wrong in so many of his inferences is that he measures Allworthy against man in general; just as Allworthy is ill-equipped to judge pure evil,

Partridge is ill-equipped to judge pure benevolence. And thus the very activity of Fielding as narrator, the relating of the individual to the species, becomes the object of ridicule in Partridge. The reason, in other words, that Partridge makes incorrect assumptions is not that his knowledge of the individual is inadequate but that his knowledge of the species is narrow. Thus the narrator goes on to generalize about mankind's limited ability to generalize about mankind.

Finally, the narrator relates Partridge to mankind by relating his desire to be home to that of Ulysses; it is an implicit argument for uniformitarianism: Partridge may be vastly different from Ulysses, in 130 fact the comparison underlines Partridge's comic ineptitude, and the road from Somersetshire to London may he vastly different from the

Aegean Sea, hut homesickness has not changed much since antiquity.

Insofar as what this analysis reveals is typical, it is possible

to assume that human motives make events in Fielding. Partridge!s

dreams, which might he taken hy both Partridge, narrator, and reader

as either chance or providence, are dismissed as being not real causes.

In another chapter I have argued that, just as Fielding's narrator

must ask what happened, his characters must ask the question too; and

this interplay of historical inquiry serves both as a device for

revealing character and as a critique of historical method. In much

the same way, Fielding’s narrator is obliged, because he is writing

history, to measure individual motives and their historical conse­

quences against the nature of man; and these same inquiries are

carried on by Fielding's characters, both as a way of revealing them

and as a way of examining the legitimacy of such generalizations.

The chapter continues:

As for Jones, he was well satisfied with the truth of what the other had asserted, and believed that Partridge had no other inducements but love to him and zeal for the cause; a blamable want of caution and diffidence in the veracity of others, in which he was highly worthy of censure. To say the truth, there are but two ways by which men become possessed of this excellent quality. The one is from long experience, and the other is from nature; which last, I presume, is often meant by genius, or great natural parts; and it is infinitely the better of the two, not only as we are masters 131

of it much earlier in life, but as it is much more infallible and conclusive; for a man who hath been imposed on by ever so many, may still hope to find others more honest; whereas he who receives certain necessary admonitions from within, that this is impossible, must have very little understanding indeed, if he ever renders himself liable to be once deceived. (IV, 188-89 ) *

The passage concludes by returning to the particular: Tom is not prudent by nature and he is too young to have acquired a shrewd insight into others by experience. 'What the passage does is roughly similar to what the analysis of Partridge does. It supplies believ­ able motives for an action. It relates these actions to human nature. It shows Tom making judgments by implicitly relating the individual to the species. And the passage comments on the wisdom, or lack of it, in such judgments, the very judgments that the narrator himself is engaging in.

The chapter continues with causal remarks interspersed in the narration. The landlord is stupidly idle because he has been bred a gentleman; the landlady detests him because he is surly, no longer rich, and, presumably, no longer potent; she distrusts Tom because he is friendly with her husband and because he appears to be a gentleman;

Partridge carries a knapsack because, being a tailor, he has made it himself, and being prudential he wishes to provide for the journey; and the chapter ends with two more extensions from the particular to the general. The landlady overcharges Tom. Her motives are obvious enough; but since, in this respect, all landladies are the same, the reason for\her greed can be found in the psychology of landladies in 132 general: they are all avaricious according to the "maxims" which are

"the grand mysteries of their trade." And the landlady treats Tom as he leaves with consummate arrogance; the reason again lies not so much in her nature as in the nature of her kind: "all those who get their livelihood by people of fashion, contract as much insolence to the rest of mankind, as if they really belonged to that rank themselves ." (iv, 91-2 )

After such a particularly dense display of motive, it is worth bringing up Ian Watt's assertion that the characters^ in Fielding 14 have no convincing inner life. It is true that Partridge's motives, as they are revealed at the beginning of the chapter, are conscious and rational to a degree that makes them stylized, con­ ventional, and apparently unrealistic. But Partridge is, at this point, rational and calculating; and Fielding is careful to present

Partridge's rational processes along with the ambiguities and errone­ ous conclusions that make them humanly probable. Certainly motives in Fielding are not entirely conscious. Wishes father thoughts in

Partridge; the analysis of Tom concerns the interplay of ideas and perception, of instinctual vitality and conscious judgment; Fielding's treatment of the hostility between the landlord and landlady hints at the sexual frustrations that presumably lie behind it; the landlady

l-**The Rise of the Novel, p. 2Jh. 133 distrusts Tom "because of a largely unconscious comparison between him and her now dissipated husband; and she displays, finally, a kind of identification by psychologically appropriating the social arrogance of the nobility which she serves.^ in no English fiction before

Fielding are states of consciousness so thoroughly and perceptively analyzed. If these psychological analyses are unconvincing, it is largely by comparison with Richardson that they seem so. But it is a history that Fielding is writing; and states of mind are important as they lead to action. The introspections and ruminations possible in Richardson's world are by no means impossible to Fielding's imagination; but they are largely irrelevant to his narrative concerns.

In one sense Watt's charge has some force. In the manner of eighteenth-century historians, Fielding introduces persons with a formal portrait, a "character." When these "characters" are long and complex, as they are in the case of Parson M a m s and Allworthy, they echo the stylistic traits of the tradition of which they are a part, the balance and antithesis of Overbury and Bishop Hall. But the "characters" may be quite brief and comparatively informal as well. The landlord and landlady in the chapter I have been discussing are introduced with a few brief touches; yet there is little doubt

■^For a survey of the treatment of the unconscious in eighteenth- century writing, see Lancelot Law Whyte, The Unconscious Before Freud (New York, i960), pp. 31-57, 96-129. 134 that the introductory remarks are meant to define them as efficiently as the larger portraits do their subjects. The consequence of develop­ ing the premises contained in a "character" is a rather static psy- 1 fi chology. Characters act largely in accordance with their "charac­ ters"; and although change is the result of men, men are in turn changed by events rather little. The subject of change is a complex one, subject for another chapter. For the moment it is sufficient to observe that human motives, the primary cause in Fielding, are rich and complex but largely fixed and static.

Not all chapters in Fielding, to be sure, are so dense with motive as the one I have analyzed. And not all motives are so explicitly

3_6 Amelia differs somewhat from Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews in the extent to which characters are free to develop, a point that will be treated in Chapter IV but must be noted here. For an examination of the literary consequences of Fielding's static view of character, see John S. Coolidge, "Fielding and 'Conservation of Character,'" Iff, LVII (i960), 2^5-259, reprinted in Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ronald Paulson, pp. 158-176.~Whyte in The Unconscious Before Freud comments, especially on pp. 48-49, on the tendency in the eighteenth century to describe mental activity in static terms. Watt treats Fielding's static view of character on pp. 274-76 of The Rise of the Novel. He concludes: "Actually, of course, separate parts of Tom's nature can hold very little converse with each other, because there is only one agency for such converse--the individual conscious­ ness through which the whole repertoire of past actions operates--and Fielding does not take us into this consciousness because he believes that individual character is a specific combination of stable and separate predispositions to action, rather than the product of its own past." This conclusion seems to me extreme, denying, as it does, the motivational complexity I have described, and denying the possi­ bility of change, a question not so easily decided in the cases of Joseph and Tom and Booth as Watt makes it appear. 135 related to human nature as are those of Partridge, Tom, and the land­ lady. The chapter shows at its most intense Fielding's consistent emphasis on human cause; and just as the eighteenth-century historian saw human cause in relation to human nature, cause is seen by Fielding in a double sense: things happen because individual men make them happen and because the nature of man is such that its individual representatives must display certain motives. (And, as I have sug­ gested, Fielding ironically builds into his comparison of the individ­ ual and the species a dramatized caution against the hazards of just such comparison.)

I have suggested above that the chapter of Tom Jones I have analyzed contains expressions of uniformitarianism. It is a concept which Fielding is explicit about elsewhere, but about which he is also, as with so many concepts, curiously elusive. In the Preface to

Con Quixote in England, Fielding writes of the difficulties of trans­ ferring the knight's adventures to an English setting:

I soon found it infinitely more difficult than I imagined to vary the scene, and give my knight an opportunity Of displaying himself in a differ­ ent manner from that wherein he appears in the ro­ mance. Human nature is every where the same; and the modes and habits of particular nations do not change it enough, sufficiently to distinguish a Quixote in England from a Quixote in Spain.17

In Tom Jones, however, a similar expression of uniformitarianism is

^Henley, XI, 9* 136 put in the mouth of the misanthropic Man of the Hill:

Those who travel in order to acquaint themselves with the different manners of men might spare themselves much pains by going to a carnival at Venice; for there they will see at once all which they can discover in the several courts of Europe. The same hypocrisy, the same fraud; in short, the same follies and vices dressed in different habits.... Human nature is every­ where the same, everywhere the object of detes­ tation and scorn. (IV, 148)

The prefatory remarks to Con Quixote in England are, without doubt, an expression of a philosophical position which Fielding held with some conviction. But the words of the Man of the Hill are his own, not Fielding's; Tom, to whom the Man of the Hill speaks, does not endorse his misanthropy; and there is every"reason to suppose that

Fielding does not.

The old man infers, from the uniformity of human nature, that all men are uniformly depraved and all men, moreover, are so nearly alike in their depravity that to associate with them is both perilous and pointless. It is not the uniformitarianism which is the object of satire or perhaps more properly pathos but rather the humanly debilitating conclusions which the old man draws from it. To the old man, human nature is a set of characteristics designating the whole of

all, or nearly all, human beings. To Fielding what is essential in human nature manifests a continuity both historical and geographical; but to say that human nature is roughly the same in ancient Greece,

Peru, and Somersetshire is not to say that differences between human beings are negligible. After all, the uniformitarianism of Fielding t

137 permits Parson Mams and Beau Didapper, Allworthy and Captain Blifil,

Dr. Harrison and Blear-eyed Moll; and, however difficult and however unconvincing, Fielding did make an English Quixote. The uniformi­ tarianism of the old man precludes investigation of particular men.

The uniformitarianism of Fielding invites it. For though greed may be as old as man, the way in which a given eighteenth-century landlady is greedy is worth observing because it is in part unique. Though the particular mixture of good and evil which most men display may be one of the central, immutable facts of human nature, we can never tell (that is, Fielding can never tell though the old man thinks he can) whether a given man will be more good than bad, or will exercise his goodness in any of a thousand ways, until we have observed him.

In the prefatory chapter of Tom Jones "Containing instructions very necessary to be perused by modern critics," one of the instruc­ tions reads as follows:

Another caution we would give thee, my good reptile, is, that thou dost not find out too near a resemblance between certain characters here introduced; as, for instance, between the land­ lady who appears in the seventh book and her in the ninth. Thou art to know, friend, that there are certain characteristics in which most indi­ viduals of every profession and occupation agree. To be able to preserve these characteristics, and at the same time to diversify their operations, is one talent of a good writer. Again, to mark the nice distinction between two persons actuated by the same vice or folly is another; and, as this 138

last talent is found in very few writers, so is the.true discernment of it found in as few readers. (XV, 19*0

Thus if we return to the chapter I have analyzed, it is obvious that the landlady is realized as a person first, the wife of a gouty husband, a shrew who is fond of comparing her present husband to her first, a vicious and humorless tyrant. It is important that she illustrates certain common traits of landladies. But her universality 1 fi is evident only after her particularity has been drawn. °

i o ■LOIn the Preface to Jonathan Wild Fielding discusses universality and particularity. And, in a well-known passage in Joseph Andrews, he writes: I declare here, once for all, I describe not men, but manners; not an individual, but a s, species. Perhaps it will be answered, Are not the characters then taken from life? To which I answer in the affirmative; nay, I believe I might aver that I have writ little more than I have seen. The lawyer is not only alive, but hath been so these four thousand years. (159) As Houghton W. Taylor has pointed out, describing characters in terms of their universality begs the question of their particularity Particular character1: An Early Phase of a Literary Evolution," FMLA, IX (19^5), 161-174, especially pp. 162-3J. If the landlady is a straw figure about whose neck is hung a sign reading "landlady," then her fictional and causal significance is quite different than it would be if she were realized as a particular landlady in whom can be seen certain universal traits. That Fielding portrays stock figures is undeniable; but that he faced the problems of particularity, both in practice and in theory, is, I think, equally undeniable. Ian Watt thinks otherwise. "Fielding," he writes, "does not make any attempt to individualize his characters. Allworthy is sufficiently categorized by his name, while that of Tom Jones, compounded as it is out of two of the commonest names in the language, tells us that we must regard him as the representative of manhood in general...." (The Rise of the Novel, p. 272.) Such a summary disregards the differences, say, between Allworthy and Or. Harrison, both of whom are quint- essentially "all-worthy" but who are very different. It blurs the 139

Events happen in Fielding because of the will and the nature of particular human beings. These particular human beings illustrate certain universal aspects of human nature or certain common aspects of their occupational group. Indeed, as I have argued in Chapter I, these observations amount to a revaluation of the nature of man. But much of the vitality of Fielding is due to the fact that the universal is technically subordinate to the particular.

Ill

In Chapter II, I argued that Fielding's stance as novelist is analogous to that of the historian in the limits of credibility both place on their work. Although fiction had gradually been in reaction against the marvelous for at least a century, it was still not in a continuous tradition with previous fiction that Fielding viewed his own fiction, but rather by analogy with history. And thus the possi­ bility that events may have causes that are marvelous is treated, in

Fielding's fiction, with the same kind of critical skepticism that the historian exercises. Since the operation of chance and the

uniqueness of Tom. And it sets up a Procrustean bed into which Parson Adams will not fit. It is worth mentioning, finally, that the relation between the particular and the general, far from being a concern only of the uniformitarian eighteenth century, is still one of the vexing problems of historical epistemology, as demonstrated by Theodor Litt's "The Universal in the Structure of Historical Knowledge," in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton (Oxford, 1936), pp. 19 1 -1 9 6 . 140

interposition of providence may often appear marvelous, it is reason­

able that Fielding should wish to minimize chance and providence in

favor of human cause. But no historian can afford to do away with

chance altogether. To choose an example powerful to the generation

that followed Fielding, no amount of human cause can account for the

Lisbon earthquake.

In one of his earliest journalistic essays, Fielding objects to

an inadequate account of chance in Tacitus.

I have often thought it a Blemish, in the Works of Tacitus, that he ascribes so little to the Interposition of this invincible Being; but, on the contrary, makes the Eveht of almost every Scheme to depend on a wise Design, and proper Measures taken to accomplish it.^9

Life, Fielding continues, is less like a game of chess than a game

of hazard; skill and wisdom count for less than chance. The passage

ends with this epigram: "Fortune often picks a great Man, in Jest,

out of the Lowest of the People.

In an essay in The True Patriot, Fielding takes a position that

seems, at first, inconsistent with that of the Champion essay. He writes that "all History is a kind of Comment on the Truth" that

events happen because of human conduct, not chance. "For, as the

great Cardinal Richelieu maintained, Fortune or blind chance doth

^The Champion, I, 64.

20p. 66 l4l not interfere so much in the great Affairs of this World, as her com­ plaisant Votaries the Fools would persuade us. What we call ill Luck, PI is generally ill Conduct." The two passages, however, are not at all contradictory; Tacitus is charged with oversimplification, "the

Fools" with evasion of responsibility. It is equally misleading to deny chance altogether and to excuse ineptitude by invoking chance.

On the question of providence, Fielding also takes a position that permits alternatives while generally denying extremes. Nowhere in his fiction or drama or journalism does Fielding relate with any conviction an example of the interposition of providence. In the

History of the Present Rebellion Fielding inveighs against attributing good fortune to providence since such reasoning assumes God to be on the side of the Pretender, an assumption Fielding is not eager to make.

But in the midst of his career as magistrate, Fielding compiled one of the more curious works of his career, Examples of the Interposition of

Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder (1752)22 The work relates thirty-three examples of murderers driven to confess or discovered in a number of miraculous ways. The examples are taken from

The Theatre of God1s Judgoments (1597)> several more recent works, and from revelations made directly to Fielding.It is a peculiarly

21f8 , Tues., Dec. 24, 1745. pO The work is reprinted in Henley, XVI, III-I6 5 . .

^ F o r a full account of the background of this work, see Homes Dudden, Henry Fielding, II, 957 . Ik2 credulous work, unrepresentative, certainly, of Fielding’s customary skepticism as writer and magistrate. Aside from the credulity toward the marvelous that it displays, the work is unrepresentative in that here Fielding believes, or seems to believe, that the operation of providence is discernible and obvious. But the work i£ representative of Fielding's consistent orthodoxy. As James A. Work has written,

"From a careful reading of his works it is clear that by the time of

The Champion, when he first spoke out in his own voice, Fielding was in all significant points an orthodox believer in the rational super- naturalism of such low-church divines as Tillotson, Clarke, and Barrow, and that he experienced n'o important changes in belief throughout the remainder of his life.2^ Fielding, without much question, believed in the existence of providence. But as with chance, he chooses not to invoke it regularly and systematically as a causal explanation.

In his novels, Fielding complicates cause in the way that he claims Tacitus does not. Events happen that cannot be accounted for in wholly human terms: the difference between moonlight and total darkness is important to what happens to Joseph and Fanny and Parson

Adams on the road, for example; and though it is Blifil who allows

Sophia's bird to escapb, it is chance which accounts for the breaking of the limb while Tom attempts to retrieve it. In his causal explan­ ations, Fielding often explicitly admits the possibility of chance, sometimes, it is true, to ironically demolish chance as cause since

2^"Henry Fielding, Christian Censor," p. ihl. 143 such explanations are too nearly marvelous for Fielding's realistic mode, sometimes to argue against chance since invoking chance implies an evasion of responsibility for action and judgment, sometimes to admit chance as a genuine possibility.

Allworthy's finding of the infant Tom in his bed is described in

Fielding's chapter title as "an odd accident." But it soon becomes clear, long before the real circumstances of the child's being there are known, that there is nothing accidental about the event; it is the result of fully explicable human motives. In another part of Tom

Jones that corresponds to the True Patriot essay, chance is introduced as cause only to be corrected by a more reasonable cause: "We shall now, therefore, pursue the steps of that lovely creature, and leave her unworthy lover a little longer to bemoan his ill-luck, or rather his ill-conduct." (IV, 2^7) But in a third passage, chance is neither ironically undercut nor replaced by human cause, but allowed to stand/ as a real causal possibility: "But while she was pursuing this thought the good genius of Sophia, or that which presided over the integrity of

Mrs. Honour, or perhaps mere chance, sent an accident in her way which at once preserved her fidelity, and even facilitated the intended busi­ ness." (ill, 363-4) And again, "It was by great accident that he him­ self had passed through that field, in order to lay wires for hares, with which he was to supply a poulterer at Bath the next morning." (Ill,

321) In Amelia, it should be added, Fielding insists more prominently 144 than in the other two novels on the need for subordinating chance as causal explanation to human responsibility.

I question much whether we may not, by natural means, account for the success of knaves, the calamities o'f fools, with all the miseries in which men of sense sometimes involve themselves, by quitting the dir­ ections of Prudence, and following the blind guid­ ance of a predominant passion; in short, for all the ordinary phenomena which are imputed to fortune, whom, perhaps, men accuse with no less absurdity in life than a bad player complains of ill luck at the game of chess. (VI, 13-14)

Yet it is not necessary to read very far in Amelia to conclude that chance, whether explicitly named or not, is consistently important to the working of the novel. Booth is arrested because he happens to come upon two men beating a third; sentenced to prison, he happens to meet Miss Matthews, a former acquaintance; and so on. In short, in the same way that the two periodical essays I have cited achieve a kind of balance in the treatment of chance, the novels themselves achieve a balance of the same kind: chance operates upon human affairs, but to attribute too much to chance is to fall into either a credulity of the marvelous or a denial of human responsibility.

