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."
[CHAPTER X]
PATRIOTIC JOURNALISM
"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.