Henry Fielding in Lisbon
Reading The Discovery of Slowness the other day, I was surprised when the principle character of John Franklin, on a visit to Lisbon, was walked off to visit the grave of Henry Fielding.Always prone to a literary pilgrimage myself, my own journey to the grave was the highlight of a Saturday in Lisbon. Knock on the gate, and ultimately a magnificent tiny lady, all smiles and Portuguese jokes about her own deafness, let us in. The sun shone but she was wrapped in a wreathe of Tibetan style woollen clothing and hat.
Fielding's grave is fairly simple to find, a stone casket raised high and surmounted by an urn. It seems a pleasing place to end up - the English cemetery was set out on the instructions of Cromwell, a place of soaring trees, butterflies, graves overflowing with wild garlic, dappled shadows. Fielding came to Lisbon for his health. he hated the place apparently and died two months later - a joke good enough for Tom Jones.
I stood near his remains and gave thanks for his life, for the fun of his books, for his role as a pioneer. Few writers have had so strong an impact, breezing a 'devil-may-care' attitude into art, breaking through boundaries and treading new ground for us to follow.
'Bye bye' the little lady said, waving a benediction as we stepped out through the gates. Fielding is in good hands.
posted by Martin at 5:26 PM
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The Latin inscription on Fielding's tomb may be freely translated as:
Attend ye Britons: honour the dust interred herein for a moment - forget not your birthright!
One of the best biographies of Henry Fielding that I have read is to be found in an American printing of his works. It is by Alfred Trumble, written in New York in 1889 and runs to 14,000 words.
HENRY FIELDING - a biographical note written in New York, August, 1889
by
ALFRED TRUMBLE.
THERE are, in the history of English literature, a few, perhaps too few, figures which hold their place and glow there like fixed stars in the firmament. Thanks to the changes of times and tastes, the great writers of one generation are relegated to obscurity, or at least to subsidiary importance, by the next, their title to eminence becomes a matter of critical question, and the qualities that made them notable and popular are cavilled at and belittled. But in the world of English letters there is one figure that stands supreme and sound, unsullied by detraction, and unaffected by carping dissection or querulous analysis, like one of those statues of bronze that, after centuries of warfare and ages of national ruin, are exhumed in all their splendid and massive integrity, to serve as monuments in modern times to the matchless art of a legendary and dimly defined past. Henry Fielding was not only the first great English novelist, but he remains to this day, and for all time, one of the greatest. The mutations of time and manners, and the changes of fashions of thought and of expression, that have dethroned so many of his contemporaries and successors, have passed him by unscathed, and if one seeks the reason for his enduring hold upon the living world, one may find it, as Thackeray did, and give it shape in Thackeray's own words:
" What a genius! What a vigour! What a bright intelligence and observation! What a wholesome hatred for meanness and knavery! What a vast sympathy! What a cheerfulness! What a manly relish of life! What a poet is here!—watching, meditating, mood creating! What a multitude of truths has that man left behind him! What generations he has taught to laugh wisely and fairly! What scholars he has formed and accustomed to the exercise of thoughtful humour and the manly play of wit! What a courage he had ! What a dauntless and constant cheerfulness of intellect, that burned bright and steady through all the storms of his life, and never deserted its last wreck ! "
Here is the whole secret of Henry Fielding's literary greatness epitomised in a paragraph. It was his splendid humanity that made him great, upon the pages of his own creations as well as upon the solemn pages of the book of life. He was, above all things, a man in thought and deed. The physical picture Thackeray draws of him is visible throughout the productions of his brain and pen. " His figure was tall and stalwart; his face handsome, manly and noble-looking; to the very last days of his life he retained a grandeur of air. Although worn down by disease, his aspect and his presence imposed respect upon the people round about him." He was, says Arthur Murphy, above six feet in height, and " his frame of body large and remarkably robust," until the gout had broken the vigour of his constitution. Can one not see the living Henry Fielding in the large and vigorous style of the shadowy Henry Fielding that his pen has left us— in the audacious freedom of critical expression; the frank fearlessness of satire; the courageous directness of his attack upon the false, the ignoble and the depraved ?
The same manhood that invests his works with their commanding spirit, also mars them with certain of the coarsenesses inseparable from the author's nature and surroundings. Fielding lived in a coarse time, and was a part of the time in which he lived. It was an age of tavern clubs and tavern dissipations; when men's titles to social consideration were measured by the number of bottles they could empty; when brutal midnight brawls heralded the way to bed, and Justice sat upon her throne with her unbandaged eyes bloodshot from the revel. Through this era Henry Fielding, the man, passed "with inked ruffles and claret stains on his tarnished lace coat, and on his manly face the marks of Food fellowship, of illness, of kindness and care, and wine." But these outward manifestations of the man of his time left no stains upon his soul. They were inseparable from the life of the body, and as his pen undertook to depict the life of which his body was a part, with a truthfulness that should put its shams and scandals to shame, the picture naturally acquired some of the indelicacies and grossnesses of the original, which, however, only serve to strengthen their sermon, and fortify their sound and healthy morality.
But in his books and out of them, in his cups, and in the sober senses which brought him the anguish and remorse of a strong mind conscious of its own weaknesses and shortcomings, one seeks in vain for any Henry Fielding but that which bears the mint-mark of an honest man. Not only honest, too, but generous as just, kindly, considerate, unselfish, full of the sweetness of a noble nature, which the abundant poison of an ignoble age and society could not spoil. " He will give any man his purse," says Thackeray; " he can't help kindness and profusion. He may have low tastes, but not a mean mind. He admires with all his heart good and virtuous men, stoops to no flattery, bears no rancour, disdains all disloyal arts, does his public duty uprightly, is fondly loved by his family, and dies at his work."
THERE was a certain heredity in the robust manhood of Henry Fielding. He was the son of a soldier, who had won his place of honor on fields of battle under the great Marlborough. General Edmund Fielding was a grandson of he Earl of Denbigh, whose loyal life had gone out in futile defense of the doomed King Charles. There are other fighting Fieldings, to be traced back as far, at least, as the bloody plain of Tewkesbury—a line, strong, active and courageous race it was fit to breed honest men and great ones, and it reached a glorious culmination in the descendant whose genius has set the family name ablaze with an immortal splendour.
General Edmund Fielding, after having fleshed his maiden sword in Flanders, and reddened his first spurs with battle blood upon the continent, married, at the age of thirty, Sarah Gould, the daughter of an honest and thrifty knight, Sir Henry (Gould, of Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, in Somerset. Sir Henry was one of the judges of the King's Bench, and had a handsome fortune and kept up a good estate. When the young soldier married into his family he also came to live in it in the intervals of his campaigns, and it was in the house of his grandfather that, on April 22, 1707, the novelist, Henry Fielding, saluted with his first baby cry the great world in which he was to play his heroic part.
In 1710 Sir Henry Gould died, and his household was broken up. By his will, made m March, 1706, Sir Henry left his daughter £3,000, which was to be invested "in the purchase either of a Church or College lease, or of lands of Inheritance," for her sole use, her husband "having nothing to do with it," which would seem to indicate that the wise old knight had a distrust of his military, and possibly impecunious, son-in-law. This money was to come to her children at the death of Mrs. Fielding, and was no unimportant part of the family estate while the good lady was yet alive. Three thousand pounds in those comparatively primitive days meant quite as much as the quadrupled sum means in our wasteful and extravagant time.
Pursuant of her provident parent's plan, Mrs. General Fielding invested a portion of her heritage in a small estate at East Stour, in Dorsetshire, where the General and herself set up their housekeeping. At East Stour, Mr. Austin Dobson tells us, according to the extracts from the parish register given in Hutchins's "History of Dorset," four children were born to the Fieldings, namely, Sarah, afterwards the authoress of "David Simple;" Anne, Beatrice, and another son, Edmund. " Edmund," says Arthur Murphy, "was an officer in the marine service," and (adds Mr. Lawrence) "died young." Anne died at East Stour in August, 1716. Of Beatrice nothing further is known. These would appear to have been all the children of Edmund Fielding by his first wife, although, as Sarah Fielding is styled on her monument, at Bath, the second daughter of General Fielding, it is not impossible that another daughter may have been born at Sharpham Park, before or after Henry Fielding raised his infantile salutation to the universe he was created to benefit and improve.
