Henry Fielding: a Memoir: Including Newly Discovered Letters and Records with Illustrations from Contemporary PrintsGodden, G. M. (Gertrude M.)
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Henry Fielding: a Memoir: Including Newly Discovered Letters and Records with Illustrations from Contemporary Prints
Godden, G. M. (Gertrude M.)
Authors, English -- 18th century -- Biography; Fielding, Henry, 1707-1754; Fielding, Henry, 1707-1754 -- Correspondence
Thus, one January morning, _Sir Alexander's_ readers would open their
paper to find him deploring the decline of "a Religion sometime ago
professed in this Country, and which, if my Memory fails me not was called
Christian." The following Saturday they are presented with a learned and
pleasant argument to prove that every male critic should be eighteen years
of age, and "BE ABLE TO READ." A few days later the pages of writers
purveying the prevalent "Infidelity, Scurrility, and Indecency" are
ingeniously allotted to various uses. In February the _Journal_ accords a
noble tribute "to that great Triumvirate Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift";
not indeed "for that Wit and Humour alone, which they all so eminently
possesst, but because they all endeavoured with the utmost Force of their
Wit and Humour, to expose and extirpate those Follies and Vices which
chiefly prevailed in their several Countries." The design of Aristophanes
and Rabelais on the other hand, appears to _Mr Censor_, if he may speak
his opinion freely, "very plainly to have been to ridicule all Sobriety,
Modesty, Decency, Virtue, and Religion out of the world." From such
considerations it is an easy passage to a definition of 'real Taste' as
derived from a "nice Harmony between the Imagination and the Judgment";
and to these final censorial warnings:--"_Evil Communications corrupt good
Manners_ is a quotation of St Paul from Menander. EVIL BOOKS CORRUPT AT
ONCE BOTH OUR MANNERS AND OUR TASTE." Four days after this learned
'lucubration' the voice of the warm-hearted magistrate speaks in a
reminder of the prevailing abject misery of the London poor who "in the
most miserable lingering Manner do daily perish for Want in this
Metropolis." And in almost the next number his Honour gives his readers
letters from the fair _Cordelia_, from _Sarah Scandal_, and from other
correspondents, of a wit pleasant enough to drive London's poverty far
from their minds. Two days after attending to these ladies, the _Censor_
takes up his keenest weapons in an attack on that "detestable vice of
slander" by which is taken away the "_immediate Jewel of a Man's Soul_,"
his good name; a crime comparable to that of murder. Here we have _Sir
Alexander_ speaking with the same voice as did the playwright and
journalist of ten years previously, when he declared, in his
_Miscellanies_, that to stab a man's character 'in the dark' is no less an
offence than to stab his flesh in the same treacherous manner. Indeed,
throughout these last columns of weekly satire, wit, and learning,
Fielding remains true to the constant tenor of his genius. He exposes the
miser, the seducer of innocence, the self-seeker, the place-hunter, the
degraded vendor of moral poison, the 'charitable' hypocrite, with the same
fierce moral energy as that with which, when but a lad of one and twenty,
he first assailed the vices of the society in which his own lot was cast.
His unconquerable energy, an energy that neither sickness nor distress
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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