The History of Henry Fielding
By . New Haven: The Yale University Press. 1919. 3 vols., royal 8vo. $15.00.
‘THE title of this book will recall Fielding’s favorite use of the word history; by which the great novelist meant a biography, either fictitious or real, that places in the proper social background all the incidents in the life of a man essential to knowing him, in conjunction with a sufficient account of the persons who bore upon that life for good or for evil. This was the aim of The History of Tom Jones; and this has been the aim of The History of Henry Fielding.’
In these opening sentences of his preface, Professor Cross summarizes the intent of his mammoth project in literary biography. To measure the performance by the intent is to be somewhat disappointed in one direction and compensated in another.
Briefly, what Professor Cross promised is a work of art: what he provides is a work of science. The difference between art and science, in their relation to the biographer’s task, is, of course, the difference of the principles of selection and accent applied to the existing material. Professor Cross has described perfectly, in the passage quoted, the selective principle of the artistic biographer; but he follows as perfectly, in the history itself, that of the scientific biographer. He speaks of the facts ‘essential to knowing’ his subject; but he sets down, rather, all the facts that can be ascertained. His definition of a history puts its premium on the living personality of the hero, seen in perspective against his living background; but the present history is preoccupied with threshing or winnowing the facts, not with the livingness of the picture into which they compose. If Fielding had applied the same method to his most familiar hero, we should perhaps know whether Tom Jones did really set out from Gloucester on the evening of November 29, 1745; but we should not know, as we do, the heart and soul of Tom Jones. A character can be known from the inside, intuitionally, and the ascertainable facts assimilated to the concept — or the facts and evidences can be faithfully assembled, to remain inert pending the act of intuition which is necessary to unify and vitalize them. Professor Cross avows no prepossession except ‘the conviction that the author of Tom Jones could not have been the kind of man described in innumerable books and essays.’ This prepossession he unanswerably makes good. But it is inherently too negative a thesis to fuse the facts and make them glow. It results in a Fielding who was not so much a person as a group of signatures. The reader is left to construct the man Henry Fielding for himself.
Professor Cross is the only biographer who has come anywhere near to giving him the materials to do it with. The work is a signal embodiment of the scholarly virtues, thoroughness and accuracy. It succeeds in rescuing Fielding forever from the clutches of careless ‘defamers and apologists,’ early and late; it traces to him a great number of works hitherto of doubtful authorship, and traces to other writers a somewhat smaller number of works once erroneously ascribed to him; it includes valuable discussions of his theory of humor and its development, of the influences which are preponderant or perceptible in his work, and of the influences which it in turn exerted. The reviewer’s one quarrel is, in fine, the quarrel with the preface. The three volumes which follow make waste paper of several ‘standard’ works, and whole reams of notes gathered in university courses in the history of the novel. This is the measure at once of the need for what Professor Cross has done and of his success in doing it. W. F.