The Facts of Fiction (5 page)

Such scenes are common in Fielding. But it is doubtful whether the blood in the latter would react to a modern police test for blood stains. For the truth is that it is no more blood than the red stuff that slops about everywhere in
Treasure Island
. And the bruises, breakages, and injuries mend themselves at far more than the normal clinical speed. There is, indeed, throughout all Fielding something of that atmosphere of magic healing that hung over Valhalla, where the warriors fought all day to amuse the gods, and were restored every night to amuse themselves.

The innumerable booby-traps into which the adorable old Parson Adams—a paternal great-grandfather of Mr. Pickwick—falls must inevitably have prematurely ended
the blundering career of such a man in the inferior and less generous progress of life.

There are so many passages in Fielding which describe the ways in which the author looked at actual life—and he saw more than just the life on the Bath Road—that one is sometimes left wondering whether any novelist before or since has seen it quite full face. Such expressions as the “vast authentic doomsday-book of nature,” from which he tells us he learned his material, announce, in a world that was still cluttered with Clelias and Astræas and other polite and pretty riff-raff of formal romance, a new method of literary craftsmanship.

The method was the new and revolutionary one of using a sitter for every portrait, even though this entailed rather obviously posing the sitter. It was poles apart from the old romantic method of turning one's back on life, to limn features of unearthly pallor and more than human loveliness.

But Fielding's was a deceptive method. It led him to believe that he was a realist. The truth is that nothing but Fielding's flow of high spirits has concealed for so long the fact that he was a hopeless romantic. The later breed of romantics has so rarely been high-spirited, that one is to be forgiven for not having immediately recognised Fielding as one of their company. But try to fit his glowing Sophia Western, or ill-treated but victorious Adams, or Fanny waiting at the altar clad in a white dimity nightgown, into the world of reality, and we can see at once that they stand out like a bunch of bright toy-balloons. Fielding's characters, by giving false details of their parents—though the author was honest enough about his debt to
Don Quixote
: which despite the general opinion to the contrary has done more to preserve the romantic tradition in the popular mind than to destroy it—have
succeeded in getting through the frontiers of realism on the passports of romance. If Henry Fielding had been a character in fiction we should say that he had been conceived by a mind more anxious about art than about humanity. After his first success he described the downward drooping curve of tragedy. To compare the Fielding of youth who made those vulgar, purple splashes of ostentation that most truly vivacious young men make in trying to squeeze from life more than life is ordinarily prepared to give, with the Fielding of middle age—which is as far as we can follow him—trying to make three hundred pounds per annum do the work of five, and feeling life slipping through his sick fingers, not rendering even its natural dues, is to compare Success with Failure.

The biographer of Fielding is fortunate if he has preceded and not succeeded good Miss Godden. Her patient and laborious researches have stuck up the stock stories that concern Fielding like so many vermin on a wire. The best stories come from his first biographer, Murphy, who did not know what a lynx higher criticism was to be. But many of the apocryphal stories even if they do not bear the stamp of truth at least contain the spirit of it. And we may reassure ourselves that there is no man of genius who left no letters, of whom we know more and have a fairer general impression.

It is no part of our work to give a complete and concise biography of Fielding. It will serve our purpose far better merely to plot a few points on the ascending curve. We catch the first, vivid, unmistakable glimpse of Fielding almost in schoolboyhood, a rakish Etonian abducting an heiress “on a Sunday, when she was on her way to church,” and assaulting her guardian so that the aid of the Law had to be invoked; then we see him living the life in town, the poor but successful, practising dramatist
of twenty-one, declaring that he must be “hackney writer or hackney coachman”; a man who could write eighteen plays in nine years, and those so casually that when Garrick begged him to revise a scene he refused, and remarked when the crowd hissed the frantic Garrick, who had the misfortune to be acting in the piece, “Oh, damn ‘em. They have found it out, have they? ”

During all this time, like the unfortunate young man in
Joseph Andrews
, he

met with smart fellows who drank with lords they did
not know, and intrigued with women they never saw.
Covent Garden was now the farthest stretch of my amb
ition; where I shone forth in the balconies of the play
houses, visited whores, made love to orange-wenches,
and damned plays.

Next we see Fielding married to an heiress of most modest fortune, setting up a showy equipage in extravagant yellow, and running through his wife's fortune in three years. After that he is to be seen more in the Temple than in Covent Garden—first obvious pathetic sign of a man of moods trying to become a man of substance—leading a lawyer's life, and writing plays that were suppressed by the censor.

Then in 1742 came
Joseph Andrews
and in the words of his first biographer: “Fielding's genius broke forth at once in an effulgence superior to all the rays of light it had before emitted like the sun in his morning glory,” which is to say that he found himself.

There are few writers who have tasted success more frequently, yet have ended their lives so near to failure, as Fielding. At the very moment when his genius was breaking forth Fielding himself was living in the valley of the
shadow of death, or in that worse darkness, the thick shadow of the sick-room. His wife was wasting away, and Fielding discovered how much of his vitality she was carrying with her. He could not write; though his need was greater than before. The hackney writer who had been able to toss off two acts of a play in a morning writing on the paper his tobacco had been wrapped in, now had to apologise to a public that was being kept waiting for his miscellanies.

