Henry Fielding and his Tom Jones
Henry Fielding（1707～1754）:Tom Jones
Fielding tolerated the fault of others, but hated cruelty and duplicity. He doesn't stand on his toes for success... He is energetic, kindly faces the various situations of life, and enjoys life to the fullest.
- Maugham (from this article)
The difficulty in writing Henry Fielding about himself is that we don't know much about him. In 1762, eight years after his death, Arthur Murphy wrote a brief biography of himself as an introduction to a particular edition of his work, but Murphy did not seem to know him personally, had very little information at hand, and perhaps desperately tried to say some lengthy and tedious digressions in order to assemble an eighty-page article. He did not state much of the facts, and subsequent studies proved that those claims were incorrect. Later writers worked hard to prove that Fielding was not the kind of wanderer of legend. Unfortunately, in order to make him more honorable, they made him less attractive. He was obviously an energetic, lustful man, and they must have shook their heads at this fact. But we have no reason to hope that a writer whose work we admire must be a decent person. His moral character does not help nor impair the quality of his work. Life is the subject of a fiction writer, and in order to describe life honestly, he must participate in the ups and downs of life; only through the keyhole peeping can not learn much. But there is no practical need to whitewash Fielding; his faults are very human, and only the overly formal and foolish people will be surprised.
Fielding was born into the gentry class. His father was an officer, who rose to the rank of general, and was the third son of John Fielding, a priest at Salisbury Cathedral, who in turn was the fifth son of the Earl of Desmond. The Desmond family is the younger of the Denby family, which claims to be descended from the Habsburg royal family. Gibbon, who wrote A History of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire, said in his autobiography: "The successors of Charles V may not recognize their English brethren; but Tom Jones, a beautiful portrayal of human fashion, will endure longer than the eagle emblem of the El Escorial Palace in Spain and the Austrian royal family." This is a great thing to say, but unfortunately the claims of these noble lords lack basis. They spelled their last name Feilding – the correct spelling was Fielding. I once read somewhere that once the Count of England asked Henry Fielding how this could have happened, and he replied, "I can only guess that it is because the people of my lineage learned to spell earlier than the one of your highnesses." ”
Tom Jones (title page of the 1749 edition)
Henry Fielding in middle age (c. 1743)
Fielding's father married Sarah, the daughter of Lord Henry Gould, a judge of the English High Court, and our great writer was born in his father's country mansion in 1707. Three years later, the Fielding family moved to East Stoul, Dorset, where they had two daughters in addition to Henry, and after moving, they had three daughters and a man. Mrs. Fielding died in 1718, and Henry entered Eton College around this time. He made several precious friends there. When he left school, even if he did not have "proficient in ancient Greek and familiar with Latin classical works very early", as Arthur Murphy said, he had learned a lot, and he could use the introduction of famous works to embellish the article in the future. At the age of eighteen, he may have left school, and it was clear that he had any hope of getting ahead in the future. He had a reliable servant who was ready to "beat, maim, or kill" his master's opponents. By chance, their master and servant spend the night in Lyme Regis, and Henry Fielding falls in love with Miss Sarah Andrews, who combines beauty and wealth. He came up with a plan to take her away, using force if necessary, and then marry her. As a result, the matter was revealed, and the girl was hurriedly sent away, peacefully married to a more suitable suitor.
When 1725. Fielding was more than six feet tall, strong and lively, with a pair of deep black eyes and a roman eagle hook high nose bridge, a short upper lip that was slightly upturned slightly cynically, and a stubborn protruding chin. He is in good health, enjoying himself to the fullest, and he is not unbearably free in all aspects. You may not know that for the next two or three years he indulged in the joy and bustle of the city in London - if the young man with a wide range of tycoons was handsome and personable, he would probably be like this. In 1728, he released a play called Love in a Cabaret. The show was quite successful. We might as well guess that his father pressured him to make a living in peace and not have to make a living by writing stage plays, so he went to Leiden University to study law. But his father remarried and may not have been willing or able to provide his son with the allowance he had promised, so Fielding was forced to return to England about a year later. He was in trouble, and according to his own description, he had no choice but to be a coachman or an employed writer.