As for providence, I have said that divine cause is never con­ sidered in the novels with any real seriousness. A single example will serve to show Fielding's customary attitude toward providence as fictional cause. A Merry-Andrew whom Tom has saved from a beating conducts Tom to the place where Sophia has passed.

Of this Partridge was no sooner acquainted, than he, with great earnestness, began to prophesy, and assured Jones that he would certainly have good 145

success in the end; for, he said, 'two such accidents could never have happened to direct him after his mistress, if Providence had not designed to bring them together at last.1 And this was the first time that Jones lent any attention to the superstitious doctrines of his companion. (IV, 335)

This passage ironically disposes of the idea of providence as cause.

And it contains within it the reason that providence cannot be assigned as cause. Fielding's stylistic emphasis is on Partridge's haste, and assurance, and dogmatism: "with great earnestness,"

"prophesy," "assured," "certainly," "could never have happened."

The emphasis, that is, is epistemological and rhetorical, on knowing and asserting knowledge. And thus providence as cause is ironically disposed of not only by putting its assertion in the mouth of Part­ ridge, not only by having the idea endorsed by Tom under circum­ stances that make his critical judgment suspect, but also by making the operation of providence, an idea that is not directly knowable, asserted as vociferously as if it were an obvious, unchallengeable, empirical observation.

Fielding's treatment of cause is ambiguous, "Fortune," with a capital "FV is introduced again and again, its pagan or at least secular overtones in a context of Christian orthodoxy. "Fortune" is ironically toyed with, sometimes dismissed, sometimes entertained.

"Chance" and "accident" similarly are advanced as causal explanations, sometimes seriously, sometimes ironically. The action of the novels takes place in a world presided over not by the First Cause of the Ik6 deists but by the omnipresent Deity of the latitudinarians; yet provi­ dence, when it is advanced as causal explanation, is ironically ren­ dered implausible. All the reader can be certain about is that events are largely caused by men. This causal ambiguity, however, far from being a source of confusion, is one source of the richness and density of Fielding’s account of experience. Leonard Lutwack has observed of

Fielding’s mixture of styles:

It is the ideal vehicle for the writer who is motivated by the spirit of irony and paradox and who finds it impossible to remain committed to a single vision of reality. A mixture of styles has the effect of making the reader pass through a succession of contradictory and ambiguous atti­ tudes; it offers no sure stylistic norm by which the reader may orient himself permanently to the fiction and the point of view of the author. He is conditioned to expect to change his position of witness as the style changes. Instead of being assimilative, the mixed style method is mimetic, or imitative of the inherent qualities of things and of the diverse attitudes with which reality may be viewed.2 5

The view of life reflected in the rhetoric of mixed styles is equally reflected in Fielding's causal ambiguity. Fielding himself charact­ erized this view of life when he writes, "The great Variety which is found in the Nature of Man, hath extremely perplexed those Writers who have endeavoured to reduce the Knowledge of him to a certain

Science.

^5"Mixed and Uniform Prose StyJ.es in the Novel," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XVIII (March, i960), 357.

^forhe Champion, I, 97* 1^7

IV

"In reality," writes Fielding in Tom Jones, "there are many little circumstances too often omitted by injudicious historians, from which events of the utmost importance arise. The world may indeed be considered as a vast machine, in which the great wheels are originally set in motion by those which are very minute, and almost imperceptible to any but the strongest eyes." (Ill, 221)

As so often in Fielding, the word historian points both ways: to a theory of history and to a theory of fiction. The theory of history which the passage comments upon is the same attribution of events to small causes which so fascinated Voltaire. The theory of fiction which the passage comments upon is a principle of construction which permits, in fiction, the remote causal influences which Fielding believed to operate in history.

The reason that Joseph's parentage can be revealed is that he has met Mr. Wilson, who, when the pedlar and Gaffer and Gammer Andrews make their revelations, can add his own account and establish his paternity. But the reason that Joseph has met Mr. Wilson is that, together with Fanny and Parson Adams, he was frightened by mysterious lights on a particular dark night and in escaping was obliged to follow the stumbling Adams down a precipice which landed him at

Wilson*s door. Just as it is possible to argue that a bright moon 148 would have prevented Joseph's establishing Mr. Wilson as his father, it is possible to argue, say, that Tom's imprudent joyfulness provides

Blifil with damning evidence of Tom's wickedness, which causes Tom to be sent away, which causes the complex chain of events that reveal

Tom's true parentage and permit his marriage to Sophia. Maurice

Johnson has traced the peregrinations of Sophia's muff through the chapters of Tom Jones. The muff is cause, again and again, of chains of events, events that happen, in a sense, simply because of the 27 presence of the muff. And as James J. lynch points out, it is because Sophia changes the ribbon of her hat that she misses seeing 28 Tom at a particularly crucial point in the narrative.

The much admired complexity of the plot of Tom Jones is, in part, a result of the working out of just such patterns of minute cause.

It is an aspect of Fielding's formal artistry that most twentieth- century readers continue to find aesthetically satisfying. But at the same time minute cause in eighteenth-century fiction is a reflection of a view of the world which is no longer very widely held. Surely no twentieth-century historian believes, with Pascal, that if Cleo­ patra's nose had been shorter, "the whole aspect of the world would

^ F i e l d i n g 's Art of Fiction (Philadelphia, 1961), pp. 129-137.

^"Structural Techniques in Tom Jones," p. 13. 29 have been different" any more than he would argue that if the child­ hood of the assassin of Archduke Francis Ferdinand had been more cheerful the First World War would not have occurred. It is not that minute cause is inconceivable or that "if" questions in history are irrelevant. As Sidney Hook argues, the rather small events on which great areas of history turn can be isolated, the alternatives explored.

But such explanation must involve a causal complexity that Pascal's epigram denies. For most twentieth-century readers, the fact that

Fielding's navels may be informed by a "Cleopatra's nose" theory of causation is no barrier to their enjoyment of the navels, however much they may reject such a theory in their own intellectual universe.

Minute causation is, in fact, an enhancement of the comic delight which most readers find in Fielding. J

For at least one modern reader, however, the working of Fielding's patterns of cause and effect is the occasion of the most derogatory criticism. Hugh Kenner finds Tom Jones the "most mechanically plotted of English novels from initial intrigue to final marriage," a quality which satisfies "Industrial Man," for whom "construction,"

"form," and "blueprint" are indistinguishable. Kenner is certainly

29sidney Hook /The Hero in History (New York, 19*K3)> p. 17^7 quotes Pascal and follows with a cogent argument on the implausibility of the "Cleopatra's nose" theory as a paradigm of historical reasoning.

30wyndham Lewis (Norfolk, Conn., 195*0> PP* 9-10 and The Poetry of Ezra Pound (Norfolk, Conn., n. d.), p. 55 as quoted in Maurice Johnson, p. 99* 150 right in his effort to see Tom Jones in terms of its intellectual background. It is "plotted" as it is not simply because of certain notions of surprise and suspense, unity and reconciliation, but because the form of the novel is a model of the form of Fielding's view of experience. However, it is difficult to see what the tastes of "industrial man" have to do with a novel published in 17^9 *

Traditional comic form, the form of the "new comedy," is rigid and stylized; but no one would think of accusing Plautus of being, for that reason, either false to experience or "mechanical." Comic form, in the sense in which it appears in Plautus, is a valid way of rendering dramatically the individual and society, no less vital for being neatly plotted. Insofar as Tom Jones is traditionally comic in form it is necessarily stylized and causally meticulous in plot. But far from being an anticipation of the age of the machine, such careful plotting is in large part an employment of narrative traditions as old as Menander. And insofar as Tom Jones is like history it is necessarily more "mechanically" formed than novels which seem to dispense with an explicit relation between historian- narrator and the events. The historian can write, "The Thirty Years'

War began in l6l8," but the chronicler who records the event at its beginning can only write, if indeed he can assume this much, "A war began today." The historian's perspective permits, and his profes­ sion demands, abstractions from the chaos of experience, abstractions 151 that implicitly include "ends" in all beginnings, that will seem,

if one chooses to call them so, "mechanical."31 And thus Fielding's

narrator can shape the events he narrates into causally satisfying patterns because, like the historian, he sees the subject matter of his history as a causally satisfying, meaningful whole. Richardson's fiction is no less true than Fielding's, but because it seems not to

have been shaped, after the events, by an historian, it seems less

"mechanical." Finally, as I have suggested, if the historian of any

age is obliged to give his history a shape, the historian in an age which found causal chains believable and endlessly fascinating will

produce a particularly "plotted" history. And fiction which is like

such history will be carefully shaped. To argue that experience is

so nearly intractable that to render it in the formally intricate

terms of Tom Jones is to be false to its essential chaos— this is

a way of denying not only fiction as history, but of denying the

possibility of the shaping act of the historian himself.

But even if the "plotting" of Tom Jones were theoretically inde­

fensible, it would have to be admitted that the novel has given great

pleasure to such un-industrial men as Coleridge and Henry James. R. S.

Crane suggests a proper justification for the impressionistic delight which Fielding's minute cause often produces. He traces the chain of

3^1 have borrowed the paradigm sentence above and the point concerning its status as a specifically historical sentence from Arthur C. Canto's "Narrative Sentences," History and Theory, II (1962), 1I+6-I79. 152 events that begin with Tom's drunken joy at Allworthy's recovery and ending in his marriage,to Sophia. "All this is probable enough," writes Crane, "but there is something of the comically wonderful in the educing of so many appropriately extreme consequences from a cause in itself so apparently innocent and trivial."32 The idea of minute cause in history is, even to those who take it most seriously, at least ironic and often comic. Both Pascal and Voltaire, on the subject, appear to believe their own speculations at the same time that they are amused by them, with that fine intellectual flexi­ bility of which both were capable. Minute cause is still intrinsic­ ally comic, but it has become increasingly suspect intellectually, not because it is essentially false but because too much is accounted for by too little. It becomes, in Fielding's use of it, a way of emphasizing its comic irony by its almost grotesque extension, and finally a way of creating a framework of architectonic power, dis­ playing the alternate frustrations and fulfillments of what Kenneth

Burke calls "progressive" and "conventional" form.33

32"The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones," in Critics and Criticism (Chicago, 1952), p. 6kO.

33"Form in literature is an arousing and fulfilment of desires. A work.has form in so far as one part of it leads a reader to antici­ pate another part, to be gratified by the sequence.... Syllogistic progression is the form of a perfectly conducted argument, advancing step by step. It is the form of a mystery story, where everything falls together, as in a story of ratiocination by Poe.... Qualita­ tive progression, the other aspect of progressive form, is subtler. Instead of one incident in the plot preparing us for some other possi­ ble incident of plot (as Macbeth's murder of Duncan prepares us for the dying of Macbeth), the presence of one quality prepares us for 153

Kenner’s suggestion that Fielding's intricate causal schemes are the vhole of his fiction, that the novels are little more than mechan­ ical plots, is more easily disposed of. There is not much in Fielding's novels that is irrelevant or formally extraneous. I have suggested that nearly any detail may be justified as being either causally rele­ vant or expressive. But there is much that must be upsetting to a reader who approaches the novels expecting the kind of mechanical oper­ ation of cause which Kenner thinks is there. A more sensible view of the cbherence of Fielding's fiction is that of Irvin Ehrenpreis, though here Ehrenpreis writes of Joseph Andrews rather than Tom Jones. In defense of Wilson's tale, he writes: "The common charges brought against this story are that it has only a weak connection with

Fielding's main plot and that it contains too many particulars.

Neither charge is sound. From a 'plot' which marches by reversals, interruptions, and digressions, the sagacious reader quickly learns not to expect causal coherence. Similarly, the details are no more crowded or minute than in the rest of the novel."3^ What Ehrenpreis

the introduction of another (the grotesque seriousness of the murder scene preparing us for the grotesque buffoonery of the porter scene).... Conventional form involves to some degree the appeal of form as form. Progressive, repetitive, and minor forms, may be effective even though the reader has no awareness of their formality. But when a form appeals as form, we designate it as conventional form." Counterstate* ment (New York, 1931), pp. 157-59.

^"Fielding's Use of Fiction: The Autonomy of Joseph Andrews," in Twelve Original Essays on Great. English Novels, ed. Charles Shapiro (Detroit, 19&0), p. 34. 13b says of Joseph Andrews is only slightly less true of Tom Jones and

Amelia. The appropriate answer to Kenner is that the novels are both mechanically plotted and they are not. Because of his stance as historian, Fielding was obliged to present cause as knowable and formally manageable; and it is certainly likely that he found attrac­ tive a tidiness of plot whereby everything is sooner or later accounted for. But his by now celebrated double irony prevents his subscribing completely to such formal efficiency.35 it is possible to argue convincingly that the story of Leonora should be in Joseph

Andrews, the gypsy episode in Tom Jones, and the conversation between the philosophical gentlemen, Booth, and Bondum in Chapter x,

Book VIII of Amelia. But it is not possible to argue that these episodes are there because they enhance the mechanical perfection of the plots in which they appear. R. S. Crane, who says so many valuable things about the formal efficiency of Fielding, may be allowed a last word here. "There are many strokes in the representation

■^The term "double irony" is Empson's /^Tom Jones,11 The Kenyon Review, XX (1958)> 217-2^^7, But what is substantially Empson's point is stated both more lucidly and more convincingly by Henry Knight Miller in his Essays on Fieldingfs Miscellanies. "I do not believe for a moment that he escaped inconsistency (few thinking men have); but the contradictions in his thought do not represent mere confusion. Indeed, I have been moved to argue that many of the ’inconsistencies' in Fielding's view of Man and of what was needful for him proved intellectually and dramatically fruitful in his fiction. He was a man of very strong convictions: but he was rescued from literary danger of mere didacticism by the felt pull of contrary positions that both his essential fair-mindedness and his self-critical native irony urged him to weigh and consider— and inevitably to dramatize." (pp* **35-36) 155 of Partridge...■which no one would wish away, yet which are bound to seem gratuitous when considered merely in the light of his somewhat minor role in the evolution of the comic action." Enlarging on his observation in a footnote, Crane continues, "Of the same order is the following sentence from the account of the fight with the captain in Joseph Andrews, Book III, chap. xi (italics mine): 'The uplifted hanger dropped from his hand, and he fell prostrated on the floor with a lumpish noise, and his half-pence rattled in his pocket....*

It is difficult to conceive of any functional analysis, however re­ fined in its principles, that would afford premises for the discussion of such traits; and yet their presence or absence is obviously an important factor in our discrimination between distinguished and undistinguished writing."3^

V

Chapter v, Book IX, of Tom Jones begins with "an apology for all heroes who have good stomachs." "Heroes," writes Fielding,

notwithstanding the high ideas which, by the means of flatterers, they may entertain of themselves, or the world may conceive of them, have certainly more of mortal than divine about them. However elevated their minds may be, their bodies at least (which is much the major part of most) are liable to the worst infirmities, and subject to the vilest offices of human nature. Among these latter, the

36"The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones," pp. 646-7. 156

act of eating, which hath by several vise men been considered as extremely mean and derogatory from the philosophic dignity, must be in some measure performed by the greatest prince, hero, or phil­ osopher upon earth. (IV, 176)

Such narratorial comment reinforces the mode of Fielding's novels,

a mode established by a good many mock-heroic passages, by his

ironic poise, his refusal to endorse rhetorically the personal values of any single character without at least some qualification,

and finally by his choice of characters itself. It is the mode which Northrop Frye calls "low mimetic," a mode in which the hero

is "superior neither to other men nor to his environment," in which 37 he is "one of us." But Fielding is more than simply "low mimetic"; more than simply choosing his characters from ordinary life, he manages his rhetoric and the ethics of his characters and plot in

such a way as to actively oppose the idea of the hero, the hero in the older sense, the "high mimetic" hero who is superior both to other men and to his environment.

Northrop Frye describes a transition in literary history from

37.Anatomy of Criticism, p. 3U. q Q I may as well confess at the outset the difficulty in making intel­ ligent observations on the mode of fictional characters. Distressingly little has been written on the subject. As A. 0. Lovejoy has observed, "We have many works, under various titles, on the history of the idea of God, but none that I can recall on the history of the idea of man. And there is an immense body of learned writing on the changes of taste in literary styles and in other arts, but no comparable investi­ gation of men's changes of taste in human character. The latter is doubtless the more difficult subject, but hardly the less important." Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore, 1961), p. 14. 157

39 high mimetic to low mimetic to ironic; and Ian Watt describes the post-Cartesian milieu out of which a taste for the realistic in 4o fiction developed. Both descriptions would account for Fielding's low mimetic mode if he were passively low mimetic, if he chose characters from ordinary life simply out of an unexpressed preference and an implicit sense of what his audience wanted to hear about. But the history of Weltanschauung and genre can only go part way in accounting for an anti-heroic passion so intense as Fielding's was.

Fielding's actively anti-heroic mode can be accounted for, I think, on two grounds, the moral and the historical. The moral grounds for making Joseph Andrews, say, into the kind of character he turns out to be are beyond my province. And besides, the matter has been treated by i ii Martin Battestin. But in Fielding's view of both the matter of history and the techniques of historiography his anti-heroism is obvious and, for my purposes, important.

The treatment of character in history was in transition in

Fielding's time from the static Theophrastan assessment of Clarendon and Burnet to the far more integrated treatment of character in the dozens of respectable but lesser historians of mid-century. It would not be quite precise to say that either the static or the flexible,

^Anatomy of Criticism, p. 34.

^ T h e Rise of the Novel, pp. 9-3^*

^^The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art,pp. 26-4-3. 158 integrated character made an unheroic view of history impossible; yet both poles of historiography, in practice, made anything remotely like Carlyle's view of the hero in history difficult indeed.

Surely one of the most moving passages in the whole of Clarendon’s

History is his character of Lord Falkland, a passage not only of great elegaic power, but, as Herbert Davis has observed, a summing up of the qualities of noble humanity which Clarendon believed to Up have been lost in the Rebellion. The passage begins with a descrip­ tion of Falkland as "a person of such prodigious parts of learning and knowledge, of that inimitable sweetness and delight in conversa­ tion, of so flowing and obliging a humanity and goodness to mankind, and of that primitive simplicity and integrity of life, that if there were no other brand upon this odious and accursed civil war than that single loss, it must be most infamous and execrable to all posterity."

