O ye fools did ye suppose the devil was dead? Is he not a liar and the father of it? Suffer ye then thus far, let the devil and his children say all manner of evil of us. And let them go on deceiving each other, and being deceived. But ye need not be deceived also; or if you are, if you will believe all they say, be it so, that we are weak, silly, wicked men ; without sense, without learning, without even a desire or design of doing good; yet I insist upon the fact: Christ is preached, and sinners are converted to God. This none but a madman can deny. We are ready to prove it by a cloud of witnesses. Neither, therefore, can

the inference be denied, that God is now visiting His people. O that all men may know, in this their day, the things that make for their peace!

(From An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion.)

HENRY FIELDING

[Henry Fielding was born on the 22nd of April 1707 at Sharpham Park, in Somersetshire. His father was Edmund Fielding, an officer and subsequently a general in the army, who was himself the son of John Fielding, canon of Salisbury, and grandson of the first Earl of Desmond of the Fielding family. That family also possessed the title of Denbigh, with which at present that of Desmond is united. The novelist's mother was Sarah Gould, daughter of a judge whose seat Sharpham was; and there, or at East Stour in Dorset, Fielding spent his childhood. He was sent to Eton and subsequently to the University

of Leyden; but our knowledge of the events of his youth (as indeed of most of his life) is very scanty and uncertain. At about the time when he came of age we find him back in London, where for some seven years he occupied himself in writing numerous plays, the best or the least bad of which is Tom Thumb. About 1735 he married a young lady named Charlotte Cradock, who is said to have possessed great beauty and charm, and to have been the model of his heroines, especially Amelia; and for a time he seems to have retired to East Stour and lived the life of a country gentleman. But if he did he soon returned to town, to play-writing, to the management of the Haymarket Theatre, and to the composition of miscellaneous literature, including in 1739 great part of a periodical called The Champion. He also was called to the bar and practised a little. But in 1742 his first novel, Joseph Andrews, appeared, and was warmly received by good judges. This may have encouraged him to issue next year three volumes of Miscellanies, which with much inferior work included not only the Journey from this World to the Next but also Jonathan Wild. Shortly afterwards his wife died; and four years later he married her maid. In the crisis of 1745 he had edited or written two Whig periodicals, the True Patriot and the Jacobite's Journal; but again very little is known of him till the influence of Mr. Lyttelton procured him the Bow Street magistrateship, and he published Tom Jones in 1749. He worked very hard in his office; published Amelia in 1751, wrote not a few pamphlets and a fresh periodical, the Covent Garden Journal, which lasted for the greater part of 1752. Next year his health, which had long been unsatisfactory, grew steadily worse, and a journey to some warmer climate was ordered. He started for Lisbon in June 1754 and reached it in August, but died there on the 8th October. His Journal of the voyage, one of his not least charming things, was published shortly afterwards, but contains no account of anything subsequent to his landing.]

CONSIDERING how much has been said of the qualities of Fielding as a novelist by authorities of all degrees of competence, and how

little pains in comparison have been bestowed on him strictly as a writer, the part of the subject with which it will be most profitable to deal here seems to be pretty clearly indicated. On the first head indeed, though it cannot be said that agreement is absolute, belief in Fielding's extraordinary excellence is unquestionably the orthodox faith, while the dissenters from it are few and, with rare exceptions among those few, unimportant. Objections in detail have indeed been taken, and may in part be taken justly, to the digressions and secondary stories which interrupt and prolong the narrative in almost all the books, to the somewhat easy-going morality, and the very complaisant dealing with loose if engaging incidents, to the relentless picture of human villainy in Jonathan Wild, to the obtrusion of political and other dissertation in Amelia. Some of these objections (as well as others which might be mentioned) are of force. But they touch mere details, and fall altogether short of the level of the excellencies which may on the other hand be assigned to him. The highest praise of all has sometimes been claimed for the mathematical exactness of construction which has been thought to make the plot of Tom Jones the most symmetrical and faultless to be found in modern times. A still higher value has been assigned— perhaps justly-by others to the combination of inventiveness and truth in character-drawing wherein Fielding has hardly a rival. It is almost impossible for him to produce a class of character which, even after a great lapse of time and a greater change of manners, does not strike us now as real and alive; nor has he any difficulty in differentiating his characters of the same class from each other by little living touches and shades. His descriptions of persons, of places, of incidents, have this same veracity and brilliancy of drawing in a hardly less extraordinary degree. Others again have fixed for special admiration on the acuteness and (within certain limits) the profundity of his general observations on human life and nature; others on his irony-a gift in which among English writers he is only excelled by Swift and only approached by Thackeray; others on the genial and humane conception of life which, though certainly not coupled with any very great optimism of philosophical view, distinguishes his books; others on the lambent easy light of the humour which -deriving in part from qualities and gifts already referred to, but containing in it something peculiar and additional-illuminates the whole of his work. It is not necessary to attempt to rank

these gifts in order; the more excellent way is to admire and enjoy them all in their certainly unique combination.

