ABSTRACT
Two related assumptions about Jonathan Wild have seldom been questioned: that the tone of the novel is 'acrid, incisive, mordant, implacably severe' and that its 'hero' is a figure of unrelieved and unsoftened villainy. Where Felix Krull is endlessly various and elusive, Wild shows to the end a notable 'conservation of character'. Henry Fielding's uses of this and related phrases suggest that the notions of 'self-consistency' and of the referability of character to a fixed moral standard are interwoven in his mind with a profound intimacy. The connection between rogue and clown, in the specific case of Fielding's novel as well as in the picaresque tradition at large, is reinforced by such a figure as Scapin, hero of Wild's 'favourite play'. The analogy between rogue and clown stops well short of any transfiguration of the hero into an exalted symbolic role, of wise fool, or existentialist outsider, or of the artist as immoralist, above the crowd and its common rules.