(Ill, 178-79) Three qualities prevent the character of Falkland from attaining the grandeur of a tragic hero. The first is Clarendon’s antithetical habit of mind: it is not that virtues are balanced off against deficiencies in character; Clarendon rather balances by saying,

Men sometimes thought him to be this, but actually he was that; he sometimes appeared to be this, but actually he was that. The anti­ theses, rather than qualifying Falkland's nobility of character, qualify the solidity of the characterization; with a hero there should

hp "The Augustan Conception of History," pp. 223-2b. 159 be no need to balance appearance and reality, character and reputa- \j tion; the hero should be immediately perceivable as heroic, especially to his antagonists. Secondly, Falkland is more acted upon than acting; he is unmistakably a man of action, but his role in Clarendon's portrait is that of victim. Third, the portrait is too intimate; Clarendon knows him too well, and this knowledge qualifies Falkland's heroic stature. Falkland's death is as moving as any part of the character. Yet it is not a hero's death. "In the morning before the battle, as always upon action, he was very cheerful, and put himself into the first rank of the lord Byron's regiment, who was then advancing upon the enemy, who had lined the hedges on both sides with musketeers; from whence he was shot with a musket on the lower part of the belly, and in the instant falling from his horse.... Thus fell that incomparable young man, in the four and thirtieth year of his age, having so much despatched the business of life that the oldest rarely attain to that immense knowledge, and the younger enter not into the world with more innocence: and whosoever leads such a life need not care upon how short warning it be taken from him." (Ill, 189-90) Falkland’s tragedy is not at all the awesome fall of the tragic hero; if a literary analogue can be made for

Clarendon's account of his life and death, it is that of domestic tragedy, the good man victimized. i6o

Bishop Burnet shows the portrayal of historical character in transition. Here is his character of William III:

Thus lived and died William the Third, King of Great Britain, and Prince of Orange; He had a thin and weak Body, was brown haired, and of a clear and delicate Constitution: He had a Roman Eagle Nose, bright and sparkling Eyes, a large front, and a Countenance composed to gravity and authority: All his Senses were critical and exquisite. He was always asthmatical, and the dregs of the Small Pox falling on his Lungs, he had a constant deep Cough. His Behavior was solemn and serious, seldom cheerful, and but with a few: He spoke little and very slowly, and most commonly with a disgusting dryness, which was his Character at all times, except in a day of Battle: for then he was all fire, tho' with­ out passion: He was then every where, and looked to every thing. He had no great advantage from his Education; Be Wit’s Discourses were of great use to him, and he, being apprehensive of the observation of those, who were looking narrowly into every thing he said or did, had brought him­ self under a habitual caution, that he could never shake off, tho' in another scene it proved as hurtful, as it was then necessary to his affairs: He spoke Dutch, French, English and German equally well; and he understood the Latin, Spanish, and Italian, so that he was well fitted to command Armies composed of several Nations. He had a Memory that amazed all about him, for it never failed him: He was an exact observer of men and things: His strength lay rather in a true discerning and a sound judgment, than in imagination or inven­ tion: His Designs were always great and good: But it was thought he trusted too much to that, and that he did not descend enough to the humours of his people, to make himself and his notions more acceptable to them: This, in a Government that has so much of freedom in it as ours, was more necessary than he was inclined to believe. 3

^ History of His Own Times, II, 304. l6l

The style is that of Clarendon vulgarized. William is rendered in terms of balance and antithesis; but the periods are cruder than

Clarendon's; the effort seems directed not toward making a character at all, not toward rhetorical nicety certainly, but toward getting

William down on paper. And the reader of Burnet is closer to

William than the reader of Clarendon's characters; the account of

William's asthma is "low" by Clarendon's standards, but its effect is of an almost Defoe-like verisimilitude.

Burnet’s modification of the character suggests a kind of chicken- or-egg problem. It is difficult to say whether the closeness and crudity of his character of William are the result of a reaction to the confining decorum of Clarendon's portraiture or whether his close­ ness of view and comparative crudeness of style exist quite independent of any conscious intent. In any case, by the time of Oldmixon's

History of England (1735)> what Burnet had consciously or unconsciously reacted against was now the object of conscious and articulate scorn.

Oldmixon writes:

I have avoided entering into the Characters of Persons in this Work, being discouraged by the Difficulty there is -in drawing them and in pre­ serving the Likeness, could one hit it, without Flattery or Satyr in the Opinion of Parties. The Earl of Clarendon's Characters tho' inimitable for the colouring, are all of this Kind, and there can be nothing more vicious in History.^

kk John Oldmixon, The History of England, During the Reigns of King William and Queen Mary, Queen Anne, King George I (London, 1735)* p. 162

After Oldmixon it is almost impossible to find a character in history,

a character, that is, in the grand manner, statically and antithet- 45 ically conceived and stylistically elevated. ' Clarendon's characters,

which permitted historical personages considerable stature and dignity,

had given place to an historiographic technique in which the actors

in history are, in fact, "low mimetic," in which an attempt to draw

them as being larger than life is felt to be mendacious. This reac­

tion against the high mimetic in history is reflected by Shaftesbury.

He writes:

We have few modern Heroes, who like XENOPHON or CAESAR, can write their own Commentarys. And the raw Memoir-Writing and unform'd Pieces of modern Statesmen, full of their interested and private Views, will in another Age be of little service to support their Memory or Name; since already the World begins to sicken with the Kind. 'Tis the learn'd, the able and disinterested Historian, who takes place at last. And when the signal Poet or Herald of Fame is once heard, the inferior Trumpets sink in Silence and Oblivion.

Sidney Hook has identified three psychological sources of inter­

est in great men. The first he calls "the need for psychological

^No doubt some finer distinctions could be made between kinds of characters than those I have made. A practice in some ways like Clarendon's can be seen in so recent a work as Arthur A. Schlesinger's The Coming of the New Deal. With the appearance of each of the actors in the first hundred days Schlesinger pauses for a largely static profile of him. If my study were of the history of histori­ ography, my contention that the use of the character declined in mid-eighteenth century would have to be defined and qualified in a way that cannot be developed here.

^Characteristicks, I, 224-25. 163 security,11 the second "the tendency to seek compensation for personal and material limitations," and the third "the flight from responsi­ bility which expresses itself sometimes in a grasping for simple solutions and sometimes in a surrender of political interest to professional politicians."^7 Probably no age of Western culture has been wholly free of a need for psychological security; yet, if

Saintsbury's phrase "the peace of the Augustans" is a little fat­ uous, few ages have felt, as the eighteenth century did, a com­ bination of satisfaction and dissatisfaction so little conducive to heroic outlets. Temple and Swift, for example, felt a considerable disaffection for their own times; but it was a disaffection that can hardly be called insecurity; both men were deeply distrustful of change, certainly distrustful of the kind of change which a hero of their time might effect: it is simply impossible to imagine a Tory temperament such as theirs finding psychological security in a tower­

ing man of action, either past or present. To the Whig temperament, the Hanoverian succession may not have solved all problems of govern­ ment, but it provided for a kind of stability which the preceding century did not know; commerce was prospering; civil liberties and religious toleration were honored and preserved, at least by com­ parison with the last days of the Stuarts. To choose a single example, no one would call the tortured mind of Dr. Johnson secure; but neither

^TThe Hero in History, p. 20. i6k is there any impulse toward hero worship in one who could write: "I know not why any one but a school-boy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind."^® With the exception of the Jacobites, no ele­ ment of English political and intellectual life felt the kind of psy­ chological insecurity that can be converted into hero worship. And so with Hookas other two sources: Hogarth's engravings testify to the "personal and material limitations" of eighteenth-century English life; yet there is no evidence that any of the wretches of Hogarth's world had the slightest expectation of deliverance by a man of action, excepting, as always, the minority's faith in the Pretender. There was a certain "surrender of political interest," perhaps, to Walpole, a "professional politician" if there ever was one. Yet no sooner had the legend of Walpole's supreme competence begun to grow than it was qualified by another legend of his manipulations and his coarseness, his spurious greatness. He was too fallible a man, seen too closely by his age, ever to seem heroic even to those who thought him great.

But the causes of the eighteenth century's taste in human beings lie deeper than Hook's categories. The century's self-conscious excoriation of pride is one of many ideas which effectively prevented the flourishing of the tragic imagination. Its suspiciousness of

"enthusiasm" is another. For whatever reasons, it is difficult for

^^Boswell's Life of Johnson,, ed. Hill and Powell (Oxford, 193*0> I, 311. 165 an age to see history as both comedy and tragedy although the materials for comedy and tragedy are always there. For Herbert

Muller in the twentieth century, history is always unmistakably ilQ high tragedy. ' But for the eighteenth century, it was, more often than not, comic, despite all the hatred and destruction of the preceding century, despite all the party strife of its own. In that 50 spirit of play that Huizinga finds so characteristic of the century,

Arbuthnot, in his History of John Bull, finds international rela­ tions of the preceding half-century to be irrepressibly comic, although all the hubris and hamaytia, all the grandeur and inadequacy necessary for tragedy are there, in the events and characters. For

Swift, history is comic in the Tale of a Tub and dozens of references in Gulliver1s Travels. If the capsule history of Pope's Third

Epistle of An Essay on Man is not comic as a whole, it contains lines that attempt to reduce great areas of history to the ludicrous:

"For forms of government let fools contest;/ Whate'er is best admini­ stered is best if For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight;/ His can't be wrong whose life is in the right." And finally, there is potential tragedy in the relation between the history of civil insti­ tutions and public morality, but for Mandeville such a study is comic.

For Fielding too, history was more often than not comic, its actors most intelligible when viewed through a mellow kind of laughter. In

^9The Uses of the Past, pp. 24-25.

^H o m o Ludens (London, 19^9 ), pp. 163, 183-89 . 166

"A Journey from This World to the Next," the point of view again and again is the valet's, the purpose being to cut historical figures down to size. And the many mock histories that enliven his periodical essays induce laughter both at historiographic ineptitude and at the hollow pomposities of history itself.

The eighteenth-century historical imagination, then, operated within certain rhetorical, historiographic, and temperamental limita­

tions of the heroic in history and within an historical perspective

in which none of the sources of hero worship existed in any signifi­

cant degree. Sidney Hook notes that the age of Roman history most

attractive to Gibbon is Rome's most unheroic, most stable, most

uneventful period.-^ Elsewhere I have repeated the familiar charge

that Hume measures history against the norm of eighteenth-century

gentility and stability. And Fielding, who does not always reflect

the dominant thought of his time, in this case not only reflects the

distrust of his age for the hero but effects a kind of incarnation of

this anti-heroic state of mind. Fielding, to be sure, is limited by

the same unacknowledged premises of the Zeitgeist that limited the

historians and imaginative writers generally. But to account for

Fielding's anti-heroics in this way is to minimize his conscious

choice. It is in part because he consciously distrusts an heroic

mentality in historians, in part because he distrusts the action of

^ The Hero in History, p. l6l. 167 the hero upon history, that he disapproves of the heroic and deliher-

.«XJ ately rejects the hero for the chief figures of his novels.

The theme of greatness appears again and again in Fielding's works. It is stated in every form and every mode that Fielding used, but never more forcefully than in the first chapter of Jonathan

Wild:

But before we enter on this great work we must endeavor to remove some errors of opinion which mankind have, by the disingenuity of writers, contracted for these, from their fear of contradicting the obsolete and absurd doc­ trines of a set of simple fellows, called, in derision, sages and philosophers, have endeavored, as much as possible, to confound the ideas of greatness and goodness; whereas no two things can possibly be more distinct from each other, for greatness consists in bringing all manner of mischief on mankind, and goodness in removing it from them. It seems therefore very unlikely that the same person should possess them both; and yet nothing is more usual with writers, who find many instances of greatness in their favorite hero, than to make him a compliment of goodness into the bargain; and this, without considering that by such means they destroy the great per­ fection called uniformity of character. In the histories of Alexander and Caesar we are frequently, and indeed impertinently, reminded of their benevo­ lence and generosity, of their clemency and kind­ ness. When the former had with fire and sword overrun a vast empire, had destroyed the lives of an immense number of innocent wretches, had scattered ruin and desolation like a whirlwind, we are told, as an example of his clemency, that he did not but the throat of an old woman, and ravish her daughters, but was content with only undoing them. And when the mighty Caesar, with wonderful greatness of mind, had destroyed the liberties of his country, and with all the means of fraud and force had placed himself at the head 168

of his equals, had corrupted and enslaved the greatest people whom the sun ever saw, we are reminded, as an evidence of his generosity, of largesses to his followers and tools, by whose means he had accomplished his purpose, and by whose assistance he was to establish it.5

In The Champion the idea of false greatness receives its earliest expression.

In like Manner, it hath been well proved, and is, I think of itself sufficiently clear, that there is no real Honour in over-running, con­ quering, and destroying Nations. Yet the Names of such as have accomplished these Exploits, are not only reverenced and honoured in their own Times, but transmitted down with all the Marks of Honour to Posterity; and we see few who have Capacity or Resolution enough to strip them of those Titles, to which they have not the least Claim.53

Even the plays contain incidental animadversions on heroes. The poem

"Of True Greatness" contains a lucid scheme in which all kinds of spurious greatness are contrasted with greatness of mind and heart.5^

And Fielding's last journalistic venture, the Covent-Garden Journal, contains abundant examples of his anti-heroic attitude.

In the passage from Jonathan Wild which I have quoted above, the moral and historical attitudes toward the hero are joined, as they often are in Fielding. The passage is by way of insisting that the action of the hero in literature must not be detached from the

^Henley, II, 2-3. 53The Champion, I, 19-20.

5**The poem appears in Henley, V. Henry Knight Miller comments use­ fully on the poem in Essays on Fielding's Miscellanies, pp. k2-^k. 169

action of the hero in life. Heroes in life, that is in history, have consequences, and these consequences Fielding disapproves of.

To pretend that a literary hero can exert causal force which is morally benign is to write fiction contradictory to the accumulated experience of history.

But if it is clear that principal characters in Fielding's

novels arise in part ou-t of a view of history that judges the hero

as morally culpable, it'is not at all clear what such heroes should be called. Frye remarks how difficult it is to apply the term

"hero" to central characters in low mimetic w o rks.^ And in this

sense I have suggested that Fielding's characters had better not be

called heroes. Although the mock-heroic mode in Fielding is / properly enough called "anti-heroic," Fielding's characters are not

anti-heroes in the usual signification of the word. They are not

opposed to a hostile society in the manner of the picaro, nor are

they lacking any "faith in efficient action.It helps rather

little to call them "new kinds of heroes," as David Daiches does.*^

55Anatomy of Criticism, p. 3^* eg "In the end, what distinguishes the anti-hero from the traditional protagonist is his lack of faith in efficient action, or his defeat on terms not of his own choosing..., or his submission to outrage, fail­ ure, ridicule, and alienation, in fact to victimization, with conscious purpose or unwitting assent...." Ihab Hassan, "The Anti-Hero in Modern British and American Fiction," in Comparative Literature: Pro­ ceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Assn. (Chapel Hill, N. C., 1959), I, 315-l6.

57r"lhe Possibilities of Heroism," American Scholar, XXV (Winter 170

They are creations for which the history of ideas and the generic taxonomy of literary criticism have no very satisfactory names.

One approach, however, which helps to locate them in the spectrum

of heroic modes is that of Americo Castro. "The epic-chivalric hero,"

he writes, "could not question the meaning of his heroic life, as

does Don Quixote.... The character of a tale, from Achilles to

Gargantua, could not discuss seriously, and from his authentic con­

science, the meaning and goal of his existence; the character was not

aware of teing a person, for he was placed there, solidly, to be a noble or grotesque figure."'’® Characters in Fielding, I have argued,

are more introspective than they are often taken to be. But what

they lack in the kind of questioning which Castro finds in Don Quixote

is more than made up for in Fielding's ironic view of them. It is an

ironic view that permits him, for example, to pretend that Lady Booby

is the heroine of Joseph Andrews and to discuss her heroic qualifica­

tions with all apparent seriousness. (3 0 ) Or it is an irony that

permits him to pretend, as late as Book XVII, that Tom is a "rogue,

whom we have unfortunately made our hero." (TJ, V, 248)

Hazlitt records his reaction to the characters in Tom Jones, a

reaction that one need not share to sympathize with.

1955-56), 96.

58"Incarnation in Don Quixote," in Cervantes Across the Centuries, ed. Angel Flores and M. J. Benardette (New York, 1947), p. 151. 171

The moral of this book has been objected to, ■without much reason; but a more serious objec­ tion has been made to the want of refinement and elegance in its two principal characters. We never feel this objection, indeed, while we are reading the book: but at other times, we have something like a lurking suspicion that Jones was but an awkward fellow, and Sophia a pretty simpleton. I do not know how to account for this effect, unless it is that Fielding's constantly assuring us of the beauty of his hero, and the good sense of his heroine, at last produces a distrust of both.59

’ "The want of refinement and elegance"— the words say more about

Hazlitt's world than about Fielding's. Still, HazlittVs response

to Fielding's characters is appropriate, if for the wrong reasons. 60 Fielding, with his celebrated ambivalence, is able to love Tom

and Sophia, to embody in them the moral values which he approves of,

and at the same time without contradicting his affection for them 61 to be amused at their expense. It is a mode neither heroic nor

^The English Comic Writers, VI, ll4.

6°See my note 35, this chapter, on the concept of "double irony."

^Hiore than on any other critical point, readers of Fielding dis­ agree on the extent to which he endorses his characters. Heartfree is positive goodness, argues one camp; another argues that he is passive goodness, inadequate in an actively evil world; and a third camp replies that Heartfree is, and is intended to be, a fool. Most readers find Joseph wholesome and ingenuous; against this idea, Dick Taylor, Jr. argues that as the novel progresses he becomes a figure of dignity and stature. /^Joseph as Hero in Joseph Andrews,11 Tulane Studies in English, VII (1957)> 91-10.27 so it goes. A full documentation of these judgments would include most of the Fielding bibliography. These running arguments, however, are not at all pointless though it is unlikely that they can be resolved; deciding on a character's value is a way, perhaps the best way, of getting at the meaning of a novel. But they are symptomatic of the splendid confusion induced by a mind 172 anti-heroic but somewhere between a mode that is quite different from the low mimetic, say, of Defoe, growing, as Fielding's mode does, out of a hatred for the hero in history and a love for man.

which, like the mind which Scott Fitzgerald admired, could "hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." CHAPTER IV

HOW THINGS ARE AND HOW THINGS WERE: HISTORICAL CHANGE AND

THE MEANING OF HISTORY

I

"Historical-mindedness is so much a preconception of modern thought," writes Carl Becker, "that we can identify a particular thing only by pointing to the various things it successively was before it became that particular thing which it will presently cease to be." Insofar as fiction, say, of the last century and a half reflects modern thought, the reader of novels expects a concern in the authors he reads with origins and continuity, permanence and change. This concern may appear only implicitly in the novel, as it does in Jane Austen, or it may be explicitly worked out, as it is in Galsworthy. But the novelist, whatever his method, is obliged to ask of the fictional world he has created, of its ways of doing things, its people, its institutions: Where did it all come from? Is it the same or better or worse than what has gone before? And what

•*The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth -Century Philosophers (New Haven, 1932), p. 19*

173 17^ are the likely consequences, in time, of the "world of the novel?

It goes "without saying that any novelist is limited In his view of the past and the present hy the intellectual possibilities of his age. But by most twentieth-century accounts the philo­ sophical perspective of the eighteenth century limited its historical imagination almost to the point of debility. According to much recent opinion, all eighteenth-century historical thought shows only a very limited sense of continuity and innovation, permanence and change, the present as the organic evolution of the past, the discrete integrity and worth of periods of history different from the writer's own. A. 0. Lovejoy, for example, demonstrates the limitations imposed upon eighteenth-century historiography by its own uniformitarianism, a habit of mind that pervaded historical 2 thought until Herder. R. H. Stromberg finds the age's ideas of cause inadequate to the historiographic tasks which it undertook; and he points out the unfortunate dichotomy which the age tended to widen and emphasize between antiquarian research and broad, obviously utilitarian history, an artificial distinction which tended to pro­ 's mote dilletantism in the advocates of both emphases. Carl Becker shows how the pursuit of enlightenment provided the ideological

2"Herder and the Enlightenment Philosophy of History," in Essays in the History of Ideas (New York, 1955), PP» 166-182.

