In the summer or autumn of 1737 the curtain was finally rung down on all the 'noise and hurry,' the achievements and audacities of Fielding's "little stage"; a few months later, and the country retirement at Stour had also become but a memory of that short life into which he managed to compress "more variety of Scenes than many People who live to be very old."
[CHAPTER VI]
BAR STUDENT. JOURNALIST
"the ... Covetous, the Prodigal, the Ambitious, the Voluptuous, the Bully, the Vain, the Hypocrite, the Flatterer, the Slanderer, call aloud for the Champion's Vengeance."--The Champion, Dec. 22, 1739.
There is no record of when or how Fielding disposed of his share in the management of the New Theatre in the Haymarket. But on June 21 1737, Walpole's Bill for regulating the stage received, as we have seen, the royal assent; and there can be no doubt that Sir Robert would at once apply his newly acquired powers to removing the dances of the fiddler, Mr Quiddam, and the drunken consolations of Mr Pillage, from the Haymarket boards, if indeed these gentlemen had not anticipated events by already removing themselves. We may safely assume that Henry Fielding's career as political dramatist came to an abrupt conclusion some time in the summer of [1737]. [1]
It remains a matter for speculation why, after seven years spent in producing a stream of not unsuccessful social comedies and farces, leading up to a final and brilliant success in the field of political satiric drama, Fielding should have thrown up the stage as a whole, when suddenly debarred from those party onslaughts which had occupied but a fraction of his dramatic energies. The cause was not any lack of popularity. "The farces written by Mr Fielding," wrote Murphy in 1762, "were almost all of them very successful, and many of them are still acted every winter, with a continuance of approbation." And it is obvious that the fashionable vices and follies of the time afforded ample inducement to a satiric dramatist to continue 'laying about him,' even when Ministerial offences had been rendered inviolate by Act of Parliament. Neither was Fielding's sanguine temperament likely to be daunted by the single failure of his farce Eurydice, which had been damned at Drury Lane on February 19 of this same year: "disagreeable impressions," Murphy tells us, "never continued long upon his mind." The most satisfactory solution of the matter seems to be that now, in the approaching maturity of his powers, the 'Father of the English Novel' was becoming conscious that the true field for his genius lay in a hitherto unattempted form of imaginative narration, and not within the five acts of comedy or farce. The entirely original conceptions of a Joseph Andrews and a Jonathan Wild may already have begun to captivate the vigorous energies of his mind. We have his own word for assigning "some years" to the writing of Tom Jones; it is therefore not unreasonable to suppose that the conception of the first English "Comic Epic Poem in Prose" may date as far back as the summer of 1737.
Leaving surmise for fact, it is certain that this year marks the dividing line in Fielding's life.
Henceforth he ceases to be the witty, facile, popular dramatist; and he enters slowly on his birthright as the first in time, if not in genius, of English novelists. To this complete severance from the theatre belongs his own remark that "he left off writing for the stage when he ought to have begun." Arrived at a late maturity, and with accumulated stores of observation and insight,--"he saw the latent sources of human action," says Murphy--his genius happily turned into a channel carved, with splendid originality, for itself alone. After nine years of servitude to the limitations of dramatic construction, limitations he was wont to relieve, as his friend James Harris tells us, by "pleasantly though perhaps rather freely" damning the man who invented fifth acts, Fielding was now soon to discover his freedom in the spacious, hitherto unadventured, regions of prose fiction. But genius, especially genius with wife and child to support, cannot maintain life on inspiration alone; and, accordingly, the ex-dramatist now flung himself, with characteristic impetuosity and courage, into a struggle for independence at the Bar, perhaps the most arduous profession, under all the circumstances, that he could have chosen. For a reputation as the writer of eighteen comedies, and as the reckless political dramatist whose boisterous energies had set the town ringing with Pasquin and the Register, the fame in short of being the successful manager of The Great Mogul's Company of Comedians, was surely the last reputation in the world to bring a man briefs from cautious attorneys. And, with whatever hopes of political patronage, any temperament less buoyant might well have hesitated to embark on reading for the Bar at the age of thirty. But "by dificulties," says his earliest biographer, "his resolution was never subdued; on the contrary they only roused him to struggle through them with a peculiar spirit and magnanimity." So, within six months of the closing down of his little theatre under Walpole's irate hand, Fielding had formally entered himself as a student at the Middle Temple.
The entry in the books of that society runs as follows:--
[574 G] 1 Nov'ris. 1737.
Henricus Fielding, de East Stour in Com Dorset Ar, filius et haeres apparens Brig: Gen'lis: Edmundi Fielding admissus est in Societatem Medii Templi Lond specialiter at obligatur una cum &c.
Et dat pro fine 4. 0. 0.
Of the ensuing two and a half years of student life in the Temple we know practically nothing, beyond one vivacious picture of Harry Fielding's attack upon the law. "His application while a student in the Temple," writes Murphy, "was remarkably intense; and though it happened that the early taste he had taken of pleasure would occasionally return upon him, and conspire with his spirits and vivacity to carry him into the wild enjoyments of the town, yet it was particular in him that amidst all his dispositions nothing could suppress the thirst he had for knowledge, and the delight he felt in reading; and this prevailed in him to such a degree, that he has been frequently known by his intimates, to retire late at night from a tavern to his chambers, and there read and make extracts from the most abstruse authors, for several hours before he went to bed; so powerful were the vigour of his constitution and the activity of his mind."