" At East Stour," continues Mr. Dobson, "the Fieldings certainly resided until April, 1718, when Mrs. Fielding died, leaving her elder son a boy of not quite eleven years of age. How much longer the family remained there is unrecorded: but it is clear that a great part of Henry Fielding's childhood must have been spent by the pleasant banks of sweetly-winding Stour, which passes through it, and to which he subsequently refers in 'Tom Jones.' His education during this time was confided to a certain Mr. Oliver, whom Lawrence designates the family chaplain. Keightley supposes that he was the curate of East Stour; but Hutchins, a better authority than either, says that he was the clergyman of Motcombe, a neighbouring village. Of this gentleman according to Murphy, Parson Trulliber in 'Joseph Andrews ' is a very humorous and striking portrait. It is certainly more humorous than complimentary. "
From Mr. Oliver's care the boy was sent to Eton, where Arthur Murphy tells us rather snobbishly, though one can forgive snobbery written in Lincoln's Inn in 1762, I hope, that he fell in with very excellent company. "Lord Lyttleton, Mr. Fox, Mr. Pitt, Sir Charles Hanbury Willliams and the late Mr. Winnington, etc." George Lyttleton was later the famous statesman and orator. Charles Hanbury became the equally famous wit and squib writer, when he achieved his baronetcy and amplified his name by inheritance. Poor Tom Winnington his old schoolmate, fought many a doughty pen and ink battle, for in later years, when Tory lampooners assailed his honest memory. Dr. Arne, sweetest of old English composers, was another Eton schoolmate of Fielding's, and among the shy boys the sturdy son of Marlborough s old campaigner fought for was Gilbert West, the translator of Pindar.
There are few records of Fielding's career at Eton. If he appears to have been an apt student and a forward boy. Murphy extols his accomplishments in Greek and Latin, but he himself depreciates them, and in one of his own verses to Walpole some years later, Fielding says:
" Tuscan and French are in my Head;
Latin I write, and Greek I—read."
However this may have been, it is certain that, as Mr. Dobson puts it, "during his stay at Eton, Fielding had been rapidly developing from a boy into a young man. When he left school it is impossible to say; but he was probably seventeen or eighteen years of age, and it is at this stage of his career that must be fixed an occurrence which some of his biographers place much farther on. This is his earliest recorded love affair."
The object of his early ripened passion was a young lady of Lyme Regis, the only daughter and heiress of one Solomon Andrew, deceased, a merchant of considerable local reputation. Lawrence says that she was Fielding's cousin. This may be so; but the statement is unsupported by any authority. She was living at Lyme with one of her guardians, Mr. Andrew Tucker, when in his chance visits to that place, young Fielding became desperately enamoured of her. At one time he seems to have actually meditated the abduction of his flame, for an entry in the town archives, discovered by Mr. George Roberts, sometime Mayor of Lyme, who tells the story, declares that Andrew Tucker, Esq., went in fear of his life "owing to the behaviour of Henry Fielding and his attendant, or man." But Miss Andrew was prudently transferred to the care of another guardian, Mr. Rhodes, of Modbury, in South Devon, to whose son, a young gentleman of Oxford, she was promptly married; and the next we know of young Henry Fielding, he had been shipped off to Leyden to learn civil law, until all of a sudden a not unusual accident happened to him.
His remittances failed, his debts oppressed, and his duns bothered him. His father, never a rich man, had married again. His second wife was a widow named Eleanor Rasa, and by this time he was fast acquiring a second family. Under the pressure of his growing cares, he found himself, however willing, unable to maintain his eldest son or to discharge his expenses at Leyden. So Henry took his departure from the University between days. At the end of 1727 or the commencement of 1728, he set foot in London, there to commence as black and bitter a battle as genius ever fought with the selfish world.
HIS father, nominally, made him an allowance of two hundred a year; but this, as Fielding himself explained, "anybody might pay that would." The consequence was that not long after the arrival of the latter m the Metropolis, he had given up all idea of pursuing the law, to which his mother's legal connections had perhaps first attracted him, and had determined to adopt the more seductive occupation of living by his wits. At this date he was in the prime of youth. He possessed every physical characteristic calculated to attract temptation. He had the constitution of an ox, the beauty of a young god, and the good heart of a Henry Fielding. Is it not easy to prefigure the result ?
His cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, writing of his experiences at this period, gives a delicate hint at their complexion. "No man," says she, "enjoyed life more than he did. His happy constitution, even when he had with very great pains half demolished it, made him forget every evil, when he was before a venison pasty, or over a glass of champagne, and, I am persuaded, he has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth. His natural spirits gave him rapture with his cook-maid, and cheerfulness when he was starving in a garret." There was a great similitude between his character and that of Sir Richard Steele. He had the advantage, both in learning and, in my opinion, genius; they both agreed in wanting money, in spite of all their friends, and would have wanted it, if their hereditary lands had been as extensive as their imagination; yet each of them was so formed for happiness, it is pity he was not immortal
Some resources, as Sir Walter Scott puts it, were necessary for a man of pleasure, and Fielding found them in his pen, having, as he used to say himself, no alternative but to be a hackney writer or a hackney coachman. He at first employed himself in writing for the theatre, then in high reputation, having recently engaged the talents of Wycherly, of Congreve, Vanbrugh, and Farquhar. Fielding's comedies and farces were brought on the stage in hasty succession; and play after play, to the number of eighteen, sunk or swam on the theatrical sea betwixt the years 1727 and 1736. None of these are now known or read, excepting the mock tragedy of "Tom Thumb," the translated play of "The Miser," and the farces of "The Mock Doctor," and "Intriguing Chambermaid," and yet they are the production of an author unrivalled for his conception and illustration of character in the kindred walk of imaginary narrative.
But Fielding's genius was essentially that of the novelist, though he had not yet discovered this fact; to him the theatre was the first road to fortune and popular preferment. His first dramatic essay—or, to speak more precisely, the first of his dramatic essays that was produced upon the stage—was a five-act comedy entitled "Love in Several Masques." It was played at Drury Lane, in February, 1728, succeeding "The Provoked Husband." In his preface, the young author refers to the disadvantage under which he laboured in following close upon that comedy, and also in being "contemporary with an Entertainment which engrosses the whole Talk and Admiration of the Town,"—i. e. " The Beggar's Opera." Still he stuck to his work. year after year, until 1736, he produced comedies, satires and the like, which were almost as soon forgotten as they were produced upon the stage.
During this period Fielding lived the life of a man of wit and pleasure about town. He stretched out his meagre and precarious earnings from the stage by private levies on better-to-do friends, and sought and found his amusement in the manifold scenes of gayety and dissipation provided by the gay and dissipated town. He even became, for a time, the manager of a theatrical company, and, no doubt, got his fill of this responsible involvement. In 1735 he opened at the little theatre m the Haymarket, with "The Great Mogul's Company of Comedians," made up of discarded actors of other theatres by whom he proposed to have his own plays acted. The venture fell as fiat as the satire of its title. It exploded and left him even poorer than he had been before.
Then he sought and found at least passing relief in matrimony. He had for some years been acquainted with a good and beautiful girl at Salisbury, who possessed the additional attraction of a small fortune, some £1,500. Her name was Charlotte Cradock, and he made her Mrs. Fielding in 1736, as fortune never came by halves, he also, at the same time, fell into a small estate of £200 a year, part of his mother's property at Stour.
There is a touch of genuine comedy about this portion of Fielding's life. He retired to his little estate at Stour with his wife, and on the income of £200, and her poor dowry of £1,500 set up the state of a great lord for their honeymoon. As Murphy tells::
"He began immediately to vie in splendour with the neighbouring country squires, encumbered himself with a large retinue of servants, all clad in costly yellow liveries. For their master's honour, these people could not descend so low as to be careful. In their apparel, but, in a month or two were unfit to be seen; the squire's dignity required that they should be new-equipped; and his chief pleasure consisting in society and convivial mirth, hospitality threw open his doors. Entertainments, hounds. and horses, entirely devoured a little patrimony, which, had it been managed with economy, might have secured to him a state of independence for the rest of his life."
And so Henry Fielding was on the town again, this time with a wife upon his shiftless hands, that could not provide for himself alone. It is to the pressure of this necessity that the world owes Henry Fielding, the immortal novelist, where, under temporarily happier circumstances, Henry Fielding, the playwright, might have otherwise been forgotten.
