Part 14 (1/2)

And the puff preliminary of the period may be read in the same columns, declaring that the ”earnest Demand of the Publick” had necessitated the use of four printing presses; and that it being impossible to complete the binding in time, copies would be available ”sew'd at Half-a-Guinea a Sett.” Sir Walter Scott tells us that, at a sale to booksellers before publication, Andrew Millar, the publisher, refused to part with _Amelia_ on the usual discount terms; and that the booksellers, being thus persuaded of a great future for the book, eagerly bought up the impression. Launched thus, and heralded by the popularity with which _Tom Jones_ had now endowed Fielding's name, the entire edition was sold out on the day of publication; an event which evoked the observation from Dr Johnson that _Amelia_ was perhaps the only book which being printed off betimes one morning, a new edition was called for before night. The Doctor gave not only unstinted praise, but also an involuntary tribute to _Amelia_. He read the book through, without pausing, from beginning to end. And he p.r.o.nounced Amelia herself to be ”the most pleasing heroine of all the romances.” [1]

But to the majority of readers Amelia is, a.s.suredly, something more than the most charming of heroines. She is the delightful companion; the wise and tender friend; a woman whose least perfection was that dazzling beauty which shone with equal l.u.s.tre in the 'poor rags' lent her by her old nurse, or in her own clothing, just as the happy purity of her nature only glows more brightly for the dark scenes through which she moves. In the whole range of English literature there is surely no figure more warmly human, and yet less touched with human imperfection; none more simply and naturally alive, and yet truer in every crisis (and there were few of the sorrowful things of life unknown to her) to the best qualities of generous womanhood. And if it is largely for her glowing vitality that we love Amelia, we love her none the less in that she is no fool. It was hardly necessary to tell us, as Fielding is careful to do, that her sense of humour was keen, and that her insight into the ridiculous was tempered only by the deeper insight of her heart. Her understanding of her husband is as perfect as her love for him; and that love is far too profound to allow a moment's suggestion of mere placid amiability. Amelia, whether quizzing the absurdities of the affected fine ladies of her own rank, or cooking her husband's supper in the poor lodgings of their poverty; whether so radiant with happiness after seeing her little children handsomely entertained that with flushed cheeks and bright eyes, ”she was all a blaze of beauty,” or, pale with distress, bravely carrying her own clothes and the children's trinkets to the p.a.w.nbroker; whether betraying her own n.o.ble qualities of silence and forgiveness, or losing her temper with Mrs Bennett,--commands equal affection and admiration. ”They say,”

wrote Thackeray, ”that it was in his own home that Fielding knew her and loved her: and from his own wife that he drew the most charming character in English fiction--Fiction? Why fiction! Why not history? I know Amelia just as well as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.”

Lady Mary, and her daughter Lady Bute, have left very definite statements concerning this portrait which their cousin was alleged to have hidden under the fair image of Amelia. Lady Bute we are told 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....” [2] And Lady Mary herself writes, ”H. Fielding has given a true picture of himself and his first wife, in the characters of Mr and Mrs Booth [Amelia and her husband], some compliments to his own figure excepted; and I am persuaded several of the incidents he mentions are real matters of fact.” [3]

Against these persuations we must place the fact that this book contains no such explicit statement as that which in _Tom Jones_ a.s.sures us of the original of the beautiful Sophia. But we shall not love Amelia the less if we see her, with her courage and her beauty, her happy gaiety of spirit, her tenderness and strength, solacing the distresses and calming the storms of Fielding's restless genius, rather than devoting those qualities to a.s.suaging the misfortunes of Captain William Booth. For indeed Captain Booth has but one substantial t.i.tle to our regard, and that is his adoration for his wife. True, he is a pretty figure of a man; he has a handsome face; he fights bravely, and would kick a rogue through the world; he believes in and loves his friends; and he plays charmingly with his children. But, deprive him of the good genius of his life, and Captain Booth would very speedily have sunk into the ruin and despair of any other profligate young gamester about the Town; and for this his adoration the culprit wins our forgiveness, even as Amelia not only forgave but forgot, when by virtue of her own unconscious goodness the Captain retrieved himself, at last, from the folly of his ways. Undoubtedly the man whom Amelia loved, and who had the grace to return that pa.s.sion, was no scoundrel at heart.

