The Adventures of David Simple (1904)/Introduction
Introduction
BY E. A. BAKER, M. A.
It is possible that The Adventures of David Simple would have been far better known as a work of some importance in the early development of English fiction had the authoress' name not been Fielding. To be the near relative of a great genius is by no means a passport to fame: a good many instances may be called to mind of its being altogether the reverse. Although Richardson himself complimented "Sally" upon her knowledge of the human heart, and quoted her saying of "a critical judge of writing," perhaps Dr. Johnson, "that your late brother's knowledge of it was not (fine writer as he was) comparable to yours," and further, "his was but as the knowledge of the outside of a clockwork machine, while yours was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside"; in spite of such eulogy from such a man, Sarah Fielding's name has been completely overshadowed by that of her brother, and is now familiar only to special students of our eighteenth-century literature.
What little, furthermore, we know about herself has been gleaned mostly from the records of her brother's life. She was born three years after him, in 1710, at East Stower at Dorsetshire. Her father was Lieutenant (afterwards General) Edmund Fielding, descendant of an old family that numbered the Earls of Denbigh in its elder branch, and in its younger, to which he belonged, the earls of Desmond in the peerage of Ireland. Her mother was Sarah, daughter of Sir Henry Gould. She died in 1718, leaving four (or five) children; one daughter had died in 1716. We can fill in the blanks of Sarah Fielding's life only with the dates and titles of her works, all of which, with the exception of the first, are utterly dead and forgotten. "The Adventures of David Simple: containing an account of his travels through the cities of London and Westminster in the search of a real friend, by a Lady," was published in 1744, and a second edition, with a preface by her brother Henry, was issued the same year. In 1747 was published a Collection of Familiar Letters between the Principal Characters in David Simple and some others, with preface by Henry Fielding, and containing five lengthy letters by him. A third volume of David Simple was published in 1752. Two years later, Miss Fielding collaborated with Miss Collier in the production of The Cry, a Dramatic Fable. Other works are: The Governess, 1749; Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia, 1757; a History of Ophelia, 1758; a History of the Countess of Dellwyn, 1759; and a translation of the Memorabilia, entitled Xenophon's Memoirs of Socrates, with the Defence of Socrates before his Judges, 1762. Harris is said to have corrected her translation.
Miss Fielding was one of Richardson's coterie of female friends, and several letters from each are included in his correspondence. The eulogy quoted above was probably called forth by her own effusive admiration for the author of Pamela; indeed, David Simple itself, in spite of the satirical character of the earlier half, is in the main a novel in the true style of the great sentimentalist. When she offers to act as Richardson's amanuensis, she writes with transports of enthusiasm. She would have found, she says, "all my thoughts strengthened, and my words flow into an easy and nervous style; never did I so much wish for it as in this daring attempt of mentioning Clarissa; but when I read of her, I am all sensation: my heart glows—I am overwhelmed—my only vent is tears." In middle age she went to Bath, to take the waters, and ultimately settled down there. A few casual references are extant of her life in that city of fashion, gaiety and culture, at the time when Beau Nash was "King," and Ralph Allen of Prior Park was playing Maecenas to many an author in distress. Allen is said to have allowed her an annuity of a hundred pounds. She died at Bath in 1768, and a monument was erected to her in the Abbey Church, bearing an inaccurate inscription and the following verses by Dr. John Hoadley—
Her unaffected manners, candid mind,
Her heart benevolent, and soul resign'd;
Were more her praise than all she knew or thought,
Though Athens' wisdom to her sex she taught.
It would be unfair to criticize David Simple on its literary merits alone, without taking into account its historical position as an early novel. It was published a year before Tom Jones. Richardson had written Pamela, but not Clarissa Harlowe. The Vicar of Wakefield was still a long way off in the future, and so were the novels of Fanny Burney. Sterne's Tristram Shandy was not published till 1759, fifteen years ahead; and four years were to elapse before Smollett's first book, Roderick Random, was to see the light. Few books, in truth, that could with any sense of propriety be called novels, were in existence at the time when Miss Fielding sat down to write. Certainly, the masterpieces of Swift and Defoe were not novels in our sense of the word. Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley Papers had far more of the stuff of which the novel of the future was to be made. In Addison there is the delineation of real life, the kindly humour, the delicate portraiture of the individual, which were to be the finest characteristics of the English novel of manners. There was also the element of satire, and it is as a satirist and a censor of society in the Addisonian style that, I think, Sarah Fielding may be most favourably regarded.
