His skepticism was not mere academic theory. He philoso- phized, he admitted, not because he was certain of establishing the truth, but because it gave him pleasure. Few philosophers have been so honest.
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55
HENRY FIELDING
1707-1754 Tom Jones
Like his fiction, Fielding was open, generous-hearted, full- blooded. Some of his character as a young man is doubtless reflected in Tom Jones himself, as perhaps the adult Fielding may be seen in the wonderful portrait of Squire Allworthy.
Well-connected, well-favored, well-educated, Fielding led the pleasantly unrestrained life of the upper-middle-class youth of his time, getting into the proper improper scrapes with girls. For some years he supported himself by writing suc- cessful, worthless plays. The best of the lot, Tom Thumb, was at least good enough, it is said, to make Swift [52] laugh for the second time in his life. This career as a playwright Fielding cheerfully abandoned when the Prime Minister, Walpole, engineered a government censorship act directed primarily at him, which incidentally stultified English drama up to the advent of Shaw. Fielding then turned to the law, journalism, and novel writing, mastering each in turn. Appointed Justice of the Peace in London, he fulfнlled his duties conscientiously, even brilliantly, organizing a detective force that later devel- oped into Scotland Yard, and being generally influential in softening the harsh justice of his day. Having abused his body hopelessly, he journeyed to Lisbon in search of health, and there died at the early age of forty-seven.
One episode of his vigorous, crowded life is typical. His first wife—she is the model for Sophia Western, the heroine of Tom Jones—he loved to distraction. Three years after her death he married her maid, and was condemned for doing so by every snob in England. He married her, however, because she was about to bear his child, and he wished to save her from disgrace. The word for Fielding is manly.
About his best novel little need be said. It lies open for your enjoyment. It has no depths to be plumbed. Its style, though a bit long-winded by our post-Hemingway standards, is transpar- ent. The characters are lifelike and simple—we may have for- gotten that in real life there actually are simple people. At one time its plot was greatly admired; Coleridge [65] foolishly declared it one of the three perfect plots in ali literature, the others being those of Ben Jonson's Alchemist and Sophocles^ Oedipus Rex [6]. Today the intrigue, turning on Toms true paternity and maternity, though manipulated with masterly skill, seems rather mechanical.
What we cannot help responding to are the comic genius animating the long, crowded story; the quick-moving panorama of eighteenth-century life in town and country; the colorful procession of picaresque incidents; and especially the zest for and tolerance of human nature, which, as Fielding says, was ali he had to offer on his bill of fare.
Fielding elevated the English novel to the high estate it has since enjoyed. His aim, he tells us, was to write comic epic poems in prose, in which the lives of recognizable men and women of ali stations would be presented without fear or favor by means of an organized, controlled narrative. He once described himself as a "great, tattered bard"; and there is a little of Homer [2,3] in him.
Among the other attractions of Tom Jones are the essays that precede each section. These should not be skipped. Not only do they reflect a mind of great charm and health and san- ity, but, together with the prefatory remarks to his other fic- tions (Joseph Andrews, Amйlia), they comprise the first rea- soned esthetic of the English novel.
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56
TS'AO HSЬEH-CH1N
1715-1763
The Dream of the Red Chamber (also called The Story of the Stone)
The Dream of the Red Chamber is by common consent the greatest work of fiction ever written in Chinese. It is probably semiautobiographical, but it is also a great work of the imagina- tion; it draws on its authors immensely learned command of earlier Chinese literature (including such novйis as the Chin Ving Mei [41]), but it goes beyond any work of literary cre- ation that had ever been attempted in China. It is a huge, sprawling novel, spanning 120 chapters, introducing around 30 principal characters and more than 400 minor ones; it is a love story, a novel of manners, and perhaps a gentle social critique (though with nothing like the satirical bite of the Chin P mg Mei). Most of ali it is an elegy.
Ts'ao Hsьeh-cfrin [Cao Xueqin] certainly lived some of what he wrote about. He was born into a formerly wealthy
family fallen on hard times. His grandfather Ts'ao Yin was a hereditary bondservant of the Ch^ng imperial family (by no means a lowly status), and had served as an imperial commis- sioner in Nanjing. But when Hsьeh-cfrin was in his early thir- ties, imperial favor was withdrawn, and the family moved to Beijing to live in slowly deepening poverty; deprived of his expected career in service to the imperial family, he devoted his life to writing his great novel. (Some of the stigma that had earlier attached to writing fiction had worn off by the eigh- teenth century; see Wu Cfreng-en, [36]. Perhaps, too, faced with the collapse of his hopes, Ts'ao Hsьeh-cfrin simply didn't care very much whether his work was respectable or not.) The first eighty chapters circulated in manuscript form during his lifetime, but a complete edition of the book was not published until 1791-92; the last forty chapters seem to have been very heavily edited by the publisher, in part to omit any hint of dan- gerous criticism of the imperial family. The book's transcen- dent qualities immediately won it an admiring readership, and it has been treasured by readers ever since.
The Dream of the Red Chamber (also known by an alterna- tive title, The Story of the Stone) describes the slow decline in wealth and power of a great family, the Chia [Jia] clan. The action takes place mainly in their elegant mansion and, espe- cially, in its large, beautiful garden. The principal character is a young man, Chia Pao-yь [Jia Baoyu], who is assumed to be, in part, Ts'ao Hsьeh-cfrin himself. Raised by his strictly orthodox Confucian father for a life of public service, Pao-yь is happier and more at ease in the women's quarters of the mansion, where he finds romance and delicacy of feeling rather than his fathers stern rectitude. He falls in love with his doomed, melancholy cousin, Lin Tai-yь [Lin Daiyu], but eventually marries a rival, Pao-ch'ai [Baochai]. Tai-yь dies of despair; Pao-yь loses his mind, eventually recovers, prepares himself for an official career but ultimately leaves the world behind to become a monk, assuring the collapse of the family fortunes. The plot of the novel is intricate, convoluted, and not always
even consistent; in outline it might sound like soap opera. What saves it is its literary grace; the authors remarkable abil- ity to observe and describe the intricate details of upper-class life in traditional China; and above ali the psychological depth of the book's characters. Pao-yь and his cousins are not stock figures of melodrama, but rather fully realized human beings with whom the reader readily identifies, even across great gaps of time and culture.
The book's title deserves a moment's attention. The translation "Dream of the Red Chamber" became current in the 1920S, and is now so widely known as to have become standard; and it would be futile to try to change it. But it is worth knowing that lou doesn't really mean "chamber"; a lou is a mul- tistoried building or tower, the sort of high pavilion (red-lac- quered pillars, fancy roof bracketing) that would grace the gar- den of a wealthy traditional Chinese household. So Hung lou meng means something more like "Red Pavilion Dream," or better, "A Dream in a Red Pavilion." The title alerts us to the role the garden and its buildings will play in the story, and to the possibility that the whole story—life itself—might be (in Buddhist fashion) merely a dream.