The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great | Page 2

Jonathan Wild." [Footnote: Henry Fielding, 1900, p. 145.] Mr. Dobson's surmise is undoubtedly correct. The "strange, surprising adventures" of Mrs. Heartfree belong to a different school of fiction from that with which we commonly associate Fielding. They are such as we should expect one of Defoe's characters to go through, rather than a woman whose creator had been gratified only a year before at the favourable reception accorded to Fanny and Lady Booby and Mrs. Slipslop.
That Jonathan Wild is for the most part a magnificent example of sustained irony, one of the best in our literature, critics have generally agreed. The comparison steadfastly insisted upon between Jonathan Wild's greatness and the greatness which the world looks up to, but which without being called criminal is yet devoid of humanity, is admirable. Admirable, too, is the ironical humour, in which Fielding so excelled, and which in Jonathan Wild he seldom drops. It would take too long to mention all the particularly good ironical passages, but among them are the conversation between Wild and Count La Ruse, and the description of Miss Tishy Snap in the first book; the adventures of Wild in the boat at the end of the second book; and, in the last, the dialogue between the ordinary of Newgate and the hero, the death of Wild, and the chapter which sets forth his character and his maxims for attaining greatness. And yet as a satire Jonathan Wild is not perfect. Fielding himself hits upon its one fault, when, in the last book, after the long narrative of Mrs. Heartfree's adventures by sea and by land, he says, "we have already perhaps detained our reader too long ... from the consideration of our hero." He has detained us far too long. A story containing so much irony as Jonathan Wild should be an undeviating satire like A Tale of a Tub. The introduction of characters like the Heartfrees, who are meant to enlist a reader's sympathy, spoils the unity. True, the way they appear at first is all very well. Heartfree is "a silly fellow," possessed of several great weaknesses of mind, being good-natured, friendly, and generous to a great excess," and devoted to the "silly woman," his wife. But later Fielding becomes so much interested in the pair that he drops his ironical tone. Unfortunately, however, in depicting them, he has not met with his usual success in depicting amiable characters. The exemplary couple, together with their children and Friendly, are much less real than the villain and his fellows. And so the importance of the Heartfrees in Jonathan Wild seems to me a double blemish. A satire is not truth, and yet in Mr. and Mrs. Heartfree Fielding has tried--though not with success--to give us virtuous characters who are truly human. The consequence is that Jonathan Wild just fails of being a consistently brilliant satire.
As to its place among Fielding's works, critics have differed considerably. The opinion of Scott found little in Jonathan Wild to praise, but then it is evident from what he says, that Scott missed the point of the satire. [Footnote: Henry Fielding in Biographical and Critical Notices of Eminent Novelists. "It is not easy to see what Fielding proposed to himself by a picture of complete vice, unrelieved by anything of human feeling. ..."]. Some other critics have been neither more friendly than Sir Walter, nor more discriminating, in speaking of Jonathan Wild and Smollett's Count Fathom in the same breath, as if they were similar either in purpose or in merit. Fathom is a romantic picaresque novel, with a possibly edifying, but most unnatural reformation of the villainous hero at the last; Jonathan Wild is a pretty consistent picaresque satire, in which the hero ends where Fathom by all rights should have ended,--on the gallows. Fathom is the weakest of all its author's novels; Jonathan Wild is not properly one of Fielding's novels at all, but a work only a little below them. For below them I cannot help thinking it, in spite of the opinion of a critic of taste and judgment so excellent as Professor Saintsbury's. When this gentleman, in his introduction to Jonathan Wild, in a recent English edition of Fielding's works, says that: "Fielding has written no greater book, he seems to me to give excessive praise to a work of such great merit that only its deserved praise is ample.
A great satire, I should say, is never the equal of a great novel. In the introductions which I have already written, in trying to show what a great novel is, I have said that an essential part of such a book is the reality of its scenes and characters. Now scenes and characters will not seem real, unless there is in them the right blend of pleasure