"I could not help reflecting how often the greatest abilities lie wind-bound, as it were, in life; or if they venture out, and attempt to beat the seas, they struggle in vain against wind and tide."
--Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon.

It was but three years after the Lyme Regis episode that Henry Fielding, then a lad of one and twenty, won attention as a successful writer of comedy. Of this his first entry into the gay world there are little but generalities to record; but, inaccurate as Murphy is in some matters of fact, there seems no reason to doubt the truth of the engaging picture which he draws of the young man's dÉbut upon the Town. We read of the gaiety and quickness of his fancy; the wild flow of his spirits; the brilliancy of his wit; the activity of his mind, eager to know the world. To the possession of genius allied to the happiest temper, a temper "for the most part overflowing into wit, mirth, and good-humour," young Fielding added a handsome face, a magnificent physique (he stood over six feet high), and the fullest vigour of constitution. "No man," wrote his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, "enjoyed life more than he did." What wonder that he was soon "in high request with the men of taste and literature," or that report affirms him to have been no less welcome in ranks of society not at all distinguished by a literary flavour.

That a youth so gifted, so "formed and disposed for enjoyment," should find himself his own master, in London, almost presupposes a too liberal indulgence in the follies that must have so easily beset him. When the great and cold Mr Secretary Addison, no less than that "very merry Spirit," Dick Steele, and the splendid Congreve, drank more than was good for them, what chance would there be for a brilliant, ardent lad of twenty, suddenly plunged into the robust society of that age? If Fielding, like his elders, indisputably loved good wine, let us remember that none of the heroes of his three great novels, neither that rural innocent Joseph Andrews, nor the exuberant youth Tom Jones, nor erring, repentant Captain Booth are immoderate drinkers. The degradation of drinking is, in Fielding's pages, accorded to brutalised if honest country squires, and cruel and corrupt magistrates; and there is little evidence throughout his life to indicate that the great novelist drank more freely than did the genial heroes of his pen. As regards Murphy's general assertion that, at this his entrance into life, young Fielding "launched wildly into a career of dissipation" no other reputable contemporary evidence is discoverable of the "wildness" popularly attributed to Fielding. That his youth was headlong and undisciplined is a plausible surmise; but justice demands that the charge be recognised as a surmise and nothing more. How keenly, twenty years later, he could appreciate the handicap that such early indulgences impose on a man's future life may be gathered from a passage in Joseph Andrews which is not without the ring of personal feeling. The speaker is a generous and estimable country gentleman, living in Arcadian retirement with his wife and children. Descended of a good family and born a gentleman, he narrates how his education was acquired at a public school, and extended to a mastery of the Latin, and a tolerable knowledge of the Greek, language. Becoming his own master at sixteen he soon left school, for, he tells his listeners, "being a forward Youth, I was extremely impatient to be in the World: For which I thought my Parts, Knowledge, and Manhood thoroughly qualified me. And to this early Introduction into Life, without a Guide, I impute all my future Misfortunes; for besides the obvious Mischiefs which attend this, there is one which hath not been so generally observed. The first Impression which Mankind receives of you, will be very difficult to eradicate. How unhappy, therefore, must it be to fix your Character in Life, before you can possibly know its Value, or weigh the Consequences of those Actions which are to establish your future Reputation?" 1 That the wise and strenuous Fielding of later years, the energetic student at the Bar, the active and patriotic journalist, the merciless exponent of the hypocrite, the spendthrift, and the sensualist, the creator of the most perfect type of womanhood in English fiction (so said Dr Johnson and Thackeray) should look back sadly on his own years of hot-blooded youth is entirely natural; but even so this passage and the well-known confession placed in the mouth of the supposed writer of the Journey from this World to the Next, 2 no more constitute direct evidence than do Murphy's unattested phrases, or the anonymous scurrilities of eighteenth-century pamphleteers.