And when these did appear it seemed as though the embittered blood of the harassed anxious husband had been transfused into the veins of the mischievous, mercurial writer. Where in
Joseph Andrews
he had hit and left no bruise, in
Jonathan Wild
he carefully broke the skin, and not only the thin skin, of his readers every time. This polite, satirical eulogy of a cut-throat highwayman stung like a wasp; or like Swift. And the sting hurt because there was poison behind it. Then came
The Journey from This World to the Next
, which fairly reeks of sick-rooms and which offered yet more release for a whole load of hatreds that he was carrying; hatred of misers, cruel men, hypocrites, ungrateful men and traitors. And all the while his wife was growing sicker and more wasted on her thin diet of Bath Waters, and Fielding more racked by anguish in the mind, and gout in the body. This, indeed, is one of the moments in his life when it must have appeared to him as though the hounds of a malicious Fate were on the point of closing round him.

In 1744 his wife died. And three years later he married her maid. Here there is a conspiracy of Fate to distort the truth. Any normally imaginative reader will reconstruct the marriage as a sordid affair, simply a righting of the wrong side of the sheet. But Lady Wortley Montagu's granddaughter, speaking from family hearsay, where she
would have picked up the worst, had there been any, assures us that the second Mrs. Fielding was “an excellent creature devotedly attached to her mistress and almost broken-hearted by her loss.”

It is hard to imagine what Henry Fielding, descendant of the Earls of Denbigh, found to talk about with a housemaid; probably the first Mrs. Fielding was the topic of their conversation. And with all her deficiencies the second Mrs. Fielding must have been a good wife. She soothed her husband's mind out of satire into sympathy, and gave the world
Tom Jones
and
Amelia
in place of more
Jonathan Wild
.

And since
Tom Jones
is our objective we will press on to it across hot acres of Jacobite politics. In February 1749 it appeared. By May of the same year Walpole had written, “Millar the bookseller has done very generously by him (Fielding). Finding
Tom Jones
, for which he had given him six hundred pounds, sell so greatly he has since given him another hundred.”

Just a year later, Fielding was begging the Duke of Bedford to arrange easy terms for him to rent one hundred pounds' worth of property that was needed to qualify for a magistrateship. And Dukes were Dukes then: patronage had not yet been killed by a democratic budget. The Duke arranged for Fielding to have his property. Fielding got on to the Bench and London got her best magistrate. But Fielding seems to have been designed by nature to repel money as well as need it. For by living honestly in a wicked world he straightway contrived to halve the income he had striven so hard for. He dolefully records:

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 DF
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 five hundred a year of the dirtiest money upon earth, to little more than three hundred, considerable portion of which remained with my clerk.

At this period there strays upon the scene a cad with a camera, Walpole, who leaves us with this snapshot of the magistrate‘s ménage. He was banqueting, writes Walpole, with a “blind man and three Irishmen on some cold mutton and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth.” It is a falsifying photograph: Fielding's company may have been poor, and his food bad, and his cloth dirty. But his mind was rich, his intentions good, and his official life immaculate. Indeed, in the fine vigour and human comprehension of his magistrature we can detect the first advertisement of those qualities that made Fielding a novelist of more than common energy and more than common compassion.

He made London a place where a man might walk along the Strand without molestation from footpads; and gangs were then almost as destructive to human life as traffic in the same locality is to-day. Fielding, indeed, ranks with Peel and Lord Byng as one of the great reformers of the corps of public safety. He found a watch that was, he says, “chosen out of those poor old decrepit People who are from their want and bodily Strength rendered incapable of getting a livelihood.”

“These men armed only with a pole which some of them are scarce able to lift ” were his troops for a punitive expedition against the massed rogues and vagabonds of London. For Fielding came of hot-headed and military stock. He had Hapsburg blood in his veins, or thought he had. And Mr. Justice Fielding, with spectacular indiscretion, led the army of the watch himself. And won. Such an action is a piece of the whole man.

Six years after the publication of
Tom Jones
came
Amelia
. And here the pot-house roaring of the former had died down to a melancholy domestic plaint. The object of
Amelia
was to “Promote the cause of virtue ”—words that won the immediate attention and respect of Johnson for the whole work—“and to expose some of the glaring evils as well public as private which at present infest the country.”

In short, it was the production of a moralist rather than of a novelist; it elevated rather than excited. And the publisher, with that unflattering estimate of human nature that is the safeguard of his kind, knew that the public would not like it, and that the booksellers would not buy. He had paid a thousand pounds for it, and with more than common cunning he withheld his usual trade discount from
Amelia
. The trade was first angry, then interested, then completely deceived. And finally bought the whole impression to show that they knew a bargain.

After the publication of
Amelia
Fielding showed the first alarming signs that he was feeling the pace. His body sagged in dropsy. His mind still lively was now denied life. He grew spiteful like a hornet. He antagonised everyone, including Smollett, who was always ready to come forward when two were wanted to make a quarrel. He drank the Bath Waters and grew worse. He was tapped by surgeons and grew desperate in health. When finally
he took a trip to Lisbon his emaciated face and swollen body drew jeers from a quayside crowd.

Once on board the ship he dicovered that the sea can be a most uncomfortable element for a sick man. His temper was always on the point of discharge. He abused a custom's house officer for not removing his hat in the presence of Mrs. Fielding, the risen lady's maid, cursed the captain because he was deaf, and later threatened to prosecute him because he was a thief.

Four months after Fielding arrived in Lisbon he was dead.

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu wrote the best short memorial account of him:

I am sorry for Henry Fielding's death, not only as I shall read no more of his writings, but because I believe he lost more than others, as no man enjoyed life more than he did; though few had less occasion to do so, the highest of his preferment being the raking in the lowest sinks of vice and misery. I should think it a nobler and less nauseous employment to be one of the staff officers that conduct the nocturnal weddings. His happy constitution (even when he had, with great pains, half demolished it) made him forget every evil when he was before a venison pasty, or over a flask 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 cookmaid, 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 a pity he was not immortal.