HENRY FIELDING 1707-1754 Henry Fielding was born in 1707, at Sharpham Park, in Somersetshire. His father, General Edmund Fielding, who belonged to a younger branch of the Denbigh family, had served under Marlborough, and was a person of good position in society, but seems to have set his son the bad example of extravagance. Henry Fielding was educated at Eton, where he is said to have acquired a great familiarity with the Latin and Greek classics. He afterwards studied jurisprudence at Leyden, but was compelled to return to England in consequence of his father's inability to support him at that university. Finding himself at the age of twenty thrown upon his own resources, "with an allowance from his father," as he said himself, which " anyone might pay who could, and with no choice but to be a hackney writer or a hackney coachman,” he preferred the former alternative, and became a dramatic author. None of his farces or comedies obtained, or indeed deserved, any considerable success; they can hardly be said to contain any promise of his future excellence. At the age of twenty-eight he married, and, inheriting at the same time a small estate, retired to the country. Here, however, in two years he had completely ruined himself by a ludicrous extravagance, and returned to London to study law. To maintain himself and his family he again wrote plays, and was besides concerned in more than one of the periodicals of the day. At thirty-five the desire of ridiculing Richardson's "Pamela" suggested to him the composition of "Joseph Andrews," and having once found the true bent of his genius, he followed it up with ardor, and, while still occupied with periodical writing and with the duties of a stipendiary magistracy, he found time for the production of his later and equally celebrated novels. But his health, which had long been declining, at last gave way altogether, and in 1754, as a last chance for life, he sailed for Lisbon, but only to die there in the autumn of the same year. Fielding's English is pure, simple, and unaffected. But his high place in English literature is due not so much to his style, though original and excellent in its kind, as to his transcendent genius as a novelist; to his wide human sympathies, his just conception and sharp delineation of character, his humor, so copious as to extend with undiminished force over his voluminous writings, and the buoyant sense of the enjoyment of life which he has infused into pages composed not unfrequently under the pressure of much physical suffering. His "The Commonwealth of Letters" first appeared in the essay on "Covent Garden Journal." It is characterized by his robust common sense, his vigorous, easy style, and his good-humored, racy wit. THE COMMONWEALTH OF LETTERS Οὐκ ἀγαθὸν πολυκοιρανίη, εἰς κοίρανος ἔστω, Εἰς Βασιλεὺς, ὦ ἔδωκε Κρόνου παῖς ἀγκυλυμήτεω Here is not allowed That worst of tyrants, an usurping crowd. To one sole monarch Jove commits the sway; HOUGH of the three forms of government acknowledged in the schools all have been very warmly opposed and as warmly defended, yet in this point the different advocates will, I believe, very readily agree, that there is not one of the three which is not greatly to be preferred to total anarchy-a State in which there is no subordination, no lawful power, and no settled government, but where every man is at liberty to act in whatever manner it pleaseth him best. As this is in reality a most deplorable state, I have long lamented, with great anguish of heart, that it is at present the case of a very large body of people in this kingdom-an assertion which, as it may surprise most of my readers, I will make haste to explain, by declaring that I mean the fraternity of the quill, that body of men to whom the public assign the name of authors. However absurd politicians may have been pleased to represent the imperium in imperio, it will here, I doubt not, be found on a strict examination to be extremely necessary, the commonwealth of literature being indeed totally distinct from the greater commonwealth, and no more dependent upon it than the kingdom of England is on that of France. Of this our legislature seems to have been at all times sensible, as they have never attempted any provision for the regulation or correction of this body. In one instance, it is true, there are (I should rather, I believe, say there were) some laws to restrain them; for writers, if I am not mistaken, have been formerly punished for blasphemy against God and libels against the government; nay, I have been told that to slander the reputation of private persons was once thought unlawful here as well as among the Romans, who, as Horace tells us, had a severe law for this purpose. In promulging these laws (whatever may be the reason of suffering them to grow obsolete) the State seems to have acted very wisely, as such kind of writings are really of most mischievous consequence to the public; but, alas! there are many abuses, many horrid evils, daily springing up in the commonwealth of literature, which appear to affect only that commonwealth, at least immediately, of which none of the political legislators have ever taken any notice, nor hath any civil court of judicature ever pretended to any cognizance of them. Nonsense and dulness are no crimes in foro civili; no man can be questioned for bad verses in Westminster Hall; and, amongst the many indictments for battery, not one can be produced for breaking poor Priscian's head,1 though it is done almost every day. But though immediately, as I have said, these evils do not affect the greater commonwealth, yet, as they tend to the utter ruin of the lesser, so they have a remote evil consequence, even on the State itself; which seems, by having left them unprovided for, to have remitted them, for the sake of convenience, to the government of laws and to the superintendence of magistrates of this lesser commonwealth, and never to have foreseen or suspected that dreadful state of anarchy which at present prevails in this lesser empire-an empire which hath formerly made so great a figure in this kingdom, and that, indeed, almost within our own memories. It may appear strange that none of our English historians have spoken clearly and distinctly of this lesser empire; but this may be well accounted for when we consider that all these histories have been written by two sorts of persons-that is to say, either politicians or lawyers. Now, the former of these have had their imaginations so entirely filled with the affairs of "To commit a grammatical error," Priscian being a famous grammarian in the time of Justinian. Cf. Hudibras," pt. II. can. 2, l. 223. "And hold no sin so deeply red, the greater empire that it is no wonder the business of the lesser should have totally escaped their observation. And as to the lawyers, they are well known to have been very little acquainted with the commonwealth of literature, and to have always acted and written in defiance to its laws. From these reasons it is very difficult to fix, with certainty, the exact period when this commonwealth first began among us. Indeed, if the originals of all the greater empires upon earth, and even of our own, be wrapped in such obscurity that they elude the inquiries of the most diligent sifters of antiquity, we cannot be surprised that this fate should attend our little empire, opposed as it hath been by the pen of the lawyer, overlooked by the eye of the historian, and never once smelt aiter by the nose of the antiquary. In the earliest ages the literary state seems to have been an ecclesiastical democracy, for the clergy are then said to have had all the learning among them; and the great reverence paid at that time to it by the laity appears from hence, that whoever could prove in a court of justice that he belonged to this state, by only reading a single verse in the Testament, was vested with the highest privileges, and might do almost what he pleased, even commit murder with impunity. And this privilege was called the benefit of the clergy. This commonwealth, however, can scarce be said to have been in any flourishing state of old time even among the clergy themselves; inasmuch as we are told that a rector of a parish, going to law with his parishioners about paving the church, quoted this authority from St. Peter, Paveant illi, non paveam ego, which he construed thus: "They are to pave the church, and not I." And this, by a judge who was likewise an ecclesiastic, was allowed to be very good law. The nobility had clearly no ancient connection with this commonwealth, nor would submit to be bound by any of its laws; witness that provision in an old act of Parliament, “That a nobleman shall be entitled to the benefit of his clergy" (the privilege above mentioned) "even though he cannot read." Nay, the whole body of the laity, though they gave such honors to this commonwealth, appear to have been very few of them under its jurisdiction, as appears by a law cited by Judge Rolls in his "Abridgment," with the reason which he gives for it: VOL. I.-18 |