Her theme is friendship. The sentiments which she has expressed in the adventures of David, Cynthia and Camilla, and in the tender episode of Stainvllle and Dumont are, says Henry Fielding, with brotherly patronage, "as noble and elevated as I have anywhere met with . . . Nay, there are some touches, which I will venture to say, might have done honour to the pencil of the immortal Shakespeare himself." Professor Wilbur L. Cross has summarized the literary tendency of the period that began with Pamela and ended with the publication of Humphry Clinker, in the following admirable terms: — "The novels of this period which have become a recognized part of our literature, whether they deal in minute incident as in Richardson and Sterne, or in farce, intrigue and adventure as in Smollett and Fielding, have one characteristic in common: their subject is the heart. Moreover, underlying them, as their raison d'être, is an ethical motive. Richardson makes the novel a medium for Biblical teaching as it is understood by a Protestant precisian; Fielding pins his faith on human nature; Smollett cries for justice to the oppressed; Sterne spiritualizes sensation, addressing 'Dear Sensibility' as the Divinity whom he adores." But David Simple, though it belongs of right to the period, appeared at too early a date, when the school was yet unformed. Miss Fielding had no definite model before her, and was without the constructive skill to invent a suitable one. To set forth the admirable philosophy that underlies her criticism of society, and to portray ideal sentiments and characters, she could hardly have chosen a more unfortunate plan than that of the picaresque story, with its loosely linked episodes and motley succession of characters, as fortuitous in arrangement as the faces we meet with in the street. Nothing can be more clumsy than her introduction of dialogue, with the names of the interlocutors formally prefixed as in a play; nothing more perplexing than her stories within the story, and then again the story told at second or third hand, but still in the first person, of brothers, lovers and acquaintances, amid whose long-protracted speeches we are apt to lose the thread altogether. Nevertheless, this method did very well up to a certain point. David Simple, it is noticeable, falls into two parts; the earlier is critical and satirical in spirit, the second half devoted to the portraiture of ideal virtues and sentiments. Henry Fielding's preface, which does ample justice to his sister's powers of drawing individual character and expressing lofty emotion, is reprinted here. Let us turn to the other side of the work.
Every novelist of that period thought it was incumbent on him to have a moral purpose in his work, and most of them were pronouncedly and deliberately didactic. Richardson taught his morality directly, with a heavy seriousness; Fielding preferred the lighter and more ambiguous method of the satirist. His sister halted between the two courses. Her satire is lacking in the right spirit of comedy. It is rather the satire of the moral essayist than of the dramatist or the story-writer. But her wit, at its best, is wonderfully sane, discriminating, and caustic. She belongs to that highest type satirist who sees things not merely as related the fashions, mannerisms and prejudices of his own time and place, but in the dry light of abstract intelligence and perfect sanity. Let the following extracts, culled at haphazard and miscellaneous in subject, speak for themselves. Their insight into human nature, as her brother pointed out, is the more remarkable if we consider the narrowness of her experience.
"I never yet knew a man who did not hate the person who seemed not to have the same opinion of him as he had of himself; and, as that very seldom happens, I believe it is one of the chief causes of the malignity mankind have against one another."
"He reflected that the customs and manners of nations relate chiefly to ceremonies, and have nothing to do with the hearts of men."
"He took a new lodging every week, and always the first thing he did was to inquire of his landlady the reputation of all the neighbourhood: but he never could hear one good character from any of them; only every one separately gave very broad hints of their own goodness, and what pity it was they should be obliged to live amongst such a set of people."
"And there for some time I will leave him to his own private sufferings—lest it should be thought I am so ignorant of the world, as not to know the proper time of forsaking people."
"In short, from morning till night, they did nothing but quarrel; and there passed many curious dialogues between them, which I shall not here repeat: for, as I hope to be read by the polite world, I would avoid everything of which they can have no idea."
"For, if by taking pains to bridle his passions, he could gain no superiority over his companions, all his love of rectitude, as he calls it, would fall to the ground. So that his goodness, like cold fruits, is produced by the dung and nastiness which surround it."
"She spent some time in the deepest melancholy, and felt all the misery which attends a woman who has many things to wish, but knows not positively which she wishes most."
"If he had but sighed, and been miserable for the loss of her, she could have married her old man without any great reluctance: but the thought that he had left her first was insupportable!"
"He never once reflected on what is perhaps really the case, that to prevent a husband's surfeit or satiety in the matrimonial feast, a little acid is now and then very prudently thrown into the dish by the wife."