Austin Dubson, who wrote Fielding's biography for the British Writers Series, said: "Hobbies and opportunities led him to the stage. "He had the keen observation of life at the time that a playwright needed, in addition to which he seemed to have some ingenuity and a sense of humor. Austin Dubson's "hobby" is likely to refer to Fielding's out-of-the-box performances with others, becoming part of his personality, and he uses writing scripts as a quick way to make quick money; "opportunity" may be a tactful point: he is handsome, energetic, and attracts a popular actress. Between 1730 and 1736, he produced two or three plays a year, both burlesque or comedies. The last two plays written by Fielding attacked the political corruption of the time, and the attack was so effective that the Cabinet passed a "Theatre Inspection Act" that required the troupe manager to obtain permission from the Minister of the Interior to perform a play. The bill has not yet been repealed and is still torturing British writers. Since then, Fielding has rarely written stage plays, occasionally lifting a pen, probably only because he is so tight on his hands.
I didn't dare pretend to have read his script, but I flipped through a few pages and the dialogue seemed natural and vivid. One of the most amusing passages I've ever seen is when he was in the "Character List" list of Thumb Tom, describing a character as fashionable at the time: "A flawless woman, except for a little alcoholism." "Many people tend to have a little contempt for Fielding's plays, and critics who read them in the library two hundred years later want them to be literaryly extraordinary, which is not the case. But the script is written for performance, not for reading; the script is of course good in literature, but a good script is written for people to perform, and it may not be easy to perform with a literary atmosphere.
Fielding's plays may now have lost their original merits, for drama is so dependent on reality that life is short, almost as short as a newspaper'; but they must have merit. Unless the public likes it, a young man who wants to write a script or a popular actress who exerts pressure cannot induce the troupe manager to perform his plays one after another. The public is the final judge in this regard. If the manager cannot assess the taste of the audience, he will undoubtedly go bankrupt. Fielding's scripts at least have the advantage that the public loves to read.
He had no delusions about the value of the script, and had personally said that he should have started writing but gave up writing books and went to the stage. He writes scripts to make money and doesn't have much respect for the audience's understanding. "When he signed up to produce a script, many of his friends who are still alive knew that he used to come home from the hotel very late and give the actors a play written on cigarette paper the next day," Murphy said. ”
Murphy also wrote an anecdote that vividly shows a glimpse of Fielding's attitude toward the masses. Once, rehearsing a comedy called Wedding Day, one of the characters played by Galik (Note: David Garrick (1717-1779), an English actor and theatre manager, was famous for his earliest appearances in Shakespeare at the time. Objecting to a scene, Fielding asked to delete it. Fielding said, "No, if that scene isn't good, let them find out for themselves." ”
The scene went on as it was, with the audience making a fuss about their displeasure, and Gallik retreated backstage to rest. Fielding is indulging in his talents, drinking a bottle of champagne to comfort himself. By this time he had drunk a lot, and there was still smoke on the corner of his mouth, and he squinted at the actor and said, "Galik, what's going on, what are they booing?" ”
"Well, the scene I begged you to delete, I already knew it wouldn't work." The way they looked scared me out of my soul for a night. ”
"Oh, god forbid!" Fielding replied, "They found out, right?" ”
I detail a small episode in Fielding's personal career because I think it had a lot to do with him as a novelist. Many great novelists have tried to write screenplays, but I can't remember who has succeeded. In fact, the two techniques are very different, and learning to write a novel will not help you to write a screenplay. The novelist has a lot of time to develop his subjects; he can describe the characters in as much detail as he loves, and the narrative motivation allows the reader to see their words and deeds; if the writer is clever, he can write the unlikely things very realistically; if he has a narrative talent, he can step by step close to the climax, prepare for a long time, and make it more moving to read; he does not have to show people the action, just write it; he can make people explain to themselves with dialogue, and write as many pages as they like. But drama relies on action, and I certainly don't mean drastic action such as falling off a cliff or being blown up by a mine. The act of handing someone a glass of water may have the highest dramatic tension. The audience's concentration is very limited and must be drawn to their attention with a series of events; something new must be kept at all times; the subject matter must be presented immediately, and its development should follow a fixed line, not diverge into irrelevant biases; the dialogue must be crisp and straightforward, so that the listener can understand the meaning without stopping to think; the characters must be consistent, the eyes can understand at a glance, no matter how complex the personality, must be complex and reasonable. Drama cannot have small places of chaos and laxity; no matter how small, the foundation must be solid and the structure must be rigorous.
If a playwright is talented enough to write what I call a script that the audience is happy to enjoy to the end, he has an advantage when he writes a novel. He has learned to make long stories short; he has learned the benefits of rapid development of plots; he has learned not to linger on the road, to stick to the main points, and to continue his story; he has learned to let the people in the book express themselves in words and deeds without the help of descriptions. So when he works on the larger canvas allowed for novels, he not only benefits from the advantages of the novel form, but the playwright's training also enables him to write novels vividly, quickly, flexibly and wonderfully. These are excellent conditions, and some good novelists, though with many other advantages, are lacking in this regard. I don't think Fielding's years of writing the screenplay were in vain, I think on the contrary, the experience he gained at that time was valuable to him in writing novels in the future.