^"History in the Eighteenth Century," JHI, XII (1951), 3OO-3O3 . 175 basis for the hatred which the eighteenth century felt for most of the history it recreated, history, unavoidably, of ages less enlightened than its own.^ Herbert Butterfield shows that much of eighteenth- century history is Whig History, the embodiment of a tendency "to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present."5

For Nicholas Berdyaev the mind of the enlightenment (a category which includes the thought of the eighteenth century though it is broader than the period alone) "denies the 'historical' all specific reality and contact with the human spirit and the human reason."^

And so it goes, with only an occasional dissenting voice, such as

Cassirer's, insisting that if the eighteenth century's sense of the past was as myopic as the usual charge puts it, then one abviously has a hard time accounting for the accomplishment of Gibbon.^ There is justice in Cassirer's rebuttal, for the age was hardly so histor­ ically limited as the indictments against it would make it seem. Few institutions of eighteenth-century England went without investigation

2l The Heavenly City, pp. 71-118*

^The Whig Interpretation of History (London, 1951), p. v.

^The Meaning of History, trans. George Reavey (London, 1936), p. 19.

^The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F. 0. A. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove (Princeton, 1951), pp. 197 ff* 176 and challenge— the church, the nobility, the judiciary system, the monarchy itself— , a challenge almost always based, at least osten­ sibly, upon historical principles. No age before the eighteenth century had been so aware of the relation between what men believed \ and what happened in history. No age before the eighteenth century had been so aware of the relation between men's psychological nature and what happened in history. No age before the eighteenth century had been so passionately devoted to the ideal of historical synthesis: the idea of universal history is frequently expressed in all kinds of contexts, sometimes with an almost reverential awe. And finally, despite all the lip service paid to utilitarian and didactic aims, the age was capable of great efforts of dispassionate inquiry into the past for no other reason than the wish to find out what another age was like.

Yet there is truth in the indictments too. It is as easy to damn the period out of its own mouth as out of its twentieth-century critics1. Shenstone, in an example representative of a widespread conviction, writes:

The passion for antiquity, as such, seems in some measure opposite to taste for beauty and perfection. It is rather the foible of a lazy and pusillanimous disposition, looking back and resting with pleasure on the steps by which we have arrived thus far, than the bold and enterprising spirit of a genius.

8 Men and Manners, ed. Havelock Ellis (Boston, 1928), pp. 95-6, 177

It is, finally, impossible to deny certain serious limitations of the eighteenth century’s historical imagination; and it would be foolish to suppose that these limitations did not impose themselves upon novelists.

Georg Lukacs has described the limitations of the eighteenth century's historical imagination as these limitations shape the fiction of the period.

The great realistic novel of the eighteenth century, which in its portrayal of contemporary morals and psychology, accomplished a revolu­ tionary breakthrough to reality for world liter­ ature is not concerned to show its characters as belonging to any concrete time. The contem­ porary world is portrayed with unusual plasticity and truth-to-life, but it is accepted naively as something given: whence and how it has devel­ oped have not yet become problems for the writer. This abstractness in the portrayal of historical time also affects the portrayal of historical place. Thus Lesage is able to transfer his highly truthful pictures of the France of his day to Spain and still feel quite at ease. Similarly, Swift, Voltaire and even Diderot set their satirical novels in a 'never and nowhere' which nevertheless faithfully reflects the essen­ tial characteristics of contemporary England and France. These writers, then, grasp the salient features of their world with a bold and penetrating realism. But they do not see the specific quali­ ties of their own age historically.°

Lukacs finds Fielding somewhat more aware of the fictional use of historical particularity than other eighteenth-century novelists.

Still, as Lukacs suggests, Fielding does not escape his age, nor

% h e Historical Novel, trans. H. and S. Mitchell (London, 19&2), p. 19. 178 does Lukacs find him to any great extent an exception to the general

condition which he outlines.

Fielding, in fact, splendidly exemplifies his age in certain ways. He was abundantly interested and informed in history; he

reasoned out his political pamphlets on historical grounds; he

speculated imaginatively about the true personalities of the actors

of history; he ruminated about the meaning of history. But, like

the historians of his time, he could write about past and present without either an awareness or a concern about the nature of

historical change. A passage from The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon

illustrates Fielding's conviction that, though the past may be

important, a sense of continuity from past to present often is not.

"There are indeed," he writes, "two different ways of tracing all

things, used by the historian and the antiquary; these are upwards

and downwards. The former shows you how things are, and leaves to

others to discover when they began to be so. The latter shows you

how things were, and leaves their present existence to be examined by others. Hence the former is more useful, the latter more curious.

The former receives the thanks of mankind; the latter of that vaiu- 10 able part, the virtuosi." A passage like this one is grounds for

assuming that Fielding's historical anecdotes, his thoughts on

history, and the events in his novels, events which, I have argued,

10Henley, XVI, 20k. 179

are meant to have a quasi-hlstorical status, are cut off from the

continuity in -which they occur, presented as detached exempla in the

continuous hut largely uniform stream of history. But to Fielding

and many of his contemporaries, some things change and some do not.

Some of those things that change are worth writing about and some

are not. And the elusive mind of Fielding provides its own incon­

sistencies with the already inconsistent thought of his age.

It is convenient, in considering Fielding’s historical imagina­

tion, to make three arbitrary categories from the whole of experience,

timeless categories, so to speak, separating three broad areas in

which men of all ages have, in varying degrees, found change worth

remarking. First of all, inanimate things may change rather little—

Stonehenge and St. Paul's, a pound note and a British musket, Parson

Adams' crabstick and Sophia's muff but they acquire a past which

the observer may or may not see in them. They are preceded and

succeeded by things of their own kind, and thus, besides their own

. past, they have an historical locus. Furniture is "period" furniture

(to choose a twentieth-century phrase) either on grounds of its own

"pastness" or on grounds of its historically identifiable design. And

thus things, in fiction, may be rendered with a sense of their own

past, sometimes, indeed, so intensely that they become in fact actors

in the novel, as the things, for example, in James's The Spoils of

Poynton are rendered. Or they may, of course, be regarded by the

novelist as stage properties. In the second place, institutions, 180 social conventions, and political orders change in time. To the observer these changes may be irrelevant. It is sometimes possible to sympathize with the impatience of many of the keenest minds of the eighteenth century with antiquarian research regarding, say, the remote history of numismatics. The history of early Norman coinages has little to do with the economics of eighteenth-century

England. Yet to the Whig imagination in the eighteenth century, the political changes associated with the Hanoverian succession touched most aspects of daily life. And in few other ages has there been

so heavy a sense of the continuity of social conventions. The writer of fiction, in the eighteenth century or in any age, can

ignore such changes in politics and institutions and manners if his fiction is remote enough, in the way, for example, that Aphra

Behn's fiction is remote. But these changes are the very heart of the closely observed fiction of the Richardson, Fanny Burney, Jane

Austen tradition. Third, people, both individually and collectively, change. It is possible to ignore many of these changes, as the eighteenth century tended to do, and to concentrate, instead, on what

is permanent and essential in human behavior. It is also possible to observe human change so closely that it becomes the main concern of the novelist. In dozens of nineteenth-century Bildungsromanen, the hero must change, wholly and essentially, or the novel fails.

Fielding's treatment of change in these three areas varies. And

his treatment of change varies from his fiction to his non-fictional l8l prose. Lukacs's statement that Fielding, in his fiction, accepts the world as "given" makes a useful starting point in considering his sense of the past. But such an account does not represent the whole of Fielding's considered opinions nor the subtlety of his fictional practice regarding historical continuity.

\ 11

The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon provides a way into Fielding's sense of the past and an access into the historical change in his fiction. Fielding in The Voyage to Lisbon speaks in his own voice, or in a voice as nearly his own as self-conscious literature ever permits. His observations are clear and leisured, seen in the mellow wisdom of his last year though they perhaps take on a certain dimen­ sion not present in Fielding's other writings because of the agonies of his dropsy and the likelihood that he imagined himself near death,

A passage near the beginning of the Journal deals with the past by mocking antiquarianism, mocking it, indeed, so effectively that the passage qualifies as ironic every apparently complimentary

11 For a full account of the biographical circumstances surrounding the Journal, see Cross, III, 1-51. 182 allusion to it that follows. When he first conceived writing a work on travel, Fielding tells us, he considered the possibility of

"enquiring into the antiquity of travelling." To this end, he planned to obtain the assistance of certain "right honourable societies," especially since such societies have endowed and encour­ aged works more curious than the one has has planned. But at length he is deterred by the discovery that a "young antiquarian, who from the most ancient record in the world,...one long preceding the date of the earliest modern collections, either of books or butterflies, none of which pretend to go beyond the flood, shews us, that the first man was a traveller, and that he and his family were scarce settled in Paradise before they disliked their own home, and became passangers to another place.

Perhaps Fielding's single most revealing comment is in a para­ graph describing his lodgings at Ryde.

For my own part, I make little doubt that this apartment was an ancient temple, built with the materials of a wreck, and, probably, dedicated to Neptune in honour of THE BLESSING sent by him to the inhabitants, such blessings having, in all ages, been very common to them. The timber employed in it confirms this opinion, being such as is seldom used by any but ship­ builders. I do not find, indeed, any mention of this matter in Hearn; but, perhaps its antiquity was too modern to deserve his notice. Certain it is, that this island of Wight was not an early convert to Christianity; nay, there is some reason to doubt whether it was ever entirely converted. But I have only time

^Henley, XVI, 202-3- 183

to touch slightly on things of this kind, which, luckily for us, we have a society whose peculiar profession it is to discuss and develope.13

Beyond a certain point, describing contrary attitudes in Fielding as

"double irony" becomes a way of making excuses, becomes a way of finding generosity of spirit and consistency of intellect where these do not exist. The above passage, that is, is strangely contradictory:

Fielding is genuinely curious about the "pastness" of the lodgings in which he finds himself but ironically scornful of the Society of

Antiquaries and their efforts to find answers to the very questions he poses; he genuinely wishes he had found the answer to a question in Hearn, but in the very same paragraph he dismisses Hearn and his fellow antiquarians with a transparently ironic gesture of praise.

The passage, in short, suggests in Fielding a spontaneous and thoughtful curiosity about the historicity of things together with a certain hostility toward contemporary efforts to give an account of just such historicity.

These two strains of curiosity toward the antiquity of things and hostility toward antiquarianism recur often throughout the

Journal. For example, Fielding writes:

Again, as many marks of want abounded every­ where, so were the marks of antiquity visible. Scarce anything was to be seen which had not some scar upon it, made by the hand of time; not an utensil, it was manifest, had been pur­ chased within a dozen years last past....

^Henley, X7I, 230-31. •^Henley, XVI, 233-3^. 18b

The motive, it should be noted, in this observation is not at all a pleasure in the "pastness" of the things observed but a reaction

to the appalling poverty by which the marks of the past are unavoid­

ably preserved. Fielding's historical curiosity is sincere and

compelling as the work ends. Of Lisbon itself, he writes:

As the houses, convents, churches, &c. are large, and all built with white stone, they look very beautiful at a distance; but as you approach nearer, and find them to want every kind of ornament, all idea of beauty vanishes at once. While I was surveying the prospect of this city, which bears so little resemblance to any other that I have ever seen, a reflec­ tion occurred to me, that if a man was suddenly to be removed from Palmyra hither, and should take a view of no other city, in how glorious a light would the ancient architecture appear to him? and what desolation and destruction of arts and sciences would he conclude had happenedbetween the several aeras of these cities? ^

Fielding's interest in the historicity of things, as shown in

The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, is exceeded in frequency, erudition, and spontaneity by his curiosity regarding the historicity of institu­ tions. There is scarcely a single one of Fielding's long succession

of pamphlets which does not contain some survey of legal or institu­ tional history. The Crisis begins by construing a text from Revela­ tion historically, specifically to mean that "Babylon owed her 1 ^ Destruction to the Prostitution and Corruption of her Citizens."

15Henley, XVI, 282. n The Crisis: A Sermon (London, 17^1), P* 185

A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain begins with a brief history of Stuart power, a contrast between French tyranny and English freedom, and a capsule survey of popery around the world. Another historical contrast between Stuart tyranny and Hanoverian freedom begins A Proper Answer to a Late Scurrilous Libel. A Charge Deliv­ ered to the Grand Jury begins with a review of the establishment of the grand jury system. In addition, for each vice that Fielding condemns he finds historical precedent for condemning it. An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers contains reflections on the development of the English constitution, the rise of trade, and the punishment of crime. A Plan of the Universal Register Office rests on the premise that it is the function of society to use fully the diversity of talents which it has available, that no society has ever fulfilled these ends, and that these ends are capable, in history, of being fulfilled. Finally, A Proposal for Making an Effectual

Provision for the Poor traces the relation between the welfare of a state and the welfare of all its members; and a specific concern with the welfare of the poor in England is traced from the time of Queen

Elizabeth. Fielding, it is clear, thought about immediate political

questions in terms of the preceding hundred years of British history; he thought about legal questions in terms of precedent and historical cause and effect; and he thought about social questions in terms of historical inadequacy and potentiality. It should be added that his responsiveness toward the history of manners and institutions is

qualified in the same way as his responsiveness toward the history of 186 things. Again and again in his journalistic writings Fielding con­ structs a mock institutional history; for example in one of the

Covent-Garden Journal essays he shows that Grub-Street dullness has existed ever since Greece and in another he traces, with punctili­ ous care, the antiquity of the mob.3^ The double joke, of course, is both upon Grub Street and the mob and upon the antiquarian mind that finds in their historical continuity a legitimate subject for inquiry.

The question of whether characters change in Fielding's fiction should be preceded by the question of whether Fielding's view of man in time admits the possibility of change. It is not an easy question to answer with one so unsystematic in his historical thought as Fielding. For that matter, the question is not easily answered of Fielding's age. In general, eighteenth-century historians felt no obligation to affirm or deny the possibility of essential change in the actors of history; their ideas on change are likely to be implicit in their historiography itself.

In all of his historical observations, Fielding's emphasis, when he writes of historical characters, is upon their fixed essence.

Historical characters are good or bad, malicious or benevolent; they are never seen in the process of becoming good or bad. Like the historians of his time, Fielding was limited by both the complex of

17I, 229-31; II, 2 2 -2 6 . 187

ideas embraced in the term uniformitarianism and by the preferences

of his age for an external approach to history, two qualities which

tended to prevent eighteenth-century historians from asking whether

a man who was distinguished in history for his malice may once have been benign. But an even more fundamental reason for the compara-

tively static nature of eighteenth-century historical psychology

is stated by R. G. Collingwood. "What prevented eighteenth-century

history from becoming scientific," he writes, "was an unnoticed

felic of substantialism implicit in the Enlightenment's quest for 1 ft a science of human nature." Earlier, in describing Tacitus,

Collingwood enlarges on the "substantialism" which he finds latent

in Enlightenment historiography:

Furneaux pointed out long ago that when Tacitus•* describes the way in which the character of a man like Tiberius broke down beneath the strain of empire, he represents the process not as a change in the structure or conformation of a personality but as the revelation of features in it which had hitherto been hypocritically concealed. Why does Tacitus so misrepresent facts? Is it simply out of spite, in order to blacken the characters of the men whom he has cast for the part of villains? Is it in pur­ suance of a theatrical purpose, to hold up awful examples to point his moral and adorn his tale? Not at all. It is because the idea of development in a character, an idea so familiar to ourselves, is to him a metaphysical impossi­ bility. A 'character' is an agent, not an action; actions come and go, but the 'characters' (as we call them), the agents from whom they proceed, are substances, and therefore eternal and unchanging. Features in the character of a Tiberius or a Nero

■ \

•^The Idea of History (New York, 1958), p. 82. 188

which only appeared comparatively late in life must have been there all the time. A good man cannot become bad. A man who shows himself bad when old must have been equally bad when young, and his vices concealed by hypocrisy.1^

"A good man cannot become bad," writes Collingwood, and the phrase

immediately suggests, to the reader of Fielding, the sentence from the dedicatory epistle to Tom Jones: "It is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good." (ill, 12) If we take

Fielding's statement of intention strictly, we must assume that he found personal human change in the sense of a realization of potentialities quite conceivable, but that he found a radical

alteration of character not inconceivable but highly unlikely.

Moreover, the function of the historian as the remover of the mask which conceals the true personality of the actors of history,

a function suggested in Collingwood's account of substantialism, is

one that fascinated Fielding. In another connection I have quoted

from the Champion the following passage on the revelations of history,

a passage that is worth quoting again for the affinity that it shows

toward the substantialistic view of history.

It may, I believe, be affirmed that the Gener­ ality of Mankind, (I mean such as are at all acquainted with History) know much more of former Times than their own. Most of us may be considered like the Spectator of one of Mr. Rich's Enter­ tainments; we see Things only in the Light in which that truly ingenious and Learned Enteftainmatic

X9P. kk. 189

Author is pleased to exhibit them, without per­ ceiving the several Strings, Wires, Clock-work, &c. which conduct the Machine; and thus we are diverted with the Sights of Serpents, Dragons and Armies, whereas indeed those Objects are no other than pieces of stuff'd Cloth, painted Wood, and Hobby-Horses, as such of his particular Friends as are admitted behind the Scenes, with­ out any Danger of interrupting Movements, very well know.

In the same Manner we are deceived in the Grand Pantomimes played on the Stage of Life, where there is often no less Difference between Appear­ ance and Reality....

It is History which strips off the Mask, and shews things in their true Light; but this is not written, or at least publish'd, 'till the ensuing Age, and for the Good of Posterity.^

In short, the evidence is incomplete; but there is every reason to believe that a complex of ideas roughly similar to Collingwood's

account of substantialism underlay Fielding's view of the actors

of history, and there is no reason to believe that he differed

significantly from his age in the extent to which he found personal

change in history a significant and believable phenomenon.

The question, finally, of whether cultures and countries change

from age to age is the fundamental question of philosophy of history

in the doctrinaire sense of the phrase. As I shall show, Fielding's

response to this question is unusual, perhaps even unique, in his

time. But for evidence that Fielding both admitted the possibility

of cultural change and found it engaging to his imagination, an early

20II, 127-29. 190 issue of the Champion gives testimony.

Different Ages, as veil as Nations, distin­ guish themselves by certain Characteristics from each other. Fashions are as peculiar to a particular Age, as Customs are to a particular Country. The coarsest Observer must take Notice of the Differences in Building, Furniture, Dress, Equipage, and others of this Kind; but a more delicate Eye may carry the Speculation much farther, may perceive on a very short Consider­ ation, somevhat of this Characteristic in our Minds, and vill, I believe, see sufficient Reason to conclude, that ve think, as veil as act by Fashion.

This I apprehend to be meant by Historians and Critics, vhen they distinguish several Ages by certain Characteristical Epithets, as Learned Age, Devout Age, Marial Age, Inquisitive Age, Dark Age, &c. to vhich likevise seems to allude, that Expression vhich frequently occurs in Polemical vriters, viz. This is a Way of Thinking in Fashion at that time

With the same play of the ironic and the serious that he is so abundantly capable of, Fielding continues, finding charity the chief characteristic of the present age, a notion vhich he iron­ ically demolishes. As he is so often fond of doing, Fielding thus speculates on a subject of immediate and legitimate concern to him, in this case hov his ovn age differs from any other, but at the same time indicates the limits of the inquiry by stating the hasty and ill-formed conclusions vhich the inquiry, hovever fundamentally legitimate it may be, is capable of evoking.

