Yet another characteristic of Fielding's personality appears in the conscious control exercised over all the humorous and satiric zest of Joseph Andrews. Here is no unseemly riot of ridicule. The ridiculous he declares in his philosophic preface is the subject-matter of his pages; but he will suffer no imputation of ridiculing vice or calamity. "Surely," he cries, "he hath a very ill-framed Mind, who can look on Ugliness, Infirmity, or Poverty, as ridiculous in themselves"; and he formally declares that such vices as appear in this work "are never set forth as the objects of Ridicule but Detestation." What then were the limits which Fielding imposed on himself in treating this, his declared subject matter of the ridiculous? Hypocrisy and vanity, he says, appearing in the form of affectation; "Great Vices are the proper Object of our Detestation, smaller Faults of our Pity: but Affectation appears to me the only true Source of the Ridiculous." Such is Fielding's sensitive claim for the decent limits of ridicule; and such the consciously avowed subject of his work. But the force of his genius, the depth of his insight, the warmth of his detestations and affections, soon carried him far beyond any mere study in the ridicule of vain and hypocritical affectation. The immortal figure of Parson Adams, striding through these pages, tells us infinitely much of the character of his creator, but nothing at all of the nature of affectation. The "rural innocence of a Joseph Andrews," to quote Miss Fielding's happy phrase 1 and of his charming Fanny, are as natural and fresh as Fielding's own Dorsetshire meadows, but instruct us not at all in vanity or hypocrisy.
To turn to the individual figures of Joseph Andrews; what do they tell us of the man who called them into being. First and foremost, it is Parson Adams who unquestionably dominates the book. However much the licentious grossness of Lady Booby, the shameless self-seeking of her waiting-woman, Mrs Slipslop, the swinish avarice of Parson Trulliber, the calculating cruelty of Mrs Tow-wouse, to name but some of the vices here exposed, blazon forth that 'enthusiasm for righteousness' which constantly moved Fielding to exhibit the devilish in human nature in all its 'native Deformity,' it is still Adams who remains the central figure of the great comic epic. Concerning the good parson, appreciation has stumbled for adequate words, from the tribute of Sir Walter Scott to that of Mr Austin Dobson. "The worthy parson's learning," wrote Sir Walter, "his simplicity, his evangelical purity of heart, and benevolence of disposition, are so admirably mingled with pedantry, absence of mind, and with the habit of athletic and gymnastic exercise, ... that he may be safely termed one of the richest productions of the Muse of Fiction." And to Mr Austin Dobson, this poor curate, compact as he is of the oddest contradictions, the most diverting eccentricities, is "assuredly a noble example of primitive goodness, and practical Christianity." We love Adams, as Fielding intended that we should, for his single-hearted goodness, his impulsiveness, his boundless generosity, his muscular courage; we are never allowed to forget the dignity of his office however ragged be the cassock that displays it; we admire his learning; we delight in his oddities. But above all he reflects honour on his creator by the inflexible integrity of his goodness. A hundred tricks are played on him by shallow knaves, and the result is but to convince us of the folly of knavery. His ill-clad and uncouth figure moves among the vicious and prosperous, and we perceive the ugliness of vice, and the poverty of wealth. With his nightcap drawn over his wig, a short grey coat half covering a torn cassock, the crabstick so formidable to ruffians in his hand, and his beloved AEschylus in his pocket, Adams smoking his pipe by the inn fire, or surrounded by his "children" as he called his parishioners vying "with each other in demonstrations of duty and love," fully justifies John Forster's comment on Fielding's manly habit of "discerning what was good and beautiful in the homeliest aspects of humanity." Before the true dignity of Abraham Adams, whether he be publicly rebuking the Squire and Pamela for laughing in church, or emerging unstained from adventures with hogs-wash and worse, the accident of his social position as a poor curate, contentedly drinking ale in the squire's kitchen, falls into its true insignificance.
Assignment for 'Joseph Andrews'
Rumour assigned to Fielding's friend and neighbour at East Stour, the Rev. William Young, the honour of being the original of Parson Adams; and it is a pleasant coincidence that the legal assignment for Joseph Andrews, here reproduced in facsimile, should bear the signature, as witness, of the very man whose "innate goodness" is there immortalised. If there be any detractors of Fielding's personal character still to be found, they may be advised to remember the truism that a man is known by his friends, and to apply themselves to a study of William Young in the figure of Parson Adams.
Of the charming picture of rustic beauty and innocence presented in the blushing and warmhearted Fanny less need be said; for Fielding's ideal in womanhood was soon to be more fully revealed in the lovely creations of Sophia and Amelia. And honest Joseph himself, his courage and fidelity, his constancy, his tenderness and chivalrous passion for Fanny, his affection for Mr Adams, his voice "too musical to halloo to the dogs," his fine figure and handsome face, concerns us here chiefly as demonstrating that Fielding, when he chose, could display both virtue and manliness as united in the person of a perfectly robust English country lad.
These then, are some of the figures that Fielding loved to create, breathing into their simple virtues a vigorous human life, fresh as Coleridge said, as the life of a Spring morning. In these joyous creations of his heart and of his genius, the great novelist assuredly gives us a perfectly unconscious revelation of his own character. And among the changing scenes of this human comedy one incident must not be forgotten. In the famous episode of the stage coach, all Fielding's characteristic and relentless hatred of respectable hypocrisy, all his love of innate if ragged virtue is betrayed in the compass of a few pages: in those pages in which we see the robbed, half-murdered, and wholly naked Joseph lifted in from the wayside ditch amid the protests and merriment of the respectable passengers; and his shivering body at last wrapped in the coat of the postilion,--"a Lad who hath since been transported for robbing a Hen-roost,"--who voluntarily stripped off a greatcoat, his only garment, "at the same time swearing a great Oath (for which he was rebuked by the Passengers) 'that he would rather ride in his Shirt all his Life, than suffer a Fellow-Creature to lie in so miserable a Condition.'"
Much has been written concerning the notorious feud between Fielding and Richardson, a feud ostensibly based upon the fact that Joseph Andrews was, to some extent, frankly a parody of Richardson's famous production Pamela. In 1740, two years before the appearance of Joseph Andrews that middle-aged London printer had published Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, achieving thereby an enormous vogue. That amazing mixture of sententious moralities, of prurience, and of mawkish sentiment, became the rage of the Town. Admirers ranked it next to the Bible; the great Mr Pope declared that it would "do more good than many volumes of Sermons"; and it was even translated into French and Italian, becoming, according to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who did not love Richardson, "the joy of the chambermaids of all nations." That all this should have been highly agreeable to the good Richardson, a 'vegetarian and water-drinker, a worthy, domesticated, fussy, and highly nervous little man,' ensconced in a ring of feminine flatterers whom he called 'my ladies,' is obvious; and proportionate was his wrath with Fielding's Joseph Andrews, of which the early chapters, at least, are a perfectly frank, and to Richardson audacious, satire on Pamela. The caricature was indeed frank. Joseph is introduced as Pamela's brother; he writes letters to that virtuous maid-servant; and the Mr B. of Richardson becomes the Squire Booby of Fielding. But there can be hardly two opinions as to such ridicule being an entirely justified and wholesome antidote to the pompous and nauseous original. To Fielding's robust and masculine genius, says Mr Austin Dobson, "the strange conjunction of purity and precaution in Richardson's heroine was a thing unnatural and a theme for inextinguishable Homeric laughter." To Thackeray's sympathetic imagination the feud was the inevitable outcome of the difference between the two men. Fielding, he says "couldn't do otherwise than laugh at the puny cockney bookseller, pouring out endless volumes of sentimental twaddle, and hold him up to scorn as a moll-coddle and a milksop. His genius had been nursed on sack posset, and not on dishes of tea. His muse had sung the loudest in tavern choruses, and had seen the daylight streaming in over thousands of empty bowls, and reeled home to chambers on the shoulders of the watchman. Richardson's goddess was attended by old maids and dowagers, and fed on muffins and bohea. 'Milksop!' roars Harry Fielding, clattering at the timid shop-shutters. 'Wretch! Monster! Mohock!' shrieks the sentimental author of Pamela; and all the ladies of his court cackle out an affrighted chorus."