He was busy with drama while marrying Charlotte Claydock. Charlotte lives in Salisbury with her two sisters, and no one knows anything about her, only that she is attractive and attractive. Fielding borrowed sophia from the book to portray her, so that readers of Tom Jones could know exactly what kind of person she was in the eyes of her lover and husband. He is a very gentle and enthusiastic husband, but he is naturally affectionate, probably not very loyal. He will definitely regret his misconduct, but the next time he meets a beautiful woman, he may still be moved. Charlotte Claydock married him and brought him fifteen hundred pounds. Some say it's a dowry, some say it's a legacy. After Fielding's comedy failed, he took the money with him to hide in the small estate of East Stoll. According to Arthur Murphy, he was there to welcome friends and family, had a herd of dogs, and hired a group of servants in "expensive yellow uniforms." Later biographers tried to prove that the story was exaggerated, but it was an indisputable fact that in 1736—two years after his marriage—the money had been spent, and he returned to London to write a script and run a theatre at the Haymarket.
A year later, the Theater Inspection Act was enacted, which halted these activities, and he had a wife and children, but only a little money to support his family. He had to find a livelihood. He entered the Middle Temple Bar School, and although "the early playful habits occasionally recured, conspiring with his spirit and energy to take him to enjoy the absurd pleasures of the city", he entered the legal profession at the right time. He worked hard, but unfortunately, his physical and mental health was ruined in his early years, and he suffered from gout like many people at that time, so he had to appear in court intermittently. He wrote again: political essays, one or two plays, and articles for a newspaper called Champion. In 1742, he wrote Joseph Andrews. This was his first novel, but it is generally believed that it was not the first novel to be written, but the biography of the great Man Jiang Nasheng Weilde. Shortly after the publication of Joseph Andrews, his beautiful wife gasped in his arms due to a fever that drove him mad with heartache. He hadn't written anything important in years.
He wrote articles in support of the government for the True Patriots and the James II Party, and he received a pension when the two newspapers ceased publication. But he was not frugal, and he was so profligate that he continued to fall into a predicament. There is a story that shows Fielding's personality: in order to pay the tax collector, he asked for an advance payment from the publisher. On his way home with the money, he met a friend who was in a worse situation than he was, so he gave the money to the other party. When the tax collector came to the door, he sent a message: "Friendship came to the door to ask for money, and it has been taken; please come back to the tax collector next time." ”
Four years after his wife's death, he married her maid, Mary Daniel. This surprised his friends, and his cousin, Mrs. Mary Volley-Montague, scoffed, blaming him for "enjoying fish and water with the cooks." However, although this woman is not very charismatic, she is a virtuous wife, and every time Fielding talks about her, she always loves and respects her. Mrs. Fielding, who continued the string, was a very decent woman who took good care of him. He needs to be taken care of, a good wife, a good mother. They gave birth to two men and a woman.
Fielding made several friends while attending Eton College, several of whom remained, including George Littleton, who came from a political family (a family that is still prominent today) and generously sponsored literature. He served as a Chancellor of the Exchequer in Henry Pelham's government from 1744 to 1745, and in 1748 recommended Fielding to Westminster as magistrate. Fielding was trained as a lawyer, experienced and talented in life, and was able to do his duty. He was highly capable, and soon after taking office he was elected president of the District Court and settled with his family in the official quarters of Ball Street. Fielding said that the errand before he took office had an illegal income of five hundred pounds a year, but he only made three hundred pounds a year of innocent money. In 1749 he published Tom Jones. Publishers paid him seven hundred pounds — the equivalent of about four thousand pounds today (in the 1940s). It's not bad to get paid for a novel in the UK.
But Fielding's health was deteriorating by this time. He often had gout attacks, so he often went to bath spa resorts or cottages near London to recuperate. But he continued to write. He wrote a number of pamphlets related to his position, including an investigation into the recent rampaging of banditry, which was said to have contributed to the passage of the famous Liquor Act, and Amelia, whose heroine was modeled after his beloved deceased wife, Charlotte. The book came out in 1752, and he was so diligent that in the same year he formed a partnership with a third newspaper, the Covent Garden Journal, which lasted for nine months. His health deteriorated, and in 1754 he resigned to succeed his half-brother John Fielding after breaking a "gang of gangsters and killers" that everyone in London feared. It seemed that his only chance to save his life was to leave London and find a better climate, so he sailed to Lisbon in June 1754 aboard the Queen of Portugal, captained by Richard Will. He arrived in August, died two months later, and was buried in an English cemetery.