2 1 I, 27b. 191

III

This peculiar background of attitudes toward historical change that I have suggested, a background of interests and hostilities, perceptiveness and limitation, affected profoundly the kind of fiction that Fielding wrote. Things, first of all, are almost totally devoid of a sense of the past. Both Joseph Andrews and

Tom Jones begin in great houses. Yet none of the furnishings of the houses, furnishings that must in another age have evoked a reverential awe, elicit comment from Fielding. Squire Allworthy's estate, to be sure, is described in one of the grand set-pieces of

Tom Jones. "The Gothic style of building could produce nothing nobler than Mr. Allworthy's house. There was an air of grandeur in it that struck you with awe, and rivalled the beauties of the best Grecian architecture; and it was as commodious within as vener­ able without." (111,26) The prospect from the house reveals a gushing spring, broken stones, meadows, woods, wild mountains, and a ruined abbey. But the description ends with a paragraph so delightfully flippant as to suggest that the reader has been taken in by an exercise in what the eighteenth century called "the false sublime" and that it is now time to get back to the business of the novel.

Reader, take care. I have unadvisedly led thee to the top of as high a hill as Mr. Allworthy's,. and how to get thee down without breaking thy neck 192

I do not veil know. However, let us e'en venture to slide down together; for Miss Bridget rings, her bell, and Mr. Allworthy is summoned to break­ fast, where I must attend, and, if you please, shall be glad of your company, (ill, 28 )

None of the inns on the road in either Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, most of which must be old and curious, evoke a similar description;

and in both novels, when travelers arrive in London they are unim­ pressed with the sense of history in public buildings, with the

"pastness" of great churches, with the grandeur and often the decay

of the houses of London. There is a difference, for Fielding's

travelers, between the country and London; but it is a difference "

in manners and morals, and it has nothing to do with the past.

If Fielding's curiosity regarding the historicity of things,

as expressed in The Voyage to Lisbon, is genuine, then the absence

of comment on the origins and continuity of things in the novels

can hardly be the result of an intellectual myopia, a state of mind

in which, as Lukacs suggests, "the contemporary world...is accepted

naively as something given." It is not that Fielding is incapable

of seeing the past in the material objects that make up a part of

the life he portrays or that he is insensitive to it. It is rather

that he finds it irrelevant to his concerns as a novelist, just as

he found antiquarianism irrelevant to his central concerns as a

human being. 193

This principle of generic appropriateness is even more obvious

in the case of institutions and manners. The continuity of institu­

tions is sometimes worth an excursion by Fielding as narrator. "Man­

kind have always taken great delight in knowing and descanting on the

actions of other," he writes in Tom Jones, going on to describe barber shops in contemporary England, (ill, 7^-75) But it is plain

that this excursion is just that, a piece of narratorical chit-chat,

incidental to the main business of the novel. Elsewhere a speculation

ends with the antiquarian conclusion: "And hence, perhaps, proceeds

the phrase of seconding an argument or a motion, and the great

consequence this is of in all assemblies of public debate. Hence,

likewise, probably it is, that in our courts of law we often hear a

learned gentleman (generally a sergeant) repeating for an hour together

what another learned gentleman, who spoke just before him, had been

saying." But again, the remarks, which are tongue-in-cheek anyhow,

are dismissed as irrelevant to the action: "Instead of accounting for

this, we shall proceed in our usual manner to exemplify it in the

conduct of the lad above mentioned,..." (IV, 3^1) The difference in

manner between, say, Squire Western and Lord_ Fellamar is a difference

that depends in part upon the tradition and historical antecedents of

each way of life. But these traditions are either understood to

Fielding and his readers or are inconsequential to a novelist and an

audience for whom rural coarseness and urban foppishness are simply

variations of human nature, not end products of certain long tendencies

in social history. - -■* 19k

Blackstone's Commentaries (1765-9) provide a useful reference

point for these perplexing variations in the usefulness of the past.

Of Blackstone's motives, Daniel J. Boorstin -writes:

From the uniformity of man's nature and the constancy of God's purpose arises the uni­ formity of the laws of nature vhich makes * relevant all information about the past of English law and the analogous institutions of ancient Rome and the distant kingdom of Whiddah. It would be impossible to conceive of a country or an epoch whose experience could not illuminate these eternal, universal laws. Blackstone inevitably appealed to history. But, it is important to notice that the very concept of the uniformity of nature, and of the possibility of a science of human nature, which stimulated him to this interest in history led him to an attitude which seeined to ignore the importance of time and place. Men like Blackstone were interested in the past because its lessons were indistinguishable from those of the present. Past and present were merged into Man as the single object of study.^

Blackstone and Fielding are not exactly contemporary, to be sure, nor

are their minds entirely similar. Nevertheless, Boorstin's analysis

indicates how a mind in some ways like Fielding's could find history

endlessly useful in the illumination of man and man's institutions without finding history necessary for explanation. For a Fielding who

was concerned about the disposition of the poor and the prevention of

crime, history could illuminate the mistakes and the wisdom of past

laws in dealing with the uniformities of poverty and crime, arrogance

22The Mysterious Science of the Law (Cambridge, Mass., 194l), p. 47. 195 and greed. But if the object of study -were man directly, human nature in all its diversity and its uniformity, then history could only duplicate the lessons of the present. What was the point of showing that Lord Fellamar was the end product of several generations of frivolous and arrogant nobility? If it is possible to observe Lord

Fellamar directly, as it is in Tom Jones, then his frivolity and arrogance need no accounting for beyond the immediate facts that he is rich, powerful, and idle. He is a particular species of human being, like a good many others of his class past and present; to demonstrate his frivolity and arrogance historically would be only redundant. And an historical examination of, say, courtship and marriage in Tom's world or the laws concerning debt in Booth's would be, however relevant to a different genre and purpose, irrelevant to works whose subject is human nature.

But, if the nouveau riche and the old are not worth separating in Fielding's world, if a member of the landed gentry who has succeeded to an estate held by an unbroken line of a dozen forebears does not differ significantly in manners from another member of the landed gentry who has come into his estate within a generation, still the historical sanction of "the'way things are done” carries a heavy, if implicit, emphasis in Fielding's novels. For all his direct experience of poverty and misfortune, for all his indignation with 196 irresponsible power, his temperament was conservative.^3 Much of the plot of Joseph Andrews turn on the variations in the relation­ ship between lady and footman, a situation capable of much comic action and ironic moralizing because it is a situation in which the relationship is fixed by a long social sanction. The plot of Tom

Jones, as Ian Watt points out, is finally a vindication of the class pli system.And even Amelia, motivated in large part by the desire for reform, still carries a heavy sense of propriety in "the way things are done." George Sherburn compares Amelia to Johnson's

Life of Savage and his letter to Chesterfield, Smollett's Roderick

Random, and Goldsmith's Enquiry. These indictments of a corrupt aristocracy are deeply felt, but there is a danger, writes Sherburn, in taking them to mean more than they do. "It consequently is wise

% o aspect of eighteenth-century intellectual life is more per­ plexing to the twentieth-century mind than the political. It is a field in which the facile generalizations of Macaulay and the Whig historians of the nineteenth century are only now being overcome. The best revaluation of eighteenth-century politics is Donald J. Greene's The Politics of Samuel Johnson (New Haven, i960). But the revaluation which Greene's book exemplifies is so new that no general study embraces the sometimes noble, sometimes opportunistic Whig politics of Fielding. His allegiances have been widely treated biographically; and George Sherburn has commented usefully on Fidlding's conservatism in "Fielding's Social Outlook," PQ, XXXV (1956), 1-23. But the relation between Fielding's politics and his human, moral values remains to be treated in anything like the depth which Greene provides for Johnson.

2^The Rise of the Novel, p. 270. 197 to realize that none of these authors was an intentional or conscious revolutionary: they were practically all of them thorough conserva­ tives of the best sort, who wrote with a desire to reform the aristoc­ racy and thus to make the world safe for what we now call the ancien regime.„25

On the question of whether characters change in Fielding there is no general agreement. Ian Watt thus describes Fielding's method:

Fielding's primary objectives in the portrayal of character are clear but limited: to assign them to their proper category by giving as few diagnostic features as are necessary for the task. Such was his conception of 'invention1 or 'crea­ tion': 'a quick and sagacious penetration into the true essence of all the objects of our contem­ plation.' This meant in practice that once the individual had been appropriately labelled the author's only remaining duty was to see that he continued to speak and act consistently.... Parson Supple must never cease to be supple.2°

Aurelion Digeon writes:

The movement of the action ^in Amelia/ is replaced by the evolution of the characters; Amelia and Booth are, in the end, far from being what they were at the beginning.27

George Sherburn describes Booth's lack of faith and his weakness of moral courage, continuing thus:

It was the psychological and moral task of the novel to rescue Booth from this mental state.

25"Fielding's Amelia: An Interpretation," p. 157-

2^The Rise of: the Novel, p. 271.

2?The Novels of Henry Fielding (London, 1925), p. 206. 198

Obviously a change of character is necessary, hut neither Fielding nor his contemporaries had any modern technique for such portrayal. In Tom Jones there is some improvement in Tom's prudence alleged at the end of the novel as due to the ripening effects of experience and age. Booth, however, is no hoy, and supernatural intervention seems almost essential. And so, during Booth's last incarceration he reads Dr. Barrow's sermons in proof of the Christian religion, and is quite suddenly convinced of his errors. Little is done by way of direct preparation for this conversion, which, however, seems requisite to the plot from the very beginning from the moment, in fact, when the parallel to Claudian's state is g i v e n . 28

John S. Coolidge describes in this way the operation of the Horatian principle of "conservation of character":

Writing a novel, Fielding can supply the 'charac­ ter' of each person from his omniscient point of view, and he almost invariably does so on the person's first appearance. From that point on his task is to keep each person acting in a way which can be deduced from that original idea of him....

This literary principle of character presenta­ tion corresponds to the philosophical conviction that the essential reality of a person is a cer­ tain idea which is his nature and to which he has a kind of duty to conform.^9

And John Butt, finally, writes:

In Amelia, as in Tom Jones, Fielding infers that at the end of the book the hero is in some respects an altered man, without persuading us of the fact.

^"Fielding's Amelia: An Interpretation," p. 151.

29"Fielding and 'Conservation of Character,'" in Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays, p. 160. 199

Dickens was the first novelist to succeed in such persuasion and George Eliot the first to specialize in showing the modifying effect of incident upon character. These Victorian successes have made demands which the modern reader is inclined to impose both upon earlier novelists and earlier dramatists without perhaps reflecting whether changes in character are altogether necessary or always important.

Out of this conflicting testimony several generalizations

can be extracted: l) characters in Fielding's novels do not change, because Fielding's literary practice is informed by a primitive psychology; 2) characters in Fielding's novels do not change, because underlying Fielding's method vas/a critical-philosophical position which denied the possibility of change; 3 ) characters in

Fielding's novels do not change, or at least do not convince us that they have changed, because Fielding lacked the technical resources to show such change; 4) characters in Fielding's novels, at least

some of them, do change; 5) characters in Fielding's novels do not change, but it really doesn't matter that they do not. In order to examine these propositions, it is first necessary to make a rough

separation of the characters into major and minor. Minor function­

aries certainly do not change in Fielding's novels. Parson Supple

is, indeed, always supple. For that matter, functionaries do not

change in anybody's novels. For if sufficient attention were devoted to them to convince the reader that they change, they would cease

•^Fielding, p. 26. 200 to be functionaries. But even Allworthy, certainly no minor charac­ ter, is static. And there is no doubt that, as Coolidge suggests,

Fielding tends to introduce most of the persons of his fiction with

"characters" and then to work out their further action in some sort of consistency with this initial "character." (Coolidge's phrase

"to keep each person acting in a way which can be deduced from that original idea of him" seems to me to state the matter in over-rigid, over-intellectualized terms.) But it is not exactly to the point to ask whether Parson Supple changes; it is only slightly more to the point to ask whether Allworthy changes; and not much is solved by pointing out that Fielding's narrative method is conducive to the maintenance of a considerable consistency in the presentation of characters. The question of whether or not Tom changes still remains.

Obviously Fielding thinks Tom changes. The successive scenes of

Tom's resolutions to Allworthy followed by Tom and Sophia before the mirror are certainly calculated to show a Tom who is repentant, experienced, and prudent. And Fielding's assurances in the last chapter that Tom has been a devoted and constant husband since pro­ vide additional evidence that Fielding, at least, is convinced. It should be added that the experience and the prudence of Tom make possible a comic resolution, the reconciliation of Tom and society.

If the plot of the novel has only succeeded in removing obstacles to Tom's marriage to Sophia, then Fielding has not shown that "it is much easier to make good men wise, than to make bad men good." For 201 the reader who is unconvinced of any change in Tom, for whom Tom is doomed to continue as he has "been, a fundamentally good hut impulsive and imprudent young man, the novel lacks both a satisfactory comic resolution and a certain measure of moral significance.

But I have already suggested an affinity between Fielding's view

of the characters in history and his fictional technique, an histor­

ical view dominated by "substantialism." Change in persons is a metaphysical impossibility for Tacitus; but obviously it is not to

Fielding. It is an "unnoticed relic" of substantialism that Colling- wood charges Fielding's century with perpetuating, not necessarily

the metaphysical underpinnings of substantialism. Fielding, in other words, like Hume in his History, emphasizes the disparity between is

and seems, not the disparity between was and ijs. Eighteenth-century

history, and Fielding's pseudo-history, proceeds on the assumption

that most men are fond of feigning. The perceptive observer in life will learn to distinguish essence from disguise, as Fielding tells us

in his essay on "The Knowledge of the Characters of Men."

But however cunning the disguise be which a masquerad­ er wears; however foreign to his age, degree, or cir­ cumstance, yet if closely attended to, he very rarely escapes the discovery of an accurate observer; for Nature, which unwillingly submits to the imposture, is ever endeavouring to peep forth and show herself; nor can the cardinal, the friar, or the judge, long conceal the sot, the gamester,. or the rake.

In the same manner will those disguises, which are worn on the greater stage, generally vanish, or prove ineffectual to impose the assumed for the real 202

character upon us, if we employ sufficient diligence and attention in the scrutiny.31

And the perceptive historian will regard his purpose as the unmasking of the actors of history, as Fielding tells us in the passage from

■32 The Champion which I have quoted above. This emphasis upon the process of unmasking is not a denial of the possibility of individual human change; it is simply a subordination of change to the more important problem: the perception of essences. Square's deathbed repentance is a device of Fielding's denouement; it is Tom's discovery of him in Molly's bedroom that matters. And whether

Black George ever repents doesn't matter to Fielding at all.33

31Henley, XIV, 2 8 3 .

3^pp. 188-89, this chapter.

33Mark Spilka /^Comic Resolution in Fielding's Joseph Andrews," in Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays7 describes the iiheme of nakedness in Joseph Andrews'! '‘Fanny, Joseph, Adams, Lady Booby, Mrs. Slipslop, Beau Didapper, Betty the chambermaid, Mr. Tow-wouse— all appear at one time or another and for various reasons, in a state of partial or complete undress." (p. 6 2 ) "With regard to affectation," Spilka comments, "Fielding's theory of the ridiculous fits in well with our 'nakedness' theme. Affectations are 'put on,' and it is the humorist's job (or more properly the satirist's) to'strip them off.' This much Fielding knew by rote from his earliest published work, a poem against masquerades, to his attack on masquerades in his last novel, Amelia: take off the mask, remove the outer pretense, and expose the 'bare facts' which lie beneath--vanity, hypocrisy, smugness." (p. 6 3 ) It is not only essential evil which is left when the mask is stripped away, Spilka argues, but often essential goodness. Fanny faints and Adams, in going to her rescue, loses his Aeschylus in the fire. The Aeschylus, symbolic of his pedantry and his reliance upon literature as a guide, is "stripped away" revealing his natural good­ ness . 203

In one way, then, characters in Fielding tend to be static because of a preoccupation with the disguises men assume. In a second way characters in Fielding tend to be static because of

Fielding's belief in a system of more-or-less fixed predispositions which govern human conduct. In "The Knowledge of the Characters of

Men," he writes:

Those who predicate of man in general, that he is an animal of this or that disposition, seem to me not sufficiently to have studied human nature; for that immense variety of characters, so appar­ ent in men even of the same climate, religion, and education, which gives the poet a sufficient licence, as I apprehend, for saying that, "Man differs more from man, than man from beast," could hardly exist unless the distinction had some original foundation in nature itself....

This original difference will, I think, alone account for that very early and strong inclination to good and evil, which distinguishes different dispositions in children, in their first infancy; in the most uninformed savages, who can have thought to have altered their nature by no rules, nor art­ fully acquired habits; and lastly, in persons, who, from the same education, &c., might be thought to have directed nature the same way; yet, among all these, there subsists, as I have before hinted, so manifest and extreme a difference of inclination or character, that almost obliges us, I think, to ack­ nowledge some unacquired, original distinction, in the nature and soul of one man, from that of another.3^

Character development in Fielding is thus best regarded as an interplay between mask and essence on the one hand and potentiality and realization on the other. Both of these emphases tend to subordinate

3^Henley, XIV, 281-2. 20k the possibility of essential change. But, although the substantial­ ism which is the historical antecedent for this view of character denies change, neither eighteenth-century historiographic practice nor Fielding's fictional technique precludes the possibility of human change. To return to the postulates of Fielding's critics, certain characters in Fielding's novels do change if by change is meant the realization of sometimes complex and subtle potentialities; characters also change if by change is meant their revelation as being essentially persons they have successfully concealed. If by change is meant the essential alteration of characters by the pressure of events into persons whom they never seemed capable of being, in the way, say, that Dorthea Brooke is essentially different at the end of Middleroarch from what she was at the beginning, then characters in Fielding do not change. Tom is potentially prudent, Booth potentially stable. No doubt the philosophy and psychology that informs this comparatively static treatment of character is primitive.

But the sophistication of the eighteenth century's view of character is quite beside the point. It is the peculiar fate of most comic characters, in the twentieth century as well as the eighteenth, to reveal themselves by fulfilling and failing to fulfill potentialities that are fairly obvious from their first presentation and by suffering an unmasking at the hands of their author. Thus characters in Evelyn

Waugh seldom change; they become what they potentially are, beneath their disguises. For Fielding a long historiographic tradition 205 based on a worn-out metaphysic together with a superficial psychology provided a basis for the creation of characters whose comic strength lies partly in their very rigidity. Great comic aitt since Fielding, whatever its informing ideas, has seldom found the means for changing characters without dissipating their comic force.

In novels, certainly in comic novels, one seldom expects to find an intense concentration upon the ways that people, collectively, change in time. Nevertheless Tom Jones contains an early example of what can be called, for lack of a better name, the Eip Van

Winkle archetype. "It has often struck me," says Tom to the Man of the Hill,

"as the most wonderful thing I ever read of in history, that so soon after this convincing exper­ ience which brought our whole nation to join so unanimously in expelling King James, for the preservation of our religion and liberties, there should be a party among us mad enough to desire the placing his family again on the throne."-- "You are not in earnest!" answered the old man; "there can be no such party. As bad an opinion as I have of mankind, I cannot believe them infatu­ ated to such a degree. There may be some hot­ headed Papists led by their priests to engage in this desperate cause, and think it a holy war; but that Protestants, that are members of the Church of England, should be such apostates, such felos de se, I cannot believe it; no, no, young man, unacquainted as I am with what has passed in the world for these last thirty years, I cannot be so imposed upon as to credit so foolish a tale; but I see you have a mind tq,sport with my ignorance." "Can it be possible," replied Jones, "that you have lived so much out of the world as not to know that during that time there have been two rebellions in favour of the son of King James, one of which is now actually raging in the very heart of the 206

kingdom." At these words the old gentleman started up, and, in a most solemn tone of voice, conjured Jones, by his Maker, to tell him if what he said was really true; which the other as solemnly affirming, he walked several turns about the room in a profound silence, then cried, then laughed, and at last fell down on his knees, and blessed God, in a loud thanksgiving prayer, for having delivered him from all society with human nature, which could be capable of such monstrous extravagances. (IV, 1^3-M-)

The image of an old man awakening to changes which he cannot believe engages the modern imagination so strongly that scarcely a year goes by without a popular journalistic account of a hill-country recluse who is unaware of any president since Coolidge or a Japanese infan­ tryman on a remote island who does not know that the war is over. It is an image arising out of the awe, dread perhaps, that modern man feels for the pressure and rapidity of change. For Fielding, as for twentieth-century man, the comfortable conviction that certain aspects of human nature are constant is upset by the reflection that the passage of thirty years could easily-, make the world and its inhabitants all but incomprehensible.

