The Ten Best Novels: Tom Jones

by W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM

1

THE difficulty of writing about Henry Fielding, the man, is that very little is known about him. Arthur Murphy, who wrote a short life of him in 1762, only eight years after his death, as an introduction to an edition of his works, seems to have had no personal acquaintance with him and had so little material that, presumably in order to fill the eighty pages of his essay, he indulged in long and tedious digressions. The facts he tells are few and subsequent research has shown that they are inaccurate.

Later writers have been at pains to show that Fielding Mas far from the dissolute creature legend has decided he was, but unfortunately in making him more respectable they have also made him less engaging. They have been inclined to shake their heads over the obvious fact that he was a man of abundant vitality and impetuous appetites. But there is no reason to expect that a man whose books you admire shall be a model of propriety. His moral character makes his books neither better nor worse. Life is the subject matter of the writer of fiction and to write about it honestly he must partake of its vicissitudes to the full; he will not learn much by looking at it through a keyhole. But really there is no need to whitewash Fielding; his faults, such as they were, were very human and only a prudish, silly person can be seriously shocked at them.

Fielding was a gentleman born. His father, an officer in the Army who rose to be a general, was the third son of John Fielding, a Canon of Salisbury, and he in turn was the fifth son of the Earl of Desmond. The Desmonds were a younger branch of the family of Denbigh who fluttered themselves that they were descended from the Habsburgs. Gibbon, the Gibbon of the Decline and Fall, wrote in his autobiography: “The successors of Charles the Fifth may disclaim their brethren of England; but the romance of Tom Jones, that exquisite picture of human manners, will outlive the palace of the Escorial, and the imperial eagle of the House of Austria.” It is a fine phrase and a pity that the chum of these noble lords has been shown to have no foundation. They spelled their name Feilding and I have read somewhere that on one occasion the then Earl asked Henry Fielding how this came about, whereupon he answered: “I can only suppose it is because my branch of the family learned to spell before your lordship’s.”

Fielding’s father married Sarah, the daughter of Sir Henry Gould, a judge of the King’s Bench, and at his country seat our author was born in 1707. Three years later the Fieldings, who by this time had two daughters besides Henry, moved to East Stour in Dorsetshire and there two more girls and a boy were born. Mrs. Fielding died in 1718 and about this time Henry went to Eton. Here he made some valuable friends and if he did not leave, as Arthur Murphy states, “uncommonly versed in the Greek authors and an early master of the Latin classics,” he had learned enough to be able later to pepper his writings with quotations. At the age of eighteen, by when he had presumably left school, he gave promise already of the sort of man he was going to be. He happened to be staying at Lyme Regis with a trusty servant ready to “ beat, maim or kill” for his master, and there he fell in love with a Miss Sarah Andrew, whose considerable fortune added to the charm of her beauty, and he concocted a scheme to carry her off, by main force if necessary, and marry her. It was discovered and the young woman was hurried away and safely married off to a more eligible suitor.

This was in 1726. Fielding was of a comely presence; he was over six foot tall, strong and active, with deep-set, dark eyes, a Roman nose, a short upper lip with an ironical curl to it, and a strong, prominent chin. He had an immense power of enjoyment and his constitution was such as to permit a great deal of excess. For all one knows to the contrary he spent the next two or three years in London indulging in the gaieties of the town as agreeably as a well-connected young man can do when he has good looks and charm of manner. In 1728 he brought out a play called Love in Several Masques. It was something of a success. One can guess, if one likes, that his father brought pressure to bear on him to prepare himself to earn his living less hazardously than by writing for the stage and he entered the University of Leiden as a student of law. But his father had married again and either would not or could not continue to pay him the allowance he had promised, so after about a year Fielding was obliged to return to England. He was in such straits that, as in his lighthearted way he put it himself, he had no choice but to be a hackney coachman or a hackney writer.

Austin Dobson, who wrote his life for the English Men of Letters series, says that his inclinations as well as his opportunities led him to the stage. He had the high spirits, the humor, the keen-witted observation of the contemporary scene which are needed by the playwright; and he seems to have had besides some ingenuity and a sense of construction. The “inclinations” of which Austin Dobson speaks may very well mean that he had the vicarious exhibitionism which is part of the playwright’s make-up and that he looked upon writing plays as an easy way to make quick money; the “opportunities” may be a delicate way of saying that he was a handsome fellow of exuberant virility and had taken the fancy of a popular actress.

