In the gloomy procession of drink, gluttony, and syphilis which makes up
so large a part of history—always excepting for a moment Joan of Arc,
that “one white angel of war” whom the English and French burned because
she did not and could not ever become mature, as I have shown in _Post
Mortem_—there is at least one very great man whom one can only pity, if
my ideas about him are correct, without the faintest trace of censure—the
author of that “foul, coarse and abominable” book, _Tom Jones_, which has
been such a nightmare to the prude and yet shows human nature better than
most of the books which are welcomed in country parsonages.
On January 1st, 1753, a young servant girl named Betty Canning
disappeared from a house in Aldermanbury, London, where she had been
employed as a servant; she reappeared on the 29th of the month at her
mother’s home, starving, half-clad, and with a fine story of abduction
and imprisonment. She identified an old gipsy-woman as her assailant,
who, being a gipsy, old and ugly, was promptly seized and sentenced
to be hanged after the light-hearted manner of the eighteenth century.
Though London was divided into two camps, for and against Betty Canning,
there seems to have been no talk of a vigilance committee, probably
because the great heart of the people was not stirred by evening
newspapers about the woes of a little servant. One of Betty’s witnesses
was a little servant girl named Virtue Hall, whose delightful name alone
should have induced credence; and Virtue appeared before Fielding, who
was then a magistrate looking into the mystery of Betty Canning, to
support Betty’s claims for vengeance. If the gipsy had been a man no
doubt she would have been hanged promptly; but, as she was a woman, the
psychology of those days could not imagine why Betty should have accused
her of abduction and a certain amount of trouble was taken to test the
truth of Betty’s accusations. As a result the gipsy was by a miracle let
off, and Betty got seven years for perjury. Nowadays it seems quite an
ordinary sort of case, where a hysterical girl will perjure her immortal
soul in order to attract attention to herself, whatever may be the
results to others; but the real interest to us lies in the light that
it casts on the sick mind of Fielding himself; for he actually believed
Virtue and published a pamphlet in support of her evidence.
This done, Fielding’s health began to warn him that he must take care
of himself, and he set about curing the chronic gout which had long
crippled him. He took an ancient remedy of Galen’s, called “the Duke of
Portland’s remedy”—Fielding was always fond of experimenting upon himself
with quack medicines—and was advised to try the waters of Bath. Meantime
he had busied himself with dogging the footsteps of no less than five
gangs of street-robbers; and in the midst of the turmoil there came a
peremptory message from the Duke of Newcastle to attend at Newcastle
House and discuss the depredations of yet more cutthroats. For months
he worked hard at the pursuit, with splendid results for the peace of
London, but disastrous results upon his own health, for he had become
deeply jaundiced and “fallen away to a shadow.” No more was to be seen
that handsome Harry Fielding who had worked so hard for literature and
civic peace; whose generosity and goodness to the poor, outcast, and
oppressed has become proverbial; but a wasted, dropsical man of pinched
face, who could hardly leave his chair, so crippled was he with the gout
and so heavy with the dropsy. The time had long gone by for Bath, if
indeed it had ever existed. The winter of 1753-4 was terribly severe and
his doctors told him that he must seek a warmer climate. Even Bishop
Berkeley’s tar-water had failed, so things must have looked black indeed
for Fielding as he was carried laboriously on board the ship _Queen of
Portugal_ for the long voyage to Lisbon. His wife, the successor of that
beloved woman whom he has immortalised in _Sophia Western_ and _Amelia
Booth_, accompanied him to nurse him, though I am afraid the poor lady
was not much use as a nurse to a sick man whose every movement caused him
pain; the very winds fought against him, and it was weeks before the ship
could get away from the Isle of Wight into blue water.
It must have been a miserable voyage for Fielding; he was confined to
the cabin because he could not mount the companion ladder owing to his
weakness and pain. Twice he had to be tapped for his dropsy; the food
was bad, his wife confined to her bed with a terrible toothache that
could not be relieved because the tooth seems to have had a peculiar root
that defied all attempts at removal; but he himself, sitting propped
up in the stuffy cabin, wrote the most delightful and uncomplaining
journal imaginable, which is quite as brilliant as, and even more moving
than, any of his novels. It is written in Fielding’s own half-jocular,
half-satirical and wholly sympathetic style, but is entirely free from
that occasional coarseness that has shocked even a generation that seems
to revel in the sex-neurotic and introspective psychoanalytical novel.
Better to use an occasional naughty word than to give the impression of
being constantly possessed by unclean thoughts of sex, which seems to be
the unhappy fate of some modern novelists.
Although he has given us an excellent description of his symptoms it
is difficult to reduce it to terms of modern pathology and to name his
actual sickness. I thought at first that he must have had cirrhosis of
the liver, because it is well known to cause severe dropsy, wasting,
haggard face, and despair. But after carefully reconsidering the symptoms
I came to the conclusion that such an idea was untenable, for cirrhosis
is not noted for its jaundice, and moreover it is caused by long and
continuous drinking, whereas Fielding is known to have been a reasonably
abstemious drinker. But there is an even more terrible disease which
would even better than cirrhosis exactly suit the conditions of our
problem, cancer. If we imagine Fielding to have suffered from a certain
form of internal malignant tumour spreading to the peritoneum, all his
symptoms would be at once explained, deep jaundice, dropsy, wasting and
frightful appearance. I am assuming that Fielding’s form of “dropsy” was
what we now call “ascites,” that is to say, an outpouring of serous fluid
into the peritoneum. His so-called asthma may possibly have been due to
heart trouble owing to the strain on his heart caused by oppression from
the dropsy, and his “gout” to septic disease of his teeth, which would
account for the toothless condition which so disfigured him towards the
end of his life and prevented him from eating the ship’s food.
Unlike some writers who, being possessed by their own unconscious minds,
are led into filth, Fielding, though occasionally coarse, is never dirty.
I remember during some months, when all the cats, dogs and roosters in
the neighbourhood combined in an assault upon sleep, and an occasional
kookooburra joined in the noise, I read through the whole of _Amelia_ and
thought it one of the most delightful books in the world; and a rereading
of it tends to confirm me in that belief. Amelia, for all her scarred
nose, is one of the most charming women in fiction, though she had a
great deal to put up with in her husband, Captain Booth, and though she
_would_ call him “Billy.”
Fielding himself was what the Americans would call a “he-man.” He was not
one of the miserable, whining, introspective heroes of post-war fiction;
and in Tom Jones and Captain Booth he has drawn a man as he thought a
man should be, and as good men probably are if we would stop our ears
to the howls of the old women. And these heroes of his were probably
drawn from himself. That terrible ironic creature, Jonathan Wild, of
course represents his knowledge of the Old Bailey; it is a grim book,
and far too ironical for most people, though it has not the sardonic and
shuddering laughter of Dean Swift and his Struldbrugs.
But if he had cancer when he started on his last voyage he must have
had it coming on when he believed Virtue’s tarradiddle, and possibly
it was because of his poor health that he believed her. No man with a
cancer beginning to gnaw at his vitals could possibly take the trouble to
cross-examine a brazen hussy who was determined to deceive him, and we
can even understand that chapter in _Amelia_ when he stops the narrative
to deliver a violent attack upon the medical profession, possibly because
when he was writing _Amelia_ he must occasionally have felt the slight
twinge and noticed the slight jaundice that would be the first symptom
that all was not well.
But he was a very kind man, even as a magistrate. He knew too much about
human nature to be harsh with anybody, and possibly Virtue, in telling
untruths, had touched a soft spot in his generous heart; in other words,
Virtue and Betty must have “vamped” him.