It is impossible, now, to discover with any certainty the incidents which Lady Mary was persuaded were matters of fact. The experiences of Captain Booth, when essaying to turn gentleman farmer, have been quoted as copies of Fielding's own ambitions at East Stour; but surely on very slender evidence. Much more personal seem many of the later scenes in the poor London lodgings, scenes of cruel distress and perfect happiness, of bitter disappointments and sanguine hope. Here, very probably, we have echoes of the struggles of Harry and Charlotte Fielding, in the days of hackney writing and of baffled efforts at the Bar; just as the dry statement by Arthur Murphy, that Fielding was ”remarkable for ... the strongest affection for his children,” comes to life in the many touching pictures of Amelia and Booth with their little son and daughter. The pursuit of such ident.i.ty of incident may the more cheerfully be left to the anecdotist, in that the biographical value of _Amelia_, is far more than incidental. For the book is, as has been said, a one-part piece. Round the single figure of Amelia all the other characters revolve; and it was of Amelia that Fielding himself has told us, in words that are a master key to his own character ”of all my offspring she is my favourite Child.” As surely as a man may be known by his choice in a friend, so is the nature of the artist betrayed when he avows his partiality for one alone among all the creations of his genius.

As to the remaining figures in this ”model of human life,” to quote Fielding's own descriptive phrase of his book, those which tell us most of their author are that worthy, authoritative, humourous clergyman, Dr Harrison; the good Sergeant Atkinson; and that fiery pedant Colonel Bath, with his kind heart hidden under a ferocious pa.s.sion for calling out every man whom he conceived to have slighted his honour. Dr Harrison does not win quite the same place in our hearts as the man whom Thackeray calls 'dear Parson Adams'; his ca.s.sock rustles a little too loudly; the saint is a trifle obscured in the Doctor. But yet we love him for his warm and protecting affection for his 'children' as he calls Amelia and Booth; for his dry humour; and for that generosity which was for ever draining his ample purse. And perhaps we like him none the less for his scholar's raillery of that early blue-stocking Mrs Bennet; while his dignity never shows to greater advantage than when he throws himself bodily on the villain Murphy, achieving the arrest of that felon by the strength of his own arm, and the nimbleness of his own legs. And to this good Doctor is given a saying eminently characteristic of Justice Fielding himself. We are told that ”it was a maxim of his that no man could descend below himself in doing any act which may contribute to protect an innocent person, or to bring a rogue to the gallows.” Another trait of the Doctor recalls Fielding's oft reiterated aversion to what he calls grave formal persons: ”You must know then, child,” said he, to poor Booth, sunk in the melancholy problem of supporting a wife and three children on something less than 40 a year, ”that I have been thinking on this subject as well as you; for I can think, I promise you, with a pleasant countenance.” Of Amelia's foster-brother Sergeant Atkinson (from whom Major William Dobbin is directly descended) it is enough to say that the n.o.ble qualities concealed beneath the common cloth of his sergeant's coat perfectly confirm a sentence written many years before by the hand of his author. ”I will venture to affirm,” Fielding declares, in his early essay on the _Characters of Men_, ”that I have known ... _a Fellow whom no man should be seen to speak to_, capable of the highest acts of Friends.h.i.+p and Benevolence.”

Fielding's energies in this his last novel, a novel be it remembered written in the midst of daily contact with the squalid vices exhibited in an eighteenth century court-room, seem to have been almost wholly absorbed in creating the most perfect escape from those surroundings in the person of Amelia. Beside the figure of his 'favourite child,' the vicious criminals of his stage, the malefic My Lord, the loathsome Trent, the debased Justice, the terrible human wrecks in Newgate, are but dark figures in a shadowy back-ground. Still, the great moralist shows no lack of vigour in his delineations of such offspring of vice. The genius that knew how to rouse every reader of _Tom Jones_ to 'lend a foot to kick Blifil downstairs,' awards in the last pages of _Amelia_, a yet more satisfying justice to that nameless connoisseur in profligacy, My Lord.