WHEN the wreck of his country fortune left him stranded once more on the merciless reefs of London, Fielding, like the drowning man grasping at the least stray bit of flotsam for relief, turned his vagrant attention to the law, for which he had been originally destined. The passage of the Licensing Act put an end to his theatrical career. The frank effrontery of his satire had begun to attract the attention of the Ministry, and a bill was framed to restrict the unbounded license of the stage, and give the Lord Chamberlain the power of censorship he holds in England to this day. Fielding bowed to his fate. He renounced the stage, and with a wife and daughter to support, at the age of thirty, entered at the Temple as a student of the law.
If Murphy is to be believed, Fielding devoted himself henceforth with remarkable assiduity to serious work. His old irregularity of life, it is alleged, occasionally asserted itself, though without checking the energy of his application. "This," says his first biographer, "prevailed in him to such a degree, that he has been frequently known by his intimates to retire late at night from a tavern to his chambers, and there read, and make extracts from the most abstruse authors for several hours before he went to bed; so powerful were the vigour of his constitution and the activity of his mind." It is to this passage, no doubt, says Mr. Dobson, we owe the picturesque wet towel and inked ruffles with which Mr. Thackeray has decorated him in "Pendennis;" and, in all probability, a good deal of graphic writing from less able pens respecting his modus vividness as a Templar. In point of fact, nothing is known with certainty respecting his life at this period; and what it would really concern us to learn—namely, whether by " chambers," it is to be understood that he was living alone, and, if so, where Mrs. Fielding was at the time of these protracted vigils —Murphy has not told us. Perhaps she was safe all the while at East Stour, or with her sisters at Salisbury. Having no precise information, however, it can only be recorded that, in spite of the fitful outbreaks above referred to, Fielding applied himself to the study of his profession with all the vigour of a man who has to make up for lost time; and that, when on the 20th of June, 1740, the day came for his being called, he was very fairly equipped with legal knowledge It is certain that he made a host of lawyer friends during this period, and that he made a good magistrate, when, in later years, he went upon the bench.
He found time to do not a little writing for hire during this studious intermission in his stirring life. According to Scott, too, he laboured under serious difficulties. Disease, the consequence of a free life, came to the aid of dissipation, and severe fits of the gout gradually impaired his robust constitution. Still he tugged at the oar, and one of his productions of this period was The Champion, a paper on the model of the elder essayists. It was issued, like The Taller, on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Murphy says that Fielding's part in it cannot now be ascertained; but, says Mr. Dobson, as the "Advertisement" to the edition in two volumes of 1741 states expressly that the papers signed A. and L. are the "Work of One Hand," and as a number of those signed A. are unmistakably Fielding's, it is hard to discover where the difficulty lay. The papers signed A. and L. are by far the most numerous, the majority of the remainder being distinguished by two stars, or the signature "Lilbourne." These are understood to have been from the pen of James Ralph, whose poem of "Night" gave rise to a stinging couplet in "The Dunciad," but who was nevertheless a man of parts, and an industrious writer. Fielding made his famous attacks on Colley Abber in The Champion, and seems to have discontinued his connection with it when he was admitted to the bar.
He did not entirely suspend his literary activity, however. In Sylvanus Urban's "Register of Books," published during January, 1741, is advertised the poem "Of True Greatness," afterwards included in the "Miscellanies" and the same authority announces the "Vernoniad," an anonymous burlesque epic prompted by Admiral Vernon's popular expedition against Porto Bello in 1739, "with six Ships only." That Fielding was the author of the latter is sufficiently proved by his order to V.
No better summary can be made of this historical cornerstone to the future fiction of the English language, than is given by Sir Walter Scott in his sketch of the author's life. Scott, writing of the book, its origin and its character, says:
" The novel of 'Pamela,' published in 1740, had carried the fame of Richardson to the highest pitch; and Fielding, whether he was tired of hearing it overpraised (for a book, several passages of which would now be thought highly indelicate, was in those days even recommended from the pulpit", or whether, as a writer for daily subsistence, he caught at whatever interested the public for the time; or whether, in flne, he was seduced by that wicked spirit of wit, which cannot forbear turning into ridicule the idol of the day, resolved to caricature the style, principles, and personages of this favourite performance. As (lay's desire to satirise Philips gave rise to the ' Shepherd's Week,' so Fielding's purpose to ridicule 'Pamela' produced 'The History of Joseph Andrews'; and in both cases, but especially in the latter, a work was executed infinitely better than could have been expected to arise out of such a motive, and the reader received a degree of pleasure far superior to what the author himself appears to have proposed. There is, indeed, a fine vein of irony in Fielding's novel, as will appear from comparing it with the pages of ' Pamela.' But ' Pamela,' to which that irony was applied, is now in a manner forgotten, and "Joseph Andrews'' continues to be read, for the admirable pictures of manners which it presents; and above all, for the inimitable character of Mr. Abraham Adams, which alone is sufficient to stamp the superiority of Fielding over all writers of his class. His learning, his simplicity, his evangelical purity of mind, and benevolence of disposition, are so admirably mingled with pedantry, absence of mind, and with the habit of athletic and gymnastic exercise, then acquired at the universities by students of all descriptions, that he may be safely termed one of the richest productions of the Muse of fiction. Like Don Quixote, Parson Adams is beaten a little too much, and too often; but the cudgel lights upon his shoulders, as on those of the honoured Knight of La Mancha, without the slightest stain to his reputation, and he is bastinadoed without being degraded. The style of this piece is said, in the preface, to have been an imitation of Cervantes; but both in 'Joseph Andrews' and 'Tom Jones ' the author appears also to have had in view the 'Roman Comique' of the once celebrated Scarron. From this authority he has copied the mock-heroic style, which tells ludicrous events in the language of the classical epic, a vein of pleasantry which is soon wrought out, and which Fielding has employed so often as to expose him to the charge of pedantry.
" 'Joseph Andrews ' was eminently successful; and the aggrieved Richardson, who was fond of praise even to adulation, was proportionally offended, while his group of admirers, male and female, took care to echo back his sentiments, and to heap Fielding with reproach Their animosity survived his life, and we find the most ungenerous reproaches thrown upon his memory, in the course of Richardson's correspondence. Richardson was well acquainted with Fielding's sisters, and complained to them—not of Fielding's usage of himself, that he was too wise, or too proud to mention, but—of his unfortunate predilection to what was mean and low in character and description. The following expressions are remarkable, as well for the extreme modesty of the writer, who thus rears himself into the paramount judge of Fielding's qualities, and for the delicacy which could intrude such observations on the ear of his rival's sister: ' Poor Fielding ! I could not help telling his sister, that I was equally surprised at, and concerned for, his continued lowness Had your brother, said I, been born in a stable, or been a runner, at a sponging house, one should have thought him a genius, and wished he had had the advantage of a liberal education, and of being admitted into good company.' After this we are not surprised at its being alleged that Fielding was destitute of invention and talents; that the run of his best works was nearly over; and that he would soon be forgotten as an author. Fielding does not appear to have retorted any of this ill will, so that, if he gave the first offence, and that an unprovoked one, he was also the first to retreat from the contest, and to allow to Richardson those claims which his genius really demanded from the liberality of his contemporaries. In the fifth number of the Jacobite Journal, Fielding highly commends ' Clarissa,' which is by far the best and most powerful of Richardson's novels; and, with these scenes in 'Sir Charles Grandison ' which refer to the history of Clementina, contains the passages of deep pathos on which his claim to immortality must finally rest. Perhaps this is one of the cases in which one would rather have sympathised with the thoughtless offender, than with the illiberal and ungenerous mind which so long retained its resentment." ,
"The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, and of his friend Mr. Abraham Adams," was published by Andrew Millar in February, 1742. Mr. Dobson tells us that various anecdotes, all more or less apocryphal, have been related respecting the first appearance of Joseph Andrews, and the sum paid to the author for the copyright. A reference to the original assignment, now in the Foster Library at South Kensington, definitely settles the latter point. The amount in " lawful Money of Great Britain," received by " Henry Fielding, Esq.," from "Andrew Millar of St. Clement's Danes in the Strand," was £183. us. In this document, as in the order to Nourse, of which a facsimile is given by Roscoe, both the author's name and signature are written with the old-fashioned double f, and he calls himself " Fielding " and not " Feilding," like the rest of the Denbigh family. If we may trust an anecdote given by Kippis, Lord Denbigh once asked his kinsman the reason of this difference. " I cannot tell, my lord," returned the novelist, "unless it be that my branch of the family was the first that learned to spell."
