|NOT far from where these lines are written, on the right-hand side of
the road from Acton to Ealing stands a house called Ford-hook. Shut in
by walls, and jealously guarded by surrounding trees, it offers
itself but furtively to the incurious passer-by. Nevertheless, it has
traditions which might well give him pause. Even in this century, it
enjoyed the distinction of belonging to Lady Byron, the poet's wife;
and in its existing drawing-room, 'Ada, sole daughter of my house and
heart,' was married to William, Earl of Lovelace. But an earlier and
graver memory than this lingers about the spot. More than one hundred
and forty-three years ago, on a certain Wednesday in June, the cottage
which formerly occupied the site was the scene of one of the saddest
leave-takings in literature. On this particular day had gathered about
its door a little group of sympathetic friends and relatives, who were
evidently assembled to bid sorrowful good-bye to some one, for whom, as
the clock was striking twelve, a coach had just drawn up. Presently a
tall man, terribly broken and emaciated, but still wearing the marks of
dignity and kindliness on his once handsome face, made his appearance,
and was assisted, with some difficulty (for he had practically lost the
use of his limbs), into the vehicle. An elderly, homely-looking woman,
and a slim girl of seventeen or eighteen, took their seats beside
him without delay; and, amid the mingled tears and good wishes of the
spectators, the coach drove off swiftly in the direction of London. The
sick man was Henry Fielding, the famous novelist; his companions, his
second wife and his eldest daughter. He was dying of a complication of
diseases; and, like Peterborough and Doddridge before him, was setting
out in the forlorn hope of finding life and health at Lisbon. Since
Scott quoted them in 1821, the words in which his journal describes his
departure have been classic:
'_Wednesday, June_ 26, 1754.--On this day, the most melancholy sun I had
ever beheld arose, and found me awake at my house at Fordhook. By the
light of this sun, I was, in my own opinion, last to behold and take
leave of some of those creatures on whom I doated with a mother-like
fondness, guided by nature and passion, and uncured and unhardened by
all the doctrine of that philosophical school where I had learnt to bear
pains and to despise death.
'In this situation, as I could not conquer nature, I submitted entirely
to her, and she made as great a fool of me as she had ever done of any
woman whatsoever: under pretence of giving me leave to enjoy, she drew
me in to suffer the company of my little ones, during eight hours; and
I doubt not whether, in that time, I did not undergo more than in all my
distemper.'
Of Fielding's life, it may be said truly, that nothing in it became him
like the leaving it. At the moment of his starting for Lisbon, his case,
as is clear from the above quotation, was already regarded by himself
as desperate. To 'a lingering imperfect gout' had succeeded 'a deep
jaundice;' and to jaundice, asthma and dropsy. He was past the power
of the Duke of Portland's powder; past the famous tar-water of the good
Bishop Berkeley. Had he acknowledged his danger earlier, his life might
have been prolonged, though, in all probability, but for brief space.
His health had for some time been breaking; he was worn out by his
harassing vocation as a Middlesex Magistrate; and he feared that, in the
event of his death, his family must starve. This last consideration it
was that tempted him to defer his retirement to the country in order to
break up a notorious gang of street-robbers, and so earn (as he fondly
hoped) some government provision for those helpless ones whom he must
leave behind him. He succeeded in his task, although he failed of his
reward; and what was worse, as regards his health, much irrecoverable
opportunity had been lost. By the time that his labours were at an
end, he was a doomed man. The Bath waters could effect nothing in the
advanced stage of his malady; and, after a short sojourn at his 'little
house' at Ealing, he took his passage in the 'Queen of Portugal,'
Richard Veal, master, for Lisbon. Of this voyage he has left his own
account; and the posthumous volume thus produced is a curiosity of
literature. It is one of the most touching records in the language of
fortitude under trial; and it is not surprising to learn--as we do from
Hazlitt--that it was a favourite book with another much-enduring mortal,
the gentle and uncomplaining 'Elia.'
In these days of steam power, and floating palaces, and luxurious
sick-room appliances, it is not easy to realize the intolerable tedium
and discomfort, especially to an invalid, of a passage in a second-rate
sailing-ship in the middle of the last century. When, after a rapid but
fatiguing two hours' drive, Fielding reached Redriff (Rotherhithe),
he had to undergo a further penance. The 'Queen of Portugal' lay
in midstream, a circumstance which necessitated his being carried
perilously across slippery ground, transferred to a wherry, and finally
hoisted over the ship's side in a chair. Nor were his troubles by any
means at an end when he found himself securely deposited in the cabin.
The voyage, already more than once deferred, was again postponed. First,
the vessel could not be cleared at the Custom House until Thursday,
because Wednesday was a holiday (Proclamation Day); then the skipper
himself announced that he should not weigh anchor before Saturday.
Meanwhile, from his unusual exertions and other causes, Fielding's main
malady had gained so considerably that he was obliged to summon Dr.
William Hunter from Covent Garden to tap him--an operation which he had
already more than once undergone with considerable relief. On Sunday the
vessel dropped down to Gravesend, reaching the Nore on July 1. Then, for
a week, they were becalmed in the Downs, making Ryde just in time to lie
safely on the Motherbank during a violent storm. Before the ship left
Ryde, the 23rd of July had arrived; and it was not until the second
week in August that she sailed up the Tagus, having taken seven weeks
to perform a journey which then, at most, occupied three, and is now
generally accomplished in about four days.