In his Dedication to Ralph Allen, Fielding states that his book ”is sincerely designed to promote the Cause of Virtue, and to expose some of the most glaring Evils, as well public as private, which at present infest this Country”. The statement seems somewhat needless when prefacing pages which enshrine Amelia; and where also are displayed Blear Eyed Moll in the prison yard of Newgate, as Newgate was twenty years before the prison reforms of Howard were heard of; Justice Thrasher and his iniquities; the 'diabolisms' of My Lord and of his tool Trent; the ruinous miseries of excessive gambling; and the abuses of duelling. Indeed the avowedly didactic purpose of the moralist seems at times to cloud a little the fine perception of the artist. There are pa.s.sages, in this book which, much as they redound to the honour of their writer, are indisputably heavy reading. But what shall not be forgiven to the creator of Amelia. ”To have invented that character,” cries Thackeray, also becoming didactic, ”is not only a triumph of art, but it is a good action.” And he tells us how with all his heart he loves and admires the 'kindest and sweetest lady in the world'; and how he thinks of her as faithfully as though he had breakfasted with her that morning in her drawing-room, or should meet her that afternoon in the Park.

It is recorded that Fielding received from Andrew Millar 1000 for the copyright of _Amelia_. But the reception of the new novel, after the first rush for copies, seems to have done little credit either to the brains or to the heart of the public. And in the month following _Amelia's_ appearance, Fielding satirises the comments of the Town, in two numbers of his _Covent Garden Journal_; protesting that though he does not think his child to be entirely free from faults--”I know nothing human that is so,”--still ”surely she does not deserve the Rancour with which she hath been treated by the Public.” As ironic specimens of the faults complained of in his heroine, he quotes the accusations that her not abusing her husband ”for having lost Money at Play, when she saw his Heart was already almost broke by it, was _contemptible Meanness_”; that she condescends to dress her husband's supper, and to dress her children, to whom moreover she shows too much kindness; that she once mentions the DEVIL; that she is a _low_ character; and that the beauty of her face is hopelessly flawed by a carriage accident. Such are some of the charges brought against the lovely Amelia by the ”Beaus, Rakes, fine Ladies, and several formal Persons with bushy wigs and canes at their Noses,” who, in Fielding's satire, crowd the Court where his book is placed on trial for the crime of dullness. Then Fielding himself steps forward, and after pleading for this his 'favourite Child,' on whom he has bestowed ”a more than ordinary Pains in her Education,” he declares, with the same hasty petulance that characterised that previous outburst in the preface to _David Simple_, that indeed he ”will trouble the World no more with any children of mine by the same Muse.” Two months later the _Gentleman's Magazine_ prints a spirited appeal against this resolution. ”His fair heroine's nose has in my opinion been too severely handled by some modern critics,” [4] writes Criticulus, after a pa.s.sage of warm praise for the characterisation, the morality, and the 'n.o.ble reflections of the book'; and he proceeds to point out that the writings of such critics ”will never make a sufficient recompense to the world, if _Mr Fielding_ adheres to what I hope he only said in his warmth and indignation of this injurious treatment, that he will never trouble the public with any more writings of this kind.” The words of the enlightened _Criticulus_ echo sadly when we remember that in little more than two years the great genius and the great heart of Henry Fielding were to be silenced.