Fielding was careful to disclaim any personal portraiture in "Joseph Andrews." In the opening chapter to Book III, he declares that he "describes not men, but manners; not an individual, but a species," though he admits that his characters are "taken from Life." In his "Preface" he reiterates this profession, adding that, in copying from nature, he has "used the utmost Care to obscure the Persons by such different Circumstances, Degrees, and Colours, that it would be impossible to guess at them with any degree of certainty." Nevertheless neither his protests nor his skill have prevented some of those identifications which are so seductive to the curious; and it is generally believed—indeed, it was expressly stated by Richardson and others—that the prototype of Parson Adams was a friend of Fielding, the Reverend William Young. Like Adams, he was a scholar and devoted to Æschylus: he resembled him, too, in his trick of snapping his fingers, and his habitual absence of mind. Of this latter peculiarity it is related that on one occasion, when a chaplain in Marlborough's wars, he strolled abstractedly into the enemy's lines with his beloved " Æschylus " in his hand. His peaceable intentions were so unmistakable that he was instantly released, and politely directed to his regiment. Once, too, it is said, on being charged by a gentleman with sitting for the portrait of Adams, he offered to knock the speaker down, thereby supplying additional proof of the truth of the allegation. He died in August, 1756, and is buried in the chapel of Chelsea Hospital. The obituary notice in the Gentleman's Magazine describes him as " late of Gillingham, Dorsetshire," which would make him a neighbour of the novelist.
Lord Thurlow, it may be worth noting, was accustomed to find a later likeness to Fielding's hero in his protégé, the poet Crabbe. contemporary tradition, it may be added, connects Mr. Peter Pounce with the scrivener and usurer, Peter Walter, whom Pope had satirised, and whom Hogarth is thought to have introduced into Plate I of "Marriage a-la-Mode." His sister lived at Salisbury; and he himself had an estate at Stalbridge Park, which was close to East Stour. From references to Walter in The Champion for May 31,1740, as well as in the essay on "Conversation," it is clear that Fielding knew him personally, and disliked him. He may, indeed, have been amongst those county magnates whose criticism was so objectionable to Captain Booth during his brief residence in Dorsetshire. Parson Trulliber, also, according to Murphy, was Fielding's first tutor—Mr. Oliver of Motcombe. But his widow denied the resemblance, and it is hard to believe that this portrait is not overcharged.
" But even the high praise due to the construction and arrangement of the story is inferior to that claimed by the truth, force, and spirit of the characters, from Tom Jones himself, clown to Black George the gamekeeper, and his family. Amongst these Squire Western stands alone; imitated from no prototype, and in himself an inimitable picture of ignorance, prejudice, irascibility, and rusticity, united with natural shrewdness, constitutional good humour, and an instinctive affection for his daughter—all which qualities, good and bad, are grounded upon that basis of thorough selfishness natural to one bred up from infancy where no one dared to contradict his arguments, or to control his conduct. In one incident alone we think Fielding has departed from this admirable sketch. As an English squire, Western ought not to have taken a beating so unresistingly from the friend of Lord Fellamar. We half suspect the passage to be an interpolation. It is inconsistent with the squire's readiness to engage in rustic affrays. We grant a pistol or sword might have appalled him, but Squire Western should have yielded to no one in the use of the English horsewhip—and as, with all his brutalities, we have a sneaking interest in the honest, jolly country gentlemen, we would willingly hope there is some mistake in this matter.
"The character of Jones, otherwise a model of generosity, openness, manly spirit mingled with thoughtless dissipation, is in like manner unnecessarily degraded by the nature of his intercourse with Lady Bellaston; and this is one of the circumstances which incline us to believe that Fielding's ideas of what was gentleman-like and honourable, had sustained some depreciation, in consequence of the unhappy circumstances of his life and of the society to which they condemned him."
A more sweeping and general objection was made against "The History of a Foundling, " by the admirers of Richardson, and has been often repeated since. It is alleged that the ultimate moral of "Tom Jones," which conducts to happiness, and holds up to our sympathy and esteem a youth who gives way to licentious habits, is detrimental to society, and tends to encourage the youthful reader in the practice of those follies to which his natural passions and the usual course of the world but too much direct him. But such prurient moralists as Richardson and his friends were scarcely competent critics of so robust and manly a genius as Henry Fielding.
Dr. Johnson took a broader view of it, and heartily endorsed "Tom Jones." The public coincided with him. Plagiarism seized upon it, and within a year, in the same way as "Pamela" had its sequel in "Pamela's Conduct in High Life," so "Tom Jones" was continued in "The History of Tom Jones the Foundling, in His Married State," a second edition of which was issued in 1750.
The preface announces that "Henry Fielding, Esq., is not the Author of this Book," a statement which no one who read the book needed.
As might perhaps be anticipated, "Tom Jones" attracted the dramatist also. In 1765 one J. H. Steffens made a comedy of it for the German boards; and in 1785 a M. Desforges based upon it another, called "Tom Jones à Londres," which was acted at the Theatre Francais. It was also turned into a comic opera by Joseph Reed in 1769, and played at Covent Garden. But its most piquant transformation is the Comedie Iyrique of Poinsinet, acted at Paris in 1765-6 to the lively music of Philidor. The famous Caillot took the part of Squire Western. "Tom Jones" was, also, recently made the foundation for a play by Robert Buchanan, called " Sophia," which was produced with some success in London. The book has been translated into French, German, Polish, Dutch, Spanish, Swedish, and Russian, in all of which tongues it has found enthusiastic admirers.
The first French translation was that of De la Place, in l750. This translation was abridged and much emasculated, in spite of which it was prohibited in France (to Richardson's delight, of course) by royal decree, an act which affords another instance, in Scott's words, of that " French delicacy, which, on so many occasions, has strained at a gnat and swallowed a camel," that is to say, the novels of M. Crébillon fils, which it would require a bold publisher to put into English.
FIELDING made one more appearance as a dramatist after the success of "Joseph Andrews," and it proved a failure. It is to be noted, par parenthese, that in spite of his fecundity as a dramatic writer he never rose to the dignity of making a decent living off the stage. It was a succession of shifts and devices, tiding over between one play and another with loans from friends, and small sops gained by midnight toil from the pamphlet publishers. Such, however, was Fielding's invariably happy nature and the enormous mental resources that he had to draw upon that, inflamed with deep potations or cool with periods of temperance, he was ever equally ready when opportunity offered, to bow under the yoke of necessity and tug a pittance out of the barren furrows of casual literary work. His life, from first to last, was that of an honest gentleman, who had been cast upon an evil time, who strove to fulfil every obligation, and who was forced to incur many that he could not fulfil, because he was too far in advance of his age to command the honour and profit his genius deserved.
We have seen at a later day Scott accumulate a vast fortune by his pen. We have seen such successors of Fielding as Thackeray and Dickens growing rich by the same craft. We have seen such poets as Tennyson and Longfellow, such romanticists as Hugo and his minor Gallic successors, gaining by single volumes more than the founder of the school of literature upon which their art was fed gained in half a laborious lifetime. The fate of Fielding was the fate of all pioneers. He blazed the way and cleared the track by which others were to travel to their goals.
No particular interest attaches to Fielding s last dramatic essay, except that of curiosity. He got no gain from it, and its paucity of profit no doubt spurred him to the production of "Jonathan Wild, the Great."
"Jonathan Wild " is one of the most trenchant satires ever written. It was, for its time, the most trenchant known to English literature, and it may be questioned if it has had a successor. The closest approach to it is Thackeray's " Barry Lyndon," which was obviously suggested by and modelled after it. With the gravity of a historian treating of grave and reverend men, the author traced the career of an unmitigated scoundrel. xxii
Every vice and iniquity of his hero, and every vice and iniquity of the society of the time, were glorified in a negative sense. To those who have any knowledge of the manners and methods of Fielding's time, " Jonathan Wild " will have a positive interest end value. To those who have not, it will, except in certain passages, prove dull reading enough. But it is illumined, even for the unilluminated, with superb passages and splendid sketches of character, in every one of which the invariable repetition of human types, from the time when humanity began, will be recognised and prized.