Due to the lack of information, I wrote about Fielding's life very briefly, and as I considered his life, a thought suddenly sprang up in my mind. He's a man, he's a good drinker, he's a bit of a gamble, and he likes women. When people talk about virtue, most of what comes to mind is sex, but chastity is only part of virtue, perhaps not the main thing. Fielding was enthusiastic and did not hesitate to surrender to passion. He can be gentle in love. Love is different from family affection and is rooted in sex, but there may also be sexual desire without love. Denying this is simply hypocrisy or ignorance. Sexual desire is an animal instinct, no less humiliating than thirst or hunger, and there is no reason not to be satisfied. If Fielding is a bit promiscuous and enjoys sex, so even if he spends his days drinking, he is no worse than most men. Like all of us, he repents of his sins, but he will repeat them when the opportunity comes. He was anxious, but well-intentioned, generous, and decent in times of corruption; he was an affectionate husband and father, brave and sincere, and very kind to his friends, who remained faithful to him until his death. Although he tolerates the fault of others, he hates cruelty and ruthlessness and duplicity. He doesn't stand on his toes because of success, and he can endure disaster strongly by eating some chicken and drinking a bottle of champagne. He is energetic, kindly faces the various situations of life, and enjoys life to the fullest.
In fact, he's a lot like his own Tom Jones. Now I would like to warn new readers of Fielding's great novel: If your excellency has a nervous and overly restrictive habit, it is best not to read this book. Austin Dubson said it best: "He does not pretend to be the perfect model, he offers a portrayal of human nature in general, perhaps rude rather than elegant, natural rather than artificial, and his desire is to do this with complete authenticity, without alleviating or concealing flaws and shortcomings." In fact, for the first time, he portrayed a real person in an English novel.
Hannah Moore recounts in her memoirs that she had only seen Dr. Johnson get angry once, when she was alluding to a witty passage in Tom Jones. Johnson said, "I am shocked to hear you quote such an evil book. I heard you read it, and I regret it: the virtuous lady should not have made this confession. I rarely see anything more depraved than that. "Now I'm going to say that virtuous women might as well read this book before marriage." This book can tell her all the facts that she needs to know in life, and many materials related to men, which will be useful to her before she enters the difficult situation of marriage. Everyone knows that Dr. Johnson is a very biased person. He did not recognize Fielding's literary merits, and once said he was an idiot. Boswell protested, and Johnson said, "When I say he's stupid, I mean he's a dull and boring hooligan." Boswell asked rhetorically, "Your Excellency, don't you admit that he painted a very natural picture of life?" "Well, sir, that's a very low-level life. Richardson had said that if he hadn't known who Fielding was, he would have thought he was the groom of the hotel. ”
But now we are accustomed to the lowly life in the novel, and the content of "Tom Jones" is written by modern novelists a lot, and we have long been accustomed to it. Overly polite critics have tried to explain the most condemnable event of Tom Jones's life in terms of moral decay and corruption: Mrs. Bellastone fell in love with him and found that he was not opposed to satisfying her desires. He was penniless at the time, she was rich, and she generously alleviated his lack. Yes, it is indeed a shameful thing for a man to accept a woman's money, and it is very unworthy, because in that case the rich and noble woman asks for far more than the money. Morally, this matter is no more shocking than a woman accepting a man's money, and it is foolish for the average person to take a man's money with a woman more seriously. We should also not forget that a term – little white face – has now been coined to describe men who make money on their attractive appearance. So, tom Jones' lack of thought, while reprehensible, is not a unique exception.
There's something interesting about Tom Jones's history, and it's perhaps worth pointing out. He was genuinely in love with the charming Sophia, but he had no uneasiness about indulging in pleasures with other beautiful and easy-to-use women: despite these interludes, he still loved Sophia deeply. Fielding is sensible and will not portray the male protagonist as more innocent than ordinary people. He knows that if we are as sober and cautious at night as we are during the day, everyone's character will improve a lot.