Between 1730 and 1736 he brought out two or three plays, comedies or farces, every year. The last two were attacks on the political corruption of the times, and the attacks were effective enough to cause the Ministry to pass a Licensing Act which obliged managers to obtain the Lord Chamberlain’s license to produce a play. This act still obtains to torment British authors. After this Fielding wrote only rarely for the stage and presumably for no other reason than that he was more than usually hard up.

I will not pretend that I have read his plays, but I have flipped through the pages and the dialogue seems natural and sprightly. The most amusing bit I have come across is the description of a character which after the fashion of the day he gives in the list of Dramatis Personae in Tom Thumb the Great: “a woman entirely faultless, save that she is a little given to drink.”

It is usual to dismiss Fielding’s plays with something like contempt and doubtless they lacked the literary distinction that the critic reading them in his library two hundred years later would like them to have. But plays are written to be acted, not to be read; it is doubtless very well for them to have literary distinction, but it is not that which makes them good plays; it may (and often does) make them less actable. Fielding’s plays have by now lost what merit they had, for the drama depends very much on actuality and so is ephemeral, almost as ephemeral as a newspaper; but some merit they must have had, for neither a young man’s wish to write plays nor pressure brought to bear by a favorite act ress will induce managers to put on play after play unless they please the public. For in this matter the public is the final judge. Unless the manager can gauge their taste he will go bankrupt.

Fielding’s plays had at least the merit that the public liked to go and see them. He had no illusions about their worth and himself said that he left off writing for the stage when he should have begun, He wrote for money and had no great respect for the understanding of an audience. “When he had contracted to bring on a play, or a farce,” says Murphy, “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.”

Murphy has another anecdote which shows rather charmingly Fielding’s attitude towards the public. During the rehearsals of a comedy called The Wedding Day, Garrick, who was playing in it, objected to a scene and asked Fielding to cut it.

“No, damn ‘em,” said Fielding, “if the scene isn’t a good one let them find it out.”

The scene was played, the audience noisily expressed their displeasure, and Garrick retired to the greenroom where his author was “indulging his genius, and solacing himself with a bottle of champagne. He had by this time drunk pretty plentifully; and cocking his eye at the actor, with streams of tobacco trickling down from the corner of his mouth, ‘What’s the matter, Garrick,’ says he, ‘what are they hissing now?’ ‘Why, the scene that I begged you to retrench; I knew it would not do; and they have so frightened me, that I shall not be able to collect myself the whole night.’ ’Oh, damn ‘em,’replies the author, ‘they have found it out, have they?'”

2

IF I have dwelt on what was after all not much more than an episode in Fielding’s career it is because I think it was important to his development as a novelist. Quite a number of eminent novelists have tried their hand at playwriting, but I cannot think of any that have succeeded. The fact is that the techniques are very different and to have learned how to write a novel is of no help when it comes to writing a play. The novelist has all the time he wants to develop his theme; he can describe his characters as minutely as he chooses and make their behavior plain to the reader by relating their motives; if he is skillful he can give verisimilitude to improbabilities: if he has a gift for narrative he can gradually work up to a climax which a long preparation makes more striking; he does not have to show action but only to write about it; he can make the persons explain themselves in dialogue for as many pages as he likes.

But a play depends on action and bv action of course I don’t mean violent action like falling off a precipice or being blown lip by a land mine; such an action as handing a person a glass of water may be of the highest dramatic intensity. The power of attention that Jin audience has is very limited ;md it must be held by JI constant succession of incidents; something fresh must he doing all the time; the theme must be presented at once and its development must follow a definite line, without digression into irrelevant bypaths; the dialogue must be crisp and pointed and il must be so put that the listener can catch its meaning without having to stop and think; the characters must be all of a piece, easily grasped by the eye and the understanding; and however complex, their complexity must be plausible. A play cannot afford loose ends; however slight, its foundation must be secure and its structure solid.

When the playwright who has acquired the qualities which I have suggested are essential to writing a play that audiences will sit through with pleasure starts writing novels, he is at an advantage. He has learned to be brief, he has learned the value of rapid incident, he has learned not to linger on the way, but to stick to his point and gel on with his story; he has learned to make his characters display themselves by their words and actions without the help of description; and so, when he comes to work on the larger canvas which the novel allows he profits not only by the advantages peculiar to the form of the novel, but his training as a playwright will enable him to make his novel lively, swift-moving, and dramatic. These are excellent qualities and some very good novelists, whatever their other merits, have not possessed them. I cannot look upon the years Fielding spent writing plays as wasted: I think on the contrary the experience he gained then was of value to him when he came to writing novels.