The idea of this satire is now believed to have originated with Fielding before he took up and executed his satire of Richardson. The probability is that he had it plotted out when the conception of " Joseph Andrews" came to him, and he laid it aside to complete the other, as being more applicable to the time. At any rate, " The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild, the Great," appeared as the third volume to the "Miscellanies, " issued in 1743. Scott speaks in slighting terms of " Jonathan Wild," but even in this deprecatory spirit he allows that " there are few passages in Fielding's more celebrated works more marked by his peculiar genius than the scene betwixt his hero and the ordinary when in Newgate." Mr. Dobson is a more appreciative critic. He writes:
" Under the name of a notorious thief-taker, hanged at Tyburn in 1725, Fielding has traced the Progress of a Rogue to the Gallows, showing by innumerable subtle touches that the (so-called) greatness of a villain does not very materially differ from any other kind of greatness, which is equally independent of goodness. This continually suggested affinity between the ignoble and the pseudonoble is the text of the book. Against genuine worth (its author is careful to explain) his satire is in no wise directed. He is far from considering Newgate as no other than Human Nature with its Mask off; but he thinks we may be excused for suspecting that the splendid Palaces of the Great are often no other than Newgate with the Mask on. Thus Jonathan Wild the Great is a prolonged satire upon the spurious eminence in which benevolence, honesty, charity, and the like have no part; or, as [fielding prefers to term it, that false or Bombast greatness which is so often mistaken for the true Sublime in Human Nature—Greatness and Goodness combined "
So thoroughly has he explained his intention in the prefaces to the "Miscellanies," and to the book itself, that it is difficult to comprehend how Scott could fail to see his drift. Possibly, like some others, he found the subject repugnant and painful to his kindly nature. Possibly, too, he did not, for this reason, study the book very carefully. At any rate, "Jonathan Wild," certainly is not of the first rank of the author's works. Dobson rates it after the three great novels, which is a fair judgement. Whatever may be the opinion of it as a story, it can rank in workmanship with any of his productions.
The measure of success of "Jonathan Wild" was only moderate. It was, perhaps, one more of curiosity, following, as it did, after "Joseph Andrews," than of genuine appreciation. Still the author got some money by it, which was very much to his purpose at the time. Thenceforward his activity as a producer of flction subsided for half a dozen years.
During this time he produced no work of signal importance. He battled with the gout and with necessity. He edited the Jacobite Journal and other transient publications of a political character, and with proper and characteristic improvidence married a second time. On November 27th, 1747, he took to wife one Mary Daniel, with whom he went to housekeeping in two rooms in Back Lane, Twickenham. Some year or so later came another eventful turn in his career.
Smollet had commenced to exercise his interest for him, to secure him an appointment. The Jacobite Journal ceased to appear in November, 1748. of the December f ollowing.
In the early part of the December following by Lord Lyttleton's interest, Fielding was appointed a Justice of the Peace for Westminster. From a letter in the "Bedford Correspondence," dated 13th of December, 1748, respecting the lease of a house or houses which would qualify him to act for Middlesex, it would seem that the county was afterwards added to his commission.
This offlce reads more importantly on paper than it was in fact. The justice's emoluments depended on fees, which he was expected to extort from the public. But it was accompanied in Fielding's case by a small pension, which helped him out, for he was too honest to thrive by the frauds placed at his command. Writing of his position, Fielding himself said:
"I will confess that my private affairs at the beginning of the winter had but a gloomy aspect; for I had not plundered the public or the poor of those sums which men who are always ready to plunder both as much as they can have been pleased to suspect me of taking; on the contrary, by composing, instead of inflaming the quarrels of porters and beggars (which I blush when I say hath not been universally practised,) and by refusing to take a shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not have had another left, I had reduced an income of about £500. a year of the dirtiest money upon earth, to little more than £300., a considerable portion of which remained with my clerk."
On the 28th of February, 1749, Andrew Millar published "The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, by Henry Fielding, Esq." It appeared in six volumes 12 mot, at sixteen shillings a set, and took the town by storm. " Tom Jones " was dedicated to Lord, or as he was then still, Mr. Lyttleton. The price paid for it by The sale of " Tom Jones " went on famously in spite of the author's habits. Of the book itself, Scott writes in these glowingly critical terms:
"The general merits of this popular and delightful work have been so often dwelt upon, and its imperfections so frequently censured, that we can do little more than hastily run over ground which has been so repeatedly occupied. The felicitous contrivance and happy extrication of the story, where every incident tells upon and advances the catastrophe, while, at the same time, it illustrates the characters of those interested in its approach, cannot too often be mentioned with the highest approbation. The attention of the reader is never diverted or puzzled by unnecessary digressions, or recalled to the main story by abrupt and startling recurrence; he glides down the narrative like a boat on the surface of some broad navigable stream, which only winds enough to gratify the voyager with the varied beauty of its banks. One exception to this praise, otherwise so well merited, occurs in the story of the Old Man of the Hill; an episode, which, in compliance with a custom introduced by Cervantes, and followed by Le Sage, Fielding has thrust into the midst of his narrative, as he had formerly introduced the History of Leonora, equally unnecessarily and inartificially, into that of 'Joseph Andrews.' It has also been wondered why Fielding should have chosen to leave the stain of illegitimacy on the birth of his hero; and it has been surmised that he did so in allusion to his own first wife, who was also a natural child.
" A better reason may be discovered in the story itself; for, had Miss Bridget been privately married to the father of Tom Jones, there could have been no adequate motive assigned for keeping his birth secret from a man so reasonable and compassion. "
No portion of Fielding's career presents stranger contrasts than that upon which he had now entered. As a magistrate he brought little personal dignity to the bench, where he sat in dirty ruffles and tarnished and threadbare garb, with red eyes and jaundiced face. But he did invest his office with a great deal of common sense, and speedily won recognition for the work he did in it. And what with the duties of his post, the useful and satirical pamphleteering that grew out of it, and the social exactions to which he subjected himself, he had his hands so full that he could have been excused for complete inactivity in the field of fiction.
But Fielding was no sluggard, and moreover his needs pressed him. He was by no means a rich man, and, we are told by Murphy, that, as a Westminster justice, he " kept his table open to those who had been his friends when young and had impaired their fortunes. " Cannot one imagine this ragged regiment feeding upon him and the incessant pressure for money its voracity produced?
One of the literary curiosities of this period of Fielding's career was his pamphlet on "A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez." This rare argument of a current legal event sheds an interesting side light on the fierce brutality of the time and affords a hint at the sort of work the author's judgeship involved for him. Bosavern Penlez was a fellow who had been hanged for robbery, and the pamphlet was written to justify his execution, which caused a great outcry. Three sailors of the GRAF man-of-war, roving London on a hot summer night, had been robbed in a house of ill-fame in the Strand. Failing to obtain redress, they attacked the house with their comrades, and wrecked it, causing a "dangerous riot " to which Fielding makes incidental reference in one of his letters to the Duke of Bedford, and which was witnessed by John Byrom, the poet and stenographer, in whose " Remains " it is described. Bosavern Penlez was one of the crowd that looked on at this affair, and who took advantage of the attack to rob the house. He was apprehended with stolen property in his possession and made an example of.
One of the most notable of Fielding's legal papers dates from this period. It is his charge to the Westminster Grand Jury, which he delivered in June, 1749, and in which among other evils he attacked his old love, the stage, for its license of personal attack, with great severity. The charge for years has been recognised as a model delivery of its kind, dignified, forcible, eloquent and picturesque. Its compilation is said by one of Fielding's contemporaries to have cost him "two gallons of Burgundy and a fit of the gout."
But the gout had become chronic with Fielding by this time. Toward the close of 1749 he fell seriously ill with fever aggravated by it. It was indeed at one time reported that mortification had supervened; but under the care of Dr. Thomson, that dubious practitioner whose treatment of Winnington in 1746 had given rise to so much paper war, he recovered, and during 1750 was actively employed in his magisterial duties. At this period lawlessness and violence appear to have prevailed to an unusual extent in the metropolis, and the office of a Bow Street justice was no sinecure. Reform of some kind was felt on all sides to be urgently required, and Fielding threw his two years' experience and his deductions therefrom into the form of a pamphlet entitled " An Enquiry into the Causes of the late Increase of Robbers, etc., with some Proposals for Remedying this growing Evil." It was dedicated to the then Lord High Chancellor, Philip Yorke, Lord Hardwicke, by whom, as well as by more recent legal authorities, it was highly appreciated, and it resulted in a government appropriation for purposes of reform that gave Fielding an opportunity to carry out some of his ideas with good results.