The _London Magazine_ for 1751 devotes the first nine columns of its December number to a resume of the novel, and continues this compliment in another nine columns of appendix. With a fine patronage the reviewer concludes that ”upon the whole, the story is amusing, the characters kept up, and many reflections which [sic] are useful, if the reader will but take notice of them, which in this unthinking age it is to be feared very few will.” Some imperfections he kindly excuses on the score of ”the author's hurry of business in administering impartial justice to his majesty's good people”; but he cannot excuse what he declares to be the ridicule of _Liberty_ in Book viii.; and he solemnly exhorts the author that as ”he has in this piece very justly exposed some of the private vices and follies of the present age” so he should in his next direct his satire against political corruption, otherwise 'he and his patrons' will be accused of compounding the same. [5] It seems incredible that any suggestion should ever have attached to the author of _Pasquin_ and the _Register_, as to one who could condone public corruption. And as for the accusation of tampering with ”Liberty” the like charge was brought, we may remember, by the ”Happy Cobler of Portugal Street” against Fielding's _Inquiry into the Encrease of Robbers_. The literary cobblers who pursued _Amelia_ with the abuse of their poor pens may very well be consigned to the oblivion of their political brother. The comment of one hostile pen cannot however be dismissed as coming from a literary cobbler, and that is the 'sickening' abuse, to use Thackeray's epithet, which Richardson dishonoured himself in flinging at his great contemporary. That abuse the sentimentalist poured out very freely on _Amelia_; but, as Mr Austin Dobson says, ”in cases of this kind _parva seges satis est_, and Amelia has long since outlived both rival malice and contemporary coldness. It is a proof of her author's genius that she is even more intelligible to our age than she was to her own.” [6]

In Fielding's satiric description of the Court before which his Amelia stood her trial, he describes himself as an 'old gentleman.' The adjective seems hardly applicable to a man of forty five; but, to quote again from Mr Austin Dobson, ”however it may have chanced, whether from failing health or otherwise, the Fielding of _Amelia_ is suddenly a far older man than the Fielding of _Tom Jones_. The robust and irrepressible vitality, the full veined delight of living, the energy of observation and strength of satire, which characterise the one, give place in the other to a calmer retrospection, a more compa.s.sionate humanity, a more benignant criticism of life.” Murphy's Irish tongue declares a similar feeling in his comparison of the pages of this, the last of the three great novels, to the calm of the setting sun; a sun that had first broken forth in the 'morning glory' of _Joseph Andrews_, and had attained its 'highest warmth and splendour' in the inimitable pages of _Tom Jones_. There is indeed a mature wisdom and patience in Amelia such as none but a pedant could demand of her enchanting younger sister Sophia. In these later pages Sophia has grown up into a gracious womanhood, while losing none of her girlhood's gaiety and charm. That Amelia, his older and wiser though scarce sadder child, was the nearest, as he himself tells us, to Fielding's own heart, is one more indication that here is the perfected image of that beloved wife, from whose youthful grace and beauty his genius had already modelled one exquisite memorial.

[1] _Anecdotes_. Mrs Piozzi. p. 221.

[2] Letters and Works of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Introductory Anecdotes, p. cxxiii.

[3] Ibid. Vol. ii. p. 289.

[4] It is curious that to this unlucky incident, based according to Lady Louisa Stuart, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's grand-daughter, on a real accident to Mrs Fielding, Dr Johnson attributed the failure of the book with the public: ”that vile broken nose ruined the sale,” he declared.

Early in January Fielding himself protests in his _Covent Garden Journal_ that every reader of any intelligence would have discovered that the effects of Amelia's terrible carriage accident had been wholly remedied by ”a famous Surgeon”; and that ”the Author of her History, in a hurry, forgot to inform his Readers of that Particular.” The particular has by now fallen into its due insignificance, and, save for Johnson's explanation therein of the poor sale of the book, is scarce worth recalling.

[5] _London Magazine_. December 1751. p. 531 and Appendix.

[6] _Fielding_. Austin Dobson. p. 161.

CHAPTER XV

JOURNALIST AND MAGISTRATE

”However vain or romantic the Attempt may seem I am sanguine enough to aim at serving the n.o.ble Interests of Religion, Virtue, and good Sense, by these my lucubrations.”

The _Covent Garden Journal_. No. 5.

Nothing could be more characteristic of Fielding's active spirit than were the early months of 1752. For, no sooner had he deposited the four volumes of _Amelia_ in the hands of the public, essaying to win his readers over to a love of virtue and a hatred of vice, by placing before their eyes that true ”model of human life,” than we find him launching a direct attack on the follies and evils of the age, by means of his old weapon, the press.

