The Missing Phoenix

As soon as I finished my last post I hauled down my copy of V. S. Pritchett's massive Collected Essays to see what if anything Pritchett had to say about Jonathan Wild. I soon discovered that not only had he anticipated (and amplified) much of my argument but that he had even used essentially the same title: "An Anatomy of Greatness." Since his piece was included in a collection published in 1942, the parallels he found between Fielding's criminal "Great Man" and modern political sociopaths focused on a different generation, but the underlying idea was the same.

There's no shame in ceding priority to Sir Victor, but the end of his essay held a surprise.

Mrs Heartfree's sea adventures, in which there is hardly a moment between Holland and Africa in which she is not on the point of losing her honour, are not so much padding but give a touch of spirit to her shopkeeping virtues and also serve the purpose of satirizing the literature of travel. It is hard on Mrs Heartfree; perhaps Fielding was insensitive.

All well and good, until Pritchett goes on:

Without that insensitivity we should have missed the adventure with the monster who was 'as large as Windsor Castle'; an episode which reminds us that the spirit of the nine o'clock news was already born in the 1700s:

I take it to be the strangest Instance of that Intrepidity, so justly remarked in our Seamen, which can be found on Record. In a Wood then, one of our Mucketeers [sic] coming up to the Beast, as he lay on the Ground and with his Mouth wide open, marched directly down his Throat.

He had gone down to shoot the Monster in the heart. And we should have missed another entrancing sight. Mrs Heartfree perceived a fire in the desert and thought at first she was approaching human habitation.

... but on nearer Approach, we perceived a very Beautiful Bird just expiring in the flames. This was none other than the celebrated Phoenix.

The sailors threw it back into the Fire so that it 'might follow its own Method of propagating its Species'.

My reaction to this was bafflement. Had I read Jonathan Wild so carelessly that I had breezed past a Monster and a Phoenix? Was V. S. Pritchett even reading the same book? As it turns out, he wasn't, exactly. The earliest version of Jonathan Wild was in a 1743 collection entitled Miscellanies. According to Fielding scholar Peter Jan de Voogd, the colorful chapter that described the Monster and the Phoenix was included in that edition, but Fielding apparently later decided it was too farfetched and left it out of a 1754 reprint. My Hamish Hamilton edition from 1947 followed the later version; Pritchett read the original text.

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.

Notebook: The Use of Learning

Henry Fielding:

Booth, as the reader may be pleased to remember, was a pretty good master of the classics; for his father, though he designed his son for the army, did not think it necessary to breed him up a blockhead. He did not, perhaps, imagine that a competent share of Latin and Greek would make his son either a pedant or a coward. He considered likewise, probably, that the life of a soldier is in general a life of idleness; and might think that the spare hours of an officer in country quarters would be as well employed with a book as in sauntering about the streets, loitering in a coffee-house, sotting in a tavern, or in laying schemes to debauch and ruin a set of harmless ignorant country girls.

Amelia