One passage of the "Enquiry " is an attack on the vice of gin drinking, which is famous as having suggested to the author's friend Hogarth the idea for his plate " Gin Lane," which was published a month later, in February, 1751. We next find Fielding figuring as an endorser of the celebrated Glastonbury waters, whose discover, made a passing sensation, and which are one of the oddities of the day. According to the account given in the Gentleman's Magazine for July in that year, a certain Matthew Chancellor had been cured of " an asthma and phthisic " of thirty years' standing by drinking from a spring near Chain Gate, Glastonbury, to which he had, so he alleged, been directed in a dream. The spring forthwith became famous, and an entry in the Historical Chronicle for Sunday, May 5th, records that above 10,000 persons had visited it, deserting Bristol, Bath, and other popular resorts. Numerous pamphlets were published for and against the new waters, and a letter in their favour, which appeared in the London Daily Advertiser for the 31st of August, signed "Z. Z.," is "supposed to be wrote " by " J - F - e - g." Fielding was, as may be remembered, a Somersetshire man, Sharpham Park, his birthplace, being about three miles from Glastonbury, and he testifies to the " wonderful Effects of this salubrious Spring " in words which show that he had himself experienced them. But they brought him no permanent relief in spite of their salubrity. The Glastonbury Springs are now neglected, but they continued popular for many years, and at one time their pump room almost rivalled that at Bath.
All this time, pinched by poverty and gout, and racked by fever and trouble, Fielding was finding a spare hour now and then to devote to the last of the fictions which have won him immortality. Like "Tom Jones," it came upon the world with but little preliminary advertisement. In Sylvanus Urban's list of publications for December, 1751, No. 17 is noticed as "Amelia,"in 4 books, 12 mot, by Henry Fielding, Esq." 'Fielding," wrote Walpole, "hath written a new book, I and they tell me put himself in it, though whether as rogue or hero I have not yet read. But what we wonder at is where and how he finds time to write at all."
There was, indeed, food for wonder in this; but Fielding's productivity was entirely superior to circumstances. His enormous energy defied the ravages of disease until physical decay became too complete for mental sustension. And indeed, the signs of growing weakness show themselves in "Amelia," and hint at the miserable circumstances under which most of that book must have been produced. What nights of toil and pain, what racking headaches and distracting harassment's by debts and duns must be behind its pages, only the author himself knew. The wonder is not that it has the faults it has, but that it has no more.
"Amelia" was published by Fielding's regular publisher, Andrew Millar. According to the General Advertiser, its day of issue was December 19,1751, but it is dated 1752. The work was dedicated to Ralph Allen. Millar paved the way for it by some of the familiar tricks of advertising of which he was fond. In one he said:
" To satisfy the earnest demand of the publick, this work has been printed at four presses; but the proprietor, notwithstanding, finds it impossible to get them (sic) bound in time, without spoiling the beauty of the impression. and therefore will sell them sew'd at half-a-guinea."
This was open enough, but, according to Scott, Millar adopted a second expedient to assist "Amelia" with the booksellers:
" He had paid a thousand pounds for the copyright; and when he began to suspect that the work would be judged inferior to its predecessor, he employed the following stratagem to push it upon the trade. At a sale made to the booksellers, previous to the publication, Millar offered his friends his other publications on the usual terms of discount; but when he came to " Amelia," he laid it aside as a work expected to be in such demand that he could not afford to deliver it to the trade in the usual manner. The ruse succeeded—the impression was anxiously bought up, and the bookseller relieved from every apprehension of a slow sale."
Scott makes but small account of " Amelia,'' of which he writes:
"'Amelia ' was the author's last work of importance. It may be termed a continuation of 'Tom Jones,' but we have not the same sympathy for the ungrateful and dissolute conduct of Booth, which we yield to the youthful follies of Jones. The character of Amelia is said to have been drawn for Fielding's second wife. If he put her patience, as has been alleged, to tests of the same kind, he has, in some degree, repaid her by the picture he has drawn of her feminine delicacy and pure tenderness. Fielding's novels show few instances of pathos; it was, perhaps, inconsistent with the life which he was compelled to lead; for those who see most of human misery, become necessarily, in some degree, hardened to its effects. But few scenes of fictitious distress are more affecting than that in which Amelia is described as having made her little preparations for the evening, and sitting in anxious expectation of the return of her unworthy husband, whose folly is, in the meantime, preparing for her new scenes of misery. But our sympathy for the wife is disturbed by our dislike of her unthankful husband, and the tale is, on the whole, unpleasing, even though relieved by the humors of the doughty Colonel Bath, and the learned Dr. Harrison, characters drawn with such advertisement. Mr. Dobson. a much more lenient if later critic, finds however ample apology for "Amelia's" weaknesses. " There are says he," several reasons why—superficially speaking—'Amelia ' should be 'judged inferior to its predecessor.' That it succeeded ' Tom Jones & after an interval of a little more than two years and eight months would be an important element in the comparison, if it were known at all deflnitely what period was occupied in writing ' Tom Jones." All that can be affirmed is that Fielding must have been far more at leisure when he composed the earlier work than he could possibly have been when filling the office of a Bow Street magistrate. But in reality, there is a much better explanation of the superiority of ' Tom Jones ' to ' Amelia ' than the merely empirical one of the time it took. 'Tom Jones,' it has been admirably said by a French critic, ' est la condensation et le resume de toute une existence. C'est le resultat et la conclusion de plusieurs annees de passions et de pensees, la formule derriere et complete de la philosophic personnelle que l'on s'est faite sur tout ce que l'on a vu et senti.' Behind 'Tom Jones & there was the author's ebullient youth and manhood; behind 'Amelia 9 but a section of his graver middle age. That, as some have contended, ' Amelia' shows an intellectual falling off cannot for a moment be admitted, least of all upon the ground—as even so staunch an admirer as Mr. Keightley has allowed himself to believe—that certain of its incidents are obviously repeated from ' The Modern Husband' and others of the author's plays. At this rate ' Tom Jones ' might be judged inferior to 'Joseph Andrews,' because the Political Apothecary in the 'Man of the Hill's' story has his prototype in the 'Coffee House Politician,' whose original is Addison's Upholsterer. The plain fact is, that Fielding recognized the ailure of his prays es literature; he regarded them as dead, and freely transplanted what was good of his forgotten work into the work which he hoped would live. In this, it may be, there was something of indolence or haste, but assuredly there was no proof of declining powers. "
Johnson was thoroughly captivated with the book. Notwithstanding that on another occasion he paradoxically asserted that the author was a " a blockhead"—" a barren rascal"—he read it through without stopping, and pronounced Mrs. Booth to be " the most pleasing heroine of all the romances." Richardson, on the other hand, found " the characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty" that he could not get farther than the first volume. With the professional reviewers, a certain " Criticulus" in the Gentleman's Magazine excepted, it seems to have fared but ill; and although these adverse verdicts, if they exist, are now more or less inaccessible, Fielding has apparently summarized most of them in a mock trial of " Amelia" before the " Court of Censorial Enquiry," the proceedings of which are recorded in Nos. 7 and 8 of the Covent Garden Journal. The book is indicted upon the Statute of Dullness, and the heroine is charged with being a "low character," a " Milksop" and a " Fool;" with lack of spirit and fainting too frequently, with dressing her children, cooking, and other " servile Offlces;" with being too forgiving to her husband; and lastly, as may be expected, with the inconsistency already amply referred to, of being "a Beauty without a nose." The other characters are raked over in a similar manner and spirit of satire.
In spite of critics, however, the books started well. The ingenious expedients of Andrew Millar appear to have so far succeeded that a new edition of " Amelia " was called for on the day of publication, and though it fell far short of the success of " Tom Jones " in a literary sense, its publication was profitable to the publisher at least.
It is not recorded that Fielding got more by it than his original £1,000, which, indeed, came at an auspicious moment, for the publication of " Amelia " found his fortunes at their lowest ebb for years, and his body in none of its old condition to protract the heroic struggle that it had waged so manfully with fate. The same old Fielding, to the last, however. It is told of him, even in these days of decadence, how he went to Johnson to borrow money to pay tax arrearages on his house, and coming homeward, met an old college chum and took him in and dined him and emptied his pockets to relieve his distress though the tax gatherer might throw him out of doors. "But I have called twice for the money," said the collector. " Well friendship called for it and had it," answered Fielding, "Call again." And Dr. Hurd, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, wrote in a letter from the Inner Temple at this time:
" I dined with Ralph Allen yesterday, where I met Mr. Fielding—a poor, emaciated, worn-out rake, whose gout and infirmities have got the better even of his buffoonery."