Looking back on the incident it seems matter for yet more Homeric laughter that Richardson should have called the resplendent genius of Fielding "low." But the feud, it may be surmised, led to much of the odium that seems to have attached to Fielding's name amongst some of his contemporaries. Feeling ran high and was vividly expressed in those days; and when cousinly admiration for Fielding was coupled by an excellent comment on Richardson's book as the delight of the maidservants of all nations, personal retorts in favour of the popular sentimentalist were but too likely to ensue. Apart from this aspect of the matter the ancient quarrel does not seem a very essential incident in Fielding's life.
The lack of means indicated by Fielding himself, in his reminiscence of this winter of 1741-2 as darkened by the illness of himself, his wife and of a favourite child, attended "with other Circumstances, which served as very proper Decorations to such a Scene," received but little alleviation from the publication of Joseph Andrews. The price paid for the book by Andrew Millar was but £183, 11s.; and there is no record that Millar supplemented the original sum, as he did in the case of Tom Jones, when the sale was assured. The first edition appears to have consisted of 1,500 copies. A second edition, of 2,000 copies was issued in the same summer, 2 and a third edition followed in 1743.
Fielding's formal declaration that he described "not men but manners"; his solemn protest, in the preface to this very book, that "I have no Intention to vilify or asperse anyone: for tho' everything is copied from the Book of Nature, and scarce a Character or Action produced which I have not taken from my own Observations and Experience, yet I have used the utmost Care to obscure the Persons by such different Circumstances, Degrees, and Colours, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any degree of Certainty"--represent rather his intention than the result. The portraits of "manners" by the "prose Homer of human nature" were too lifelike to escape frequent identification. Thus not only was the prototype of Parson Adams discovered, but that of his antithesis, the pig-breeding Mr Trulliber, was thought to exist in the person of the Rev. Mr Oliver, the Dorsetshire curate under whose tutelage Fielding had been placed when a boy. Tradition also connects Mr Peter Pounce with the Dorsetshire usurer Peter Walter. 3
Two echoes have come down to us of the early appreciation of this novel. A translation of Joseph Andrews, "par une Dame Angloise," and bound for Marie Antoinette by Derome le Jeune, was placed on the shelves of her library in the Petit Trianon. 4 And, seven years after the appearance of Joseph Andrews, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, when sixty years old, writes from her Italian exile: "I have at length received the box with the books enclosed, for which I give you many thanks as they amuse me very much. I gave a very ridiculous proof of it, fitter indeed for my granddaughter than myself. I returned from a party on horseback; and after having rode 20 miles, part of it by moonshine, it was ten at night when I found the box arrived. I could not deny myself the pleasure of opening it; and falling upon Fielding's works was fool enough to sit up all night reading. I think Joseph Andrews better than his Foundling." 5
"Is there on earth a greater object of contempt
than the poor scholar to a splendid beau; unless perhaps the
splendid beau to the poor scholar."
Covent Garden Journal, No. 61.
If the 'sunrise' of Fielding's genius did indeed shine forth on the publication of Joseph Andrews, it was a sunrise attended by dark clouds. For, with the appearance of these two little volumes, we enter on the most obscure period of the great novelist's life, and on that in which he appears to have suffered the severest 'invasions of Fortune.'
As regards the winter immediately preceding the appearance of that joyous epic of the highway, he himself has told us that he was 'laid up in the gout, with a favourite Child dying in one Bed, and my Wife in a Condition very little better, on another, attended with other Circumstances, which served as very proper Decorations to such a Scene.' In the following February, an entry in the registers of St Martin's in the Fields records the burial of a child "Charlott Fielding." So it is probable that the very month of the appearance of his first novel brought a private grief to Fielding the poignancy of which may be measured by his frequent betrayals of an anxious affection for his children.
To such distresses of sickness and anxiety, there was now, doubtless, added the further misery of scanty means. For a few months later an advertisement (hitherto overlooked) appears in the Daily Post, showing that Fielding was already eagerly pushing forward the publication of the Miscellanies, that incoherent collection which is itself proof enough that necessity alone had called it into being. "The publication of these Volumes," he says, "hath been hitherto retarded by the Author's indisposition last Winter, and a train of melancholy Accidents, scarce to be parallel'd; but he takes this opportunity to assure his Subscribers that he will most certainly deliver them within the time mentioned in his last receipts, viz. by the 25th December next." 1
We may take it, then, that the first six months of 1742 were attended by no easy circumstances; and, accordingly, during these months Fielding's hard-worked pen produced no less than three very different attempts to win subsistence from those humoursome jades the nine Muses. To take these efforts in order of date, first comes, in March, his sole invocation of the historic Muse, the Full Vindication of the Dutchess Dowager of Marlborough, published almost before Joseph Andrews was clear of the printers, and sold at the modest price of one shilling. We learn from the title page that the Vindication was called forth by a "late scurrilous Pamphlet," containing "base and malicious Invectives" against Her Grace. Together with Fielding's natural love for fighting, a family tie may have given him a further incitement to draw his pen on behalf of the aged Duchess. For his first cousin, Mary Gould, the only child of his uncle James Gould, M.P. for Dorchester, had married General Charles Churchill, brother to the great Duke. Whether this cousinship by marriage led to any personal acquaintance between 'old Sarah' and Harry Fielding we do not know; and the muniment room at Blenheim affords no trace of any correspondence between the Duchess and her champion. But certainly the Vindication lacks nothing of personal warmth. Fielding tells us that he has never contemplated the character of that 'Glorious Woman' but with admiration; and he defends her against the attacks of her opponents through forty strenuous pages, in which the curious may still hear the echoes of the controversies that raged round the Duke and his Duchess, their mistress Queen Anne, and other actors of the Revolution. The Vindication appeared in March; and a second edition was called for during the year. As far as Millar's payment goes Fielding, as appears from the assignment in Joseph Andrews, received only £5; and it is to be feared that the Duchess (who is said to have paid the historian Hooke £5000 for his assistance in the production of her own celebrated pamphlet) placed but little substantial acknowledgment in Fielding's lean purse. Her champion at any rate had, within three years, modified the views expressed in this Vindication, concerning the munificence of Her Grace's private generosity; for in his journal the True Patriot, there occurs the following obituary notice, "A Man supposed to be a Pensioner of the late Duchess of Marlborough.... He is supposed to have been Poor."