While he was still busy with the theater he married Charlotte Cradock. She was one of three sisters who lived at Salisbury, and nothing is known of her but that she was beautiful and charming. Fielding described her in Sophia and the reader of Tom Jones can therefore gain a very exact notion of what she looked like in the eyes of her lover and husband. As a husband he was tender and passionate, though since he was what he was, probably none too faithful. He doubtless regretted his infidelities, but that, it may be supposed, did not prevent him from falling for the next pretty woman who came his way.

With Charlotte Cradock he got £1500. One authority says it was by way of dowry, another that it was a legacy; anyhow, after the failure of a comedy, with this money he retired to his small estate at East Stour and according to Arthur Murphy there kept open house, had a pack of hounds and a large retinue of servants in “costly yellow liveries.” Subsequent biographers have been at pains to show that this story is exaggerated, but the fact remains that by 1736, two years after his marriage, the money was spent and he returned to London to write more plays and to manage a theater in the Haymarket.

When the Licensing Act became law a year later and so put an end to these activities, he had a wife and child and precious little money to support them on. He had to find a means of livelihood. He entered the Middle Temple and though “it happened that the early taste he had taken of pleasures would occasionally return upon him; and conspire with his spirit and vivacity to carry him into the wild enjoyments of the town,” he was in due course called to the bar. He practiced law with proper industry, but the dissipation of his early life had ruined his constitution and like everyone else at the time he suffered severely from the gout. He was thus able to follow his profession only by snatches. He took again to his pen. He wrote political tracts, a play or two, and articles for a paper called the Champion.

In 1742 he produced Joseph Andrews. This was his first novel to be published, though not, it is believed, the first he wrote, which was Jonathan Wild. Shortly after the publication of Joseph Andrews his beautiful wife died of fever in his arms and left him distracted with grief. For some years he produced nothing of importance.

He wrote for two papers, the True Patriot and the Jacobite’s Journal, in support of the government and when they came to an end was granted a pension. But he was improvident and of a naturally extravagant temper and he continued to be in embarrassed circumstances. A story is told of him that is characteristic: in order to pay the tax collector he got his publisher, Andrew Miller, to give him an advance and while taking the money home met a friend who was in even worse case than he was; so he gave him the money and when the tax collector came sent him the message: “Friendship has called for the money and had it; let the collector call again.”

3

FOUR years after his wife’s death he married her maid, Mary Daniel. It shocked his friends, and his cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the letterwriter, was haughtily scornful because he could “feel raptures with his cook-maid”; but though she had few personal charms, she was an excellent creature and he never spoke of her but with affection and respect. The second Mrs. Fielding was a very decent woman, who looked after him well, and he wanted some looking after, a good wife and a good mother. She bore her husband two hoys and a girl.

Among the friends Fielding had made at Eton, and whose friendship he had retained, was George Lyttelton, a member of a distinguished political family (distinguished to the present day) and a generous patron of literature. He was a Lord of the Treasury from 1744 to 1754 and in 1749 succeeded in getting Fielding made Justice of the Peace for Westminster. He was fitted for the post by his training as a lawyer, his knowledge of life, and his natural gifts. He appears to have performed his duties with efficiency. Shortly after his appointment he was chosen Chairman of Quarter Sessions and established himself in Bow Street. Fielding says that before his accession the job was worth £500 a year of dirty money, but that he made no more than £300 a year of clean.

In 1749 he published Tom Jones. He was paid £700 for it. Since I presume money at that period was worth from four to six times what it is worth now, this sum was the equivalent of something between £.4000 and £4000. Thai would not be bad payment for a novel in England today.

But Fielding’s health was by now very poor. His attacks of gout were frequent and he had often to go to Bath or to a cottage he had near London lo recuperate. But he did not cease to write. He wrote pamphlets concerning his office; one, An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers, is said to have helped the famous Gin Act to be passed; and he wrote Amelia, the heroine of which was again drawn from his dear dead Charlotte. This appeared in December, 1751; and the following year, such was his energy, he formed a connection with a third newspaper, the CoventGarden Journal, which lasted for nine months. His health grew worse and worse and in 1754, after breaking up “a gang of villains and cutthroats” who had become the terror of London, he resigned his office to his half brother John Fielding. It appeared that his only chance of life was to seek a better climate than that of England and so in June of that year, 1754, he left his native country on the Queen of Portugal, Richard Veal master, for Lisbon. He arrived in August and two months later died. He was buried in the English cemetery.

