INTRODUCTION
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