"If, indeed, her reputation had been lost, and she had conversed long enough with a man to have worn out her youth and beauty, and had been left in poverty, and all kinds of distress, without any hopes of relief, her folly would have then been so glaring, he could by no means have owned her for his child."
"John's coldness and neglect; nay, his liking other women better than his wife, which no virtuous woman can possibly bear."
"Lucretia herself (whose chastity nothing but the fear of losing her reputation could possibly have conquered)."
"The words genius, and no genius; invention, poetry, fine things, bad language, no style, charming writing, imagery, and diction, with many more expressions which swim on the surface of criticism, seemed to have been caught by those fishers for the reputation of wit, though they were entirely ignorant what use to make of them, or how to apply them properly."
"He was not of the opinion, that the more ignorant a man is of any subject, the more necessary it is to talk of it."
Her satire of the amateur critic is always keen. One of the most entertaining chapters in the book is that relating the conversation of a number of fine ladies on the subject of pathos on the stage. It is amusing to find that some literary historians have not perceived the irony of the passage, and so have done less than justice to Miss Fielding's critical acumen.
"Fourth Lady. There is nothing so surprising to me as the absurdity of almost everybody I meet with; they can't even laugh or cry in the right place. Perhaps it will be hardly believed, but I really saw people in the boxes last night, at the tragedy of Cato, sit with dry eyes, and show no kind of emotion, when that great man fell on his sword; nor was it at all owing to any firmness of mind, that made them incapable of crying neither, for that I should have admired: but I have known those very people shed tears at George Barnwell.
"A good many Ladies speak at one time. Oh, intolerable I cry for an odious apprentice-boy, who murdered his uncle at the instigation too of a common woman, and yet be unmoved, when even Cato bled for his country.
Old Lady. That is no wonder, I assure you, ladies; for I once heard my Lady Know-all positively affirm George Barnwell to be one of the best things that ever was wrote: for that nature is nature in whatever station it is placed; and that she could be as much affected with the distress of a man in low life, as if he was a lord or a duke. And what is yet more amazing is, that the time she chooses to weep most, is just as he has killed the man who prays for him in the agonies of death; and then only, because he whines over him, and seems sensible of what he has done, she must shed tears for a wretch whom everybody of either sense or goodness, would wish to crush, and make ten times more miserable than he is."
I conclude with two remarkable analyses of types of character, that would have done honour to Addison. The second, moreover, is charming, and warrants the saying of some person who replied to the objection that David Simple could not possibly be the work of a woman, by retorting that no man could have written it.
"You are to know, sir, there are a set of men in the world, who pass through life with very good reputations, whose actions are in the general justly to be applauded, and yet upon a near examination their principles are all bad, and their hearts hardened to all tender sensations. Mr. Orgueil is exactly one of those sort of men; the greatest sufferings which can happen to his fellow-creatures, have no sort of effect upon him, and yet he very often relieves them; that is, he goes just as far in serving others as will give him new opportunities of flattering himself; for his whole soul is filled with pride, he has made a god of himself, and the attributes he thinks necessary to the dignity of such a being, be endeavours to have. He calls all religion superstition, because he will own no other deity; he thinks even obedience to the Divine Will, would be but a mean motive to his actions; he must do good, because it is suitable to the dignity of his nature; and shun evil, because he would not be debased as low as the wretches he every day sees."
"Thus ended this dialogue; in which vanity seemed to have had a fair chance of gaining the victory over love; or, in other words, where a young lady seemed to promise herself more pleasure from the purse than the person of her lover, And I hope to be excused by those gentlemen who are quite sure they have found one woman, who is a perfect angel, and that all the rest are perfect devils, for drawing the character of a woman who was neither; for Miss Nanny Johnson was very good-humoured, had a great deal of softness, and had no alloy to these good qualities, but a great share of vanity, with some small spices of envy, which must always accompany it. And I make no matter of doubt, but if she had not met with this temptation, she would have made a very affectionate wife to the man who loved her: he would have thought himself extremely happy, with a perfect assurance that nothing could have tempted her to abandon him. And when she had had the experience, what it was to be constantly beloved by a man of Mr. Simple's goodness of heart, she would have exulted in her own happiness, and been the first to have blamed any other woman for giving up the pleasure of having the man she loved for any advantage of fortune; and would have thought it utterly impossible for her ever to have been tempted to such an action; which then might possibly have appeared in the most dishonourable light: for to talk of a temptation at a distance, and to feel it present, are two such very different things, that everybody can resist the one, very few people the other."