indicate a higher ideal of dramatic writing than Fielding is held to
have attained, and probably the key to them is to be found in that
reaction of better judgment which seems invariably to have followed his
most reckless efforts. It was a part of his sanguine and impulsive
nature to be as easily persuaded that his work was worthless as that it
was excellent. "When," says Murphy, "he was not under the immediate
urgency of want, they, who were intimate with him, are ready to aver
that he had a mind greatly superior to anything mean or little; when his
finances were exhausted, he was not the most elegant in his choice of
the means to redress himself, and he would instantly exhibit a farce or
a puppet-shew in the Haymarket theatre, which was wholly inconsistent
with the profession he had embarked in." The quotation displays all
Murphy's loose and negligent way of dealing with his facts; for, with
the exception of _Miss Lucy in Town_, which can scarcely be ranked among
his works at all, there is absolutely no trace of Fielding's having
exhibited either "puppet-show" or "farce" after seriously adopting the
law as a profession, nor does there appear to have been much acting at
the Haymarket for some time after his management had closed in 1737.
Still, his superficial characteristics, which do not depend so much upon
Murphy as upon those "who were intimate with him," are probably
accurately described, and they sufficiently account for many of the
obvious discordances of his work and life. That he was fully conscious
of something higher than his actual achievement as a dramatist is clear
from his own observation in later life, "that he left off writing for
the stage, when he ought to have begun;"--an utterance which (we
shrewdly suspect) has prompted not a little profitless speculation as to
whether, if he had continued to write plays, they would have been equal
to, or worse than, his novels. The discussion would be highly
interesting, if there were the slightest chance that it could be
attended with any satisfactory result. But the truth is, that the very