This same month of March marked Fielding's final severance with the Champion. The partners of that paper, meeting on March the 1st, ordered "that Whereas Henry Fielding Esq., did Originally possess Two Sixteenth Shares of the Champion as a Writer in the said paper and having withdrawn himself from that Service for above Twelve Months past and refused his Assistance in that Capacity since which time Mr Ralph has solely Transacted the said Business. It is hereby Declared that the said Writing Shares shall devolve on and be vested in Mr James Ralph." 2 It is curious that Fielding did not add to his impoverished exchequer by selling his Champion shares.
Having sought assistance from the Muse of history in March, Fielding returns to his old charmer the dramatic Muse in May; assisting in that month to produce a farce, at Drury Lane, entitled Miss Lucy in Town. In this piece, he tells us, he had a very small share. He also received for it a very small remuneration; £10, 10s. being recorded as the price paid by Andrew Millar.
In the following month Fielding's inexhaustible energies were off on a new tack, producing, in startling contrast to Miss Lucy, a classical work, executed in collaboration with his friend the Rev. William Young, otherwise Parson Adams. The two friends contemplated a series of translations of all the eleven comedies of Aristophanes; adorned by notes containing "besides a full Explanation of the Author, a compleat History of the Manners and Customs of the Ancient Greeks particularly of the Athenians"; and in June they inaugurated their scheme with the work in question, a translation of the Plutus. 3 William Young, says Hutchins, "had much learning which was the cement of Mr Fielding's connexion with him"; and Fielding's own scholarship, irradiated by his wit, would assuredly have made him an ideal translator of Greek comedy. But the public of 1742 appears to have afforded very little encouragement to this scheme, preferring that "pretty, dapper, brisk, smart, pert, Dialogue" of their own comedies, to which allusion is made in the authors' preface.
The rest of the year shows nothing from a pen somewhat exhausted perhaps with the production of Joseph Andrews of the historical Vindication, and of parts of a Drury Lane farce and of the Plutus, all within five months. And the winter following, in which the promised Miscellanies should have appeared, brought, in the renewed illness of his wife, an anxiety that paralysed even Fielding's buoyant vigour. This we learn from his own touching apology for the further delay of those volumes; a delay due, their author tells us, to "the dangerous Illness of one from whom I draw all the solid Comfort of my Life, during the greatest Part of this Winter. This, as it is most sacredly true, so will it, I doubt not, sufficiently excuse the Delay to all who know me." 4 Early in the following year, after this second winter of crushing anxiety, and under an urgent pressure for means, Fielding tried again his familiar rôle of popular dramatist, giving his public the husks they preferred, in the comedy of the Wedding Day. This comedy was produced at Drury Lane on the 17th of February 1743.
If Fielding had failed to descend to the taste of the Town in offering them Aristophanes, he flung them in the Wedding Day something too imperfect for acceptance, even by the 'critic jury of the pit,' And the bitter humour in which he was now shackling his genius to the honourable task of immediate bread-winning, or in his own words to the part of "hackney writer," comes out clearly enough in the well-known anecdote of the first night of this comedy. In Murphy's words, Garrick, then a new player, just taking the Town by storm, "told Mr Fielding he was apprehensive that the audience would make free in a particular passage; adding that a repulse might so flurry his spirits as to disconcert him for the rest of the night, and therefore begged that it might be omitted. 'No, d--mn 'em,' replied the bard, 'if the scene is not a good one, let them find that out.' Accordingly the play was brought on without alteration, and, just as had been foreseen, the disapprobation of the house was provoked at the passage before objected to; and the performer alarmed and uneasy at the hisses he had met with, retired into the green-room, where the author was indulging his genius, and solacing himself with a bottle of champaign." Fielding, continues Murphy, had by this time drank pretty plentifully, and "'What's the matter, Garrick?' says he, 'what are they hissing now?' Why the scene that I begged you to retrench; I knew it would not do; and they have so frightened me that I shall not be able to collect myself again the whole night. Oh! d--mn 'em, replies the author, they HAVE found it out, have they!" That Fielding should be scornfully indifferent to the judgment of the pit on work forced from him by overwhelming necessities, and which his own judgment condemned, is a foregone conclusion; but that he suffered keenly in having to produce imperfect work, and was jealously anxious to clear his reputation, as a writer, in the matter of this particular comedy, is no less apparent from the very unusual personal explanation he offered for it, soon after the brief run of the play was over. For no man was more shy of autobiographical revelations. His biographers are continually reduced to gleaning stray hints, here and there, concerning his private life. 5 And therefore we can measure by this emergence from a habitual personal reticence the soreness with which he now published work unworthy of his genius. "Mr Garrick," Fielding tells us, speaking of this distressed winter of 1742-3 "... asked me one Evening, if I had any play by me; telling me he was desirous of appearing in a new Part [and] ... as I was full as desirous of putting Words into his Mouth, as he could appear to be of speaking them, I mentioned [a] Play the very next morning to Mr Fleetwood who embraced my Proposal so heartily, that an Appointment was immediately made to read it to the Actors who were principally to be concerned in it." On consideration, however, this play appeared to Fielding to need more time for perfecting, and also to afford very little opportunity to Garrick. So, recollecting that he still had by him a play which, although 'the third Dramatic Performance' he ever attempted, contained a character that would keep the audience's "so justly favourite Actor almost eternally before their Eyes," he decided, with characteristic impetuosity, to a change at the last moment. "I accordingly," he writes, "sat down with a Resolution to work Night and Day, owing to the short Time allowed me, which was about a Week, in altering and correcting this Production of my more Juvenile Years; when unfortunately the extreme Danger of Life into which a Person, very dear to me, was reduced, rendered me incapable of executing my Task. To this Accident alone I have the vanity to apprehend, the Play owes most of the glaring Faults with which it appeared.... Perhaps, it may be asked me why then did I suffer a Piece which I myself knew was imperfect, to appear? I answer honestly and freely, that Reputation was not my Inducement; and that I hoped, faulty as it was, it might answer a much more solid, and in my unhappy situation, a much more urgent Motive." This hope was, alas, frustrated; not even the brilliancy of a cast which included Garrick, Mrs Pritchard, Macklin, and Peg Woffington, could carry the Wedding Day over its sixth night; and the harassed author received 'not £50 from the House for it.' The comedy is a coarsely moral attack on libertinism, a fact which probably, in no wise added to the popularity of the play in the pit and boxes of 1743.
A doggerel prologue, both written and spoken by Macklin, gives an excellent picture of the playhouse humours, and of the wild pit, of those exuberant days; and contains moreover the following sound advice, addressed to Fielding
"Ah! thou foolish follower of the ragged Nine
You'd better stuck to honest Abram Adams, by half;
He, in spite of critics can make your Readers laugh."
The next publication of these lean years was the Miscellanies, a collection of mingled prose, verse, and drama, of which the only connecting link seems to be the urgent need of money which forced so heterogenous a medley from so great an artist. These long delayed volumes appeared, probably, in April, and were, says Fielding, composed with a frequent "Degree of Heartache." They include the lover's verses of his early youth; philosophical, satiric, and didactic essays; a reprint of the political effusion dedicated to Dodington; a few plays; the fragment entitled A Journey from this World to the Next; and the splendid ironic outburst on villany, Jonathan Wild.
