Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/153

 FIELDING 143 so easily dissipated and diverted from the creation of im perishable works as that of humour ; and it is a fair conjecture that the abundant gifts of the &quot; prose Homer &quot; received direction and stimulus from his friend s example as well as his father s impecuniosity. He had no talent for the versification in which Lyttelton delighted and attained such success as to find a place among Johnson s Poets ; the only distinction he achieved in that line was the mention of his name by Swift as an unapproachable master of the art of sinking. We can conceive that Fielding s sympathy with his friend s pretty pastoral fancies and glowing heroics was not invariably earnest ; still his thoughts had been turned towards literature and learning, while his genius was left free to discover its own natural path. If his father had been able to pay him his nominal allowance of .200 a year when he returned from Leyden, iu all likelihood Fielding would have qualified himself for admission to the bar, and the wit which has become a pos session for all time would have spent itself for the entertainment of the law-courts. But, as he says himself of his allowance, &quot; anybody might pay it who would ; &quot; and meantime he resolved to put money in his purse by writing for the stage. He submitted his sketch of Don Quixote in England to Booth and Gibber, but both, he tells us, &quot; dis suaded him from suffering it to be represented.&quot; He re wrote it afterwards when his services were in request, and, conceiving the idea of making the Knight stand for a borough, added some election scenes which greatly increased its value as an acting play. Meantime, lie set himself with ready versatility to provide a comedy in the manner of Congreve. His first effort, entitled Love in Several Masques, was produced at Drury Lane in February 1728, and when the author printed it with a dedication to his kins woman Lady Mary Wortley Montague, he was able to boast that though it succeeded one of the most successful comedies of the time, the Provoked Husband, and was &quot; contemporary with an entertainment which engrossed the whole talk and admiration of the town,&quot; it had no small measure of success. For ten years from this date Fielding was an established and prolific play-writer, as will be seen from the following catalogue: The Temple Beau, a comedy, 1730; The Authors Farce, 1730; The Coffee-House Politician, a comedy, 1730 ; Tom Thumb the Great, a bur lesque, 1730 ; The Letter Writers, a farce, 1731 ; The Grub Street Opera, a burlesque, 1731 ; The Lottery, a farce, 1731 ; The Modern Husband, a comedy, 1732 ; The Covent Garden Tragedy, a burlesque, 1732; The Debauchee, a comedy, 1732; The Mock Doctor (adaptation of Moliere s Le Medecin malgre lui), 1732; The Miser (adaptation of L Avare), 1733 ; Deborah, or a Wife for you all, an after piece, 1733 ; The Intriguing Chambermaid, a two-act comedy, 1733 ; Don Quixote in England, a comedy, 1734 ; An Old Man taught Wisdom, a farce, 1735 ; The Universal Gallant, SL comedy, 1735 ; Pasquin, a dramatic satire, 1736 ; The Historical Register, 1737; JEurydice, a farce, 1737; Eur yd ice Hissed, 1737; Tumble-down Dick, an extravaganza, 1737 ; Miss Lucy in Town, a farce, 1742 ; The Wedding- Day, a comedy, 1743. And not only did Fielding write plays ; he identified himself so closely with the stage as to become a manager. He had a booth at Bartholomew Fair in 1733, in conjunction with Hyppesley the comedian; and in 173G, he took the Haymarket Theatre, and organized a company called &quot; The Great Mogul s Company,&quot; a notable incident in the history of the stage, inasmuch as it led to the institution of the dramatic censorship. None of Fielding s plays, with the exception, perhaps, of his adaptation the Miser, can be said to have &quot; kept the stage&quot;; few even of the students of literature have read them, and those who have read them have dismissed them too hastily. The closest students these plays have ever had were the dramatists of the following generation, whose works, notably those of Sheridan, contain many traces of their assiduity. The tradition about his writing scenes after his return from tavern carousals on the papers in which his tobacco had been wrapt, and his cool reception of Garrick .s desire that he should alter some passage in the Wedding- Day, have helped the impression that they were loose, ill- considered, ill-constructed productions, scribbled off hastily to meet passing demands. There is only a fraction of the truth in this notion. That the plays are not the work of a dull plodder or a mechanician of elaborate ingenuity goes without saying; but, though perhaps rapidly considered and rapidly constructed, they are neither ill-considered nor ill- constructed, and bear testimony to the large and keen intelligence, as well as the overflowing humour and fertile wit of their author. With all Fielding s high spirits, joyous self-confidence, and disdain of criticism, he was no idler over his work ; whatever his hand found to do, writing plays, or newspaper articles, or novels, reading law, or administering justice, he did with all his might. He found in play-writing abundant scope for the exercise of that far- sighted and fertile constructive faculty which gave the world afterwards in Tom Jones one of the most perfect plots in literature. His plays abound in artfully prepared surprises, and the conclusions are never huddled, confused, and unsatisfactory ; he never lacked the skill to unloose the knots which he had had the ingenuity to tie. It may be taken as a national characteristic, whether in the way of merit or defect must be for others to say, that he wrote for the stage as he found it, and practised its methods as he found them, troubling himself little with theories of what it and they ought to be. If we know anything of the actors and actresses who took part in his plays, it is amus ing to trace the skill with which he adapted himself to their peculiarities. With regard to his moral tone, it is substantially the same as that which pervades Tom Jones. He had no sympathy whatever with the goodness or goodi- ness of Addison and Steele. His creed is stated in the prologue to the second of his plays, &quot; written by a friend,&quot; perhaps the same friend to whom he says he owed the first suggestion of Tom Jones, the friend of his school-days, Lord Lyttelton. Some persons, this prologue runs, &quot;Will argue that the stage Was meant to improve and not debauch the age. Pshaw ! to improve ! the stage was first designed Such as they are to represent mankind.&quot; If we desire to draw a distinction between Fielding s moral ity and that of the Restoration dramatists, we should say that he takes more care that the rakes shall not have the best of it. Very early in his dramatic career Fielding discovered how much of his strength lay in burlesque. The obligations which he professed to owe to Gibber in the preface to his first comedy did not prevent him from turning that versatile writer and his son Theophilus to ridicule very soon after wards. That Gibber, in the meantime, had offended him by refusing the Temple Beau, which was not acted at Drury Lane, or the Wedding-Day, which was originally intended for Mrs Oldfield and Wilkes, is likely enough ; if so, the Author s Farce, in which a poor play-writer reads a play to the manager and receives his comments upon it, listening all the while to his self-glorification, was an ample revenge. In Tom Thumb, a burlesque on inflated tragedy, in which the taste introduced by Dryden and other tragic dramatists of the Restoration period is parodied with irresistible humour, the satire is of a less personal kind, and can be read now with more enjoyment. Fielding, with the consciousness of his aristocratic descent as well as his superior powers, had a large share of Pope s contempt for Grub Street, and was a sort of Ishmael among his play-