4

WHEN I consider his life, which from inadequate material I have briefly sketched, I am seized with a singular emotion. He was a man. He was fond of the bottle, he was something of a gambler, and he liked women. When people speak of virtue it is generally sex they have in mind, but chastity is only a small part of virtue and perhaps not the chief one. Fielding had strong passions and he had no hesitation in yielding to them, l.e was capable of loving tenderly. Now love, not affection, which is a different thing, is rooted in sex, but there can be sexual desire without love. It is only hypocrisy or ignorance that denies it. Sexual desire is an animal instinct and there is nothing more shameful in it than in thirst or hunger and no more reason not to satisfy it.

If Fielding was dissolute because he enjoyed, somewhat promiscuously, the pleasures of sex, then he was at all events no worse than most men. Like most of us he regretted his sins, but when opportunity occurred, committed them again. He was hot-tempered, but kindhearted, generous, and in a corrupt age honest; an affectionate husband and father; courageous and truthful, a good friend to his friends, who till his death remained attached to him. Though tolerant of the faults of others, he hated brutality and double-dealing. He was not puffed up by success and with the help of a chicken and a bottle of champagne bore adversity with fortitude. He took life as it came, with high spirits and good humor, and enjoyed it to the full.

In fact he was very like his own Tom Jones. Now I should like to warn any new reader of Fielding’s greatest novel that if he is of a squeamish habit he had better not start on it. It has been well said by Austin Dobson that “he made no pretence to produce models of perfection, but pictures of ordinary humanity, rather perhaps in the rough than in the polished, the natural than the artificial, his desire is to do this with absolute truthfulness, neither extenuating nor disguising defects and shortcomings.” In fact he described, for the ffrst time in English fiction, a real man.

Hannah More in her memoirs relates that she never saw Dr. Johnson angry with her but once and that was when she alluded to some witty passage in Tom Jones. “ I am shocked to hear you quote from so vicious a book,” he said. “I am sorry to hear you have read it: a confession which no modest lady should ever make. I scarcely know a more corrupt work.”

Now I should say that a modest lady before marriage would do very well to read the book. It will tell her pretty well all she needs to know of the facts of life and a lot about men which cannot fail to be useful to her before entering upon that difficult state. But no one ever has looked upon Dr. Johnson as free from prejudice. He would allow Fielding no literary merit and once even described him as a blockhead. When Boswell demurred, he said: “What I mean by his being a blockhead is that he was a barren rascal.”

“Will you not allow, Sir, that he draws very natural pictures of human life?” answered Boswell.

“Why, Sir, it is of very low life. Richardson used to say that had he not known who Fielding was, he should have believed he was an ostler.”

We are used to low life in fiction now and there is nothing in Tom Jones that the novelists of our own day have not made us familiar with. Prudish critics have sought to explain away as due to the loose morality of the times the incident that has on the whole been looked upon as the most blameworthy in the career of Mr. Jones: Lady Bellaston fell in love with him and found him not unwilling to gratify her desire: he was pretty well penniless at the moment and she was wealthy. She very generously relieved his necessities.

Well, it is doubtless a discreditable thing for a man to accept money from a woman, and it is also an unprofitable one, because rich ladies in these circumstances demand a good deal more than their money’s worth. Morally it is no more shocking than for a woman to accept money from a man and it is only foolishness on the part of common opinion to look upon it as such. Nor should it be forgotten that our own day has found it necessary to invent a term, gigolo, to describe the male who turns his personal attractiveness into a source of profit; so Tom’s lack of delicacy, however reprehensible, can hardly be regarded as unique.

There is one interesting point in his amorous career that is perhaps worth pointing out. He was honestly, sincerely, and deeply in love with the charming Sophia and yet felt no qualms about indulging in the pleasures of the flesh with any woman who was good-looking and facile. He loved Sophia none the less for these episodes. Fielding was much too sensible to make his hero more continent than is the average sensual man. He knew that we should all be more virtuous if we were as wise at night as we are in the morning.

Tom Jones is well enough constructed and the various incidents follow one another with a happy invention. Fielding was as little concerned with probability as the picaresque novelists who were his predecessors in the genre, and the most unlikely events occur, the most outrageous coincidences bring people together; yet he bustles you along with such gusto that you have hardly time, and in any case little inclination, to protest. The characters are painted in primary colors with a slapdash bravura and if they somewhat lack subtlety they make up for it by being very much alive.