That Fielding had not long before been dangerously ill, and that he was a martyr to gout, is fact; the rest is probably no more than the echo of a foregone conclusion, basen upon report, or dislike to his works. Hurd praised Richardson and proscribed Sterne. He must have been wholly out of sympathy with the author of "Tom Jones." At any rate, it is some satisfaction to reflect that this censorious formalist was called by Johnson a "word-picker," and by franker contemporaries "an old maid in breeches."
Richardson wrote exultantly of " Amelia " to one of his admirers, " Captain Booth, madame, has done his business," predicted dead failure for the book, and foretold that it would be the author's last novel. It was so, but at the dictation of a power very different from the Pharisaical author of "Pamela'' and the carping critics who supported him.
The completion of "Amelia" found its author in a very bad way physically, indeed. His gout had become chronic and aggravated. There were forebodings of dropsy. Time and again his physicians commanded him: - to absolute inactivity and freedom from care. The satire of this prescription is exquisite in its perfection. In order to cure himself, Fielding would have had to starve himself to death. - He did nothing of the kind though. Like a sentinel at his post, he remained in harness in defiance of anguish and flashes and glooms of hopefulness and despair that would have distracted and overturned a feebler mind. " 'Tis not the labor that tires me," he writes to a friend at this period " nor the trouble of thinking. Ideas grow with growth and expand with their execution. If I were a score of years younger, what could I not accomplish ? " Alas ! it was the old story of powers that mature while men decay. A black and bitter life's lesson was bearing splendid fruits at a day too late for the gardener to enjoy them. Fielding still seems to have cherished hopes for another work of fiction after " Amelia." He hints at it obscurely in the few letters he found time to write, and several times alluded to it in casual conversation. But he appears never to have got beyond the germ of the idea, and never to have even skeletonized the plan for its performance. In the profound depths of his deep and daring brain, this last infant of his proud originality died stillborn.
But he wrote all the same. He started the Covent Garden Journal, as a sort of critical and censorious review of the Great Britain in which he was so great a figure. The Covent-Garden Journal was a bi-weekly paper in which Fielding, under the style and title of " Sir Alexander Drawcansir," assumed the office of censor of Great Britain. The first number of this new venture was issued on January the 4th 1752, and th
1752, and the price was threepence. In plan and general appearance it resembled the Jacobite's Journal, consisting mainly of an introductory essay, paragraphs of current news, often accompanied by pointed editorial comment, miscellaneous articles and advertisements. One of the features of the earlier numbers was a burlesque, but not very successful, "Journal of the Present Paper War," which speedily involved the author in actual hostilities with the notorious quack and adventurer, Dr. John Hill, who for some time had been publishing certain impudent lucubration in the London Daily Advertiser under the heading of The Inspector; and also with Smollett, whom he ([fielding) had ridiculed in his - second number, perhaps, on account of a certain little paragraph in the first edition of " Peregrine Pickle." Smollett, always irritable and combative, retorted by a needlessly coarse and venomous pamphlet, in which, under the name of " Habbakkuk Hilding, Justice, Dealer and Chapman," Fielding was attacked with indescribable brutality. Another, and seemingly unprovoked, adversary whom the " Journal of the War " brought upon him was Bonnel Thornton, afterwards joint author with George Colman of " The Connoisseur," who, in a production styled Have at you All; or, the Drury Lane Journal, lampooned Sir Alexander with remarkable rancour and assiduity. Mr. Lawrence has treated these "quarrels of authors " at some length; and they also have some record in the curious collections of the elder Disraeli. As a general rule, [fielding was far less personal and much more scrupulous in his choice of weapons than those who assailed him; but the conflict was an undignified one, and, as Scott has justly said, " neither party would obtain honour by an inquiry into the cause or conduct of its hostilities."
In the enumeration of Fielding's works, says Mr. Dobson very justly, it is somewhat difficult (if due proportion be observed) to assign any real importance to efforts like the Covent Garden Journal. Compared with his novels, they are insignificant enough. But even the worst work of such a man is notable in its way, and Fielding's contributions to the Journal are by no means to be despised. They are shrewd lay sermons, often exhibiting much out-of-the-way erudition, and nearly always distinguished by some of his personal qualities. In No. 33, on " Profanity," there is a character-sketch which, for vigour and vitality, is worthy of his best days; and there is also a very thoughtful paper on Reading," containing a kindly reference to " the ingenious author of 'Clarissa,"' which should have mollified that implacable moralist. In this essay it is curious to notice that, while Fielding speaks with due admiration of Shakespeare and Moliere, Lucian Cervantes, and Swift, he condemns Rabelais and Aristophanes, although in the invocation in "Tom Jones " he had included both these authors among the models he admired. Another paper in the Covent-Garden Journal is especially interesting, because it affords a clue to a project of Fielding's which unfortunately remained a project. This was a translation of the works of Lucian, to be undertaken in conjunction with his old colleague, the Rev. William Young. Proposals were advertised, and the enterprise was duly heralded by a " puff preliminary," in which Fielding, while abstaining from anything directly concerning his own abilities, observes: " I will only venture to say that no man seems so likely to translate an author well, as he who hath formed his stile upon that very author "—a sentence which, taken in connection with the references to Lucian in " Tom Thumb," " The Champion," and elsewhere, must be accepted as distinctly autobiographic. The last number of the Covent-Garden Journal (No. 72) was issued in November, 1752. By this time Sir Alexander seems to have thoroughly wearied of his task. With more gravity than usual he takes leave of letters, begging the public that they will not henceforth father on him the dullness and scurrility of his worthy contemporaries, "since I solemnly declare that, unless in revising my former works, I have at present no intention to hold any further correspondence with the gayer Muses."
He published, too, a resume of a series of law cases that had come under his judicial observation, entitled "Examples of the Interposition of Providence in the Detection and Punishment of Murder," a " Proposal for Making an Effectual Provision for the Poor," and "The Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning." This latter was' in its way, a notable work.
On the 29th of January, 1753, one Elizabeth Canning, a domestic servant, aged eighteen or thereabouts, and who had hitherto borne an excellent character, returned to her mother, having been missing from the house of her master, a carpenter, in Aldermanbury, since the first of the same month. She was half starved and half clad, and alleged that she had been abducted, and confined during her absence in a house on the Hertford road, from which she had just escaped. This house she afterwards identified as that of one Mother Wells, a person of very indifferent reputation. An ill-favoured old gypsy woman named Mary Squires was also declared by her to have been the main agent in ill-using and detaining her. The gypsy, it is true, averred that at the time of the occurrence she was a hundred and twenty miles away; but Canning persisted in her statement. Among other people before whom she came was Fielding, who examined her, as well as a young woman called Virtue Hall, who appeared subsequently as one of Canning's witnesses. Fielding seems to have been strongly impressed by her appearance and her story, and his pamphlet (which was contradicted in every particular by his adversary, John Hill), gives a curious and not very edifying picture of the magisterial procedure of the time. In February, Wells and Squires were fried: Squires was sentenced to death, and Wells to imprisonment and burning in the hand.
Then, by the exertions of the Lord Mayor, Sir Crisp Gascoyne, who doubted the justice of the verdict, Squires was respited and pardoned. Forthwith London was split up into Egyptian and Canningite factions; a hailstorm of pamphlets set in; portraits and caricatures of the principal personages were in all the print shops; and, to use Churchill's words,
" Betty Canning was at least,
With Gascoyne's help, a six months' feast."
In April, 1754, however, Fate so far prevailed against her that she herself, in turn, was tried for perjury. Thirty-six witnesses swore that Squires had been in Dorsetshire; twenty-six that she had been seen in Middlesex. After some hesitation, quite of a piece with the rest of the proceedings, the jury found Canning guilty, and she was transported for seven years. At the end of her sentence she returned to England to receive a legacy of £500, which had been left her by an enthusiastic old lady of Newington-green. Her " case " is full of the most inexplicable contradictions; and it occupies in the " State Trials " some 420 closely-printed pages of the most curious and picturesque eighteenth-century details. But how, from the 1st of January, 1753, to the 29th of the same month, Elizabeth Canning really did manage to spend her time is a secret that, to this day, remains undivulged.