Anne Oldfield

By birth and education Fielding's natural place was in the costly society of those peers and men of wealth and fashion who courted the brilliant young wit; but fortune had decreed otherwise, and at this his first entrance on the world he found, as he himself said, no choice but to be a hackney writer or a hackney coachman. True, his father allowed him a nominal £200 a year; but this, to quote another of his son's observations, "anybody might pay that would." The fact was that Colonel Fielding's marriage with Madame Rasa had resulted in a large and rapidly increasing family; and this burden, together with "the necessary demands of his station for a genteel and suitable expence," made it impossible for him to spare much for the maintenance of his eldest son. Launched thus on the Town, with every capacity for spending an income the receipt of which was denied to him, the young man flattered himself that he should find resources in his wit and invention; and accordingly he commenced as writer for the stage. His first play, a comedy entitled Love in Several Masks, was performed at Drury Lane in February 1728, just before the youthful dramatist had attained his twenty-first year. In his preface to these 'light scenes' he alludes with some pride to this distinction--"I believe I may boast that none ever appeared so early on the stage";--and he proceeds to a generous acknowledgment of the aid received from those dramatic stars of the eighteenth-century, Colley Gibber, Mr Wilks and Mrs Oldfield, all of whom appeared in the cast. Of the two former he says, "I cannot sufficiently acknowledge their civil and kind behaviour previous to its representation"; from which we may conclude, as his biographer Laurence points out, that Harry Fielding was already familiar with the society of the green-room. To Mrs Oldfield,--that charming actress

"In publick Life, by all who saw Approv'd
In private Life, by all who knew her Lov'd"--

the young man expresses yet warmer acknowledgments. "Lastly," he declares, "I can never express my grateful sense of the good nature of Mrs Oldfield ... nor do I owe less to her excellent judgment, shown in some corrections which I shall for my own sake conceal." The comedy is dedicated, with the graceful diction and elaborate courtesies of the period, to Fielding's cousin, that notable eighteenth-century wit, the Lady Mary Wortley Montagu; and from the dedication we learn that to Lady Mary's approval, on her first perusal, the play owed its existence. What the approval of a great lady of those times meant for the young writer may be measured by the fact that Fielding concludes his dedication by solemnly 'informing the world' that the representation of his comedy was twice honoured with Her Ladyship's presence.

In view of the frequent accusation of coarseness brought against Fielding, we may quote a few lines of the prologue with which he made his literary entry into the world. Here his audience are promised

"Humour, still free from an indecent Flame,
Which, should it raise your Mirth, must raise your Shame:
Indecency's the Bane to Ridicule,
And only charms the Libertine, or Fool:
Nought shall offend the Fair One's Ears to-day,
Which they might blush to hear, or blush to say.
No private Character these Scenes expose,
Our Bard, at Vice, not at the Vicious, throws."

Thus it was with an honourable declaration of war against indecency and libel that the young wit and man of fashion, began his career as "hackney writer." If to modern taste the first promise lacks something of fulfilment, it is but just to remember that to other times belong other manners.

In the play, rustic and philosophic virtue is prettily rewarded by the possession of a beautiful heiress, while certain mercenary fops withdraw in signal discomfiture; and that Fielding, at one and twenty, had already passed judgment on that glittering 'tinsel' tribe, is clear enough from his portrait of the "empty gaudy nameless thing," Lord Formal. Lord Formal appears on the stage with a complexion much agitated by a day of business spent with "three milleners, two perfumers, my bookseller's and a fanshop." In the course of these fatigues he has "rid down two brace of chairmen"; and had raised his colour to "that exorbitancy of Vermeille" that it will hardly be reduced "under a fortnight's course of acids." It is the true spirit of comedy which introduces into this closely perfumed atmosphere the bluff country figure of Sir Positive Trap, with his exordiums on the rustic ladies, and on "the good old English art of clear-starching." Sir Positive hopes "to see the time when a man may carry his daughter to market with the same lawful authority as any other of his cattle"; and causes Lord Formal some moments' perplexity, his lordship being "not perfectly determinate what species of animal to assign him to, unless he be one of those barbarous insects the polite call country squires." In this production of a youth of twenty we may find a foretaste of that keen relish in watching the human comedy, that vigorous scorn of avarice, that infectious laughter at pretentious folly, which accompanied the novelist throughout his life.

