Beau was an essay in the vein of Congreve and Wycherley, though, in a measure, an advance on Love in Several Masques.
With the Temple Beau Fielding’s dramatic career definitely begins. His father had married again; and his Leiden career had been interrupted for lack of funds. Nominally, he was entitled to an allowance of £200 a year; but this (he was accustomed to say) “any body might pay that would.” Young, handsome, ardent and fond of pleasure, he began that career as a hand-to-mouth playwright around which so much legend has gathered—and gathers. Having—in his own words—no choice but to be a hackney coachman or a hackney writer, he chose the pen; and his inclinations, as well as his opportunities, led him to the stage. From 1730 to 1736 he rapidly brought out a large number of pieces, most of which had merit enough to secure their being acted, but not sufficient to earn a lasting reputation for their author. His chief successes, from a critical point of view, the Author’s Farce (1730) and Tom Thumb (1730, 1731), were burlesques; and he also was fortunate in two translations from Molière, the Mock Doctor (1732) and the Miser (1733). Of the rest (with one or two exceptions, to be mentioned presently) the names need only be recorded. They are The Coffee-House Politician, a comedy (1730); The Letter Writers, a farce (1731); The Grub-Street Opera, a burlesque (1731); The Lottery, a farce (1732); The Modern Husband, a comedy (1732); The Covent Garden Tragedy, a burlesque (1732); The Old Debauchees, a comedy (1732); Deborah; or, a Wife for you all, an after-piece (1733); The Intriguing Chambermaid (from Regnard), a two-act comedy (1734); and Don Quixote in England, a comedy, which had been partly sketched at Leiden.
Don Quixote was produced in 1734, and the list of plays may be here interrupted by an event of which the date has only recently been ascertained, namely, Fielding’s first marriage. This took place on the 28th of November 1734 at St Mary, Charlcornbe, near Bath (Macmillan’s Magazine, April 1907), the lady being a Salisbury beauty, Miss Charlotte Cradock, of whom he had been an admirer, if not a suitor, as far back as 1730. This is a fact which should be taken into consideration in estimating the exact Bohemianism of his London life, for there is no doubt that he was devotedly attached to her. After a fresh farce entitled An Old Man taught Wisdom, and the comparative failure of a new comedy, The Universal Gallant, both produced early in 1735, he seems for a time to have retired with his bride, who came into £1500, to his old home at East Stour. Around this rural seclusion fiction has freely accreted. He is supposed to have lived for three years on the footing of a typical 18th-century country gentleman; to have kept a pack of hounds; to have put his servants into impossible yellow liveries; and generally, by profuse hospitality and reckless expenditure, to have made rapid duck and drake of Mrs Fielding’s modest legacy. Something of this is demonstrably false; much, grossly exaggerated. In any case, he was in London as late as February 1735 (the date of the “Preface” to The Universal Gallant); and early in March 1736 he was back again managing the Haymarket theatre with a so-called “Great Mogul’s Company of English Comedians.”
Upon this new enterprise fortune, at the outset, seemed to smile. The first piece (produced on the 5th of March) was Pasquin, a Dramatick Satire on the Times (a piece akin in its plan to Buckingham’s Rehearsal), which contained, in addition to much admirable burlesque, a good deal of very direct criticism of the shameless political corruption of the Walpole era. Its success was unmistakable; and when, after bringing out the remarkable Fatal Curiosity of George Lillo, its author followed up Pasquin by the Historical Register for the Year 1736, of which the effrontery was even more daring than that of its predecessor, the ministry began to bethink themselves that matters were going too far. How they actually effected their object is obscure: but grounds were speedily concocted for the Licensing Act of 1737, which restricted the number of theatres, rendered the lord chamberlain’s licence an indispensable preliminary to stage representation, and—in a word—effectually put an end to Fielding’s career as a dramatist.
Whether, had that career been prolonged to its maturity, the result would have enriched the theatrical repertoire with a new species of burlesque, or reinforced it with fresh variations on the “wit-traps” of Wycherley and Congreve, is one of those inquiries that are more academic than, profitable. What may be affirmed is, that Fielding’s plays, as we have them, exhibit abundant invention and ingenuity; that they are full of humour and high spirits; that, though they may have been hastily written, they were by no means thoughtlessly constructed; and that, in composing them, their author attentively considered either managerial hints, or the conditions of the market. Against this, one must set the fact that they are often immodest; and that, whatever their intrinsic merit, they have failed to rival in permanent popularity the work of inferior men. Fielding’s own conclusion was, “that he left off writing for the stage, when he ought to have begun”—which can only mean that he himself regarded his plays as the outcome of imitation rather than experience. They probably taught him how to construct Tom Jones; but whether he could ever have written a comedy at the level of that novel, can only be established by a comparison which it is impossible to make, namely, a comparison with Tom Jones of a comedy written at the same age, and in similar circumstances.
Tumble-Down Dick; or, Phaeton in the Suds, Eurydice and Eurydice hissed are the names of three occasional pieces which belong to the last months of Fielding’s career as a Haymarket manager. By this date he was thirty, with a wife and daughter. As a means of support, he reverted to the profession of his maternal grandfather; and, in November 1737, he entered the Middle Temple, being described in the books of the society as “of East Stour in Dorset.” That he set himself strenuously to master his new profession, is admitted; though it is unlikely that he had entirely discarded the irregular habits which had grown upon him in his irresponsible bachelorhood. He also did a good deal of literary work, the best known of which is contained in the Champion, a “News-Journal” of the Spectator type undertaken with James Ralph, whose poem of “Night” is made notorious in the Dunciad. That the Champion was not without merit is undoubted; but the essay-type was for the moment out-worn, and neither Fielding nor his coadjutor could lend it fresh vitality. Fielding contributed papers from the 15th of November 1739 to the 19th of June 1740. On the 20th of June he was called to the bar, and occupied chambers in Pump Court. It is further related that, in the diligent pursuit of his calling, he travelled the Western Circuit, and attended the Wiltshire sessions.
Although, with the Champion, he professed, for the time, to have relinquished periodical literature, he still wrote at intervals, a fact which, taken in connexion with his past reputation as an effective satirist, probably led to his being “unjustly censured” for much that he never produced. But he certainly wrote a poem “Of True Greatness” (1741); a first book of a burlesque epic, the Vernoniad, prompted by Vernon’s expedition of 1739; a vision called the Opposition, and, perhaps, a political sermon entitled the Crisis (1741). Another piece, now known to have been attributed to him by his contemporaries (Hist. MSS. Comm., Rept. 12, App. Pt. ix., p. 204), is the pamphlet entitled An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews, a clever but coarse attack upon the prurient side of Richardson’s Pamela, which had been issued in 1740, and was at the height of its popularity. Shamela followed early in 1741. Richardson, who was well acquainted with Fielding’s four sisters, at that date his neighbours at Hammersmith, confidently attributed it to Fielding (Corr. 1804, iv. 286, and unpublished letter at South Kensington); and there are suggestive points of internal evidence (such as the transformation of Pamela’s “MR B.” into “Mr Booby”) which tend to connect it with the future Joseph Andrews. Fielding, however, never acknowledged it, or referred to it; and a great deal has been laid to his charge that he never deserved (“Preface” to Miscellanies, 1743).
But whatever may be decided in regard to the authorship of Shamela, it is quite possible that it prompted the more memorable