The Preface, largely occupied as it is with those private circumstances which forced the hasty production of the Wedding Day, has other matter of even greater interest for the biographer. Thus Fielding's sensitive care of his reputation in essential matters appears in the fiery denial here given to allegations of publishing anonymous scandals: "I never was, nor will be the Author of anonymous Scandal on the private History or Family of any Person whatever. Indeed there is no Man who speaks or thinks with more detestation of the modern custom of Libelling. I look on the practice of stabbing a Man's Character in the Dark, to be as base and as barbarous as that of stabbing him with a Poignard in the same manner; nor have I ever been once in my Life guilty of it." Here too, he marks his abhorrence of that 'detestable Vice' hypocrisy, which vice he was, before long, to expose utterly in the person of Blifil in Tom Jones. His happy social temperament is betrayed in the characteristic definition of good breeding as consisting in "contributing with our utmost Power to the Satisfaction and Happiness of all about us." And in these pages we have Fielding's philosophy of goodness and greatness, delivered in words that already display an unrivalled perfection of style. Speaking of his third volume, that poignant indictment of devilry the Life of Mr Jonathan Wild the Great, it is thus that Fielding exposes the iniquity of villains in "great" places:--"But without considering Newgate as no other than Human Nature with its mask off, which some very shameless Writers have done, a Thought which no Price should purchase me to entertain, I think we may be excused for suspecting, that the splendid Palaces of the Great, are often no other than Newgate with the Mask on. Nor do I know anything which can raise an honest Man's Indignation higher than that the same Morals should be in one Place attended with all imaginable Misery and Infamy and in the other with the highest Luxory and Honour. Let any impartial Man in his Senses be asked, for which of these two Places a Composition of Cruelty, Lust, Avarice, Rapine, Insolence, Hypocrisy, Fraud and Treachery, was best fitted, surely his Answer must be certain and immediate; and yet I am afraid all these Ingredients glossed over with Wealth and a Title, have been treated with the highest Respect and Veneration in the one, while one or two of them have been condemned to the Gallows in the other."
Here is the converse of that insight which could discern goodness under a ragged cassock, or in a swearing postilion. And, having discerned the true nature of such Great Men, Fielding proceeds to point out that "However the Glare of Riches and Awe of Title may terrify the Vulgar; nay however Hypocrisy may deceive the more Discerning, there is still a Judge in every Man's Breast, which none can cheat or corrupt, tho' perhaps it is the only uncorrupt thing about him"; that nothing is so preposterous as that men should laboriously seek to be villains; and that this Judge, inflexible and honest "however polluted the Bench on which he sits," always bestows on the spurious Great the penalty of fear, an evil which "never can in any manner molest the Happiness" of the "Enjoyments of Innocence and Virtue."
The subsequent philosophic dissertation on the qualities of goodness and greatness is interesting for such passages as the definition of a good man as one possessing "Benevolence, Honour, Honesty, and Charity"; and the fine declaration that of the passion of Love "goodness hath always appeared to me the only true and proper Object." And the very springs of action underlying half at least of each of the three great novels, and almost every page of Jonathan Wild, are revealed in the final declaration of the writer's intention to expose in these pages vice stripped of its false colours; to show it "in its native Deformity." As the native and stripped deformity of vice is perhaps not often fully apprehended and certainly is very seldom exposed in our own age, Fielding, by the very sincerity and fire of his morality, doubtless loses many a modern reader.
It is in the third volume of the Miscellanies, a volume completely occupied by Jonathan Wild, that Fielding first fully reveals himself as public moralist. And in this Rogue's progress to the gallows he displays so concentrated a zeal, that nothing short of his genius and his humour could have saved these pages from the dullness of the professional reformer. For the little volume consists of a relentless exposure of the deformity and folly of vice. Here the foul souls of Wild and his associates, stripped of all the glamour of picturesque crime, stand displayed in their essential qualities, with the result that even the pestilential air of thieves' slums, of 'night cellars,' and of Newgate purlieus, an air which hangs so heavy over every page, falls back into insignificance before the loathsomeness of the central figure. A few years later, in the preface to Tom Jones, Fielding formally asserted his belief that the beauty of goodness needed but to be seen 'to attract the admiration of mankind'; in Jonathan Wild he appears to be already at work on the converse doctrine, that if the deformity of vice be but stripped naked, abhorrence must ensue. Such a naked criminal is Wild; and in the contemplation of his vices, as in the case of the arch hypocrite Blifil, in Tom Jones, and of the shameless sensualist "My Lord," in Amelia, Fielding's characteristic compassion for the faults of hard pressed humanity is, for the time, scorched up in the fierceness of his anger and scorn at deliberate cruelty, avarice and lust. Under the spell of Fielding's power of painting the devil in his native blackness, we feel that for such as Wild hanging is too handsome a fate. It is easy for his Newgate chaplain to assert that "nothing is so sinful as sin"; it takes a great genius and a great moralist to convince us, as in this picture, that nothing is so deformed or so contemptible. The dark places of Jonathan Wild receive some light in the character of the good jeweller, in the tender scenes between that honest ruined tradesman and his wife and children, and in the devoted affection of his apprentice. But the true illumination of the book, and its personal value for the biographer, lie in the white heat of anger, the "sustained and sleepless irony" to adopt Mr Austin Dobson's happy phrase, with which Fielding, with a force unwavering from the first page to the last, here assails his subject. An underlying attack on the Ministerial iniquity of "Great Men" in high places seems to be often suggested; if this be a true inference, it does but give us further proof of Fielding's energies as a political, no less than as a moral, reformer. Certainly, through all the squalid scenes of the book, the contention is insisted on that criminals of Wild's tyrannical stamp may as easily be found in courts, and at the head of armies, as among the poor leaders of Newgate gangs. To the wise moralist it is the same rogue, whether picking a pocket or swindling his country.
And not to forget the wit in the moral reformer, we may leave Mr Jonathan Wild listening to one of the reasons given by the Newgate chaplain for his Reverence's preference for punch over wine: "Let me tell you, Mr Wild there is nothing so deceitful as the spirits given us by wine. If you must drink let us have a bowl of punch; a liquor I the rather prefer as it is nowhere spoken against in Scripture."
After Jonathan Wild the most interesting fragment of the Miscellanies is the Journey from this World to the Next. In this essay Fielding reveals his philosophy, his sternness, his affections, and his humour, as a man might do in intimate conversation. His warm humanity breathes in the conception that "the only Business" of those who had won admission to Elysium 'that happy Place,' was to "contribute to the Happiness of each other"; and again in the stern declaration of Heaven's doorkeeper, the Judge Minos, that "no Man enters that Gate without Charity." And indeed the whole chapter devoted to the judgments administered by Minos on the spirits that come, confident or trembling, before him, and are either admitted to Heaven, sent back to earth, or despatched to the "little Back Gate" opening immediately into the bottomless pit, is full of personal revelation. We feel the glee with which Fielding consigns the "little sneaking soul" of a miser to diabolically ingenious torments; the satisfaction with which he watches Minos apply a kick to the retreating figure of a duke, possessed of nothing but "a very solemn Air and great Dignity"; and the pleasure it gave him to observe the rejection accorded to "a grave Lady," the Judge declaring that "there was not a single Prude in Elysium." Again, nothing could be more true to Fielding's nature than the account of the poet who is admitted, not for the moral value he himself places on his Dramatic Works (which he endeavours to read aloud to Minos), but because "he had once lent the whole profits of a Benefit Night to a Friend, and by that Means had saved him and his Family from Destruction"; unless it were the account of the poverty driven wretch, hanged for a robbery of eighteen-pence, who yet could plead that he had supported an aged Parent with his labour, that he had been a very tender Husband, and a Kind Father, and that he had ruined himself for being Bail for a Friend. "At these words," adds the historian, "the gate opened, and Minos bid him enter, giving him a slap on the Back as he passed by him."