If the 'Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon' were no more than the chronicle
of the facts thus summarized--nay, if it were no more than what Walpole
flippantly calls the 'account how his [Fielding's] dropsy was treated
and teased by an innkeeper's wife in the Isle of Wight,' it would
require and deserve but little consideration. That it is a literary
masterpiece is not pretended; nor, in the circumstances of its
composition, could a masterpiece be looked for--even from a master. But
it is interesting not so much by the events which it narrates as by the
indirect light which it throws upon its writer's character, upon his
manliness, his patience, and that inextinguishable cheerfulness which,
he says in the 'Proposal for the Poor,' 'was always natural to me.' His
sufferings must have been considerable (he had to be tapped again before
the voyage ended); and yet, with the exception of some not resentful
comment upon the inhumanity of certain watermen and sailors who had
jeered at his ghastly appearance, no word of complaint as to his own
condition is allowed to escape him. On the other hand, his solicitude
for his fellow-travellers is unmistakable. One of the most touching
pages in the little volume relates how, when his wife, worn out with
toothache, lay sleeping lightly in the state room, he and the skipper,
who was deaf, sat speechless over a 'small bowl of punch' in the
adjoining cabin rather than run the risk of waking her by a sound. 'My
dear wife and child,' he says, speaking of a storm in the Channel, 'must
pardon me, if what I did not conceive to be any great evil to myself, I
was not much terrified with the thoughts of happening to them: in truth,
I have often thought they are both too good, and too gentle, to be
trusted to the power of any man I know, to whom they could possibly be
so trusted.' In another place he relates, quite in his best manner,
how he rebuked a certain churlish Custom-house officer for his want of
courtesy to Mrs. Fielding. At times one forgets that it is a dying man
who is writing, so invincible is that appetite for enjoyment which
made Lady Mary say he ought to have been immortal. Not long after they
reached Ryde he wrote to his half-brother and successor John (afterwards
Sir John) Fielding: 'I beg that on the Day you receive this Mrs. Daniel
[his mother-in-law] may know that we are just risen from Breakfast in
_Health and Spirits_ [the italics are ours] this twelfth Instant at 9
in the morning.' At Ryde they were shamefully entreated by the most
sharp-faced and tyrannical of landladies, in whose incommodious hostelry
they sought temporary refuge; and yet it is at Ryde that he chronicles
'the best, the pleasantest, and the merriest meal [in a barn], with more
appetite, more real, solid luxury, and more festivity, than was ever
seen in an entertainment at White's.' And almost the last lines of the
'Journal' recall a good supper in a Lisbon coffee-house for which they
'were as well charged, as if the bill had been made on the Bath road,
between Newbury and London.' But the pleasures of the table play a
subordinate part in the sick man's diary, and often only prompt a larger
subject, as when the John Dory which regales them at Torbay introduces
a disquisition on the improvement of the London fish supply. As might be
anticipated, some of his best passages deal with the humanity about him.
With characteristic reticence, he says little of his own companions, but
his pen strays easily into graphic sketches of the little' world of the
'Queen of Portugal.' The ill-conditioned Custom-house officer, already
mentioned; the military fop who comes to visit the captain at Spithead;
the sordid and shrewish Ryde landlady with her chuckleheaded nonentity
of a husband--are all touched by a hand which, if tremulous, betrays
no diminution of its cunning. Of all the potraits, however, that of the
skipper is the best. *
* The picture, it should be added, was not at first
presented in its racy entirety. When, in February, 1755, the
'Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon' was given to the world for
the benefit of Fielding's widow and children, although the
'Dedication to the Public' affirmed the book to be 'as it
came from the hands of the author,' many of the franker
touches which go to complete the full-length of Captain
Richard Veal, as well as sundry other particulars, were
withheld. This question is fully discussed in the
Introduction to the limited edition of the 'Journal,'
published in 1892 by the Chiswick Press.
The rough, illiterate, septuagenarian sea-captain, 'full of strange
oaths' and superstitions, despotic, irascible and good-natured,
awkwardly gallanting the ladies in all the splendours of a red coat,
cockade and sword, and heart-broken, privateer though he had been, when
his favourite kitten is smothered by a feather-bed, has all the elements
of a finished individuality. It is with respect to him that occurs
almost the only really dramatic incident of the voyage. A violent
dispute having arisen about the exclusive right of the passengers to
the cabin, Fielding resolved, not without misgivings, to quit the
ship, ordering a hoy for that purpose, and taking care, as became a
magistrate, to threaten Captain Veal with what that worthy feared more
than rock or quicksand, the terrors of retributary legal proceedings.
The rest may be told in the journalist's own words: 'The most distant
sound of law thus frightened a man, who had often, I am convinced, heard
numbers of cannon roar round him with intrepidity. Nor did he sooner see
the hoy approaching the vessel, than he ran down again into the cabin,
and, his rage being perfectly subsided, he tumbled on his knees, and a
little too abjectly implored for mercy.
'I did not suffer a brave man and an old man, to remain a moment in this
posture; but I immediately forgave him.' Most of those who have related
this anecdote end discreetly at this point. Fielding, however, is too
honest to allow us to place his forbearance entirely to the credit of
his magnanimity. 'And here, that I may not be thought the sly trumpeter
of my own praises, I do utterly disclaim all praise on the occasion.
Neither did the greatness of my mind dictate, nor the force of my
Christianity exact this forgiveness. To speak truth, I forgave him from
a motive which would make men much more forgiving, if they were much
wiser than they are; because it was convenient for me so to do.'
With the arrival of the 'Queen of Portugal' at Lisbon the 'Journal'
ends, and no further particulars of its writer are forthcoming. Two
months later he died in the Portuguese capital, and was buried among the
cypresses of the beautiful English cemetery. _Luget Britannia gremio non
dari Fovere natum_--is inscribed upon his tomb.