Anatomy of "Greatness"*

Henry Fielding's novel Jonathan Wild bears the full title The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. It may at first seem puzzling that Fielding uses the word "Great" to refer to his antihero, who is a pickpocket, gangster, and all-around scoundrel, but lest anyone miss the point he includes the word GREAT or GREATNESS (in all caps) in at least sixteen chapter titles: "An adventure where Wild, in the division of the booty, exhibits an astonishing instance of GREATNESS" and "Wild proceeds in the highest consummation of GREATNESS" (the latter is where he is hanged), and so on. Fielding's narrator makes it clear that Wild's "greatness" consists largely of limitless ambition and a total absence of scruples, and he contrasts it pointedly with "goodness," which Wild lacks utterly. The two qualties are, in fact, held to be incompatible. Wild's foil is the honest merchant Heartfree. Duped and swindled by Wild, Heartfree almost ends up on the scaffold, and the narrator makes it clear that he is utterly without "greatness." He refuses when given the opportunity to escape, because doing so might require the death of one or more of his guards. To Wild, this is nothing but contemptible weakness.

All of this is, of course, highly ironic, and Wild, though based on a notorious criminal whose doings also inspired Defoe and John Gay, is generally considered to be a stand-in for Robert Walpole, the long-serving poltical leader who is counted as Britain's first prime minister. Whether Fielding's satirical depiction of Walpole's character is fair is questionable, but Walpole was at the time widely regarded, or mocked, as "a Great Man" and was not particularly known for possessing scruples. Today, when our public sociopaths openly pride themselves on their lack of concern for those whom they destroy, the figure of Wild seems at least as relevant as it was in the eighteenth century.

There are traces in the novel of a different kind of narrative: the nautical picaresque of Defoe and Smollett. In one puzzling chapter, Fielding sends Wild off to the Americas for a period of seven or eight years. What happens there isn't described, and when Wild returns it's as if he's just gone to the corner for a quart of milk. A more fully developed episode involves Heartfree's virtuous wife. Spirited abroad by Wild under false pretenses, she escapes rape at his hands, but her supposed rescuer, a French sea captain, proves only to be the next in a chain of attempted seducers. She survives a shipwreck on the coast of Africa and is saved from the advances of another rake by a kindly, half-naked hermit who then, naturally, throws himself at her feet. Eventually she makes it safely home.

* Update: After posting this I discovered that V. S. Pritchett has anticipated my title. More on that next time.