Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 9.djvu/156

 146 FIELDING despair and destitution by the tender kindness of two life long friends. In 1745 Fielding made a second successful venture in periodical literature. In November of that year, when London was agitated by the news of the preparations of the Jacobites for marching across the border, he issued the first number of the True Patriot, in which he brought all his powers of ridicule and his robust sense to the service of the established Government. He continued the publica tion of the True Patriot till the rebellion was suppressed. More than a year afterwards, in December 1747, he began another periodical, called The Jacobite Jo^lrnal, the object of which he stated to be &quot; to eradicate those feelings and sentiments which had been already so effectually crushed on the field of Culloden.&quot; In both these ventures he was pro bably assisted by his staunch friend Lyttelton. One of the reasons he gave for starting them was the lamentable ignorance of the common run of journalists, and the greater accuracy of the information at his command, a taunt and boast for which his rivals retaliated by copious personal abuse, and the accusation that he was in the pay of the Government. If Fielding was in the pay of the Govern ment, they made but a poor return for his support when it was no longer required. Soon after the discontinuance of the Jacobite Journal, towards the close of 1748, he obtained, again, it is said, through Lyttelton s assistance, the post of a paid Middlesex magistrate. In one of his earliest comedies Fielding had thrown hearty ridicule on these functionaries, who had brought their office into disrepute by their scandalous venality. It was notorious that they eked out their small fees by selling justice to the highest bidder. When Fielding himself accepted such an office his enemies exulted loudly over the step as a degradation. About the same time he gave them another handle for scurrility by marrying his deceased wife s maid. This last act, as Lady Mary Montague said, &quot; was not so discreditable to his character as it may sound.&quot; &quot; The maid had few personal charms, but was an excellent creature, devotedly attached to her mistress, and almost broken-hearted for her loss. In the first agonies of his own grief, which approached to frenzy, he found no relief but from weeping along with her, no solace, when a degree calmer, but in talking to her of the angel they mutually regretted. This made her his habitual confidential associate; and in process of time he began to think he could not give his children a tenderer mother, or secure for himself a more faithful housekeeper and nurse. At least this was what he told his friends, and it is certain that her conduct as his wife confirmed it, and fully justified his good opinion.&quot; Fielding s enemies did not scruple to say that in his dis charge of his duties as a justice he was no better than his own Justice Thrasher ; but there was no foundation for the charge, it was only a personal retort in the coarse manner of the time. We have, on the contrary, in the zeal with which Fielding applied himself to his work, an instance of that earnest side of his character which is perhaps kept too much in the background in Thackeray s charming lecture on him as a humorist. One of his favourite themes was the preposterousness of undertaking any work without the requisite knowledge, and he showed by his published charge to a grand jury, by pamphlets on various notorious cases, and by an elaborate inquiry into the causes of crime and the most advisable remedies, that he was himself a diligent student of the numerous volumes of the law which he ridi culed Justice Thrasher for neglecting. He was sufficiently sensitive to the spiteful calumnies of his literary antagonists to formally deny, in his Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon, that lie had been guilty of the corruption with which they charged him, declaring that, &quot; on the contrary, by compos ing instead of inflaming the quarrels of porters and beggars, and by refusing to take a shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not have had another left, he had reduced an income of about .500 a year, of the dirtiest money upon earth &quot; the income of the justice came from fees &quot;to little more than .300, a considerable portion of which remained with his clerk.&quot; A few months after his appointment to the justiceship, in February 1749, Fielding published his masterpiece The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. Here we have the ripe fruits of his life. His varied experience supplied his imagination with abundant suggestions of incident. His long struggle with his pen far a livelihood had given elasticity to his style. His mind was full ; the hackwork, which would have exhausted poorer energies had mobilized his, and made him perfect master of his resources. Hard minds, like stones, are not enriched by rolling ; but Fielding s mind was of the plastic sort, and went on gaining by its incessant movement. His heart, too, had remained as fresh as his brain. His own life had been far from, scrupulously pure, but he could still give the world &quot; a miracle of loveliest womanhood &quot; in Sophia Western. His name had been a byword and reproach in respectable circles from his early manhood upwards, but he could still write in deprecation of the cynical philosophy of Mandeville, and create a pattern English gentleman in Squire All- worthy. One would never imagine from reading Tom Jones that its author was a man of illustrious family who had treated his titled relations with airy independence, and been left by them to win a livelihood by the exercise of his own wits, unsupported by any of the sinecures which their influence might have placed at his disposal. There was no moralist of the time whose scorn was so heartily and steadily directed against vice, against profligacy, avarice, hypocrisy, meanness in every shape and size ; he made war without ceasing on all ungenerous emotions. In breaking with convention, he remained faithful to society. It is a curious circumstance that this true soldier in the war of humanity, like his great exemplar Cervantes, should be more often read for the sake of indelicate passages which he wrote in pursuance of fidelity to nature, than for the generous sentiment and wise philosophy with which his work as a whole is penetrated. But even this posthumous injustice he could have foreseen without ill-nature. Judging from Richardson s lament over his rival s continued lowness, and the anecdote told by Horace Walpole of his being found &quot; banqueting with a blind man and three Irishmen &quot; when some persons of quality wanted his services as a police magistrate, one might imagine that Fielding spent his leisure off the bench in gratifying his preference for low company. That he enjoyed the frank ness and originality of unconventional associates is likely enough ; but he has shown that he had more profitable employment for his leisure. In the first two years after he took office, he completed his last novel, Amelia. It has always been supposed that, in the relations between the somewhat frail but good-natured Captain Booth and his perfect wife Amelia, Fielding drew in some particulars at least from his own domestic life. Dr Johnson, who refused to read Joseph Andrews, and inferred from Tom Jones that Fielding was &quot; a blockhead &quot; and &quot; a barren rascal,&quot; owned that he was so taken by Amelia as to read it through at a sitting, and mentions as an evidence of its popularity that it was the only instance he knew- of the whole of a first edition being sold in one day. Mr Lawrence has pointed out that this last circumstance was due to the ingenuity of the publisher; still the sale was sufficiently rapid to be a tribute to the popularity of its predecessors from the same pen. A more substantial tribute to the author was the increasing price paid for his labours; he received 600 for Tom Jones, and 1000 for