When the author's own turn came, he very little expects, he tells us, "to pass this fiery Trial. I confess'd I had indulged myself very freely with Wine and Women in my Youth, but had never done an Injury to any Man living, nor avoided an opportunity of doing good; but I pretended to very little Virtue more than general Philanthropy and Private Friendship." Here Minos cut the speaker short, bidding him enter the gate, and not indulge himself trumpeting forth his virtues. Whether or no we may here read the reflections of Fielding's maturity, looking honestly back over his own forty years and forward with humble fear into the future, we may certainly see reflected in both confession and judgment much of the doctrine and the practice of his life.
After the failure, early in 1743, of the Wedding Day, and the subsequent publication of the Miscellanies, Fielding seems to have thrown his energies for twelve months into an exclusive pursuit of the law. This appears from his statement, made a year later, in May 1744, that he could not possibly be the author of his sister's novel David Simple, which had been attributed to him, because he had applied himself to his profession "with so arduous and intent a diligence that I have had no leisure, if I had inclination, to compose anything of this kind." Clearly, in the period that covers the publication of Joseph Andrews an historical pamphlet, parts of a farce and of Plutus, and of the Miscellanies, Fielding found both leisure and inclination for writing; so this sudden immersion in law must relate to the twelve months or so intervening between these works and the publication of his statement. Murphy corroborates this bout of hard legal effort. After the Wedding Day says that biographer "the law from this time had its hot and cold fits with him." The cold fits were fits of gout; and inconveniences felt by Fielding from these interruptions were, adds Murphy "the more severe upon him, as voluntary and wilful neglect could not be charged upon him. The repeated shocks of illness disabled him from being as assiduous an attendant at the bar, as his own inclination and patience of the most laborious application, would otherwise have made him."
Mr Counsellor Fielding follows his retrospect of this strenuous attack on the law with a declaration that, henceforth, he intends to forsake the pursuit of that 'foolscap' literary fame, and the company of the 'infamous' nine Muses; a decision based partly on the insubstantial nature of the rewards achieved, and partly it would seem due to the fact that at Fielding's innocent door had been laid, he declares, half the anonymous scurrility, indecency, treason, and blasphemy that the few last years had produced. 6 In especial he protests against the ascription to his pen of that 'infamous paltry libel' on lawyers, the Causidicade, an ascription which, as he truly says, accused him "not only of being a bad writer and a bad man, but with downright idiotism in flying in the face of the greatest men of my profession." He also declares that no anonymous work had issued from his pen since his promise to that effect; and that these false accusations had injured him cruelly in ease, reputation and interest. This solemn declaration that the now detested Muses shall no longer beguile Fielding's pen affords excellent reading in view of the fact that this absorbed barrister must, within a year or two, have been at work on Tom Jones. The whole emphatic outburst was probably partly an effort to assert himself as now wholly devoted to the law, and partly an example of one of those "occasional fits of peevishness" into which, Murphy tells us, distress and disappointment would betray him.
The preface to his sister's novel David Simple, in which Fielding took occasion to announce these protests and assertions, is his only extant publication for this year of 1744; and apart from its biographical value is not of any great moment. Ample proof may be found in it of brotherly pride and admiration for the work of a sister "so nearly and dearly allied to me in the highest friendship as well as relation." There is the noteworthy declaration that the "greatest, noblest, and rarest of all the talents which constitute a genius" is the gift of "a deep and profound discernment of all the mazes, windings, and labyrinths which perplex the heart of man." The utterance concerning style, by so great a master of English, is memorable--"a good style as well as a good hand in writing is chiefly learned by practice." And a delightful reference should not be forgotten to the carping ignorant critic, who has indeed, "had a little Latin inoculated into his tail," but who would have been much the gainer had "the same great quantity of birch been employed in scourging away his ill-nature."
Disabled by gout and harassed by want of money, a yet greater distress was now fast closing on Fielding in the prolonged illness of his wife. "To see her daily languishing and wearing away before his eyes," says Murphy, "was too much for a man of his strong sensations; the fortitude with which he met all other calamities of life [now] deserted him." In the autumn of 1744 Mrs Fielding was at Bath, doubtless in the hope of benefit from the Bath waters. And here, in November, she died. Her body was brought to London for burial in the church of St. Martin's in the Fields; receiving on the 14th of November, 1744, honourable interment in the chancel vault, to the tolling of the great tenor bell, and with the fullest ceremonial of the time. Indeed it is evident, from the charges still preserved in the sexton's book, that Fielding rendered to his wife such stately honours as were occasionally accorded to the members of the few great families interred in the old church.
The death of this beloved wife, Murphy tells us, brought on Fielding "such a vehemence of grief that his friends began to think him in danger of losing his reason." When we remember that he himself has explicitly stated that lovely picture of the 'fair soul in the fair body,' the Sophia of Tom Jones, to have been but a portrait of Charlotte Fielding, we can in some measure realise his overwhelming grief at her death. And that the exquisite memorial raised to his wife by Fielding's affection and genius was not more beautiful in mind or face than the original, is acknowledged by Lady Bute, a kinswoman of the great novelist. Lady Bute was no stranger, "to that beloved first wife whose picture he drew in his Amelia, where, as she said, even the glowing language he knew how to employ did not do more than justice to the amiable qualities of the original, or to her beauty. He loved her passionately, and she returned his affection; yet had no happy life for they were almost always miserably poor, and seldom in a state of quiet and safety. His elastic gaiety of spirit carried him through it all; but meanwhile, care and anxiety were preying upon her more delicate mind, and undermining her constitution. She gradually declined, caught a fever and died in his arms." That Fielding's married life was unhappy, whatever were its outward conditions, is obviously a very shallow misstatement; but, for the rest, the picture accords well enough with our knowledge of his nature. The passionate tenderness of which that nature was capable appears in a passage from those very Miscellanies, which, he tells us, were written with so frequent a "Degree of Heartache." In the Journey from this World to the Next, Fielding describes how, on his entrance into Elysium, that "happy region whose beauty no Painting of the Imagination can describe" and where "Spirits know one another by Intuition" he presently met "a little Daughter whom I had lost several years before. Good Gods! What Words can describe the Raptures, the melting passionate Tenderness, with which we kiss'd each other, continuing in our Embrace, with the most extatic Joy, a Space, which if Time had been measured here as on Earth, could not have been less than half a Year."
The fittest final comment on Henry Fielding's marriage with Charlotte Cradock is, perhaps, that saying of a member of his own craft of the drama, "Now to love anything sincerely is an act of grace, but to love the best sincerely is a state of grace."
"he only is the true Patriot who always does what is in his Power for his Country's Service without any selfish Views or Regard to private Interests."--The True Patriot.