To this same year is attributed a poem called the Masquerade, which need only be noticed as again emphasising its author's lifelong war against the evils of his time. The Masquerade is a satire on the licentious gatherings organised by the notorious Count Heidegger, Master of the Revels to the Court of George II.

Many years later Fielding reprinted 3 two other poetical effusions bearing the date of this his twenty-first year. Of these the first, entitled "A Description of U----n G---- (alias New Hog's Norton) in Com-Hants" identified by Mr Keightley as Upton Grey in Hampshire, is addressed to the fair Rosalinda, by her disconsolate Alexis. Alexis bewails his exile among

"Unpolish'd Nymphs and more unpolish'd Swains,"

and describes himself as condemned to live in a dwelling half house, half shed, with a garden full of docks and nettles, the fruit-trees bearing only snails--

"Happy for us had Eve's this Garden been She'd found no Fruit, and therefore known no Sin,"--

the dusty meadows innocent of grass, and the company as innocent of wit. This sketch of rural enjoyments recalls a later utterance in Jonathan Wild, concerning the votaries of a country life who, with their trees, "enjoy the air and the sun in common and both vegetate with very little difference between them." With one or two eloquent exceptions there is scarce a page in Fielding's books devoted to any interest other than that of human nature.

The second fragment is a graceful little copy of verse addressed to Euthalia, in which we may note, by the way, that the fair Rosalinda's charms are ungallantly made use of as a foil to Euthalia's dazzling perfections. As Fielding found these verses not unworthy of a page in his later Miscellanies they are here recalled:

TO EUTHALIA.
WRITTEN IN THE YEAR 1728.
"Burning with Love, tormented with Despair,
Unable to forget or ease his Care;
In vain each practis'd art Alexis tries;
In vain to Books, to Wine or Women flies;
Each brings Euthalia's Image to his Eyes.
In Lock's or Newton's Page her Learning glows;
Dryden the Sweetness of her Numbers shews;
In all their various Excellence I find
The various Beauties of her perfect Mind.
How vain in Wine a short Relief I boast!
Each sparkling Glass recalls my charming Toast.
To Women then successless I repair,
Engage the Young, the Witty, and the Fair.
When Sappho's Wit each envious Breast alarms,
And Rosalinda looks ten thousand Charms;
In vain to them my restless Thoughts would run;
Like fairest Stars, they show the absent Sun."

Love in Several Masks was produced, as we have seen, in February, 1728; and it is a little surprising to find the young dramatist suddenly appearing, four weeks later, as a University student. He was entered at the University of Leyden, as "Litt. Stud," on the 16th of March 1728. The reason of this sudden change from the green-room of Drury Lane to the ancient Dutch university must be purely matter of conjecture, as is the nature of Fielding's undergraduate studies, Murphy having lately been proved to be notably erroneous as to this episode. 4 His name occurs as staying, on his entry at Leyden, at the "Casteel von Antwerpen"; and again, a year later, in the recensiones of the University for February 1729, as domiciled with one Jan Oson. As all students were annually registered, the omission of any later entry proves that he left Leyden before 1730; with which meagre facts and his own incidental remark that the comedy of Don Quixote in England was "begun at Leyden in the year 1728," our knowledge of the two years of Fielding's university career concludes. In February 1730 he was presumably back in London, that being the date of his next play, the Temple Beau, produced by Giffard, the actor, at the new theatre in Goodman's Fields.

Leyden--1727

The prologue to the Temple Beau was written by that man of many parts, James Ralph, the hack writer, party journalist and historian, who was in after years to collaborate with Fielding, both as a theatrical manager and as a journalist. Ralph's opening lines are of interest as bearing on Fielding's antagonism to the harlequinades and variety shows, then threatening the popularity of legitimate drama:

"Humour and Wit, in each politer Age, Triumphant, rear'd the Trophies of the Stage: But only Farce, and Shew, will now go down, And HARLEQUIN'S the Darling of the Town."