The first number of the _Covent Garden Journal_ appeared on the 4th of January, and its pages, produced under Fielding's own management and apparently largely written by his own pen, provided satires on folly, invectives against vice, and incitements to goodness and sense, delivered in the name of one _Sir Alexander Drawcansir, Knt. Censor of Great Britain_. [1] The new paper ran but for seventy-two numbers; perhaps for all the wit and learning, the fire and zest of its columns, the public were reluctant to buy their own las.h.i.+ngs. But it may be doubted whether, except in the pages of his three great novels, Henry Fielding ever revealed himself more completely than in these his last informal 'lucubrations.' Here, the active Justice, the accomplished scholar, the lawyer, and man of the world, the first wit of his day, talks to us of a hundred topics, chosen indeed on the spur of the moment, but discussed in his own incomparable words, and with the now mature authority of one, who had ”dived into the inmost Recesses of Human Nature.” No subject is too abstruse, none too trifling, for _Mr Censor_ to illumine. Freed from the political bands of the earlier newspapers, this last _Journal_, produced be it remembered by a man in shattered health, and distracted by the squalid business of a Bow Street Court-room, ranges over an amazing compa.s.s of life and manners.

Thus, one January morning, _Sir Alexander's_ readers would open their paper to find him deploring the decline of ”a Religion sometime ago professed in this Country, and which, if my Memory fails me not was called Christian.” The following Sat.u.r.day they are presented with a learned and pleasant argument to prove that every male critic should be eighteen years of age, and ”BE ABLE TO READ.” A few days later the pages of writers purveying the prevalent ”Infidelity, Scurrility, and Indecency” are ingeniously allotted to various uses. In February the _Journal_ accords a n.o.ble tribute ”to that great Triumvirate Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift”; not indeed ”for that Wit and Humour alone, which they all so eminently possesst, but because they all endeavoured with the utmost Force of their Wit and Humour, to expose and extirpate those Follies and Vices which chiefly prevailed in their several Countries.” The design of Aristophanes and Rabelais on the other hand, appears to _Mr Censor_, if he may speak his opinion freely, ”very plainly to have been to ridicule all Sobriety, Modesty, Decency, Virtue, and Religion out of the world.” From such considerations it is an easy pa.s.sage to a definition of 'real Taste' as derived from a ”nice Harmony between the Imagination and the Judgment”; and to these final censorial warnings:--”_Evil Communications corrupt good Manners_ is a quotation of St Paul from Menander. EVIL BOOKS CORRUPT AT ONCE BOTH OUR MANNERS AND OUR TASTE.” Four days after this learned 'lucubration' the voice of the warm-hearted magistrate speaks in a reminder of the prevailing abject misery of the London poor who ”in the most miserable lingering Manner do daily perish for Want in this Metropolis.” And in almost the next number his Honour gives his readers letters from the fair _Cordelia_, from _Sarah Scandal_, and from other correspondents, of a wit pleasant enough to drive London's poverty far from their minds. Two days after attending to these ladies, the _Censor_ takes up his keenest weapons in an attack on that ”detestable vice of slander” by which is taken away the ”_immediate Jewel of a Man's Soul_,”

his good name; a crime comparable to that of murder. Here we have _Sir Alexander_ speaking with the same voice as did the playwright and journalist of ten years previously, when he declared, in his _Miscellanies_, that to stab a man's character 'in the dark' is no less an offence than to stab his flesh in the same treacherous manner. Indeed, throughout these last columns of weekly satire, wit, and learning, Fielding remains true to the constant tenor of his genius. He exposes the miser, the seducer of innocence, the self-seeker, the place-hunter, the degraded vendor of moral poison, the 'charitable' hypocrite, with the same fierce moral energy as that with which, when but a lad of one and twenty, he first a.s.sailed the vices of the society in which his own lot was cast.

His unconquerable energy, an energy that neither sickness nor distress could abate, still a.s.saults that ”cursed Maxim ... that Everybody's business is n.o.body's.” And his wit has lost none of its point when thrusting at the lesser follies of the day; at the fair Clara's devotion to her pet monkey; at the insolence of the Town Beau at the playhouse; at the arrogance of carters in the streets; at the vagaries of fas.h.i.+on according to which Belinda graces the theatre with yards of ruff one day, and on the next discards that covering so entirely that the snowy scene in the boxes ”becomes extremely delightful to the eyes of every Beholder.”