joseph andrew
Except this sad event and its rather incongruous sequel,
Fielding's marriage to his wife's maid Mary Daniel—a marriage, however, which
did not take place till full four years later, and which by all accounts
supplied him with a faithful and excellent companion and nurse, and his
children with a kind stepmother—little or nothing is again known of this
elusive man of genius between the publication of the Miscellanies in 1743, and
that of Tom Jones in 1749. The second marriage itself in November 1747; an
interview which Joseph Warton had with him rather more than a year earlier (one
of the very few direct interviews we have); the publication of two
anti-Jacobite newspapers (Fielding was always a strong Whig and Hanoverian),
called the True Patriot and the Jacobite's Journal in 1745 and the following
years; some indistinct traditions about residences at Twickenham and elsewhere,
and some, more precise but not much more authenticated, respecting patronage by
the Duke of Bedford, Mr Lyttelton, Mr Allen, and others, pretty well sum up the
whole.
Tom Jones was published in February (a favourite month with
Fielding or his publisher Millar) 1749; and as it brought him the, for those days,
very considerable sum of L600 to which Millar added another hundred later, the
novelist must have been, for a time at any rate, relieved from his chronic
penury. But he had already, by Lyttelton's interest, secured his first and last
piece of preferment, being made Justice of the Peace for Westminster, an office
on which he entered with characteristic vigour. He was qualified for it not
merely by a solid knowledge of the law, and by great natural abilities, but by
his thorough kindness of heart; and, perhaps, it may also be added, by his long
years of queer experience on (as Mr Carlyle would have said) the "burning
marl" of the London Bohemia. Very shortly afterwards he was chosen
Chairman of Quarter Sessions, and established himself in Bow Street. The Bow
Street magistrate of that time occupied a most singular position, and was more
like a French Prefect of Police or even a Minister of Public Safety than a mere
justice. Yet he was ill paid. Fielding says that the emoluments, which before
his accession had but been L500 a year of "dirty" money, were by his
own action but L300 of clean; and the work, if properly performed, was very
severe.
That he performed it properly all competent evidence shows,
a foolish, inconclusive, and I fear it must be said emphatically snobbish story
of Walpole's notwithstanding. In particular, he broke up a gang of cut-throat
thieves, which had been the terror of London. But his tenure of the post was
short enough, and scarcely extended to five years. His health had long been broken,
and he was now constantly attacked by gout, so that he had frequently to
retreat on Bath from Bow Street, or his suburban cottage of Fordhook, Ealing.
But he did not relax his literary work. His pen was active with pamphlets
concerning his office; Amelia, his last novel, appeared towards the close of
1751; and next year saw the beginning of a new paper, the Covent Garden
Journal, which appeared twice a week, ran for the greater part of the year, and
died in November. Its great author did not see that month twice again. In the
spring of 1753 he grew worse; and after a year's struggle with ill health, hard
work, and hard weather, lesser measures being pronounced useless, was persuaded
to try the "Portugal Voyage," of which he has left so charming a record
in the Journey to Lisbon. He left Fordhook on June 26, 1754, reached Lisbon in
August, and, dying there on the 8th of October, was buried in the cemetery of
the Estrella.
Of not many writers perhaps does a clearer notion, as far as
their personality goes, exist in the general mind that interests itself at all
in literature than of Fielding. Yet more than once a warning has been sounded,
especially by his best and most recent biographer, to the effect that this idea
is founded upon very little warranty of scripture. The truth is, that as the
foregoing record—which, brief as it is, is a sufficiently faithful summary—will
have shown, we know very little about Fielding. We have hardly any letters of
his, and so lack the best by far and the most revealing of all
character-portraits; we have but one important autobiographic fragment, and
though that is of the highest interest and value, it was written far in the
valley of the shadow of death, it is not in the least retrospective, and it
affords but dim and inferential light on his younger, healthier, and happier
days and ways. He came, moreover, just short of one set of men of letters, of
whom we have a great deal of personal knowledge, and just beyond another. He
was neither of those about Addison, nor of those about Johnson. No intimate
friend of his has left us anything elaborate about him. On the other hand, we
have a far from inconsiderable body of documentary evidence, of a kind often by
no means trustworthy. The best part of it is contained in the letters of his
cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and the reminiscences or family traditions
of her grand-daughter, Lady Louisa Stuart. But Lady Mary, vivacious and
agreeable as she is, had with all her talent a very considerable knack of
writing for effect, of drawing strong contrasts and the like; and it is not
quite certain that she saw very much of Fielding in the last and most
interesting third of his life. Another witness, Horace Walpole, to less
knowledge and equally dubious accuracy, added decided ill-will, which may have
been due partly to the shrinking of a dilettante and a fop from a burly
Bohemian; but I fear is also consequent upon the fact that Horace could not
afford to despise Fielding's birth, and knew him to be vastly his own superior
in genius. We hear something of him again from Richardson; and Richardson hated
him with the hatred of dissimilar genius, of inferior social position, and,
lastly, of the cat for the dog who touzles and worries her. Johnson partly
inherited or shared Richardson's aversion, partly was blinded to Fielding's
genius by his aggressive Whiggery. I fear, too, that he was incapable of
appreciating it for reasons other than political. It is certain that Johnson,
sane and robust as he was, was never quite at ease before genius of the
gigantic kind, either in dead or living. Whether he did not like to have to
look up too much, or was actually unable to do so, it is certain that
Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, and Fielding, those four Atlantes of English verse
and prose, all affected him with lukewarm admiration, or with positive dislike,
for which it is vain to attempt to assign any uniform secondary cause,
political or other. It may be permitted to hint another reason. All Johnson's
most sharp-sighted critics have noticed, though most have discreetly refrained
from insisting on, his "thorn-in-the-flesh," the combination in him
of very strong physical passions with the deepest sense of the moral and
religious duty of abstinence. It is perhaps impossible to imagine anything more
distasteful to a man so buffeted, than the extreme indulgence with which
Fielding regards, and the easy freedom, not to say gusto, with which he
depicts, those who succumb to similar temptation. Only by supposing the
workings of some subtle influence of this kind is it possible to explain, even
in so capricious a humour as Johnson's, the famous and absurd application of
the term "barren rascal" to a writer who, dying almost young, after
having for many years lived a life of pleasure, and then for four or five one of
laborious official duty, has left work anything but small in actual bulk, and
fertile with the most luxuriant growth of intellectual originality.