A question too important to omit altogether, but too complicated to examine thoroughly, is the relation of this wonderful work in fiction to earlier members of the same class in English Literature. The delusive and rhetorical title of "Father of the English Novel " has been applied to Fielding, as to Richardson, to Defoe and to others. What is certain is, that he raised that novel at once in the scales of complexity, of variety, and of truth to life. But we have nothing whatever to guide us in seeking to discover the motives which put him upon the practice of this art; and not very much to help us to his own theory of the novel. He calls

it indeed in one place a comic epic poem in prose; but it would be distinctly dangerous to accept this definition in too good faith, and other passages in which he claims for the novelist a sort of parity with the historian proper in the philosophical arrangement of motive and event, may not be more serious. He did not, it must be remembered, produce Joseph Andrews, his first published novel, till he was just ceasing to be a young man even at the liberal computation of youth, which makes it cease at thirty-five; and it is very improbable that he wrote Jonathan Wild much earlier, even if its age in production be not identical with its date of publication. I should indeed judge from internal evidence-there is no other -that the Journey from this World to the Next was a good deal the senior of both of these. But here, though there is much of Fielding's acute observation and shrewd recording of traits of human nature, neither gift is put to any real degree at the service of the art of story-telling proper, and the book is merely a string of character-sketches, not much if at all more like those of a novel or even a romance, than the essays with personages of Addison and his group. Surprising therefore as it may seem that such a masterpiece as Joseph Andrews should be a mere recoil from something else, a mere parody not to say caricature, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the desire to ridicule Richardson and Pamela was its real original; while I am inclined to think that no very different motive need be assigned to the possibly contemporary Jonathan Wild. Indeed, careful readers of Jonathan, especially of the curious episode of Mrs. Heartfree's adventures, will have noticed not a few attempts at burlesque of the French and other romances. That these two exercises must have revealed to Fielding his own powers and set him on the construction of

the far more ambitious edifice of Tom Jones is not so much probable as certain; while no additional disposing causes except reminiscences of his youth and observations made in his Bow Street office need be assigned for Amelia.

The acquired accomplishments, as distinguished from the natural genius, with which Fielding set about the production of his masterpieces, and the qualities of craftsman in English as distinguished from those of expert in human nature which he possessed are not uninteresting or unimportant to investigate. Although a man of good reading, and (as is now known) the possessor in his later years at any rate of a considerable library, he can hardly be ranked among the most scholarly of English writers. He enjoyed indeed the inestimable advantage—sometimes flouted by ungrateful persons who have had it, or disdained in fox-and-grapes fashion by those who have not, but absolutely unmistakable in the results of its presence or absence—which is conferred, and conferred only, by the old-fashioned classical education. But it is uncertain how long he was exposed to its influence at Eton, and certain that the greater part of his intellectual breeding was rather haphazard. And when he began to write (which he did very early, and when most men are still at the University) it was in the service of the most careless and ungirt of all the Muses, the Muse of Farce and stage burlesque. Nor can it be said that, even after many years of practice in somewhat severer kinds, he was ever a very correct writer; though there is a great advance in correctness to be noticed between the Journey from this World to the Next and the Voyage to Lisbon. In the former, as elsewhere, the distinction which he himself both ingeniously and ingenuously puts in his Epistle to Sir Robert Walpole,

"Latin I write and Greek-I read,"

is illustrated; for a translator of the First Olynthiac ought to have known better than to use the non-existent and indeed impossible form" Nousphoric." In this same piece the mere English is also far from perfect. Relatives and demonstratives are perpetually used without precision and with confusion; the sentences are piled up with addition after addition in the old fashion; and it is particularly noteworthy that Fielding is here trying, with very partial success, at the crisp ironic phrase to which he afterwards attained in perfection.

In Joseph and Jonathan, but especially in the former, he was