Ralph bids his audience turn to the 'infant stage' of Goodman's Fields for matter more worthy their attention; and his promise that there

"The Comick Muse, in Smiles severely gay, Shall scoff at Vice, and laugh its Crimes away"

must surely have been inspired by the young genius from whom twenty years later came the formal declaration of his endeavour, in Tom Jones, "to laugh mankind out of their favourite follies and vices."

The special follies of the Temple Beau have, for background, of course, those precincts in which Fielding was later to labour so assiduously as a student, and as a member of the Middle Temple; but where, as the young Templar of the play observes, "dress and the ladies" might also very pleasantly employ a man's time. But except for an oblique hit at duelling, a custom which Fielding was later to attack with curious warmth, this second play seems to yield few passages of biographical interest. Of very different value for our purpose is the third play, which within only two months appeared from a pen stimulated, presumably, by empty pockets. This was the comedy entitled the Author's Farce, being the first portion of a medley which included the 'Puppet Show call'd the Pleasures of the Town; the whole being acted in the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, long since demolished in favour of the present building.

In the person of Harry Luckless, the hero of the Author's Farce, it is impossible not to surmise the figure of young Fielding himself; a figure gay and spirited as those of his first comedy, but, by now, well acquainted with the hungers and the straits of a 'hackney writer.' Mr Luckless wears a laced-coat and makes a handsome figure (we remember that Fielding had always the grand air), whereby his landlady, clamouring for her rent, upbraids him for deceiving her: "Cou'd I have guess'd that I had a Poet in my House! Cou'd I have look'd for a Poet under lac'd Clothes!" The poor author offers her the security of his (as yet unacted) play; whereupon Mrs Moneywood (lineal ancestress of Mrs Raddles) pertinently cries out: "I would no more depend on a Benefit-Night of an unacted Play, than I would on a Benefit-Ticket in an undrawn Lottery." Luckless next appeals to what should be his landlady's heart, assuring her that unless she be so kind as to invite him "I am afraid I shall scarce prevail on my Stomach to dine to-day." To which the enraged lady answers: "O never fear that: you will never want a Dinner till you have dined at all the Eating-houses round.--No one shuts their Doors against you the first time; and I scarce think you are so kind, seldom to trouble them a second." And that the good landlady had some grounds for her wrath is but too apparent when she announces: "Well, I'm resolv'd when you are gone away (which I heartily hope will be very soon) I'll hang over my Door in great red Letters, No Lodging for Poets ... My Floor is all spoil'd with Ink, my Windows with Verses, and my Door has been almost beat down with Duns.' While the landlady is still fuming, enters our author's man, Jack.

"Jack. An't please your Honour, I have been at my Lord's, and his Lordship thanks you for the Favour you have offer'd of reading your Play to him; but he has such a prodigious deal of Business he begs to be excus'd. I have been with Mr Keyber too: he made no Answer at all...."

"Luckless. Jack.

"Jack. Sir.

"Luckless. Fetch my other Hat hither. Carry it to the Pawnbroker's.

"Jack. To your Honour's own Pawnbroker.

"Luckless. Ay And in thy way home call at the Cook's Shop. So, one way or other I find, my Head must always provide for my Belly."

At which moment enters the caustic, generous Witmore, belabouring the profanity, the scurrility, the immodesty, the stupidity of the age with one hand, the while he pays his friend's rent with the other; and who, incidentally, is requested by that irascible genius to kick a worthy publisher down the stairs, on the latter's refusal to give fifty shillings "no, nor fifty farthings" for his play. Once mollified by the settlement of her bill, we have the landlady playing advocate for her hapless lodger in words that sound very like the apologia of Mr Harry Fielding himself: "I have always thought, indeed, Mr Luckless had a great deal of Honesty in his Principles; any Man may be unfortunate: but I knew when he had Money I should have it...." And the good woman's reminiscence that while her lodger had money her doors were thundered at every morning between four and five by coachmen and chairmen; and her wish that that pleasant humour'd gentleman were "but a little soberer," finishes, we take it, the portrait of the Fielding of 1730. "Jack call a coach; and d'ye hear, get up behind it and attend me," cries the improvident poet, the moment his generous friend has left him; and so we are sure did young Mr Fielding put himself and his laced coat into a coach, and mount his man behind it, whenever the exigencies of duns and hunger were for a moment abated. And with as gallant a humour as that of his own Luckless did he walk afoot, when those "nine ragged jades the muses" failed to bring him a competency.