IV

Every age answers the question, What does history mean? in its own ways. But no other age offers answers more diverse and complex than the eighteenth centuryv The idea of progress was held by men of stature and. intellect, as was the idea of decline. The idea that in the eighteenth century could be found a set of norms against which to measure deficiencies in the civilization of preceding ages was widely believed, as wap the idea that the eighteenth century presented a panorama of unexampled corruption and decadence. What is more re­ markable than this diversity is the fact that, as Boorstin shows of

Blackstone and as Lois Whitney shows of Shaftesbury and a number of lesser writers, both of these extreme and apparently contradictory views of the meaning of history were often held at the same time by the same m e n . 35 And what is more, they were often held at the same time that these writers believed in the uniformity of human nature, a position that seems to deny the possibility of significant human change. A writer who puzzled about the meaning of history in the eighteenth century was faced with a full spectrum of possibilities as well as a confusing inconsistency within the positions even of the individual proponents themselves.

Within the range of eighteenth-century philosophies of history there are two complementary aspects which it is profitable to separate the geometry and the teleology of history. History is seen, first of all, to cohere in such a way as to present the appearance of a shape—

35Boorstin, The Mysterious Science of the Law, passim; Lois Whitney, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, 1935), passim. ~ 208 a curve, a series of curves, a spiral, an ascending or a descending line, a straight line with a few scarcely discernible wavers. Apart from such an exception as B a y l e , 3 6 the century was nearly unanimous in its conviction that history coheres, that history is going some­ where, that events stand in a relation to each other that can be imagined in linear terms. The second aspect of philosophy of history is described by Karl Lowith:

It is not by chance that we use the words "meaning" and "purpose" interchangeably, for it is mainly purpose which constitutes meaning for us. The meaning of all things that are what they are, not by nature, but because they have been created either by God or by man, depends on purpose. A chair has its meaning of being a "chairy in the fact that it indicates something beyond its material nature: the purpose of being used as a seat. This purpose, however, exists only for us who manufacture and use such things. And since a chair or a house or a town or a B-29 is a means to the end or purpose of man, the purpose is not inherent in, but tran­ scends, the thing. If we abstract from a chair its transcendent purpose, it becomes a meaningless combination of pieces of wood.

The same is true in regard to the formal structure of the meaning of history. History, too, is meaning­ ful only by indicating some transcendent purpose beyond the actual facts.37

^Cassirer /The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, p. 206J writes: "It is no accident that- he chose for his critical work the form of a Historical and Critical Dictionary. For the dictionary allows the spirit of mere co-ordination to prevail by contrast with the spirit of subordination that dominates the rational systems. In Bayle there is no hierarchy of concepts, no deductive derivation of one concept from another, but rather a simple aggregation of materials, each of which is as significant as any other and shares with it an equal claim to complete and exhaustive treatment."

^Meaning in History (Chicago, 19^9), p. 5 . 209

Thus eighteenth-century historical thought inevitably involves such concepts as God and nature and happiness.

These are the possibilities of imagining history in linear terms

•which were available to the eighteenth-century mind. The idea of progress, as G. H. Hildebrand defines it, includes three principles:

"first, the belief that history follows a continuous, necessary, and orderly course; second, the belief that this course is the effect of a regularly operating causal law; and, third, the belief that the course of change has brought and will continue to bring improvement in the condition of mankind.It is an idea more systematically and fervently expressed in eighteenth-century France than in eighteenth- century England. But to the English Whig temperament of the first half of the century, the securing of personal liberties in the Revolu­ tion and the rise of trade together with the inescapable contract between the gentility of the present and the barbarism of the past--- all of these point to a future delightful to contemplate. And by the second half of the century, Priestly was addressing posterity with the same kind of breathless adoration as Condorcet and Diderot.^ It should be added that an emotional rather than an intellectual assent

^ The Idea of Progress, ed. F. J. Teggart, revised by George H. Hildebrand (Berkeley, 19^9), p. 4.

^Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philoso­ phers; attitudes toward the future, including the habit of addressing posterity, are discussed in Becker’s chapter "The Uses of Posterity," pp. 119 -1 6 8 . 210

0 to the idea of progress was possible for a mind like Bume's. His empirical, anti-rationalist view of history allowed for the possi­ bility of both progress and decay blit confirmed neither.^® Yet he

endorses the values qf civilization as these values are .everywhere

obvious in eighteenth-century England and as they are just as obvious­

ly absent in most of history.

Lois Whitney defines a second possibility, "cultural primitiv­

ism" :

Common to J_all forms of cultural primitivism/ is the conviction that'the time— whatever time may, for a given writer, be in question-— is out of joint; that what is wrong with it is due to an abnormal complexity and sophistication in the life of civilized man, to the pathological multiplicity and emulativeness of his desires and the oppressive over-abundance of his belongings, and to the fac­ titiousness add want of inner spontaneity of his emotions; that "art," the work of man, has corrupted "nature," that is, man's own nature; and that the model of the normal individual life and the normal social order, or at least a nearer approximation to it, is to be found among contemporary "savage" peoples, whether or not it be supposed to have been realized in the life of primeval man. :^

Primitivism implies decline. But it is also possible to see decline

^This aspect of Hume's historical thought is discussed in Mossner's "An Apology for David Hume, Historian," p. 66k.

V xiv. Primitivism is properly divided into cultural and chronological primitivism, but since cultural primitivism tends to be by far the prevailing form in the eighteenth century, I have simplified my discussion by omitting the other. The locus classicus for definitions of the forms of primitivism is A. 0 Lovejoy and George Boas, Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity (Baltimore, 1935). 211 in history without positing a culture, either imagined or actual,

in which primitive and consequently "natural" virtues inhere. The time is out of joint, goes such an argument, but not by reference to primitive culture but by reference to immutable standards of truth

and reason. It is a view of history sometimes largely aesthetic, a

conviction that the arts have declined from a particular high point

in h istory,^ but more often moral, a conviction that as luxury

increases integrity decreases and the possibility of a moral, rational

society becomes less and less attainable. The shape of this view of history is sometimes cyclical, sometimes only vaguely downward, from no particular point in space and time; it is a view of history that,

for lack of a better name, can be called "anti-progressivism." It was subscribed to in various ways by Clarendon, Temple, Warton, Gold­

smith, and Swift. And despite the lack of clarity in the position and

the diversity of its proponents, it is clear enough that a man like

Temple was in no sense a primitivist. And thus it is useful to dis­

tinguish these two quite different views of historical decline. *

A fourth way of seeing the shape of history is expressed by

Voltaire. Along with a progressivist strain in Voltaire's historical

thought there appears again and again the familiar principle of

uniformitarianism. Voltaire believed in a better world in the future

^ s e e John D. Scheffer, "The Idea of Decline in Literature and the Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century England," MP, XXXIV (1936), pp. 155-178. 212 and he deplored the bigotry and oppression of the past. But ultimately history coheres, for Voltaire, not as a movement to or from anything, not an ascending or a descending line, but a horizontal one. Coher­ ence in history is a corrolary of the assumption that men, in all times and places, are the same, that only customs vary.

"Nature" is obviously the chief teleological category in eighteenth-century historical thought. The concept of "nature," in all its rich and usually unacknowledged ambiguity, supported all four of the philosophies sketched above: the progressivist'.s view of posterity is the attainment, at last, of-man's natural condition; the primitivist's view of the present is the perversion of the natural condition of simpler cultures; the anti-progressivist's view of. all history, especially the present, is the perversion of man's ideal, hence natural, condition; and the uniformitarian's view of history is of the mass of accretions that surround the basic and uniform nature of man. "Natural," to be sure, means something rather different in each of these four contexts. And "nature," too, is quite different for Mandeville, who saw self-interest as the natural condition of historical progress,, and for Shaftesbury, who found in individual man and in history a natural impulse to benevolence and amicable associa­ tion . ^

^3por a wide-ranging account of "nature" in eighteenth-century thought see Basil Willey, The Eighteenth Century Background (London, 19±*0). See also a brief but useful note on the relation between primitivism and "nature" in Lovejoy and Boas, Primitivism and Related Ideas, pp. Pope begins the fourth epistle to the Essay on Man with this invocation:

Oh Happiness! our being’s end and aim! Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! What e ’er thy name....

Where, he goes on to ask, can happiness be found? in lust? in indo­ lence?

Take Nature's path, and mad Opinion's leave, , . All states can reach it, and all heads conceive....

Thus, to be natural is to be happy. And consequently a movement in history to or from, "the natural" is unavoidably a movement to or from a kind of collective happiness. Nature, to be sure, is often a self- sufficient teleological category in eighteenth-century thought. For

Shaftesbury a largely benevolent view of history needs no further justification than the assumption that man is naturally benevolent, that., left to his own impulses, he will build a world that is a kind of extension of his moral sense. But more often, the historical tele­ ology of the century involved, as in Pope, an assignment of purpose to history so that happiness complements the idea of nature. '

Still another teleological category in eighteenth-century histor­ ical thought, one by no means exclusive of either of those above, is

11-19-

^Twickenham Edition, III, i, ed. Maynard Mack (London, 1950), 128- 30. llG 'See Paul Hazard, European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, trans. J. Lewis May (London, 1 9 5 M > Chapter II, for a survey of the idea of happiness in eighteenth-century European thought. 2lb the historical correlary of the cosmology which Lovejoy identifies b6 as "the temporalizing of the Great Chain of Being." The static continuum which made up the Great Chain was increasingly, as the century progressed, imagined not as having been realized in a single creative act but as being realized in a continuing creation. The idea that every possible gradation in the universe exists from the divine to the lowest orders of life encountered difficulties both logical and moral, the most patent of which was that the continuum contained gaps. But plenitude, the cosmological ideal of the "full­ ness" of nature, rather than being abandoned, was simply extended in time. From such a view of the cosmos, it follows that stratification is inevitable; in fact the moral and intellectual and physical diversity of man is to be celebrated, just as the universe is a better one f,dr containing ants, elephants, and all that lie between. But there are gaps in the gradations in society, inequities, inefficiencies, misapplied efforts, wasted talents. There are too many aspirants for one level in society, none for another. The best of societies is the fullest in that the gaps are filled, the diversity of talents put to use: in a word, Mandeville's buzzing hive. And just as a creative plenitude is the divine plan for the cosmos, a social plenitude is the divinely ordained plan for history.

i l 6 “ The Great Chain of Being, pp. 2^2-287. 215

Finally there is the perplexing question of God's will in history for the eighteenth-century imagination, God's will in the tradition­ ally orthodox sense. The classic expression of divine teleology is

Augustine's, a view of history described by Karl LBwith in this way:

To a man like Augustine all our talk about progress, crisis, and world order would have seemed insignificant; for, from the Christian point of view, there is only one progress: the advance toward an ever sharper distinction between faith and unbelief, Christ and Anti­ christ; there are only two crises of real significance: Eden and Calvary; and there is only one world order: the divine dispensation, whereas the history of in an endless variety

Certainly Augustinian history survived in the eighteenth century; indeed it survives in the twentieth. But it received remarkably little attention, perhaps remarkably little credence, from the large number of divines who attained prominence. Their concerns were elsewhere.

As Basil Willey remarks, the legacy of the seventeenth century to the eighteenth was not a solid body of faith but a vigorous mass 48 of controversy. Most eighteenth-century Christian apologetics show a basic orthodoxy on the defensive, desperately pruning the excrescences from its doctrine, part of a movement, as Paul Hazard describes it, "European in scope and aiming at freeing religion

^ Meaning in History, p. 172.

^®The Eighteenth Century Background; see Willey's first chapter for a brilliant summary of religion in the period. 216 from the accretions which had accumulated about it, and at presenting a creed so liberal in doctrine that no one in future could accuse it of obscurantism, so transparently clear in its moral teaching that 1|Q no one henceforth could deny its practical efficiency." 7

Warburton is a representative English figure of this movement, a divine, by the way, much admired by Fielding.-’® In his View of

Lord Bolingbroke1s Philosophy he quotes Bolingbroke with unfeigned horror:

"It is MADNESS, or something WORSE than madness, for Divines to imagine themselves able to comprehend a whole Oeconomy of divine Wisdom from Adam down to Christ. And yet this is so customary, that not only the learned and ingenious, but every dabbler in Theology, who must pass for a fool or a knave whenever he grows extravagant, affects to reason in the same manner."51

But, as Warburton proceeds with his defense, it is clear that it is not so much a systematically Christian theology, including a syste­ matically Christian view of history, that he is defending but rather his integrity and that of his coreligionists. His defense lacks the

^European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, pp. 86-87.

^®TJ, XIII, i: "Open thy Maeonian and thy Mantuan coffers, with whatever else includes thy philosophic, thy poetic, and thy histori­ cal treasures, whether with Greek or Roman characters thou hast chosen to inscribe the ponderous chests: give me a while that key to all thy treasures, which to thy Warburton thou hast intrusted." (Henley, V, 3*0

View of Lord Bolingbroke1s Philosophy in Four Letters to a Friend (London, 175*0, P* 12* ~ 217 grace and wit of eighteenth-century controversy at its best; and it lacks the kind of solemn piety that could enable him to wave

Bolingbroke aside as a poor fool. The key words in Warburton's book are "God's moral attributes," "God's wisdom and power,"

"expectation of a future state," and "the historical authenticity of the scriptures." And the stages through which the argument usually moves are: what Bolingbroke says, followed, perhaps, by what Dr.

Clarke says, followed by what Toland says, followed by what Warburton makes of it all. This combination of circumstances then, the need for a point-by-point refutation, the spirit of controversy without the grace to avoid bombast, the constant awareness of a body of published controversy surrounding every point these conspire to destroy any possibility of the mystical vision of the omnipresence of God in history. It should be added that Warburton's defense of

Pope's Essay on Man in which he pronounces it "a Justification of

Providence against the impious Objections, of Atheistical Men," however generous a gesture to a poet who never meant to undermine orthodoxy, is a splendid example of the concession which faith was able to make to accommodate itself to good sense.in short, Augustinian history was a view of man in time available to the eighteenth century. But

52warburton on Pope is quoted in A. W. Evans' Warburton and the Warburtonians (London, 1932), p. 7 6 . Evans' book is a useful commen­ tary on the whole of Warburton's career, especially noteworthy because Evans is one of the few twentieth-century scholars with any sympathy for either Warburtonfs intellect or his temperament. 218 such a view thrives as a superstructure, built upon a solid, unques­ tioned faith; a divine who must spend his angry days and nights beating off the Deists and the Hobbists, the "libertines and the

Atheists^' is in no position to contemplate the Civitas Dei, nor are the followers who are nourished on his polemics.

V

The second number of the Covent-Garden Journal contains an example of Fielding's complex and involuted irony in an essay that

is representative of his response to the possibilities of philosophy

of history that I have summarized above.

It hath been, I believe, a common Practice with Men, in all Ages, to complain of the Badness of their own Times, and as readily to commend the Goodness and Virtue of their Fore-fathers. So that it is easy to fix on several AEras in History, which have been the Subject of equal Satire and Panegyric. Succeeding Ages have sung forth the Praises of certain Periods of Time, and have reComr mended them as Examples to Posterity; which yet, if we believe the Historians, as well as Satyrists, who lived in those very Periods, abounded with all Kinds of Vice and Iniquity.

The present Age, notwithstanding its Improvement as well as Virtue, as in Art and Science, doth not escape from this censorious Disposition; with all the Reason which we have to set a Value on ourselves, in Preference to so many other Ages and Countries, there are still some few at this very Time, and in this very Nation, who would persuade us, that Virtue, Taste, Learning, indeed, every Thing worthy of Commendation, were never at a lower Ebb than they are at present among us. 219

Fielding disagrees with this low valuation of the present. It is unfair, he says, to compare ancient heroes with modern depravity.

What about Sodom and Gomorrah? the Corinthians? Nero? /

So far the essay is a sober, straightforward argument against a superficial anti-progressivism; there is no reason to suspect that it is anything but a genuine, un-ironic presentation of Fielding's con­ viction that history shows no decline at all, only examples of good and bad in every age. But he continues.

And now surely it must be acknowledged, that we do not live in the worst of Times; but I will not be contented with this Concession. I will now attempt to prove, that we live in the best, in other Words, that this is one of the most Virtuous Ages, that hath ever appeared in the World.

Freedom of expression is nearly universal, he argues; but he proceeds to undercut his assertion by heavy qualification. Charity abounds; otherwise there would not be beggars at every door. Merit in the arts and sciences is rewarded, not by singling out a few but by spreading sixpence among the many. Public spirit runs high; indeed everybody wants to serve the public. Great men confer favors; but so as to avoid suspicion of partiality, these great men choose for the recip­ ients of their favors England's greatest boobs.53 ' ^

Fielding's essay is a magnificent example of the ironic art of which he was master, the rhetoric of leading the reader by the nose

53q g J, I, 139-1^. 220 only to encourage him to fall on his face. Still, if' anti-progressivism is demolished by argument and a limited kind of progressivism is demolished by irony, Fielding would seem to be without a position of his own. And in a sense he is.

Fielding's poem "Of True Greatness" contains these lines:

To you! who in this Gothic leaden age, When wit is banished from the press and stage, When fools to greater folly make pretence, And those who have it seem ashamed of sense;5^

The lines are certainly, in part, a foil to set off the brilliance of Codington, the poem's subject. Nevertheless Fielding was in a position to feel deeply the decline of dramatic art, the irrespon­ sibility of patrons, the dullness of journalism, and, consequently, the decline of wit and imagination in his own times. But in "A

Proper Answer to a Late Scurrilous Libel," he argues that civil and religious liberties exist under the Hanovers. Taxes, to be sure, are higher; but the responsibilities of government are greater now; and in any case high taxes are the result of Jacobite agitation, not of a decline in the efficiency of government.55 jn his Enquiry into the

Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers he writes:

The "introduction,.of trade".. .hath indeed given a new face to the whole nation, hath in great meas­ ure subverted the former state of affairs, and hath ' almost totally changed the manners, customs, and

•^Henley, XII, 23k.

55genley, XV, 358. 221

habits of the people, more especially of the lower sort. The narrowness of their fortune is changed into wealth; the simplicity of their manners into craft; their frugality into luxury; their humility into pride; and their subjection into equality.

The philosopher, perhaps, will think this a bad exchange....

But the politician finds many emoluments to com­ pensate all the moral evils introduced by trade, by which the grandeur and power of the nation is carried to a pitch that it could never otherwise have reached; arts and sciences are improved, and human life is embellished with every ornament, and furnished with every comfort, which it is cap­ able of tasting.5°

Actually both are right, says Fielding, although what each man mini­ mizes is certainly as real as what he emphasizes. The politician must not overlook the moral effects of increased luxury. Finally, in A Dialogue Between a Gentleman of London, Agent for Two Court

Candidates, and an Honest Alderman of the Country Party, Fielding's gentleman, the vehicle for Fielding's own politics, says: "Indeed, to speak a bold political Truth, some Degree of Corruption always hath attended, and always will attesnd a rich and flourishing

Nation."57

What this series of historical evaluations adds up to is an avoidance of attributing a pattern to history. If the growth of luxury leads to moral laxness, Fielding resolutely argues away the

56Henley, XIII, Ik,

57(London, 174-7), p. 48. 222 conclusion that history shows decline. If the Hanoverian monarchs rule incomparably better than the Stuarts did, then no conclusion about the course of history is justified; all that one can say is that the former are more generous, more honorable, more responsive to public opinion and sensitive to traditional British liberties than the Stuarts were. In fact, when a view of the present in relation to the past is pushed into a doctrinaire formula in

Fielding's works, it is always put into the mouth either of an ironic persona or a character whom neither we nor Fielding need endorse. For example, in one of the letters which Fielding wrote v. for his sister's Familiar Letters, Valentine writes to David Simple:

"...there is a strict analogy between taste and morals of an age; and depravity in the one always induces depravity in the other."

