Henry Fielding: A Memoir | Page 9

true Spartan Devotion, I have sacrificed my Blood." [8] That the sacrifice was not made in vain appears from the reputation with which Fielding left Eton of being "uncommonly versed in the Greek authors and an early master of the Latin classics"; and also from the yet better evidence of his own pages. Long after these boyish days we find him, in the words of "The man of the Hill," thus eloquently acknowledging the debt of humanity, and doubtless his own, to those inestimable treasures bequeathed to the world by ancient Greece: "These Authors, though they instructed me in no Science by which Men may promise to themselves to acquire the least Riches, or worldly Power, taught me, however, the Art of despising the highest Acquisitions of both. They elevate the Mind, and steel and harden it against the capricious Invasions of Fortune. They not only instruct in the Knowledge of Wisdom, but confirm Men in her Habits, and demonstrate plainly, that this must be our Guide, if we propose ever to arrive at the greatest worldly Happiness; or to defend ourselves, with any tolerable Security, against the Misery which everywhere surrounds and invests us." [9] And that this was no mere figure of speech appears from that touching picture which Murphy has left us of the brilliant wit, the 'wild' Harry Fielding, when under the pressure of sickness and poverty, quietly reading the De Consolations of Cicero. His Plato accompanied him on the last sad voyage to Lisbon; and his library, when catalogued for sale on behalf of his widow and children, contained over one hundred and forty volumes of the Greek and Latin classics.
Thus, supreme student and master as he was of "the vast authentic book of nature," there is abundant proof that Fielding fulfilled his own axiom that a "good share of learning" is necessary to the equipment of a novelist. Let the romance writer's natural parts be what they may, learning, he declared, "must fit them for use, must direct them in it, lastly must contribute part at least of the materials." [10] Looking back on such utterances by the 'father of the English Novel,' written at the full height of his power, it is but natural to wonder if the boy's eager application to Greek and Latin drudgery had in it something of half-conscious preparation for the great part he was destined to play in the history of English literature.
It is clear that Henry Fielding flung his characteristic energies zealously into the acquirement of the classical learning proffered him at Eton; but a fine scholarship, great possession though it be, was not the only gain of his Eton years. Here, says Murphy in his formal eighteenth-century phrasing, young Fielding had "the advantage of being early known to many of the first people in the kingdom, namely Lord Lyttelton, Mr Fox, Mr Pitt, Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and the late Mr Winnington, etc."
Of these companions at Eton, George Lyttelton, afterwards known as the "good Lord Lyttelton," statesman and orator, stands foremost by virtue of the generous warmth of a friendship continued throughout the novelist's chequered life. To Lyttelton Tom Jones was dedicated; it was his generosity, as generously acknowledged, that supplied Fielding, for a time, with the very means of subsistence; and to him was due the appointment, subsequently discharged with so much zealous labour, of Magistrate for Westminster and Middlesex. It is recorded that George Lyttelton's school exercises "were recommended as models to his schoolfellows." Another Eton friend, Thomas Winnington, made some figure in the Whig political world of the day; he was accredited by Horace Walpole with having an inexhaustible good humour, and "infinitely more wit than any man I ever knew." Of the friendship with Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, of which we first hear at Eton, little is known, save the curious episode of the recovery, many years after its author's death, of Fielding's lost play _The Good-Natured Man>_, which had apparently been submitted to Sir Charles, whose celebrity was great as a brilliant political lampoonist. Of the acquaintance with Henry Fox, first Baron Holland, we hear nothing in later life; but the name of the greatest of all these Eton contemporaries, that of the elder Pitt, recurs in after years as one of the party at Radway Grange, in Warwickshire, to whom Fielding, after dinner, read aloud the manuscript of Tom Jones. [11] A reference to his fellow-Etonian may be found in one of the introductory chapters of that masterpiece, where Fielding, while again advocating the claims of learning, takes occasion to pay this sonorous tribute to Pitt's oratory: "Nor do I believe that all the imagination, fire, and judgment of Pitt, could have produced those orations that have made the senate of England in these our times a rival in eloquence