Such failure on the part of the Muses was due to no want of wooing on his part. During the six years between Fielding's first appearance as dramatic author in 1728, and his marriage in 1734, there stand no fewer than thirteen plays to his name. Of these none have won any lasting reputation; and to this period of the great novelist's life may doubtless be applied Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's description, when lamenting that her kinsman should have been "forced by necessity to publish without correction, and throw many productions into the world he would have thrown into the fire, if meat could have been got without money, and money without scribbling." Lady Mary's account moreover is reinforced by Murphy's classical periods: "Mr Fielding's case was generally the same with that of the poet described by Juvenal; with a great genius, he must have starved if he had not sold his performance to a favourite actor. Esurit, intactam Paridi, nisi vendit Agaven." A complete list of all these ephemera will be found in the bibliography at the end of this volume; here we need but notice those to which a special interest attaches. Thus, that incomparable comic actress, Kitty Clive, was cast for a part in the Lottery, a farce produced in 1731; and three years later Fielding is adapting for her, especially, the Intriguing Chambermaid. It was in these two plays, and that of the Virgin Unmasked, that the town discovered the true comic genius of Kitty Clive "the best player I ever saw," in Dr Johnson's opinion. For this discovery Fielding takes credit to himself, in the dedication addressed to Mrs Clive, which he prefixed to the Intriguing Chambermaid; and in which he finds opportunity to pay a noble tribute to the private life of that inimitable hoyden of the stage. "I cannot help reflecting" he writes, "that the Town hath one great obligation to me, who made the first discovery of your great capacity, and brought you earlier forward on the theatre, than the ignorance of some and the envy of others would have otherwise permitted.... But as great a favorite as you at present are with the audience you would be much more so were they acquainted with your private character ... did they see you, who can charm them on the stage with personating the foolish and vicious characters of your sex, acting in real life the part of the best Wife, the best Daughter, the best Sister, and the best Friend." That this splendid praise was as sincere as it was generous need not be doubted. No breath of slander, even in that slanderous age, seems ever to have dulled the reputation of the queen of comedy, and "better romp than any I ever saw in nature"--to quote Dr Johnson again,--Kitty Clive.

Kitty Clive as Philida

So few of Fielding's letters have been, to our knowledge, preserved, that the following note addressed to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and concerning the Modern Husband, a comedy produced in 1731 or 1732, must here be given, though containing little beyond the fact that the dramatist of three years' standing seems still to have placed as high a value on his cousin's judgment, as when recording her approval of his first effort for the stage. The play was a piece of admittedly moral purpose, and was dedicated to Sir Robert Walpole. The first line of the autograph is, apparently, missing.

"I hope your Ladyship will honour the Scenes, which I presume to lay before you, with your Perusal. As they are written on a Model I never yet attempted, I am exceedingly anxious least they should find least Mercy from you than my lighter Productions. It will be a slight compensation to the modern Husband, that your Ladyship's censure will defend him from the Possibility of any other Reproof, since your least Approbation will always give me a Pleasure, infinitely superior to the loudest Applauses of a Theatre. For whatever has past your judgment, may, I think without any Imputation of Immodesty, refer Want of Success to Want of Judgment in an Audience. I shall do myself the honour of waiting on your Ladyship at Twickenham next Monday to receive my Sentence, and am, Madam, with the most devoted Respect

"Your Ladyship's
"most Obedient most humble Servant
"Henry Ffielding. 5
"London 7'br 4."