From this formula, Valentine deduces that morality in his own time has sunk to the lowest state of any "age or nation."5® Clearly it is

Valentine who speaks, not Fielding. And in an issue of The True

Patriot, a letter appears from "Gravis" which asks how a nation jealous of liberty can sink so low.

The World in its original Constitution may be so framed ^Gravis writes in answer to his own ' question/, the Minds of Men so temper'd and all Things so tied or chained together, what whether Vice or Virtue most prevails, Rewards or Punish­ ments may ensure according to the Operations of Nature: I will not say that it is most probably so always; and by this Means apparent Inconsist­ encies may be reconcil'd, and all Nations suffer

58Henley, XVI, 28 -9 . 223

alike, according to their Degree of Vice. But this does not exclude the Hand of God. For as Nature first operated "by Almighty Direction, so neither can she continue her Operations without Almighty Permission....

If a Nation is immers'd in Sloth, or eaten up by Luxury, its Neighbors will pilage and harrass it, and the more Sloth, Luxury, and other Vices prevail, the more will it bear, and the longer will the People be in opening their Eyes. Do not these Vices then cause the Nation's Afflictions? Are they not the Foundation of all its Evils? Most certainly; since the suffering these Evils is a Consequence of its Vice; whereas an indus­ trious, wise, virtuous, religious People, will always be above and secure from the Threats or Attempts of a tricking or treacherous Enemy.... All the Vices of the Age, I believe, may be resolved into Luxury and Avarice.59

The name of the ostensible author is perhaps clue enough that the letter is not fully endorsed by Fielding. But more important evidence is the fact that Gravis 1s formula runs contrary to the very purpose of The True Patriot: the successful resistance to the Jacobite uprising depends not upon the absence of luxury but upon a good supply of soldiers and the successful presentation of the worth of the

Hanoverian succession.

Fielding's incidental remarks in his fiction confirm the impression given by his non-fictional prose. Posterity is appealed to "For how­ ever short the period may be of my own performances, they will most probably outlive their own infirm authorJ and the weakly productions of his abuse contemporaries." (TJ, V, 2$k) but the references to

59#11, Tues., Jan. ik, 1746. 224 posterity are never in a context of progressive theory. In a chapter

on the hospitality of Allworthy, Fielding writes, "It is no wonder that

in an age when this kind of merit /ability to converse, judge, and

write/ is so little in fashion, and so slenderly provided for,

persons possessed of it should very eagerly flock to a place where

they were sure of being received with great complacence." (TJ, III,

47) But if the reader were to take this remark as a part of a

theory of historical decline, he would find, before he had finished

the novel, this paragraph:

There is not, indeed, a greater error than that which universally prevails among the vulgar, who, borrowing their opinion from some ingorant satir­ ists, have affixed the character of lewdness to these times. On the contrary, I am convinced there never was less of love intrigue carried on among persons of condition than now. Our present women have been taught by their mothers to fix their thoughts only on ambition and vanity, and to despise the pleasures of love as unworthy their regard; and being afterwards, by the care of such mothers, married without having husbands, they seem pretty well confirmed in the justness of those sentiments; whence they content themselves, for the dull remainder of life, with the pursuit of more innocent, but I am afraid more childish amusements, the bare mention of which would ill suit with the dignity of this history. In my humble opinion, the true characteristic of the present beau monde is rather folly than vice, and the only epithet which it deserves is that of frivolous. (TJ, V, 94-5)

On one conspicuous occasion, Fielding's skepticism is given

dramatic form in his fiction. It is in that chapter of Tom Jones in

which primitivism is hot an abstraction but a dramatically realized 225 episode: Tom and Partridge's meeting with the gypsies. The gypsies are happy, food is plentiful, they are wisely ruled, and they dis­ play the spontaneity and lack of affectation which doctrinaire primitivists found, or thought they found, in residents of the South

Sea Islands, in American Indians, and in the noble abstractions of the followers of Rousseau. Indeed, for a moment Fielding's histor­ ical imagination permits him a paragraph of nearly unadulterated primitivism.

And here we will mbke a concession, which would not perhaps have beeh expected from us, that no limited form of government is capable of rising to the same degree of perfection, or of producing the same benefits to society, with this. Mankind have never been so happy as when the greatest part of the then known world was under the dominion of a single master; and this state of their felicity continued during the reigns of*five successive princes. .This was the true era of the golden age, and the only golden age which ever had any exist­ ence, unless in the warm imaginations of the poets, from the expulsion from Eden down to this day. (V, .18-19)

Fielding's note, however, in which he explains "five successive princes" names "Nerva, Trajan, Adrian, and the two Antonini." And it becomes obvious that it is not noble savages that Fielding is Q writing about at all. He continues with a discussion of absolute monarchy, the only difficulty with it being that of "finding any man adequate to the office of an absolute monarch." Since most men desire power in order to do harm, the likelihood of finding a mon­ arch with sufficient moderation, wisdom, and goodness is rather small. "Nor can the example of the gypsies, though possibly they may 226 have long been happy under this form of government, be here urged; since we must remember the very material respect in which they differ from all other people, and to which perhaps this their happiness is entirely owing, namely, that they have no false honours amoung them, and that they look on shame as the most grievous punishment in the world." Thus what begins as an apparent endorsement of primitivism becomes a discussion of the' possibilities of absolutism. The happi-

* ness of the gypsies is not connected with some theoretical and remote point in time when all men were as unencumbered with civilization and as benignly governed as they; but it is connected with some of the most civilized days of Rome. And the near impossibility of finding a benign monarch together with the uniqueness of the gypsies obviates any possibility of connecting the episode to a theory in which the gypsies are symbolic of the primitive origins of man.

Thus it is that Fielding's view of the shape of history is that history has no shape. His position is not Bayle's. Contrary to

Bayle's position, history, for Fielding, coheres in endless and inter­ secting chains of cause and effect. And his position is not Hume's.

He is skeptical of doctrinaire philosophies of history not because of a philosophical incompatibility with a priori systems but on the grounds of a man of good sense who found life too complicated to permit such abstractions. And unlike Hume, Fielding loved the country too much to permit the satisfaction Hume found in the end product of English civil­ ization: its salons, its polish and grace. In short, few others, 227 perhaps no one else, in eighteenth-century intellectual life managed to maintain a keen interest in both history and philosophies of history, all with a conviction that history has something to say about the meaning of life, without attaching himself to the systematic belief that history is moving in a more-or-less orderly, more-or-less obvious direction.

Finally there is the peculiar relation of Fielding to the his­ torical teleology of his time. Like most of his contemporaries,

Fielding used the word "nature" in various ways. But for the sense in which he most often uses the word, the chapter title, "Containing matter rather natural than pleasing," is a representative example.

The matter of the chapter is the behavior of Thwackum, Square, and

Blifil at the time of Allworthy's illness, an illness which they suppose will end in death. Their behavior*is probable and it is consistent with their characters; hence it is "natural." To say that the gypsies are "natural" and civilized men are "unnatural" would be nonsense for Fielding. "The natural" is not, in the way that he most often uses the word, a quality which can be attached to a limited group of men or isolated at a particular point in time. It is simply a name given to the lawful operation of the physical uni­ verse and the reasonably lawful operation of human psychology, at all times and in all men.

The gypsy episode shows that Fielding found the idea of happi­ ness no frivolous goal. And his Christian orthodoxy must have given 228 him, at times, a vision of the kingdom of God on earth. But if, as I have argued, Fielding does not see history as either progressing or regressing, then happiness is a condition of a few fortunate men at a few fortunate times. And not once in all of his writings does

Fielding show the slightest interest or credence in the Augustinian philosophy of history.

In his vision of the "full" society, however, Fielding invests the cosmological plenitude of the Great Chain with a generous common sense, a concrete reality, and a deep feeling for his fellow human beings. In The True Patriot he argues:

I have often thought it one of the best Arguments to prove Man a Social Animal, that Nature hath severally endow'd us with Talents so different from each other. Men, indeed, in this Light, seem so regularly designed to form a Society, as the several Parts of a Machine to compose the whole.

These talents are justly proportioned by nature. Nearly everyone can labor, some can hold office, only a few can be lawgivers and poets.

Therefore the best society £s the one in which these talents are properly made to function. ' '

I believe no one will deny, but that sufficient Examples may be found in History of this disorderly and improper Collocation of the Members of a Com­ monwealth. And here the same Consequence will follow,, with this Difference only, that as the Public is not reduced, like the Machine above described, to a State of Rest, but still goes on in a violent, tho' an irregular Motion, it will, , by that Means, be in Danger of absolute Destruction.

60#8, Tues., Dec. 2k, 171*5 . 229

In A Proposal for the Effective Provision for the Poor, Fielding 4 writes:

From what I have here advanced it seems, I think, apparent that, among a civilized people, that polity is the hest established in which all the members, except such only as labour under any utter incapacity, are obliged to contribute a share to the strength and wealth of the public. Secondly, That a state is capable of this degree of perfection; and, consequently, that to effect this is the business of every wise and good legislature.

And in A Plan of the Universal Register Office, he writes:

If any Society ever hath been, or ever can be so regulated, that no Talent in any of its Members, which is capable of contributing to the general Good, should lie idle and unemployed, nor any of the Wants of its Members which are capable of Relief, should remain unrelieved, that Society might be said to have attained its utmost Perfection.62

This view of the good society appears again and again in Fielding's works. But it is a good society, however possible and however desirable, which is not seen as the end product of a lawful working out of history. There is nothing inevitable about the judicious use of the. talents in a society. It is a goal to be pursued in history, not one to be submitted to.

Fielding's philosophy of history, as I have described it, is unusual and perhaps unique in his time, which is reason enough for

6lHenley, XIII, 137.

^2 (London, 1752), p. U. 230 having described it. But his is a position which is more than interesting in itself; it is an attitude toward history of perva­ sive consequences for the mode of Fielding's fiction. Raymond

Aron describes a possible position toward history in modern thought.

And although the position which Aron describes is one which grows out of a century of episte^^pgical and historical thought which followed Fielding, the position— Aron calls it "history as devel­ opment" is relevant to Fielding's. "Instead of applying a rigid plan," writes Aron, "the historian happily sets out to discover all the singularities; he strives to recognize and understand them in themselves. Whereas the believer in progress subordinates and sacri­ fices, as it were, the past to the future, the philosopher of development is one with life and respects it, since each of its moments bears within itself its own raison d'etre*"^

VI

Aron's category suggests that the man without a philosophy of history, in the linear sense, can afford a pleasure in the contem­ plation of his own time that neither the progressivist nor the anti-progressivist can enjoy. Indeed, Aron's category suggests the

^ introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. George J. Irwin (London, 1961), p. 1^9 231 possibility of a range of literary inodes open to the writer who takes his philosophy of history seriously. For certain modes and genres are compatible with a sacrifice of the present to the past, some with a sacrifice of the past to the future, some are compatible with a despair of the present, and some with a celebration of it.

To a primitivist, two modes are likely to be most appealing. If

a writer's view of the world is shaped by the conviction that civil­

ization, with its complexity and affectation, represents man's decline from primitive simplicity and wisdom, then his most likely literary realizations of such views of life are either an exposure of the affectation, satire in other words, or an illumination of the pleasures of an existence in.which all choice is simplified, whether this exist­ ence is remote in time or not— in other words, romance. The Vicar of

Wakefield is a logical consequence of the primitivist strain in

Goldsmith's historical thought. It is symptomatic of a primitivist

strain in Shaftesbury's thought that he defends satire as a corrective

of excess. Thomas Da y ’s Sanford and Merton, with its contrast of

civilized guile and ingenuous purity, is emblematic of great areas of

Rousseauistic historical thought in eighteenth-century England. The

satiric rage of Thomson when he leaves his customary bucolic setting

to treat his immediate time and place is the natural realization of an

implicit primitivism; and Young's Gothic melancholia, in Night

Thoughts, is only one of his poetic modes, the other represented by

his satiric indignation against fashion and foppery in The Universal

Passion and his Imitations. 232

But it is to the anti-progressivist, for whom the world shows not only a decline from primitive simplicity but an awesome decay, that satire is the most effective mode. It is in part the strength

of the idea of historical decline, a decline not from primitive simplicity but from norms of reason and intelligence and honorable­ ness, that the strength of satire in the eighteenth century is

indebted. To the obvious example of Swift, one could add Pope. To be sure, much of eighteenth-century satire manages to catch the manner of Swift and Pope without sharing their historically based

indignation at the second-rate writers who receive first-rate praise, the second-rate politicians who administer, and the egregious fops who pretend to grace and polish. But without the power of Swift

and Pope it is unlikely that satire would have prospered so widely

as it did in the eighteenth century; and without their frequent con­ viction that mankind, in their own age, was decadent, the satire of

Swift and Pope would be only a kind of posturing. -

For the progressivist those modes are possible that permit allow­

ances, understanding, hope. How, after all, could Tennyson rage

against man for failing to be rational and honorable? The failures

of man and his world are real enough to the progressivist; and protest

is a legitimate mode. But if, by the operation of historical laws,

life is getting better, then satire becomes if not pointless at least

lacking in conviction. The writer in an age of progress directs his

indignation at "conditions," not at man. The progressivist may 233 celebrate his own world lyrically, or he may imaginatively investigate his own world with the analytical curiosity possible in prose fiction.

But if his own world is imperfect and evolving, he can hardly recon­ cile himself with it. And thus comedy, in the traditional sense of the genre as it‘evolves from ritual, is difficult for the progressiv­ ist and rarely successful in the nineteenth century.

Of course no mode is pure, few writers are philosophically con­ sistent, no philosophical position is quite so limiting to the writer as I have suggested, and few writers relate their experience to a \ comprehensive view of history. Still, a writer's idea of history is, however elusively, a powerful component in his total evaluation of experience. And for Fielding, to return to Aron's category, a con­ scious if unsystematic sorting out of philosophies of history resulting in a rejection of them all is in itself a philosophy of history, one that leads to an embracing of the present, and one that, in a writer, leads to the choice of a mode that permits such expression.

Northrop Frye repeatedly calls attention to the correspondence between Tom Jones and the mythic structure of comedy, especially "new 6U comedy." Tom's birth is mysterious; he is, though more fully developed than most comic heroes, a quintessentially ordinary man

(witness his name), and is contrasted against a broad range of

Anatomy of Criticism, p. 51* 23k ingenious and idiosyncratic characters who block his wisheshe is blocked, moreover, not only by one "heavy father" but by two;88 he believes he has violated his mother;87 and the plot brings him to a near catastrophe before the reversal sets him right again.88 Insofar as Tom Jones corresponds to the plotting and resolution of ritual comedy, it represents a repudiation of Blifilism, of course, but a repudiation, too, of Squire Westernism and, for that matter, Squire

Allworthy-ism. The mechanical, prohibitive, generally older charac­ ters give way to a younger character who, in the course of the work, has picked up some of the stability of the "blocking" characters without sacrificing his own vitality. And thus, however moral or intellectual the content of such comedy may be, its resolution is social. It is an affirmation of the possibilities^^ society as it is, a celebration of the values implicit in oneP's own time. Arid it is a mythic representation of the reconciled society open only to those writers who can envision the reconciled society in their own experience, which is to say those writers who are free, in one way or another-, of the tendentiousness of doctrinaire philosophy of history.

But besides being comic in the mythic sense, Fielding's novels are funny: they induce laughter in a way that comedy does not always

65p. 167. 88p. 172.

67p. 181. 68p. 178. 235 do. Ralph Piddington has built a theory upon a remark of Bergson's, that "our laughter is always the laughter of a group,"^9 which, if it does not account for the whole of human laughter— no treatise does that— , at least illuminates the kind of laughter which Fielding's mode of fiction evokes; The ludicrous, Piddington writes, requires first a situation demanding "conflicting evaluations"; second, "such evaluations must be social in character"; and third, the ludicrous must be comparatively devoid of any deep feeling. For "it is well known that the slightest arousal of fear, anger, or moral indig­ nation immediately inhibits and destroys our appreciation of the ludicrous."?0 "By laughing," he writes, "we adopt an attitude which from our infancy has expressed an attitude of complete satisfaction with things as they are; by adopting this attitude we inhibit any tendency to change in our system of social evaluations."?1- Fielding, it is clear, dislikes Parson Trulliber, and he. expects his readers to dislike him too. But parson Trulliber does not arouse, either in

Fielding or the reader, "fear, anger, or moral indignation," to use

Piddington's words. If Fielding were more angry at Trulliber, his 1 characterization of him would be less funny. But vanity and hypocrisy are two constants in life; and if the writer were to imagine a time in which they did not exist or a way in which they could be banished

69rhe Psychology of Laughter: A Study in Social Adaptation (London, 1953TTp - 39.

7°PP- 89-92.

?Lp. 129. 236 from the face of the earth, then his portrayal of them would be not at all funny. Most of the characters in Amelia who are associated with the law do tend to arouse Fielding's indignation; and insofar as

Fielding hates them, insofar as he relates them to a vision of reform, they are less funny, probably for most readers not funny at all. And most readers have probably felt the conflicting emotions, in reading

Amelia, of sharing the author's earnest concern for the abuses he portrays together with a keen dissatisfaction in a Fielding who is no longer funny.

Fielding is certainly satiric. But his satire is seldom sustained.

And it is seldom related to the historically based despair of Swift and

Pope. Certainly it would be a distortion of the intent of Tom Jones to call it primarily or largely satiric.

Fielding's customary mode, then, is mythically comic in plot, often ludicrous, satiric but always so as to subordinate the satire to the prevailing mode of laughter. Taken together these elements are parts of a fictional mode which Andrew Wright has called "festive" and

"celebratory." "Seen in proper perspective," argues Wright, "Joseph

Andrews does of course exhibit both the bad and the good life: but the artistic motive is festive rather than lenten, ideal rather than horta­ tory; not presentational but spectacular."^2 it is the mode, finally,

?2Joseph Andrews: Mask and Feast, to be published in Essays in Criticism in 1963. which fictionally realizes Fielding's attitude toward the point which he himself occupied in history— in short, an affirmation, a celebra­ tion of his own time. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Abrams, M. H. The Mirror and the Lamp. New York, 1953*

/Addison, Joseph, et al»7 The Spectator, ed. H. Chalmers, k vols. New York, l88l.

Adlerfeld, Gustavus. The Military History of Charles XII, 3 vols. London, 17**0.

An Apology for the Life of M r . Bampfylde-Moore Carew, 6th ed. London, n.d.

Arbuthnot, John. "The History of John Bull," in The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot, ed. George A. Aitken. Oxford, I892.

Aron, Raymond. Introduction to the Philosophy of History, trans. George J. Irwin. London, 19&1.

Baker, Sheridan. "Fielding's Amelia and the Materials of Romance," PQ, LXI (1962), 437-^9.