Fielding's active pen seems to have been laid aside for twelve months after the death of his wife; and it is perfectly in accord with all that we know of his passionate devotion to Charlotte Cradock that her loss should have shattered his energies for the whole of the ensuing year. Murphy, as we have seen, speaks of the first vehemence of his grief as being so acute that fears were entertained for his reason. According to Fielding's kinswomen, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Lady Bute, the first agonies of his grief approached to frenzy; but "when the first emotions of his sorrow were abated" his fine balance reasserted itself, and to quote again from Murphy, "philosophy administered her aid; his resolution returned, and he began again to struggle with his fortune."
As we hear no more of exclusive devotion to the law, it may be assumed that the attempt of the previous year to live by that arduous calling alone was now abandoned; and to a man of Fielding's strong Protestant and Hanoverian convictions the year of the '45, when a Stewart Prince and an invading Highland army had captured Edinburgh and were actually across the border, could not fail to bring occupation. Fielding believed ardently that Protestant beliefs, civil liberty, and national independence of foreign powers were best safeguarded by a German succession to the English throne; so by the time Prince Charles and 6,000 men had set foot on English soil, the former 'Champion of Great Britain' was again up in arms, discharging his sturdy blows in a new weekly newspaper entitled the True Patriot.
The True Patriot is chiefly notable as affording the first sign that Fielding was now leaving party politics for the wider, and much duller, field of Constitutional liberty. A man might die for the British Constitution; but to be witty about it would tax the resources of a Lucian. And, accordingly, in place of that gay young spark Mr Pasquin, who laid his cudgel with so hearty a good will on the shoulders of the offending 'Great Man,' there now steps out a very philosophic, mature, and soberly constitutional Patriot; a patriot who explicitly asserts in his first number, "I am of no party; a word I hope by these my labours to eradicate out of our constitution: this being indeed the true source of all those evils which we have reason to complain of." And again, in No. 14, "I am engaged to no Party, nor in the Support of any, unless of such as are truly and sincerely attached to the true interest of their Country, and are resolved to hazard all Things in its Preservation." Here is a considerable change from the personal zest that placed Mr Quiddam and Mr Pillage before delighted audiences in the Little Theatre in the Haymarket.
The available copies of the True Patriot, now in the British Museum, 1 include only thirty-two numbers, starting from No. 1, which appeared on the 5th of November, 1745, and ending on June 3, 1746. The first number contains a characteristic tribute to Dean Swift, whose death had occurred 'a few days since.' Doctor Jonathan Swift, says the Patriot, was "A genius who deserves to be rank'd among the first whom the World ever saw. He possessed the Talents of a Lucian a Rabelais and a Cervantes and in his Works exceeded them all. He employed his Wit to the noblest Purposes in ridiculing as well Superstition in Religion as Infidelity and the several Errors and Immoralities which sprung up from time to time in his Age; and lastly in defence of his Country.... Nor was he only a Genius and a Patriot; he was in Private Life a good and charitable Man and frequently lent Sums of Money, without interest, to the Poor and Industrious; by which means many Families were preserved from Destruction." In No. 2, the Patriot reiterates his "sincere Intention to calm and heal, not to blow up and inflame, any Party-Divisions"; but even the task of defending the British Constitution could not stifle Fielding's wit, and he escapes, for breathing space as it were, into a column devoted to the news items of the week, gathered from various papers, and adorned by comments of his own, printed in italics. And in this running commentary on the daily occurences of the time we get nearer, perhaps, to the table-talk of Henry Fielding than by any other means. Thus he faithfully repeats the inflated obituary lists that were then in fashion, but with such a variation as the following, "Thomas Tonkin, ... universally lamented by his Acquaintance. Upwards of 40 Cows belonging to one at Tottenham Court, universally lamented by all their Acquaintance." On a notice of an anniversary meeting of the Society for propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts there is the pertinent comment "It is a Pity some Method--was not invented for the Propagation of the Gospel in Great Britain." After the deaths of a wealthy banker and factor, comes the obituary of "One Nowns a Labourer, most probably immensely poor, and yet as rich now as either of the two Preceeding"; beside which may be placed the very characteristic assertion in No. 6 that "Spleen and Vapours inhabit Palaces and are attired with Pomp and Splendor, while they shun Rags and Prisons."
There is scarcely a personal allusion in all the thirty-two numbers of the Patriot, save the charming picture of that gentleman sitting in his study "meditating for the good and entertainment of the public, with my two little children (as is my usual course to suffer them) playing near me." And the ending of his horrid nightmare, in which a Jacobite executioner was placing a rope round his neck, "when my little girl entered my bedchamber and put an end to my dream by pulling open my eyes, and telling me that the taylor had brought home my cloaths for his Majesty's Birthday." The number for January 28 must not be overlooked, containing as it does, a scathing and humourous exposure of the profligate young sparks of the Town, from no less a pen than that of the Rev. Mr. Abraham Adams; and Parson Adams' letter concludes with a paragraph in which may be heard the voice of the future zealous magistrate: "No man can doubt but that the education of youth ought to be the principal care of every legislation; by the neglect of which great mischief accrues to the civil polity in every city." When himself but a lad of twenty, and in the prologue of his first comedy, Fielding had entered his protest against certain popular vices of the time, and had made merry over its follies. The desire to make the world he knew too well a better place than he found it is just as keen in the wit and humourist of thirty-nine; a desire, moreover, undulled by twenty years of vivacious living. Surely not the least amazing feature of Fielding's genius is this dual capacity for exuberant enjoyment, and incisive judgement. "His wit," said Thackeray, "is wonderfully wise and detective; it flashes upon a rogue and brightens up a rascal like a policeman's lantern."
To this time of national ferment belongs a publication of which we know nothing but the title, a Serious Address; and also one of our rare glimpses of the novelist's home life. Joseph Warton writes to his brother Tom, on October 29, 1746:--"I wish you had been with me last week when I spent two evenings with Fielding and his sister, who wrote David Simple, and you may guess I was very well entertained. The lady indeed retir'd pretty soon, but Russell and I sat up with the Poet till one or two in the morning, and were inexpressibly diverted. I find he values, as he justly may, Joseph Andrews above all his writings: he was extremely civil to me, I fancy, on my Father's account." Joseph Warton's father was Vicar of Basingstoke, Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and moreover, something of a Jacobite; whereby, we may surmise, that the True Patriot did not allow his staunch Hanoverian sentiments too great an invasion into his private society. Alas, that it did not occur to Warton to preserve, for the entertainment of later ages, some fuller record of those two noctes ambrosianae.
This sister, Sally Fielding as her cousin Lady Mary Wortley Montagu called her, made some figure in the literary world of the day. Richardson extolled her "knowledge of the human heart"; Murphy writes of her "lively and penetrating genius"; and her classical scholarship is attested by a translation of Xenophon's Memorabilia. That she also shared some of the engaging qualities of her brother may be assumed from the lines written to the memory of the "esteemed and loved ... Mrs. Sarah Fielding," by her friend Dr. John Hoadley.
"Her unaffected Manners, candid Mind,
Her Heart benevolent, and Soul resign'd;
Were more her Praise than all she knew or thought
Though Athens Wisdom to her Sex she taught."
