Ten Novels And Their Authors Read Online Free PDF Page B

grandmother, engaging 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, by the influence of his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, and with the help of the charming, but not particularly chaste, actress, Anne Oldfield, a play of Fielding’s was put on by Colley Cibber at Drury Lane. It was called Love in Several Masques and was given four performances. Shortly after this he entered the University of Leyden with an allowance from his father of two hundred pounds a year. But his father had married again and either could not, or would 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 then that, as in his light-hearted 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 humour, 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 thevicarious 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. To please a leading lady has ever been the surest way for a young dramatist to get his play produced. Between 1729 and 1737 Fielding composed or adapted twenty-six plays, of which at least three greatly pleased the town; and one of which made Swift laugh, a thing that to the best of the Dean’s recollection he had only done twice in his life before. Fielding did not do very well when he attempted pure comedy; his great successes seem to have been in a genre which, so far as I know, he devised himself, an entertainment in which there were singing and dancing, brief topical sketches, parodies and allusions to public figures: in fact, something indistinguishable from the revues popular in our own day. According to Arthur Murphy, Fielding’s farces ‘were generally the production of two or three mornings, so great was his facility in writing’. Dr. Dudden looks upon this as an exaggeration. I don’t think it is. Some of these pieces were very short, and I have myself heard of light comedies that were written over a week-end and were none the worse for that. The last two plays Fielding wrote 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 licence to produce a play. This act still obtains, to torment British authors. After this, Fielding wrote only rarely for the theatre and, when he did, 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, reading a scene here and there, and the dialogue seems natural and sprightly. The most amusing bit I have come across is the description which,after the fashion of the day, he gives in the list of Dramatis Personæ 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 as of no account, and doubtless no one would give them a thought if he were not the author of Tom Jones . They lack the literary distinction (such as Congreve’s plays have) which 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 certainly well for them to have literary distinction; but