Dobson's Fielding

THRE current discussions upon modern fiction might easily receive some light from an examination of Fielding’s work, and it is a pity that Mr. Dobson, in his careful study,¹ should not have given a

more suggestive sketch of the novelist, even at the risk of leaving unsettled the date and place of Fielding’s second marriage. Mr. Dobson, to be sure, excuses himself from offering any critical estimate of Fielding’s place in literature on the ground that Mr. Leslie Stephen has lately done this well ; but one may fairly ask that the portrait of a man of letters should bear some distinct marks of his appearance in that character, and not show him merely as he might be seen by the rogues who were brought up before the justice of Bow Street.

Mr. Dobson is so much at home in the life and literature of the eighteenth century that we may suspect his very familiarity to have made him indifferent to many matters about which his less informed readers would be curious, and more bent on hunting down obscure facts than of lifting into light, by his imagination, the commoner ones. He has made some additions to our knowledge of particulars in Fielding’s life, and he has, by the fullness of his knowledge, given a sensible and reasonable interpretation of incidents which have been a stumbling-block to previous biographers. For so much we are grateful, but Mr. Dobson makes us demand more. We did not want from him, what his book is, a long article for a biographical encyclopædia, where clearness of judgment, accuracy of statement, and directness are the sole requisites; we wanted an imaginative picture, which should project Fielding from a background of his circumstances, and enable us to see his individuality.

The book is an admirable one for those who already enjoy a fair acquaintance with the literature and characters of Fielding’s time. Mr. Dobson moves about among the persons of his story with so much ease that one hardly perceives at first the closeness of his knowledge ; one is aware only of the naturalness of the book, and its freedom from any straining after effect. Thus the casual reflections and side remarks which Mr. Dobson makes have a value quite out of proportion to their apparent intention ; and throughout one has the satisfaction of putting himself under the guidance of a scholar who has been over the ground a great many times, and is not now making the exploration with the reader.

The somewhat contemptuous tone which Mr. Dobson takes toward Richardson is heightened by the easy justification which he has for Fielding’s excesses ; but he is right in requiring a judgment of Fielding’s novels to be based upon the novels themselves, and not upon the tales that are told of the author’s youth. The present generation of critics has done much to secure fair play for men of letters; the scientific spirit which aims at an exactness of statement is more favorable to just judgment than that partisan temper which may be found in critics who have a very high code of ethics, and come to the judgment seat with their minds made up beforehand. If we are not mistaken, the students of English literature hereafter will pay the writers of this day the compliment of accepting with little question the results of their investigations. It will remain for them to make a more synthetical judgment, and one more obedient to the imagination. The minuteness of study to-day, which is almost as noticeable in literature as in science, is both corrective and preparatory. It is gently removing errors of past judgment; it is simplifying the work of a future survey, and the temper of these scholars is a humane one. One might please himself long with a reflection upon the interest which men are taking now in the Queen Anne period, and we suspect that the acute critics of the next generation will entertain the readers of The Atlantic with considerations upon this revival of interest. Why was it, they will ask, that in the latter part of the nineteenth century Englishmen, and those Americans who were most under English influence, turned back to the very circumscribed England of the former half of the eighteenth century ? That was a period when Pope’s couplets, with their finality, epitomized the well-defined boundary of the world of which men were conscious ; but in the latter half of the nineteenth century there was an exceeding restlessness of spirit, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam was a true exponent of the temper of the age. Well, these acute critics will continue, the answer may be looked for both in the reaction which followed a spiritual quest, and in the strong scientific tendencies of the age, which demanded a bottom to things. George Eliot never took any solid satisfaction in the characters whom she

created except in that of Caleb Garth, who was wont to speak of business, as many of religion, with reverence and a profound sense of its reality and comprehensive power. So it was the frankness and the limitations of Fielding that made him satisfactory to students of fiction, and led them to say, Here is welldefined art and a solid basis in human character. We leave to these critics many fine things which they might say. It surely is enough to criticise a critic, without inventing one.