Beaufort Buildings, Strand, in 1725
Sarah Fielding's name occurs again as living with her brother in that house in Beaufort Buildings with which is associated perhaps the happiest instance of Fielding's warm-hearted generosity. The story may be given as nearly as possible in the words of the narrator, one G. S., writing from Harley Street in 1786. After speaking of the conspicuous good nature of "the late Harry Fielding," G. S. says: "His receipts were never large, and his pocket was an open bank for distress and friendship at all times to draw on. Marked by such a liberality of mind it is not to be wondered at if he was frequently under pecuniary embarrassments.... Some parochial taxes for his house in Beaufort Buildings being unpaid, and for which he had been demanded again and again [we may remember how Mr. Luckless' door was "almost beat down with duns"]...he was at last given to understand by the collector who had an esteem for him, that he could procrastinate the payment no longer." To a bookseller, therefore he addressed himself, and mortgaged the coming sheets of some work then in hand. He received the cash, some ten or twelve guineas, and was returning home, full freighted with this sum, when, in the Strand, within a few yards of his own house, he met an old college chum whom he had not seen for many years. "Harry felt the enthusiasm of friendship; an hundred interrogatives were put to him in a moment as where had he been? where was he going? how did he do? &c. &c. His friend told him in reply he had long been buffeting the waves of adverse fortunes, but never could surmount them." Fielding took him off to dine at a neighbouring tavern, and as they talked, becoming acquainted with the state of his friend's pocket, emptied his own into it; and a little before dawn, he turned homewards "greater and happier than a monarch." Arrived at Beaufort Buildings his sister, who had anxiously awaited him, reported that the collector had called for the taxes twice that day. "Friendship," answered Harry Fielding "has called for the money and had it;--let the collector call again." Well might his cousin Lady Mary say of the man of whom such a story could be told, "I am persuaded he has known more happy moments than any prince upon earth."
During the summer following Warton's visit to the brother and sister, Fielding published a Dialogue between an Alderman and a Courtier. And in the following November his second marriage took place, at the little City church of St Bene't's, Paul's Wharf. The story of this marriage cannot be better told than in the words of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's granddaughter, Lady Louisa Stuart, quoting from the personal knowledge of her mother and grandmother:
"His biographers seem to have been shy of disclosing that after the death of this charming woman [his first wife] he married her maid. And yet the act was not so discreditable to his character as it may sound. The maid had few personal charms, but was an excellent creature, devotedly attached to her mistress, and almost broken-hearted for her loss. In the first agonies of his own grief, which approached to frenzy, he found no relief but from weeping with her; nor solace, when a degree calmer, but in talking to her of the angel they mutually regretted. This made her his habitual confidential associate, and in process of time he began to think he could not give his children a tenderer mother, or secure for himself a more faithful housekeeper and nurse. At least this was what he told his friends; and it is certain that her conduct as his wife confirmed it, and fully justified his good opinion." From a supposed allusion by Smollett, in the first edition of Peregrine Pickle, (an allusion afterwards suppressed) it would appear that Fielding's old schoolfellow and lifelong friend 'the good Lord Lyttelton' so far approved the marriage as himself to give Mary Daniel away; and, as the dates in the Twickenham Register of births show that the marriage was one of justice as well as expediency, this well accords with Lyttelton's upright and honourable character. Of Fielding's affectionate and grateful loyalty to his second wife ample evidence appears in the pages of his last book, the Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. Throughout this touching record of the journey of a dying man, there are references to her tenderness, ability and devotion. At the sad parting from children and friends, on the morning of their departure for Lisbon, he writes of her behaviour as "more like a heroine and philosopher, though at the same time the tenderest mother in the world." When, during the voyage down the Thames, an unmannerly custom house officer burst into the cabin where Fielding and his wife were sitting, the man was soundly rated for breaking "into the presence of a lady without an apology or even moving his hat"; by which we may see his sensitive care that due respect was accorded her. He tells us how he persuaded her with difficulty to take a walk on shore when their vessel was wind bound in Torbay, it being "no easy matter for me to force [her] from my side." With anxious forboding he thinks of his "dear wife and child" facing the world alone after his death, for "in truth I have often thought they are both too good and too gentle to be trusted to the power of any man I know, to whom they could possibly be so trusted." And in a more formal tribute he acknowledges the abilities that accompanied her worth, when he says that "besides discharging excellently well her own and all tender offices becoming the female character; ... besides being a faithful friend, an amiable companion, and a tender nurse, [she] could likewise supply the wants of a decrepit husband and occasionally perform his part." That Fielding suffered socially by the fact of his second marriage is probable. But the fact is proof, if proof were needed, of his courage in reparation, and of the unworldly spirit in which he ultimately followed the dictates of that incorruptible judge which he himself asserted to be in every man's breast.
It was in December 1747, just a month after his second marriage, that Fielding again flung himself into the arena of contentious journalism, 'brandishing' his pen as truculently as ever on behalf of the Protestant and Hanoverian succession, and in despite of the Jacobite cause. He called his new paper "The Jacobite's Journal, by John Trott Plaid Esq're.," and the ironic title was accompanied by a woodcut traditionally associated with Hogarth. The ironic mask, Fielding explains, was assumed "in order if possible to laugh Men out of their follies and to make men ashamed of owning or acting by" Jacobite principles.
The Jacobite's Journal appeared at a moment when public opinion, and public gossip also, seem to have been immersed in the question whether a notorious pamphlet purporting to have been found among the papers of a late Minister, Mr. Thomas Winnington, were genuine or a libel. Into this fray Fielding promptly plunged, publishing, in December 1747, 2 a shilling pamphlet entitled A Proper Answer to a Late Scurrilous Libel, ... By the Author of the Jacobites Journal. This little pamphlet, copies of which may be seen in the British Museum, is merely a further vigorous declamation for civil liberty and the Protestant religion, as under King George, and contains hardly any reference either to Winnington or to the author. It was retorted on in two further pamphlets. In one of these a Lady Fanny and her friend, enjoying a 'Chit chat,' discuss the news that Lady Fanny is she "whom F---g represents in a Plaid Jocket in the front of his Jacobite Journal." "The Whirling Coxcomb," cries Lady Fanny enraged, "what had he to do with ridiculing any Party, who had travell'd round the whole Circle of Parties and Ministers, ever since he could brandish a Pen." 3 Her Ladyship adds some further sneers on writers pensioned to amuse people with their nonsense. The other counter pamphlet consists of conversations overheard, all over the town, on the subject of Winnington and his Apology. Here a mercer and a bookseller abuse Fielding for boxing the political compass, and for selling his pen. Another bookseller insinuates that Fielding's own attack on the Apology is but a half-hearted affair--"Ah Sir, you know not what F---g could do if he were willing ... you would have seen him mince and hash it so as to make half the Town weep and the other laugh. Don't you think the Pen that writ Pasquin, Joseph Andrews, and the Champion could have answered the Apology if he had had the Will?" "But I can't see why the Author of the Jacobite Journal should want that will," protests a Bencher. "Alas Sir!" cries the bookseller, "You forget the Power of Necessity. If a Man that wants Bread can establish a Paper by the P--t Off--e [Post Office?] taking off two thousand every week is he not more excusable...." To which the Bencher replies that possibly it is Fielding's 'Wavering Principles' that have "brought him to the Necessity of writing for Bread." 4 From all which we may assume that Fielding's superiority to what he calls the "absurd and irrational Distinction of Parties [which] hath principally contributed to poison our Constitution" 5 was very little understood by the heated party factions of 1747.