Banerji, H. K. Henry Fielding: Playwright, Journalist and Master of the Art of Fiction, His Life and Works. Oxford, 1929.

Battestin, Martin C. The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art; A Study of "Joseph Andrews." Middletown, Conn., 1959.

Bayle, Pierre. Historical and Critical Dictionary, 4 vols. London, 1710.

Beatty, Richard D. "Language and Fiction," The Graduate Review of Philosophy, IV (1962), 16-22.

Beatty, Richard Croora. "Criticism in Fielding's Narratives and his Estimate of Critics," PMLA, XLIX (193*0, IO87-IIOO.

Becker, Carl L. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philoso­ phers . New Haven, 1932.

238 'th 239

Berdyaev, Nicholas. The Meaning of History, trans. George Reavey. London, 193^* ~ \

Berlin, Isaiah. "Historical Inevitability,11 in The Philosophy of His­ tory in our Time, ed. Hans Meyerhoff. Garden City, 1959? PP* 2^9- 271.

------. The Hedgehog and the Fox. New York, 1953•

Bissell, Frederick Olds. Fielding’s Theory of the Novel, Cornell Studies in English, XXII. Ithaca, 1933*

Black, John B. The Art of History. New York, 1926.

Black, Sidney J. "Eighteenth Century 'Histories1 as a Fictional Mode," Boston University Studies in English, I (1955)? 38-^.

Blanchard, Frederic T. Fielding the Novelist, A Study in Historical Criticism. New Haven, 1926.

Bolingbroke, Henry St. John, Lord Viscount. "Letters on the Study and Use of History," in Works, 8 vols. London, 1809, III, 315-IV, 155.

Boorstin, D. J. The Mysterious Science of the Law. Cambridge, Mass., 19^1.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago, 1961.

------"The Self-Conscious Narrator in Comic Fiction before Tristram Shandy," FMLA, LXVII (1952), 163-185.

Boswell, James. Boswell's London Journal, 1762-1763, ed. F. A. Pottle. New York, 1950*

— ------* Samuel Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. " L. F. Powell. Oxford, 193^*

Boyer, Abel. The History of Queen Anne. London, 1735.

Burke, Kenneth. Counterstatement. New York, 1931.

Burnet, Gilbert. Bishop Burnet's History of his Own Time, 2 vols. London, 172U.

Bury, J. B. The Idea of Progress. New York, 1932. 1 Butt, John. Fielding, Writers and their Work #57. London, 1959. Butterfield, Herbert. The Whig Interpretation of History. London, 1951

Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man.ij An Introduction to a Philosophy of Hu*”813 Culture. New Haven, 1955/

------:------The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. F. C. A. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove. Princeton, 1951*

Castro, Americo. "Incarnation in 'Don Q u i x o t e , Cervantes Across the Centuries, ed. Angel Flores and M. J. Benarae-fete. New York, l9?7, PP. 136-178.

Clarendon, Edward Hyde, Earl of. The History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, ed. W. Dunn Macray, vols. Oxford, 1888.

Collingwood, R. G. The Idea of History, New York, 1958*

Cooke, Arthur L. "Henry Fielding and the Writers of Heroic Romance," PMLA, LXII (1947), 984-99*4.

Coolidge, John S. "Fielding and 'Conservation of Character,'" MP, LVII (May, i960), 245-259; reprinted in Fielding: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Ronald Paulson. Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1952, pp. 159-178.

Corstius, J. C. Brandt. "Prelude to the Historical Novel: New Eight­ eenth Century Views on History and Novel," in Comparative Literature Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Assn., ed. Werner P. Friederich (Univ. of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature, #2 3 ), 2 vols, Chapel Hill, N. C., 1959, I, 272-279.

Crane, R. S. "The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones," in Critics and Criticism, ed. R. S. Crane. Chicago, 1952, pp. 616-647.

'Crocker, Lester G. "The Problem of Truth and Falsehood in the Age of Enlightenment," JHI, XIV (1953), 575-603.

Cross, Wilbur. The History of Henry Fielding, 3 vols. New Haven, 1918.

• Daiches, David. "The Possibilities of Heroism," The American Scholar, XXV (Winter, 1955-56), 94-106. ;

Danto, Arthur C. "Mere Chronicle and History Proper," Journal of Phil­ osophy, L (1953), 173-182.

------. "Narrative Sentences," History and Theory, II (1962), 146-179* ■ Davidson, William. /Review of Ernest C. Mossner, "Was Hume a Tory Historian?" JHI, II (19^1 ), 225-236 and Mossner, "An Apology for David Hume, Histokan," FMLA, LVI (19^1), 657-690J F§, XXI (19^2), 206-209. - )

Davis, Herbert. "The Augustan Conception of History," in Reason and the Imagination: Studies in the History of Ideas, l600-l 6 0 0 , ed. J. A. Mazzeo. New York, 19^2, pp. 213-229.

Digeon, Aurelion. The Novels of Fielding. New York, 1925.

Dobree, Bonamy. English Literature in the Early Eighteenth Century, 1700- 17to (OHEL, Vol. VII). New York, 1959• 1 Dorn, Walter L. "The Heavenly City and Historical Writing on the Enlightenment," in Carl Becker's Heavenly City Revisited, ed. R. 0. Rockwood. Ithaca, 1958, pp. 52-69.

Dudden, F. Homes. Henry Fielding: His Life, Works, and Times, 2 vols. r Oxford, 1952.

Duncan, Hugh Dalziel. Language and Literature in Society. Chicago, 1953.

Ehrenpreis, Irvin. "Fielding's Use of Fiction: The Autonomy of Joseph Andrews," in Twelve Original'Essays on Great English Novels, ed Charles Shapiro. Detroit, 19667 pp. 23-W.

Empson, William. "Tom Jones," Kenyon Review, XX (1958), pp. 217-2^9.

An Essay on the New Species of Writing Founded by Mr. Fielding, ed. Alan D. McKillop (ARS Publ. #95)* Los Angeles, I9S2 .

Evans, A. W. Warburton and the Warburtonians. London, 1932.

j/Fielding, Henry, et al»7 The Champion: Containing a Series of Papers, Humorous, Moral, Political, and Critical, 2 vols. London, 17^1.

' E ~ 7 The Champion; or, Evening Advertiser. London, 1739- 42.

Fielding, Henry. The Covent-Garden Journal, ed. G. E. Jensen, 2 vols. New Haven, 1915*

JZ ------J The Crisis: A Sermon. London, 17^1.

JZ J A Dialogue Between a Gentleman of London, Agent for Two Court Candidates, and an Honest Alderman of the Country Party. London, 17W - 2k2

Fielding, Henry. The Female Husband and other Writings, ed. Claude E. Jones. Liverpool, i960.

Z------J The Important Triflers: A Satire. London, 17^8 .

------. The History of the Present Rebellion in Scotland, with an introduction and notes by Ifan Kyrle Fletcher. Newport, Monmouthshire, 193^*

/C------./The Jacobite's Journal, by John Trott-plaid, Esq. London, 17^7-17557------

------. TheLovers Assistant, or, New Art of Love, ed. Claude E. Jones (ARS Publ. $89)• Los Angeles, 1 ^ 6 l 7

------. Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin. Boston, 1961.

J_ J A Plan of the Universal Register-Office. London, 1752. j p ------—J A Serious Address to the People of Great Britain; The Second Edition Corrected, with Additions. London, 17^5*

------. Shame la /Prided as appendix to the Battestin edition of Joseph Andrews./ l_------J The True Patriot and The History of Our Own Times. London,

------• Works, ed. W. E. Henley et al.,16 vols. New York, 1902.

Firth, Charles. "Burnet as an Historian," in Essays Historical and Literary. Oxford, 1938, pp. 17h-209.

Ford, Ford Madox. The English Novel from the Earliest Cays to the Ceath of Joseph Conrad. Philadelphia, 1929.

Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, 1957.

Gay, Peter. "Carl Becker's Heavenly City," in Carl Becker's Heavenly City Revisited. Ithaca, 1958, pp. 27-51. ”

Greason, A. LeRoy, Jr., "Fielding's The History of the Present Rebel­ lion in Scotland," PQ, XXXVII (195^)7 119-123.

Gruman, Gerald J. "'Balance' and 'Excess' as Gibbon's Explanation of the Cecline and Fall," History and Theory, I (i960), 75-85. 243

Hassan, Ihab H. "The Anti-Hero in Modern British and American Fiction," in Comparative Literature; Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Comparative Literature Assn., ed. Werner P. Friederich (Univ. of North Carolina Studies in Comparative Literature #23 ), 2 vols., Chapel Hill, N. C., 1959; I; 309-323*

Hazard, Paul. European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, trans. J. Lewis May. London, 195^*

Hazlitt, William. Lectures on the English Comic Writers, in Works, Centenary Edition, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. London, 1931; VI, 1-168.

Heilman, R. B. "Fielding and ’The First Gothic Revival,'" MLN, LVII (1942), 671-73.

Hook, Sidney. The Hero in History. New York, 19^3*

Huizinga, "Johann. Homo Ludens. London, 19^9 .

Hutchins, Eleanor N. "'Prudence' in Tom Jones: A Study in Connotative Irony," PQ, XXXIX (i960), 496-507. ... .

------. "Verbal Irony in Tom Jones," PMLA, LXXVII (1962), 46-50.

Hume, David. History of England, 8 vols. London, 1782.

Irwin, William R. The Making of Jonathan Wild: A Study, in the Literary Method of Henry Fielding. New York, 194-1.

Iser, Wolfgang. Die Weltanschauung Henry Fieldings. Tubingen, 1952.

Jarvis, Rupert C. "Fielding and the Forty-Five," N and Q, CCI (1956), 391-394.

------. /'Fielding and the Forty-Five," N and Q, CCI (1956), 479-482.

------. "Fielding and the Forty-Five," N and Q, CCII (1957), 14-24. <>

Johnson, Maurice. "The Device of Sophia's Muff in Tom Jones," MLN, LXXIV (1959); 685-690.

------. Fielding's Art of Fiction. Philadelphia, 1961.

Johnson, Samuel. A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. London, 1755.

Z' 2kk

Johnston, Arthur. "Fielding, Hearne, and Merry-Andrews," N and Q, ccv (i960), 295-96.

Jordan, R. M. "The Limits of Illusion: Faulkner, Fielding and Chaucer," Criticism, II (i960), 278-305.

Keast, William R. "The Element of Art in Gibbon's History," ELH, xxiii (1956), 153-162.

Kettle, Arnold. An Introduction to the English Novel, 2 vols. London, 1951.

Knight, Douglas. Pope and the Heroic Tradition. New Haven, 1951*

Koch, Dorothy A. "English Theories Concerning the Nature and Uses of History, 1735-1791/' Unpubl. diss., Yale, 1946.

Krutch, Joseph Wood. Samuel Johnson. New York, 1944.

Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition. London, 1948.

Leggett, A. W. The Idea in Fiction. London, 1934.

LeSage, Alain Rene, The Adventures of Gil Bias, trans. Tobias Smollett. London, n.d.

Levy-Bruhl, Lucien. "The Cartesian Spirit and History," in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton. Oxford, 1936, pp. 191-196.

Litt, Theodor. "The Universal in the Structure of Historical Know­ ledge," in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. Raymond Klibansky and H. J. Paton. Oxford, 1936, pp. 125-136.

Love joy, A.. 0. "Herder and the Enlightenment Philosophy of History," in Essays in the History of Ideas, New York, 1955, PP» 166-182.

------. "Optimism and Romanticism," FMLA, XLII (1927),pp. 921- 945.

1------* The Great Chain of Being. Cambridge, Mass., 1957* * . _ ^ ------. "The Parallel of Deism and Classicism," in Essays in the History of Ideas, New York, 1955* PP* 78-98.

------. Reflections on Human Nature. Baltimore, 1961. 2l+5

Lovejoy, A. 0. and George Boas. Documentary History of Primitivism and Related Ideas in Antiquity. Baltimore, 1935*

Lowith, Karl. Meaning in History. Chicago, 19^9-

Lucian. "The Way to Write History," in Works, trans. H. W, Fovler and F. G. Fowler, 4 vols. Oxford, 1905, II, IO9-I3 6 .

. True History and Lucius or the Ass, trans. Paul Turner. Bloomington, Ind., 1958.

Luk^cs, Georg. The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. London, 1962.

Lutvack, Leonard. "Mixed and Uniform Prose Styles in the Novel," Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, XVIII (i960), 35°-357*

Lynch, James J. "Structural Techniques in Tom Jones," Zeitschrift fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik,VII (1959)> 5-1&.

Meyer, Paul H. "Voltaire and Hume as Historians: A Comparative Study of the Essai Sur Les Moeurs and the History of England," PMLA, LXXIII (1958), 5l15S.

Miller, Frances S. "The Historic Sense in Eighteenth-Century English Literature." Unpubl. diss., Johns Hopkins, 1935*

Miller, G. N. The Historical Point of View in English Literary Criti­ cism from 1560-1770* Anglistishe Forshungen, Heft 35* Heidelberg, 1913.

Miller, Henry Knight. Essays on Fielding1s Miscellanies: A Commentary on Volume One. Princeton, 1961.

/Miller, Sanderson^ An Eighteenth-Century Correspondence,ed. Lilian Dickins and Mary Stanton. London, 1910.

Mossner, E. C. "An Apology for David Hume, Historian," PMLA, LVI (19^1), 657-690. \ .

Muller, Herbert. The Uses of the Past. New York, 1953.

McKillop, Alan Dugald. The Early Masters of English Fiction. Lawrence, Kansas, 1956.

------. "Some Recent Views of Tom Jones," College English, XXI (1959)* 17-22. 2k6

Oldmixon, John. The History of England, During the Reigns of King William and Queen Mary, Queen Anne, King George I. London, 1735-

Piddington, Ralph. The Psychology of Laughter: A Study in Social Adaptation. London, 1953*

Pope, Alexander. Works, Twickenham Edition. London, various dates.

Popper, Karl. "Has History any Meaning," pp. M+9-63 of The Open Society and Its Enemies, one vol. ed. (Princeton, 1950)-ih The Philosophy of History in our Time, ed. Hans Meyerhoff. Garden City, 1959, PP» 300- 311.

Price, Kingsley Blake. "Ernst Cassirer and the Enlightenment," JHI, XVIII (1957), 101-112.

/Ralph, James^_7 The -ffistory of England during the Reigns of K. William, Q. Anne, and K. George I. London, 1 7 ^

Rickman, H. P., ed. Meaning in History: W. Dilthey's Thoughts on History and Society. London, 1961.

Riley, E. C. Cervantes's Theory of the Novel. Oxford, 1962.

Robinson, Howard. Bayle the Sceptic. New York, 1931*

Rogers, Winfield H. "Fielding's Early Aesthetic and Technique," SP, XL (19^3), 529-51.

Rollin, /Charles^ The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles „ Lettres, k vols. London, 173^"

Rosenbaum, Morton I. "Swift's View of History," Unpubl. diss., Wis­ consin, 1952.

Sampson, R. V. Progress in the Age of Reason. Cambridge, Mass., 1956.

Seymour, Mabel. "Fielding's History of the Forty-Five," PQ, XIV (1935), 105-125.

Scheffer, John D. "The Idea“ of Decline in Literature and the Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century England," Iff, XXXIV (1936), 155-178*

Scott, Sir Walter. "Fielding," in Lives of the Novelists, 2 vols. Boston, 1826, I, l-4l.

Shaftesbury, Anthony, Earl of. Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols. London, 1732. 247

Shea, Bernard. "Machiavelli and Fielding's Jonathan Wild," PMLA, LXXII (1957), 55-73.

Shensbone, William. Men and Manners, ed. Havelock Ellis. Boston, 1928.

Sherburn, George. "Fielding's Amelia'; An Interpretation," ELH, III (1936), 1-14; reprinted in Fielding, ed. Ronald Paulson. Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962, pp. 146-157.

— ------. "Fielding's Social Outlook," in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, ed. James L. Clifford. New York, 1959, PP« 251- 273. .

Smith, LeRoy W. "Fielding and Mandeville: The 'War Against Virtue,'" Criticism, III (1961), 7 -I5.

. "Fielding and 'Mr. Bayle's Dictionary,'" Texas Studies In Language and Literature, IV (1962), 16-20.

Spillca, Mark. "Comic Resolution in Fielding's Joseph Andrews," in Fielding, ed. Ronald Paulson. Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962, pp. 59-6 8 .

Starnes, D. T. "Purpose in the Writing of History," MP, XXIII (1922-23), 2 8 1 -300.

Stewart, Keith. "Ancient Poetry as History in the Eighteenth Century," JHI, XIX (1958), 335-347.

Stromberg, R. N. "History in the Eighteenth Century," JHI, XII (1951), 300-303.

Strype, John. Annals of the Reformation and Establishment of Religion and other Various Occurrences in the Church of England, during Queen Elizabeth's Happy Reign,~¥ vols. Oxford, l8i4!

Taine, Hippolyte. History of English Literature, trans. Henry Van Laun, 3 vols. New York, 1900. fc»-c . V Taylor Dick, Jr., "Joseph as Hero in Joseph Andfews," Tulane Studies in English, VII (1957), 9I-IO9 .

Teggart, F. J. ed. The Idea of Progress, revised by George H. Hilde­ brand. Berkeley, 194-9 •

------. Theory and Processes of History. Berkeley, i960.

o 248

Thompson, James Westphall. History of Historical Writing, 2 vols. New York, 1942.

Thornbury, Ethel M. Henry Fielding's Theory of the Comic Prose Epic, Univ. of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature #30• Madison, 1931.

Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York, 1953- Voltaire. Philosophical Dictionary, trans. with intro, by Peter Gay, 2 vols. New York, 1962.

Wallace, Robert M. "Fielding's Knowledge of History and Biography," SP, XLIV (1947), 89-IO7.

------. "Henry Fielding's Narrative Method: Its Historical and Biographical Origins." Unpubl. diss., North Carolina, 194;?.

Walsh, W. H. An Introduction to Philosophy of History. London, 1951.

Warburton, /William^/ A View of Lord Bolingbroke1s Philosophy in Four Letters to a Friend. London, 175^- ~

Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. London, 1957•

Wells, John E. "Henry Fielding and the History of Charles XII," JEGP, xi (1912), 603-613.

West, Rebecca. The Court and the Castle. New Haven, 1961.

/Whalley, Vj An Essay on the Manner cf Writing History, ed. Keith Stewart, ARS Publ. #80. Los Angeles, i960.

Whitney, Lois. Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore, 1934.

Whyte, Lancelot Law. The Unconscious Before Freud. New York, i960.

Willey, Basil. The Eighteenth Century Background, London, 1940.-

Work, James A. "Henry Fielding, Christian Censor," in The Age of Johnson: Essays Presented to Chauncey Brewster Tinker. New Haven, 19^9, PP. 139-14&

Wright, Andrew. "Joseph Andrews: Mask and Feast," to be published in Essays in Criticism in I963. AUTOBIOGRAPHY

I, Philip Thayer Stevick, was born in Elyria, Ohio, October 17,

1930. I received my secondary-school education in the Elyria public schools. From 1948 to 1950 I attended Baldwin-Wallace College, and

in 1953* after two years of military service, I entered Kent State

University, which granted me the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1955 and the Master of Arts degree in 1956. From 195& to 1959 I was, successively, Instructor and Assistant Professor of English at

Mount Union College, Alliance, Ohio. In 1959 I began my doctoral work at the Ohio State University. While completing the requirements for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, I have held the positions of

Assistant and Assistant Instructor. And during the year I96I-62 I was assistant to Professor Andrew Wright.

I have accepted a position as Assistant Professor of English at the University of Connecticut.

249