Tobias Smollett

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Smollett: The Satirist As a Character Type

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In the following excerpt, Paulson focuses on Smollett's later novels, arguing that while earlier works like Roderick Random define what it is to be a satirist, later novels, such as Ferdinand Count Fathom and, ultimately, Humphry Clinker, represent Smollett's greatest maturity as a writer and contain his most realistic character portrayals.
SOURCE: "Smollett: The Satirist As a Character Type," in his Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England, Yale University Press, 1967, pp. 186-208.

The Search for a Satirist

After Peregrine Pickle each of Smollett's novels is to some extent a search for a satirist, an exploration into the function and meaning of the satirist, just as each contains a solution of some kind to the problem of a satiric form. Roderick, Peregrine, and Crabtree [a character in Peregrine Pickle] offer three solutions to the problem of the satirist and his function: beginning his career with a mechanical adaptation, Smollett ends with a rather searching inquiry into the nature of satire in relation to the individual who practices it. Peregrine and Crabtree are useful satirists (in the sense that their attacks are "true"), but before they can be useful human beings as well, they have to be cured of their misanthropy. The distinction between man and satirist, private and public roles, runs through the rest of Smollett's fiction, receiving its definitive treatment in his last novel, Humphry Clinker.

This distinction arose, one suspects, as part of Smollett's attempt to square his Juvenalian satirist first with the current doctrine (Steele, Tatler, No. 242) that satire, and so the satirist, must be good-natured, and second with the picaresque form. His solution is related to the Jonsonian one, the theory of humoring and dehumoring. Both Ben Jonson and Smollett recognized that satirizing is not the normal state of man and has to be explained. Smollett requires Peregrine to be cured of his pride and misanthropy, as Jonson did his malcontent satirists, when there is no longer any need for the envy and dissatisfaction that brought them into being. The return of his money, the timely inheritance of his estate, the love of Emilia, and revenge on his old enemies free Peregrine from the need for misanthropy; under Emilia's loving smile even Crabtree has become cheerful as the book ends.

There are also suggestions of dehumoring in the case of Roderick. All the important characters along the way gravitate back to the hero at the end; the evils have been repaid—Captain Oakum is dead and the loathsome Mackshane is in prison; the good have been rewarded—Morgan with a rich wife, Bowling with success, Roderick with father, wife, and fortune. There is no further need for revenge: "The impetuous transports of my passion are now settled and mellowed into endearing fondness and tranquility of love" (Chap. 69; 3, 260). It is clear that the satiric function is a sort of mask, assumed when the hero is dispossessed and discarded when his estate is returned to him, for both Roderick and Peregrine have streaks of good nature in them, invariably of a sentimental or benevolent kind; opposed to Roderick's passionate rages are his "sympathy and compassion" for the unfortunate and his "tender passion" for the good, and Peregrine's generosity, compassion, good nature, and "natural benevolence" are insisted on from time to time. By making misanthropy a mask for a tender heart Smollett suggests the idea that one is not simply a satirist but a man who is for a time forced into the role by intolerable circumstance.

This seems to be a general idea behind the character of Ferdinand Fathom, who is the malcontent satirist carried to its furthest implication. In his preface to Ferdinand Count Fathom (1753), Smollett says that Fathom is himself the evil that is being exposed; but running just below the novel's surface is a recognition of (or an unwillingness to pass up) the connection between the satirist and the criminal: both exploit and punish the folly of mankind. Take for example the seduction of Celinda. "Perhaps such a brutal design might not have entered his imagination," the reader is told, if Fathom had not noticed "certain peculiarities":

Besides a total want of experience, that left her open and unguarded against the attacks of the other sex, she discovered a remarkable spirit of credulity and superstitious fear … so delicate was the texture of her nerves, that one day, while Fathom entertained the company with a favourite air, she actually swooned with pleasure.

(Chap.34; 8, 274-75)

With aeolian harps and old wives' tales Fathom seduces Celinda; in sections like this it is problematic whether the satire is more on Fathom's viciousness or on Celinda's folly. In his commentary on the episode, Smollett shifts his authorial emphasis from the victim's gullibility to Fathom's evil.28 But one wonders whether by pointing out that Celinda thereafter "grew every day more sensual and degenerate," ending in a life on the streets, Smollett is not presenting both the evil example of Fathom and the punishment Celinda deserves for her romantic illusions.