To call one's political opponent a 'Whirling Coxcomb,' or a 'pensioned scribbler,' was a very mild amenity in eighteenth century party warfare; and the abuse of such small fry as these anonymous pamphleteers might be wholly disregarded did it not show Fielding's prominence, during these anxious times, as a strenuous Hanoverian, and also the fact that he had now not only largely abjured party politics, but that what party tenets he still held were changed. Indeed as much may surely be deduced from the following philosophic passage in his True Patriot. "I have formerly shown in this Paper, that the bare objecting to a Man a Change in his Political Notions, ought by no means to affect any Person's Character; because in a Country like this it is simply impossible that a Man of sound Sense, and strict Honour, should always adhere to the same Political Creed." 6 It is very little material to our knowledge of Fielding as an honest man and a great genius to discover, were it possible, precisely what changes his political views underwent. When Sir Robert Walpole essayed to corrupt the nation Fielding fought strenuously in the cause of political honour; when a Stewart invasion threatened (as he thought) both civil liberty and Protestant beliefs he flung himself as zealously into the defence of the Church of England and of the Hanoverian Government. It is clear that the latter exertions stirred up much cheap obliquy; and it must be admitted that such references to his antagonists as "last weeks Dunghill of Papers" were likely to entail unsavory retort.
This abuse seems to have broken out with an excess of virulence not long after the appearance of the Jacobite's Journal; a fate, as Fielding observes, little to be expected by the editor of a loyal paper. His dignified protest in the matter is worth recalling. In a leading article he declares that "before my paper hath reached the 20th. number a heavier load of Scandal hath been cast upon me than I believe ever fell to the Share of a Single Man. The Author of the Journal was soon guessed at; Either from some Singularity in Style, or from little care which being free from any wicked Purpose, I have ever taken to conceal my Name. Of this several Writers were no sooner possessed than they attempted to blacken it with every kind of Reproach; pursued me into private Life, even to my boyish Years; where they have given me almost every Vice in Human Nature. Again they have followed me with uncommon Inveteracy into a Profession in which they have very roundly asserted that I have neither Business nor Knowledge: And lastly, as an Author they have affected to treat me with more Contempt than Mr. Pope, who hath great Merit and no less Pride in the Character of a Writer hath thought proper to bestow on the lowest Scribbler of his Time. All this moreover they have poured forth in a vein of Scurrility which hath disgraced the Press with every abusive Term in our Language." Although, as Fielding adds, those who knew him would not take their opinion from those who knew him not, it is to be feared that the scurrilous libellers of the day succeeded in creating a prejudice that is hardly yet dispersed. For such petty clamours would be trifling enough round the figure of the creator of the English novel, were it not that in the abuse of the gutter press of his day we may probably find the reason for much of the vague cloud which has so strangely overhung Fielding's name. In his own spirited protest he tells us of the 'ordure' that was thrown at him; and it is an old saying that if enough mud be thrown some will stick.
In the February following the appearance of his new paper Fielding must have been at Twickenham; for the baptism of his son William appears in the Parish Register for that month. A writer of thirty years ago says that the house celebrated as that in which Fielding lived was then still standing, a quaint old fashioned wooden dwelling, in Back Lane; and adds the information that Fielding had two rooms, the house being then let in lodgings. 7 Lysons, however, in his Environs of London, published in 1795, says that Fielding "rented a house at this time in the Back-Lane at Twickenham," adding that he received his information from the Earl of Orford. The site is now occupied by a row of cottages. In his Parish Register for Twickenham Horace Walpole commemorates the great novelist's residence in that quiet village, so full of eighteenth century memories. Here, he says,
"... Fielding met his bunter Muse,
And, as they quaff'd the fiery juice,
Droll Nature stamp'd each lucky hit
With unimaginable wit."
Bunter was a cant word for a woman who picks up rags about the street; and it may seem to later generations that the epithet fitted far more nicely the bunter muse of that "facile retailer of ana and incorrigible society-gossip," that rag-picker of anecdotes, Mr. Horace Walpole himself.
When the Journal had been running some six months, Fielding formally relinquished his ironic character of a Jacobite, partly because, as he says, the evils of Jacobitism were too serious for jesting and required more open denunciation; partly because the age required more highly seasoned writing, the general taste in reading very much resembling "that of some particular Man in eating who would never willingly devour what doth not stink"; and partly from the ineptitude of the public to appreciate the ironic method. This latter passage is of interest as coming from the author of that great masterpiece in irony, Jonathan Wild. Fielding has observed, he tells us that "though Irony is capable of furnishing the most exquisite Ridicule; yet as there is no kind of humour so liable to be mistaken it is of all others the most dangerous to the Writer. An infinite Number of Readers have not the least taste or relish for it, I believe I may say do not understand it; and all are apt to be tired when it is carried to any degree of Length."
The Jacobite's Journal is of course mainly occupied with maintaining the Protestant British Constitution; but here, as in the True Patriot, Fielding allows himself a pleasant running commentary on the daily news. He also erects a Court of Criticism in which, by virtue of his "high Censorial Office," he administers justice in "all matters in the Republic of Literature." By thus adopting the title of "Censor of Great Britain" the editor of the Jacobites Journal preserves his identity with that censorial Champion who nine years before had essayed to keep rogues in fear of his Hercules' club. Two judgments delivered by the Court are of interest. In one, due castigation is given to that incorrigible mimic and wit Foote, who was once threatened by no less a cudgel than that of Dr. Johnson himself. Foote was evading all law and order by his inimitable mimicries at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket; and for these performances at his "scandal-shop" is very properly brought up before Mr. Censor's Court. Whereupon Foote begins to mimic the Court "pulling a Chew of Tobacco from his Mouth, in Imitation of his Honour who is greatly fond of that weed." The culprit suffers conviction for crime against law and good manners. Having thus seen to the public welfare, Fielding also happily settles a little score of his own on one of his anonymous libellers. "One Porcupine Pillage," he records, "came into the court and threw a great shovelful of dirt at his honour, but luckily none of it hit him." His comments on weekly news items are no less characteristic than those hidden in the columns of the Patriot. Thus, on a trotting match, he observes, "Trotting is a Sport truly adapted to the English Genius." And on a man found dead in Jewin Street "formerly an eminent Dealer in Buckrams, but [who] being greatly reduced is supposed to have died for Want," he notes, "either of Common Sense in himself or Common Humanity in his Aquaintance." His own humanity is shown in the wise appeals, repeated on more than one page of the Journal, for some effective provision for the distressed widows and children of the poor clergy. And his unbiassed judgment appears in the amende honorable to Richardson, in the form of generous and unstinted praise of Clarissa.
The first number of the Jacobite's Journal was dated Dec. 5, 1747, and 'Mr. Trott Plaid' formally takes leave of his subject exactly eleven months later, on November 5, 1748, declaring that Jacobites were, by then, little to be feared. 8 Ten days before this last 'brandish' of Fielding's Constitutional pen, on October 26, 1748, his oaths had been received as a Justice of the Peace for Westminster.