I’m afraid Mr. Allworthy is a little too good to be true, but here Fielding has failed as every novelist since has failed who has attempted to depict a perfectly virtuous man. Experience seems to show that it is impossible not to make him a trifle stupid. One is impatient with a character who is so good that he lets the most obvious fakes impose on him. Ralph Allen of Prior Park is said to have been the original of Allworthy and it is of him that Pope wrote: —

If this is so, and the portrait is accurate, it only shows that a character taken straight from life is never quite convincing in a piece of fiction.

Blifil on the other hand has been thought too bad to be true. Fielding hated deceit and hypocrisy and his detestation of Blifil was such that it may be he laid on his colors with too heavy a hand: but Blilil, a mean, sneaking, self-seeking, cold-blooded fish. Is not an uncommon type. The fear of being found out is the only thing that restrains him from being a knave. But Blifil’s main fault is that he lacks life, he is a dummy, and I have asked myself if this is not because of an instinctive feeling on his creator’s part that if he had given him a more active and prominent role he would have made him so powerful and sinister a figure as to upset the balance of his story.

5

Tom Jones is written in a very agreeable fashion and the style is more easy and natural than that of Jane Austen, whose Pride and Prejudice was written fifty years later. The reason of this I take to be that Fielding modeled himself on Addison and Steele, whereas Jane Austen was influenced, perhaps unconsciously, by the pomposity of Dr. Johnson, whom we know she read with admiration, and by the writers of her own day who had adopted something of his manner.

It has been said, I forget by whom, that a good style should resemble the conversation of a cultivated man. That is exactly what Fielding’s style does. He is talking to the reader and telling him the story of Tom Jones as he might tell it over the dinner table with a bottle of wine to a number of friends. He does not mince his words any more than does a modern writer. The beautiful and virtuous Sophia was apparently quite used to bearing such words as whore, bastard, and strumpet and that which, for a reason hard to guess. Fielding writes b—ch. In fact there were moments when her fattier. Squire Western, applied them very freely to herself.

But the conversational method of writing a novel, the method by which the author takes you into his confidence, telling you what he feels about the characters and the situations in which they are, has its drawback. The author is always at your elbow and so hinders your immediate communication with the persons of his story. He is apt to irritate you sometimes by moralizing and once he starts to digress is apt to be tedious. You do not want to hear what he has to say about this, that, and the other; you want him to get on with the Story.

Fielding’s digressions are nearly always sensible or amusing and their only fault is that one could well do without them. They are brief and he has the grace to apologize for them. But he went further than that. He prefaced each of the books into which Tom Jones is divided by an essay. Some critics have greatly admired them and looked upon them as adding to the excellence of the book. I can only suppose that is because they were not interested in the novel as a novel. An essayist takes a subject and discusses it. If his subject is new to you, he may tell you something that you didn’t know before, but now subjects are hard to find and in general he expects to interest you by his own altitude and the characteristic way ho regards things. That is to say, he expects to interest you in himself.

But that is the last thing you are prepared to do when you read a novel. You don’t care a row of pins about the author; he is there to tell you a story and introduce to you a group of characters. Because it has been my business I have read the essays with which Fielding introduced his various books, but, although I would not deny their merit, I have read them with impatience. The reader of a novel should want to know what happens next to the characters in whom the author has interested him and if he doesn’t there is no reason for him to read the novel at all. For the novel, I can never repeat too often, is not to be looked upon as a medium of instruction or edification, but as a source of intelligent entertainment.

On reading over these pages I find myself fearing that I have given the reader of this introduction the impression that Tom Jones is a rough, coarse book, dealing with adventurers and loose women, and vulgar. That would be a very false impression. Fielding knew life too well to take people at their face value and his experience had shown him that it is not in human nature to be entirely disinterested. Complete unselfishness is beautiful, but it is not of this world and it is ingenuous to expect it. But in Sophia Western he has drawn a charming and tender portrait of as delightful a young woman as has ever enchained a reader of fiction. She is simple but not silly, virtuous but no prude; she has character, determination, and courage; she has a loving heart and she is beautiful, it is touching to know that in creating her Fielding was remembering his own beloved (and I am afraid, long-suffering) wife.

I do not think I can end this introduction better than by quoting the words of that wise critic George Saintsbury: —

Tom Jones is an epic of life — not indeed of the highest, the rarest, the most impassioned of life’s scenes and phases, but of the healthy average life of the average natural man; not faultless nor perfect by any means, but human and actual as no one else but Shakespeare has shown him in the mimic world.

(The next novel to be discussed by Mr. Maugham will be Balzac’s Le Pére Goriot.)