The book "Tom Jones" is well structured, and the various things are created one after another, and they are very cleverly created. Fielding, like his predecessors in the legendary novelists of his kind, was less concerned with the question of probability, the most unlikely things happened, the most absurd coincidences that brought people together; but he was so excited to take you forward, and you had little time and little willingness to argue. The people in the book are sloppily and gorgeously painted with three primary colors, if they are a little not meticulous, but they are very vivid and vivid, enough to make up for their shortcomings. I think Mr. Olvassy is a little too good to be true, but Fielding's failure in this regard is similar to that of every novelist who wants to portray the perfect sage. Experience tells us that this person must seem a little stupid, so kind that the reader should not be able to bear the most in the book who cannot even recognize the most obvious deception. It is said that Ralph Allen of the Prio Estate is the prototype of Monsieur Olvassui, and Pop once wrote a poem describing him saying:
Let the humble Alan, clumsily and shyly reply,
Secretly doing good deeds, I found that the famous red glow.
If this is true, this description is very precise, but it means that the characters borrowed directly from real life are not necessarily convincing in the novel.
Bliffel, on the other hand, was considered too bad to resemble a real person. Fielding hated deception and hypocrisy, and he hated Bliffel so much that he exaggerated him too much; but Bliffel's vile, sneaky, mercenary, cold-blooded fellow was not a rare type. He did not become a liar, but was completely afraid of being discovered. But Breffel's main shortcoming was his lack of life, and he was a fool. I once asked myself whether it was because of the creator's instinctive feelings that if given him a lively and prominent personality, he would become a powerful and evil character and destroy the balance of the story, so he wrote it this way.
Tom Jones is very pleasantly written, and the style is more readable and natural than Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice fifty years later. I think the reason is that Fielding's teacher, Jonathan, and Jane Austen, who read Dr. Johnson's articles with admiration, may have been unconsciously influenced by his arrogance and by the writers of her time who adopted the Johnson style. Someone has said—I forget who it is—that a good style of writing should be like the conversation of a cultured person. That's what Fielding's style is. He speaks to his readers and tells them the story of Tom Jones like drinking a bottle of wine at the dinner table and telling a story to many friends. He is no more euphemistic than modern writers. The beautiful and virtuous Sophia was obviously used to hearing words like "prostitute," "bastard," "prostitute," and Fielding somehow wrote them all as "bitch." In fact, sometimes her father, Lord Weston, used these words with her at will.
However, the conversational style of writing a novel in which the author confides in you and tells you how he feels about the characters and their situation in the book also has drawbacks. The author is always by your side, preventing you from communicating directly with the characters. Sometimes he is easy to teach people, which annoys you very much, and once he starts to digress, it may become tedious and tedious. You don't want to hear his opinion on this and that and that and other things; you want him to continue telling stories. Fielding's digressions are almost always reasonable or interesting, the only drawback is that there are no words, but fortunately the digressions are short, and he generously apologizes for it.
Fielding divided Tom Jones into several films, each with an introductory text. Some critics admired it, believing that it added to the excellence of the work. I can only guess that they were not interested in the novel itself. Essayists grasp a topic to discuss. If his subject matter is new to you, he may tell you something you didn't know before, but new subjects are hard to find, and by and by and large he expects to pique your interest with his own attitude and his peculiar way of looking at things. That is, he wants to get you interested in him personally. But that's the last thing you're going to do when you read a novel. You don't care about the author, he's coming to tell you a story and introduce you to a group of characters. I read Fielding's article introducing his books, and although I did not deny its merits, I was impatient to read them. The reader of the novel should want to know what will happen next to the person in the book that the author has drawn his concern about, otherwise he has no reason to read the novel at all. I repeat it many times, and the novel should not be used as a medium of teaching or inspiration, but as a source of intellectual entertainment.
Re-reading this, I'm afraid that readers who read the introductory text will think that Tom Jones is a shoddy work about adventurous, prodigal women, and ordinary people. That impression is very wrong. Fielding knew too much about human nature to look at the surface of man, and his experience taught him that human nature is not completely fair and objective. It is a beautiful thing not to be selfish at all, but it is rare in the world, and it is naïve to expect this. But he portrayed Sophia Weston as the most flattering, charming, and gentle portrait of a young girl the reader of the novel has ever seen. She is simple but not stupid, her moral character is noble but not false; she has personality, determination, courage; she has a lover's heart, and she looks beautiful. It is very touching to learn that Fielding has portrayed her as a remembrance of his beloved (and probably long-suffering) wife.
I think I'd better conclude this introductory article by quoting the wise critic George Saintsbury:
"Tom Jones is the epic of life—not necessarily the noblest, rarest, most impassioned scene and process of life, but the epic of ordinary life of the health of ordinary natural people; not flawless, but as humane and real as what Shakespeare presented to him in the simulated world."