Henry Fielding (review)

170 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 4:2 for a lost ideal to be found anew—tile ideal of freedom "for its own sake, the unconditional pursuit of a free-minking society, a freely adopted social contract which would enhance diat noble savage ever present in every child" (p. 137). Rousseau matters as a thinker, Cro argues, for two reasons. First, he is intuitive. His noble savage never existed in reality; the whole theory is allegorical. Real savages (for instance , die barbarians of the north) appear in his writings as "blood-thirsty hunters and despoilers" (p. 144), and the original noble savage—the supposed original, predating urban man and woman—could be noble only because the earth was so wide that individuals did not need to prey on each outer. Secondly, Rousseau's thought is deeply political. His was the task, therefore, of "transforming commonplaces into a revolutionary doctrine " (p. 148). He derived ideas from the literature of the voyagers but made of them a symbol bodi deep and precise—"the symbol of a new man" (p. 150). Like other mytiiologists of civilization, Rousseau takes as his starting point the notion of some primal calamity disturbing the inner rhythms of human experience. In Rousseau's case, Cro explains , this event was the barbaric invasion which separated speech from music (p. 159). Thus the actual savages wreck the harmony of human life; die mythical savage restores it. It is a paradoxical note on which to end a stimulating book. John McVeagh University of Ulster Donald Thomas. Henry Fielding. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1990. ? + 436pp. £25.00. ISBN 0-312-05443-2. It is not easy to get a fix on Fielding—he leaves a bold and energetic presence in eighteenth-century letters and social history, but he remains an enigmatic figure. He has not left us much in the way of correspondence and he has denied us any diaries or journals. The personality that emerges from his novels is more an exponent of his age and culture, more a fictional figure that is part of the textual discourse than a reflection of the real aumor. Contradictions in his life also abound. Here is a man who begins a successful career as a dramatist at the age of twenty-one and some twenty years later, by then a magistrate and chairman of Westminster sessions, attacks, in his A Charge Delivered to the Grand Jury, the licentiousness of die stage that was still producing his plays; who is quick to attack lawyers and litigation in his writing, but educates himself in the law and also spends a considerable part of his adult life suing friends and enemies for debts; who begins his fictional career by attacking die moral dubiousness and sentimental excesses of Richardson, but concludes widi a novel as much connected widi his rival's works as with his own earlier fiction. Here is the apostle of common sense and prudence who dies before he is forty-eight in part a victim of his own physical excesses. The eighteenth century is an age of writers who were also personalities—Pope, Swift, Sterne, and Johnson are as real and immediate to us as dieir works. But Fielding is his works; we know him largely from the multifaceted careers and activities of his relatively brief life. REVIEWS 171 There were three Fieldings: die young playwright who, because of the Licensing Act of 1737, was forced to give up his dramatic career at the very point that he had achieved security and success; the literary man who managed to participate in the forging of a new fictional genre at die same time mat he was establishing himself as a political and social commentator and satirist; and die magistrate who went against the current as much in his honesty as in his social concerns and who, with his brother John, was instrumental in bringing law and order to die streets of London by establishing an early form of what would later be a proper police force. Any one of these careers would have been sufficient for a normal mortal; that Fielding was able to succeed widi such energy and gusto in all three invites our wonder and curiosity...