Fathom is to some extent that traditional figure of the English picaresque, the criminal who unwittingly serves to reveal the folly of his dupes as well as his own knavery. An example is his cheating of Don Diego de Zelos, who reveals in his discourse to Fathom a great fund of pride, vanity, and intolerance, as well as a tempting overconfidence in his own judgment. As if enough functions had not been heaped upon him, Fathom is also one of the dupes, more often than not gulled by the party he intended to gull.29 Finally, he has maintained all along an "ingredient in his constitution" which, though not exactly a tincture of goodness, will ultimately "counteract his consummate craft, defeat the villainy pf his intention"; thus, like Smollett's other satiric figures, he is permitted to return to a normal life at the end—this time by repentance (Chap. 43; 9, 37).30

In Smollett's next novel, Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760-61), he uses the favorite solution of the Elizabethan dramatists who wanted to give their heroes license to rail—madness. Madness as a mask is very different from madness as a commentary on the protagonist. The essential difference between Sir Launcelot and Don Quixote, his prototype, is that Quixote goes out to attack imaginary wrongs while the real world of less spectacular but more dangerous wrongs lies all about him; Sir Launcelot attacks real wrongs which in his (and Smollett's) world cannot be cured in any way other than by the intervention of a madman. Sir Launcelot contrasts himself with Quixote: "I see and distinguish objects as they are discerned and described by other men.… I quarrel with none but the foes of virtue and decorum" (Chap. 2; 10, 19). "It was his opinion," we are told, "that chivalry was an useful institution while confined to its original purposes of protecting the innocent, assisting the friendless, and bringing the guilty to condign punishment" (Chap. 18; 10, 245-46). Smollett here proves the integrity of his satirist without concealing the fact of his madness—having his "truth" as well as his rage. Sir Launcelot is forced to revert to an older, nobler code by the sorrow he feels at losing his beloved Aurelia and the outrage he feels at her guardian's conduct; all combine to unhinge his mind and turn him into a foe of all injustice.

Unlike Quixote, he is not allowed to be mocked, however eccentric his appearance and actions; for that there is his Sancho Panza, Crabshaw (as there was Strap in Roderick Random). When Sir Launcelot finds himself among the unregenerate, he simply lays about him with his lance and disperses them. Confronting Justice Gobble, he is able to cow the ex-tailor and his wife by producing his name and rank. Like Peregrine and Crabtree, he fancies himself a higher justice. When all the prisoners flock around him "in accusation of Justice Gobble," he is reminded of the "more awful occasion, when the cries of the widow and the orphan, the injured and oppressed, would be uttered at the tribunal of an unerring Judge against the villainous and insolent authors of their calamity" (Chap. 11; 10, 140).31 In short, he thinks of himself as God's right hand, and with madness as a mask Smollett can accept him as such without having to postulate a set of psychological traits like Peregrine's to explain him. At the end, when order has been restored and Aurelia is safe, Greaves returns to his normal pursuits. Having put off his armor, he appears at his wedding in "a white coat and blue satin vest" (Chap. "The Last"; 10, 339).

From the radical metaphor of this novel it appears that satire to Smollett is a vocation or a quest, and for eighteenth-century Englishmen like Greaves it must be a throwback of some sort to an earlier, simpler, or more sensible world. It is not an entirely admirable occupation, and even Greaves learns that recourse to law is the only answer. And so the pattern established in Peregrine Pickle is followed in the subsequent novels, although the satirists themselves represent different areas of exploration and experiment. They have in common a dislocation of some sort—whether a criminal mind like Fathom's or a sort of madness like Greaves', and they use these infirmities (Fathom unconsciously, Greaves consciously) to reveal the hidden corruption around them; finally, in one way or another, they are returned to a normal equilibrium when the satiric role is no longer required. One can distinguish between Smollett's treatment of the cause of the humor and his treatment of the humor itself. He early sensed what causes would be acceptable (loss of estate, loss of Aurelia), but two sorts of humor were available to him, an internal and an external one. It could be internal like rage, which is peculiarly individual and needs explaining; or it could be external like madness or sickness, which is beyond the individual's control and responsibility. The latter, which most clearly delimits the areas of the observer and the observed, as well as private and public experience, will be the method of Smollett's final works.

