"A Manly Relish"

HENRY FIELDING (1,183 pp.)--F. Homes Dudden--Oxford ($21).

One dreary day in June 1754, a curious piece of goods was lugged to the dockside at Rotherhithe, on the Thames, to be stowed aboard the Queen of Portugal, bound for Lisbon. To the staring navvies it must have looked rather like the corpse of a drowned man, bloated and discolored. In fact, the man was alive, though drowning inwardly of dropsy and so weak that he could scarcely move a finger. There was nothing for it but to strap him in an armchair and hoist him over the side like any common lading. As the winch turned and the invalid rose lurching, the sailors and dockmen burst into jeering laughter at the pitiful figure.

Thus did England, in a careless age, make a farewell to her first great novelist --whom she considered at best a hack writer and at worst a national disgrace.

Some of the discerning disagreed, and half a dozen generations have since made what posthumous penance can be made for England's incomprehension of Henry Fielding--they have stayed awake a million and one nights reading his ribald masterpiece, Tom Jones.

Some of the mud slung at Fielding in his lifetime has stuck through the centuries, but the last of it is scraped away in Henry Fielding, by Frederick Homes Dudden, master of Oxford's Pembroke College, a biography which must now become the standard work on Fielding. As a biographer, Master Dudden is as dull and honest as an old pewter pot; but he brims nevertheless with the sloshing ale of Fielding's vitality, and time & again the rollicking old genius seems to seize the pot in his pudgy fist, slam the table, and roar out his irrepressible toast to life, and again life.

The Manners of Comedy. Fielding came of the cadet line in the family of the Fielding Earls of Denbigh. His father was a roistering colonel who so mismanaged his estate that he could not even supply his children with fit beer, and young Henry, as he complained himself, was "forced to drink water for several days together."

At 17, Henry lit his candle at both ends and rushed off to singe the fashionable moths in London and Salisbury. He was a big, ruddy-faced fellow, standing over six feet, with a chest like a barrel and a profile like something in a Punch & Judy show. His eyes, however, were "dark, and as full of sweetness as of fire," and his wit and intellect were already honed to a cutting edge. In London's beau monde of 1727, the petticoats rustled and the epigrams bristled where young Henry passed; he appeared to like the sound of petticoats best.

At 20, however, Henry was getting weary of the swim, and he tried to trouble the fashionable waters with his first play, Love in Several Masques, a deft little comedy of London manners. An excerpt from the conversation of a Fielding fop:

"Reading, sir, is the worst thing in the world for the eyes; I once gave in to it, and had in a very few months gone through almost a dozen pages . . . But I found it vastly impaired the lustre of my eyes. I had, sir, in that short time, perfectly lost the direct ogle."

After a year and a half of study in Holland, Henry came back to London determined to capture the theater. In six months he wrote four plays. All were staged, and one, a brilliant parody called The Tragedy of Tragedies, was a smash hit. In the next ten years, Fielding dashed off more than 70 plays. Bernard Shaw thought Fielding "the greatest practicing dramatist" England produced between Shakespeare and himself; most other critics rate him at the top of the second rank.

Novelist Discovered. For some of his contemporaries, Fielding got a little too good. His satire, The Historical Register for the Year 1736, subjected the Walpole ministry to ridicule, and in revenge the ministry passed a censorship bill and swept Fielding's plays off the boards. At 30, Fielding was ruined. Moreover, he had several years before eloped in a hotheaded moment with a poor but beautiful girl, Charlotte Cradock, and now he had a wife and two children to support.

At this point, Fielding found his true talent. In 1740 the first English novel, Samuel Richardson's Pamela, was published, and swept the country with amazement. Fielding read it and, enraged at Richardson's sentimental blathering, sat down and wrote a parody, Shamela. In the writing, he discovered that he was a novelist, and in a few short months produced his own novel, Joseph Andrews.

It was the irony of Fielding's life that at the moment of his success he lost his happiness. He was stricken at 34, during the writing of Joseph Andrews, with gout. At the same time, his daughter Charlotte fell sick and died, and his wife came down with an undiagnosed disease that killed her three years later. The shock of her death put Fielding in a condition "approached to frenzy"; for a year he could write nothing. His only consolation was to talk to his wife's maid, who had loved her mistress dearly, and whom he kept on as his housekeeper. Three years later, to the scandal of London, he married her; and (to give scandal its due) she presented him with a son three months after the wedding. Meanwhile, Fielding had settled down to the writing of Tom Jones.

The Archetypes of Fiction. "Teach me," wrote Fielding in his preface, "to know mankind better than they know themselves . . . Imitation here will not do the business. The picture must be after Nature herself." It was the birth of the realistic novel. The characters laid down with narrow-eyed precision are the archetypes of English fiction: the worthy squire, the eccentric clergyman, the hero strong in the arm and weak in the head, the treacherous stepbrother, the pure (but reasonable) heroine, the vicious lady of quality, the canting thief.

After Tom Jones, which Fielding published when he was 41, the government gave him a small sinecure, the magistracy of Westminster. Fielding promptly enlarged his district, and in the next five years established himself as a legal reformer. He set up the first effective police force in London (the famous Bow Street Runners), broke the power of the gangs that had long terrorized the city.

At 46, he collapsed from a combined attack of jaundice, dropsy and asthma. The next year, no better, he sailed for Lisbon. He died there three months later, yet to the last, he kept his spirit calm and cheerful and never lost what Thackeray called his ''manly relish of life." His last letter home bears witness: "I must have from Fordhook likewise four hams, a very fine hog fatted as soon as may be and being cut into flitches sent me, likewise a young hog made into pork and salted and pickled in a tub. A vast large Cheshire cheese, and one of Stilton, it to be had good and mild . . . God bless you and yours."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.