With the appearance of Tom Jones Fielding steps into his own place among the immortals. But lofty as his genius was, his feet were firmly planted in the world which he relished so keenly. To no man could be applied more happily the motto chosen by him for his title page, mores hominum multorum vidit--he saw the manners of many men. This characteristic emerges in a personal reminiscence of the novelist, at the very moment when the sheets of Tom Jones were passing through the press. The great-nephew of his intimate friend Mrs Hussey relates; "Henry Fielding was fond of colouring his pictures of life with the glowing and variegated tints of Nature, by conversing with persons of every situation and calling, as I have frequently been informed by one of my great aunts, the late Mrs Hussey, who knew him intimately. I have heard her say, that Mr Fielding never suffered his talent for sprightly conversation to mildew for a moment; and that his manners were so gentlemanly, that even with the lower classes, with which he frequently condescended particularly to chat such as Sir Roger de Coverley's old friends, the Vauxhall water-men, they seldom outstepped the limits of propriety. My aunt ... [was] a fashionable sacque and mantua-maker, and lived in the Strand, ... One day Mr Fielding observed to Mrs Hussey, that he was then engaged in writing a novel, which he thought would be his best production; and that he intended to introduce into it the characters of all his friends. Mrs Hussey, with a smile, ventured to remark, that he must have many niches, and that surely they must already be filled. 'I assure you, my dear madam,' replied he, 'there shall be a bracket for a bust of you.' Some time after this, he informed Mrs Hussey that the work was in the press; but, immediately recollecting that he had forgotten his promise to her, went to the printer, and was time enough to insert, in vol. iii. p. 17, where he speaks of the shape of Sophia Western--'Such charms are there in affability, and so sure is it to attract the praises of all kinds of people.... It may indeed be compared to the celebrated Mrs Hussey.' To which observation he has given the following note: 'A celebrated mantua-maker in the Strand, famous for setting off the shapes of [women].'" [10]
Here is yet further proof, that Fielding loved not only to see the manners of many men, but also to render them whatever service lay within his power. Never were the warmest heart and the loftiest genius more happily united than in the creator of the English novel.
Lyttelton not only suggested and approved the great Comic Epic, and enabled distressed genius to live while composing it; his own worth and benevolence, together with those of the generous Allen, afforded Fielding, as he tells us, the materials for the picture here presented of Allworthy. "The World," he says, speaking of this picture, "will not, I believe, make me the Compliment of thinking I took it from myself. I care not: This they shall own, that the two Persons from whom I have taken it, that is to say, two of the best and worthiest Men in the World, are strongly and zealously my Friends." And a point of still closer personal interest is the fact, already noticed, that in the lovely character and person of Sophia Western, Fielding raised an enduring memorial to that beloved wife whose death had occurred a few years before the publication of Tom Jones. The authenticity of the portrait is explicitly stated in the Invocation prefixed to Book xiii. Apostrophizing that 'gentle Maid,' bright 'Love of Fame,' Fielding bids her, in the eighteenth century phrase that falls so strangely on a modern ear, "Foretell me that some tender Maid, whose Grandmother is yet unborn, hereafter, when under the fictitious Name of Sophia she reads the real worth which once existed in my Charlotte, shall, from her sympathetic Breast, send forth the Heaving Sigh." Then follows, immediately, his own desire that he too may live in the knowledge and honour of far distant readers. Fielding lies buried under southern skies, far from his wife's English grave; but in the immortal pages of his masterpiece they are not divided.
[CHAPTER XII]
MR JUSTICE FIELDING
"The principal Duty which every Man owes is to his Country."
Enquiry into the ... Increase of Robbers.
To have created the English novel were, it might seem, achievement enough to tire for a while the most vigorous of intellects; but to the author of Tom Jones the apathy of repose was unknown. At no period of Fielding's short life can he be discerned as doing nothing; and, indeed, to an insight so penetrating, to an ardour so irrepressible, the England of George the Second can have afforded but very little inducement to inaction.
Thus, in the one month of October 1748, the pages of Tom Jones must have been nearing completion, if indeed the sheets were not already passing through the press. The Hanoverian philippics of "Mr Trott-Plaid" were still resounding in the Jacobite's Journal. While, on the 26th. of the month, Fielding's oaths were received for an entirely new rôle, that of a Justice of the Peace for [Westminster]. [1] Ten days later the Jacobite's Journal had ceased to exist; and that a rumour was abroad connecting this demise of the Journal with the bestowal of a new and arduous post on its editor appears from a paragraph in the London Evening Post. On Nov. 8, that organ prepares its readers for the fact that the now defunct "Mr Trott-Plaid" may possibly "rise awful in the Form of a Justice." Within four weeks of this announcement 'Justice Fielding's' name appears for the first time in the Police-news of the day, in a committal dated December [10th] [2] . And two days later he is sending three thieves to the Gatehouse, and admitting a suspected thief to bail, "after an Examination which lasted several hours." And it is interesting to notice that throughout this first month of his magisterial work the now 'awful form' of Justice Henry Fielding was kept constantly tempered in the public mind by the fact of his still undiminished popularity as a dramatist. In this December his comedies, with the inimitable 'romp' Kitty Clive as Miss Lucy, or the Intrigueing Chambermaid or Chloe, as the case might be, were played no fewer than nine times on the Drury Lane boards.
Scarcely had Fielding bent his genius to these new responsibilities of examining Westminster suspects and sending the rogues of that city to prison, than he appears preparing for an extension of those duties over the county of Middlesex. To be a county magistrate in 1750, however, necessitated the holding of landed estate worth £100 per annum; and Fielding's estate, for many years, seems to have been his pen. In this difficulty he turned to the Duke of Bedford, whose public virtues, and private generosity, were so soon to be acknowledged in the Dedication of Tom Jones. It was but three weeks after his appointment that the Westminster magistrate wrote as follows to the giver of those "princely Benefactions":
"Bow Street. Decr. 13. 1748.
"My Lord,