EVEN while he was at work on "The Case of Elizabeth Canning" it was evident that Fielding's life was wearing itself swiftly out. His work had become the severest kind of labour to him. Ideas still lived, but executive capacity was decaying rapidly. Asthma had come to complicate his troubles, and the winter of 1753-54 was a dreadfully hard one. He had gone to Bath for treatment at the end of 1753, but in February, 1754, he returned to town, and put himself under the care of the notorious Dr. Joshua Ward, of Pall Mall, by whom he was treated and tapped for dropsy. Ward appears in Hogarth's " Consultation of Physicians," 1736, and in Pope-" Ward try'd on Puppies, and the Poor, his drop." He was a quack, but must have possessed considerable ability. Bolingbroke wished Pope to consult him in 1744; and he attended George II. There is an account of him in Nichols "'Genuine Works of Hogarth," vol i., p. 89. What Induced Fielding to place himself in such Empirical hands will never be known.
According to his own statement, however, he de- rived some benefit, from Ward's treatment, but by the following winter it was decided that only removal to a warmer climate could save him. Lisbon was decided upon as the place for his sojourn, and a passage in a vessel trading to the port was engaged for the sick man, his wife, daughter, and two servants; and after some delays they started. At this point the actual "Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon," Fielding's last work, begins with a well-remembered entry:
" Wednesday, June 26th, 1754.—On this day, the most melancholy sun I had ever beheld arose, and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the light of this sun, I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and take leave of some of those creatures on whom I doted with a mother-like fondness, guided by nature and passion, and uncured and unhardened by all the doctrine of that philosophical school where I had learnt to bear pains and to despise death.
" In this situation, as I could not conquer nature, I submitted entirely to her, and she made as great a fool of me as she had ever done of any woman whatsoever; under pretence of giving me leave to enjoy, she drew me to suffer the company of my little ones, during eight hours; and I doubt not whether, in that time, I did not undergo more than in all my distemper.
" At twelve precisely my coach was at the door, which was no sooner told me than I kiss'd my children round and went into it with some little resolution. My wife who behaved more like a heroine and philosopher, tho' at the same time the tenderest mother in the world, and my eldest daughter followed me; some friends went with us, and others here took their leave; and I heard my behaviour applauded, with many murmurs and praises to which I well knew I had no title; as all other such philosophers may, if they have any modesty, confess on the like occasions."
Two hours later the party reached Rotherhithe. Here, with the kindly assistance of his and Hogarth's friend, Mr. Saunders Welch, High Constable of Holborn, the sick man, who, at this time, " had no use of his limbs," was carried to a boat, and hoisted in a chair over the ship's side. This latter journey, far more fatiguing to the sufferer than the twelve miles' ride which he had previously undergone, was not rendered more easy to bear by the jests of the watermen and sailors, to whom his ghastly, death-stricken countenance seemed matter for merriment; and he was greatly rejoiced to find himself safely seated in the cabin. The voyage, however, already more than once deferred, was not yet to begin. Wednesday, being King's Proclamation Day, the vessel could not be cleared at the Custom House; and on Thursday the skipper announced that he should not set out until Saturday. As Fielding's complaint was again becoming troublesome, and no surgeon was available on board, he sent for his friend, the famous anatomist, Mr. Hunter, of Covent Garden, by whom he was tapped, to his own relief, and the admiration of the simple sea-captain, who (he writes) was greatly impressed by "the heroic constancy with which I had borne an operation that is attended with scarce any degree of pain." On Sunday the vessel dropped down to Gravesend, where, on the next day, Mr. Welch, who until then had attended them, took his leave; and Fielding, relieved by the trocar of any immediate apprehensions of discomfort, might, in spite of his forlorn case, have been fairly at ease. He had a new concern, however, in the state of Mrs. Fielding, who was in agony with toothache, which successive operators failed to relieve; and there is an unconsciously touching little picture of the sick man and his skipper, who was deaf, sitting silently over "a small bowl of punch" in the narrow cabin, for fear of waking the pain-worn sleeper in the adjoining stateroom." Of his second wife, as may be gathered from the opening words of the Journal, Fielding always speaks with the warmest affection and gratitude.
Finally they weighed anchor and managed to reach the Nore. For more than a week they were wind-bound in the Downs; but on the 11th they anchored off Ryde, from which place, on the next morn-in", Fielding despatched the following letter to his brother. Besides giving the name of the captain and the ship, which are carefully suppressed in "The Journal," it is especially interesting as being the last letter written by Fielding of which we have any knowledge:
"On board the Queen of Portugal, Richd Veal at anchor on the Mother Bank, off Ryde, to the Care of the Post Master of Portsmouth—this is my Date and yr Direction. July 12, 1754.
" Dear Jack, After receiving that agreeable line from Messrs Fielding and Co., we weighed on Monday morning and sailed from Deal to the Westward Four Days long but inconceivably pleasant Passage brought us yesterday to an Anchor on the Mother Bank, on the Back of the Isle of Wight, where we had last Night in Safety the Pleasure of hearing the Winds roar over our Heads in as violent a Tempest as I have known, and where my only Consideration were the [Pears which must possess any Friend of ours, (if there is happily any such) who really makes our Well-being the Object of his Concern especially if such Friend should be totally inexperienced in Sea Affairs. I therefore beg that on the Day you receive this Mrs Daniel* may know that we are just risen from Breakfast in Health and Spirits this twelfth Instant at 9 in the morning. Our Voyage hath proved fruitful in Adventures all which being to be written in the Book, you must postpone yr Curiosity. As the Incidents which fall under
'It will be remembered that the maiden-name of Fielding's second wife, as given in the Register of St. Benet's, was Mary Daniel. '' Mrs. Daniel " was therefore, in all probability, Fielding's mother in-law; and it may reasonably be assumed that she had remained in charge of the little family, at Fordhook, yr. Cognizance will possibly be consigned to Oblivion, do give them to us as they pass. Tell yr Neighbour I am much obliged to him for recommending me to the Care of a most able and experienced Seaman, to whom other Captains seem to pay such Deference that they attend and watch his Motions, and think themselves only safe when they act under his Direction and Example. Our ship in Truth seems to give Laws on the Water with as much Authority and Superiority as you Dispense Laws to the Public and Examples to yr' Brethren in Commission. Please to direct yr Answer to me on Board as in the Date, if gone to be returned, and then send it by the Post and Pacquet to Lisbon to " Yr affect Brother.
" H. FIELDING " To John Fielding Esq. at his House in Bow Street, Covt. Garden London."
Fielding lived to reach Lisbon and die there, on October 8, 1754, in his forty-eighth year. He was buried in the English cemetery there, and some sort of a tomb was set up to him. His first tomb, which Wraxall found, in 1772, "nearly concealed by weeds and nettles," was erected by the English factory, in consequence mainly — as it seems—of a proposal made by an enthusiastic Chevalier de Meyrionnet, to provide one (with an epitaph) at his own expense. That now existing was substituted in 1830 by the exertions of the Rev. Christopher Neville, British Chaplain at Lisbon. It is a heavy sarcophagus, resting upon a large base, and surmounted by just such another urn and flame as that on Hogarth's Tomb at Chiswick. On the front is a long Latin inscription; on the back the better-known words:
" LUGET BRITANNIA GREMIO NON DARI FOVERE NATUM"
Attention Britons - honour the dust interred here. Remember your birthright.
It is to this last memorial that George Borrow referred in his "Bible in Spain"
" Let travellers devote one entire morning to inspecting the Arcos and the Mai das agoas, after which they xliv may repair to the English church and cemetery, Père-la-, chaise in miniature, where, if they be of England, they may well be excused if they kiss the cold tomb, as I did, of the author of 'Amelia,' the most singular genius which their island ever produced, whose works it has long been the fashion to abuse in public and to read in secret."
Borrow's book was first published in 1843. Of late years the tomb had been somewhat neglected; but from a communication in The Athenæum of May, 1879, it appears that it had then been recently cleaned, and the inscriptions restored by order of the present chaplain, the Rev. Godfrey Pope.
Fielding left two posthumous works, "The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon" and a comedy, "The Fathers, or The Good Natured Man." The journal was published in 1755. It proved a commercial failure. The play was acted first in 1778, by Garrick, at Drury Lane. It proved a failure too.
The literary life of Henry Fielding went out with little honour, as honour goes before the gilded world. But the splendours of his prime are for him a certain guarantee of immortality. And always and ever, while honest men of letters tug at the oar in the ink sea, his name will be to them an inspiration and his life an honour to their craft and an invitation to the sacrifices that advance civilisation, however little profit they garner from the world, they benefit and ennoble at such terrible personal cost.
New York, August, 1889.
ALFRED TRUMBLE.
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