Frontispiece to Fielding's 'Tom Thumb'

In 1731-32 the burlesque entitled the Tragedy of Tragedies; or the Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, took the Town. The Tragedy parodies the absurdities of tragedians; and so far won immortality that in 1855 it was described as still holding the stage. But its chief modern interest lies in the tradition that Swift once observed that he "had not laughed above twice" in his life,--once at the tricks of a merry-andrew, and again when Fielding's Tom Thumb killed the ghost. The design for the frontispiece of the edition of 1731, here reproduced, is from the pencil of Hogarth; and is the first trace of a connexion between Fielding and the painter who was to be honoured so frequently in his pages. An adaptation from MoliÈre, produced in 1733, under the title of the Miser, won from Voltaire the praise of having added to the original "quelques beautes de dialogue particuliÈres a sa [Fielding's] nation." The leading character in the Miser, Lovegold, became a stock part, and survived to our own days, having been a favourite with Phelps. In Don Quixote in England, produced in 1733 or 34, 6 Fielding reappears in the character of patriotic censor with the design, as appears from the dedication to Lord Chesterfield, of representing "the Calamities brought on a Country by general Corruption." No less than fifteen songs are interspersed in the play, and it is matter for curious conjecture why none of them was chosen for a reprint among the collected verses published ten years later in the Miscellanies. Time has almost failed to preserve even the hunting-song beginning finely--

"The dusky Night rides down the Sky,
And ushers in the Morn;
The Hounds all join in glorious Cry,
The Huntsman winds his Horn:"

But a happier fate has befallen the fifth song, now familiar as the first verse of the Roast Beef of Old England. It is eminently appropriate that the most distinctly national of English novelists should have written:

"When mighty Rost Beef was the Englishman's food,
It ennobled our Hearts, and enriched our Blood;
Our Soldiers were brave and our Courtiers were good.
Oh, the Rost Beef of old England,
And old England's Rost Beef!

"Then, Britons, from all nice Dainties refrain,
Which effeminate Italy, France, and Spain;
And mighty Rost Beef shall command on the Main.
Oh, the Rost Beef, etc."

To this truly prolific period of the young 'hackney writer's' pen belongs an Epilogue, hitherto overlooked, written for Charles Johnson's five-act play Caelia or the Perjur'd Lover, and spoken by Kitty Clive. The lines, which are hardly worth reprinting, consist of an ironic attack on the laxity of town morals, where "Miss may take great liberties upon her," and each woman is virtuous till she be found out.

An average of two plays a year is a record scarcely conducive to literary excellence; any more than is the empty cupboard, and the frequent recourse to 'your honour's own pawnbroker,' so often and so honourably familiar to struggling genius. "The farces written by Mr Fielding," says Murphy"... were generally the production of two or three mornings, so great was his facility in writing"; and we have seen Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's assertion that much of his work would have been thrown into the fire had not his dinner gone with it. Of the struggles of these early years 7 (struggles never wholly remitted, for, to quote Lady Mary again, Fielding would have wanted money had his hereditary lands been as extensive as his imagination) we get further suggestions in the Poetical Epistle addressed to Sir Robert Walpole when the young poet was but twenty-three. The lines go with a gallant spirit, but it is not difficult to detect a savour of grim hardship behind the jests:

"While at the Helm of State you ride,
Our Nation's Envy and its Pride;
While foreign Courts with Wonder gaze,
And curse those Councils which they praise;
Would you not wonder, Sir, to view
Your Bard a greater Man than you?
Which that he, is you cannot doubt,
When you have heard the Sequel out.
. . . . . "The Family that dines the latest,
Is in our Street esteem'd the greatest;
But latest Hours must surely fall
Before him who ne'er dines at all.
Your Taste in Architect, you know,
Hath been admir'd by Friend and Foe;
But can your earthly Domes compare
With all my Castles--in the Air?
"We're often taught it doth behove us
To think those greater who're above us;
Another Instance of my Glory,
Who live above you, twice two Story,
And from my Garret can look down
On the whole Street of Arlington." 8

Not to depend too greatly on Mr Luckless for our picture of Fielding as a playwright, we will conclude it with the well-known passage from Murphy: "When he had contracted to bring on a play, or a farce, it is well known, by many of his friends now living, that he would go home rather late from a tavern, and would the next morning deliver a scene to the players, written upon the papers which had wrapped the tobacco in which he so much delighted." Would that some of those friends had recorded for our delight the wit that, alas! has vanished like the smoke through which it was engendered. What would we not give for the table-talk of Henry Fielding.