A POSTHUMOUS WORK BY FIELDING.*
Mn. FRANK STOCKTON is in London just now, and he was present at the recent Authors' Dinner. Had any one, we wonder, the courageous indiscretion to ask the chronicler of the doings of the Rudder-Grangers—most original and unaccountable of story-tellers—whether the author of Tons Jones had helped him, with a hint, to his Merry Chanter? If he has not, then here we find a coincidence which might furnish an instance to Mr. Puff, for nothing so matter-of- factly funny as Mr. Stockton's story of the ship's captain who was always waiting for a particular tide, has been written since Henry Fielding set down his woeful ex- periences of the anonymous ship's captain—(triumphantly identified by Mr. Austin Dobson as one Richard Veal) —who was always waiting for a certain wind. The ex- cursions to the shore made by the passengers on the ballast-logged and barnacle-clogged Merry Chanter' are, of course, pure comedy ; while those of the Fieldings, made from the wind-bound ship, also unnamed by the chief sufferer, but also identified by his zealous and tremendously-in-earnest editor as the Queen of Portugal,' had some tragical aspects, although seemingly unperceived by Fielding, who was merely moved to vexation under conditions which would have driven most men to despair. Into the matter of the first appearance of this posthumous work, Mr. Austin Dobson enters at some length in his careful and interesting introduction ; but the general reader will not care very much about it. Very likely Fielding did write a good many awkward things about the Captain and some other persons in his original manuscript, which were afterwards judiciously tempered, although there is quite wonderful good-humour in the Journal, all things considered—especially his own incon- ceivable temerity in undertaking such a voyage in such a state —but the point has only 'academic' importance (neverthe- less, Mr. Austin Dobson does well in making it), and we are satisfied with the moderate indictment of the Captain on board, the innkeepers on shore, the land-thieves and water- thieves, and with the extraordinary picture of suffering, inconvenience, barbarous manners, intolerable tedium, and "stolid philosophy which is the last the world owes to the pen of Henry Fielding.
In the spring of 1753, after "demolishing a gang of villains and cut-throats," briefly but graphically described, Fielding went to Bath to recruit; and he gives the following matter-of- fact account of his bodily condition, premising that he had suffered much at the hands of physicians, and derived no benefit from any advice but his own, which was to take tar- water, according to Bishop Berkeley's counsel. "I went into the country," he says, "in a very weak and deplorable condition, with no fewer or less diseases than a jaundice, a dropsy, and an asthma, altogether uniting their forces in the destruction of a body so entirely emaciated that it had lost all its muscular flesh." The operation of tapping was repeated three times. Fielding took a Mr. Ward's medicines, without either faith or profit, and says, with his customary frankness : "Those of the tliaphoretic kind which are thought to require a great strength of constitution to support, had so little effect on me that Mr. Ward declared it was as vain to attempt sweating me as a deal board." In the whole of that month of May, "the sun scarce appeared three times,"—the summer was not propitious, and it was decided that before the winter the Fieldings should migrate to Lisbon, a favourite resort of valetudinarians in those days. How they accomplished a feat which must have been, even under the most favourable conditions, one to make our modern spirits quail, is the burden of this Journal, surely one of the strangest books ever written. The Flying Dutchman' would have been a transport preferable to the ship to which John Fielding (afterwards the Sir John, of the No-Popery Riots, and otherwise known to fame) consigned his brother, with the best intentions, for the doomed ship at least flew ! For what Richard Veal's ship did, readers had better consult without delay this oddest, most downright and yet desultory, exact yet incongruous, equanimous yet wretched, satirical yet good-natured narrative of life under circumstances of which Mr. Austin Dobson justly remarks : "If ever place of confinement came under Johnson's definition of a jail, with the chance of being drowned,' it must assuredly have been the good ship 'Queen of Portugal." We agree with
• The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. By Henry Fielding. With Introduction and Notes by Austin Dobson. London ; The Chiswick Press.
Mr. Austin Dobson that the Voyage to Lisbon is not the author's masterpiece; but many will read it with great appreciation who have not read, and could not read, Fielding's master- pieces ; and there are unsurpassed little bits in it, as, for instance, the grimly humorous record of how Mr. Fielding, finding the wind "nested in the south-west, where it constantly blew hurricanes" (at Greenwich), and sagely foreseeing that the voyage was likely to be inconveniently prolonged, sent ashore for his friend Mr. Hunter, "the great surgeon and anatomist of Covent Garden," and had himself tapped by way of precaution, "the young sea-surgeon attending the operation (which relieved the sufferer of ten quarts of water) not as a performer, bat as a student." The writer proceeds gravely :—
"I was now eased of the greatest apprehension which I had from the length of the passage ; and I told the Captain I had become indifferent as to the time of his sailing. He expressed much satisfaction in this declaration, and at hearing from me, that I found myself, since my tapping, much lighter and better. In this, I believe, he was sincere, for he was, as we shall have occasion to observe more than once, a very good-natured man ; and as he was a very brave one too, I found that the heroic con- stancy with which I had borne an operation that is attended with scarce any degree of pain, had not a little raised me in his regard. That he might adhere, therefore, in the most religious and vigorous manner to his word, he ordered his ship to fall down to Gravesend on Sunday morning, and there to await his arrival."
The unhappy passengers had already been four days on board the dreadful ship, to which the writer's "physical
friends" (doctors) had condemned Fielding, and to which he had been conveyed under agonising conditions, amid the stares and jeers of bystanders, whose detestable conduct provoked one of the strongest and finest passages to be found in his writings (pp. 46-47). To appreciate the Journal, one must never lay aside the thought that the writer is dying, remem- bering that we feel the self-command, the detachment of mind, the humour, and the judgment that pervade these pages. Otherwise he would beguile us into forgetting what he knew from the outset of the voyage, by his fresh and vigorous portraits of Captain Veal, his nephew, the innkeeper and his wife ; by his vignettes of places and things ; also by his large discourse on subjects by the way ; boat-fares, for instance, riverine rights and wrongs, the allegory of Ulysses' Crew and Circe, political economy, "the vague and uncertain use of a word called 'Liberty,'" and the indis- pensable superiority and supremacy of the British Fleet.
He treats the latter subject in a couple of sensible sentences which might be quoted at present with great advantage on public occasions as the gist of the matter, without a word being out of place. Mr. Austin Dobson remarks with justice that the Voyage to Lisbon gives a picture of fortitude, of cheerful patience, of manly endurance under trial, which may be fairly described as unexampled in our literature, and says of the close of Fielding's life :—" He expended his last energies in works of philanthropy and benevolence; almost his last ink was shed in opposing the infidel tenets of Boling- broke; and he went to a foreign grave with the courage of a hero and the dignity of a philosopher." "Last ink" is slightly (and unintentionally) comic ; so is the fact that Fielding allots just one-fifth of a page to the city of Lisbon, which he curtly describes as "the nastiest in the world, tho' at the same time one of the most populous." This was written before the famous earthquake which occurred simultaneously with the birth of Marie Antoinette, and in which, according to Macaulay, Dr. Johnson refused to believe.
Previous page