The Sick Satirist

Smollett returns in his last work to the connection between satire and abnormality established in Sir Launcelot Greaves, exploring its possibilities, both technical and moral. The satiric observers of his Travels Through France and Italy (1766) and History and Adventures of an Atom (1769) act as a bridge between the demented Greaves and the physically ill Matthew Bramble of Humphry Clinker (1771).

In the Travels, Smollett sees his journey in terms of the conventions of Juvenalian satire. His departure is the prototypical exile of the Juvenalian idealist, and this "Smollett" coincidentally has all the characteristics of the figure: he rails, threatens to cane rogues, and smells out evil beneath the fairest disguises. He is driven to travel the road of moral censure like the Juvenalian, first, by personal defeat (he is "traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons, and overwhelmed by the sense of a domestic calamity"); second, by the general situation in England ("a scene of illiberal dispute, and incredible infatuation, where a few worthless incendiaries had, by dint of perfidious calumnies and atrocious abuse, kindled up a flame which threatened all the horrors of civil dissension"); and, third—the original touch that sets him off from the conventional Juvenalian—by the poorness of his health (he hopes "the mildness of the climate" in southern France will "prove favorable to the weak state of [his] lungs").32 Although all of these motives for travel have their foundation in biographical fact, I suspect that Smollett sensed the connection between his own illness and his travels and Sir Launcelot Greaves' madness and his quest. The sick Smollett looking for health becomes the satirist seeking a place in which he can morally survive, and the sickness itself gradually develops into a satiric metaphor of man's condition.

Smollett's frail health and his background as a physician make up a central fact of his point of view. The chicanery and selfishness of the people who meet the friendless traveler are translated into the physical effect they have on him. The roguery of a ship's captain is dramatized by the effect on a delicate man of being put into a rough sea in an open boat and then having to walk a mile to an inn; the roguery of an innkeeper, by the effect of poor diet or of having to sit up in a cold kitchen until a bed is emptied in the morning. It is always the physical that Smollett attacks—inns, sanitation, even the white sand used on the paths of Versailles which hurts his eyes by the reflection of the sun. The physical sensation in his bones or lungs tells him to look for a moral corruption in his surroundings; garbage in the streets connects with indecency in behavior and finally with a perverted morality.

The Travels is thus as much a guidebook to conduct as to the sights of France and Italy. It is related less significantly to travel books than to the imaginary visits made by Orientals to Paris and London, as in the Lettres persanes of Montesquieu and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World. Smollett's work shares with these a satiric intention and the convenience of the epistolary form, which is easily adaptable to the cumulative catalogue of formal verse satire. As Smollett must have recognized in writing the Travels, the letter form offered as striking an opportunity to the satirist as to the Richardsonian writer-to-the-moment. The letter lends itself not only to emotional crises but also to other moments of great intensity, from which indignation as well as sentiment may issue. As the Duchess of Newcastle wrote in her preface to CCXI Sociable Letters (1664), "The truth is they are rather scenes than letters, for I have endeavored under cover of letters to express the humors of mankind and the actions of man's life." Thus as a satire the Travels has an advantage over Smollett's satiric explorations in his novels: there is no need for either plot or character development, the emphasis being neatly balanced between the sight seen and the commentary. But the Travels is also a true memoir and so lacks the emphasis, the coherence, and the point, as well as the complexity, of Smollett's fictions.

The moral-physical parallel that underlies the satiric use of sickness in the Travels becomes the structural principle of Smollett's political satire, The History and Adventures of an Atom. The device of an object that passes from person to person making satiric observations on what it witnesses was probably taken from Charles Johnstone's Chrysal (1760, 1765), in which the object is a coin and the episodes are held together by the theme of man's lust for and dependence on gold.33 Smollett follows Johnstone in combining the idea of the coin that passes from pocket to pocket (as in Tatler No. 249) with the idea of metamorphosis (as in Spectator No. 343 and Fielding's Journey from This World to the Next). Johnstone makes Chrysal not only a guinea but, at the same time, the spirit of gold, which can enter into the possessor's mind. Smollett's satirist is the indestructible atom whose travels from organ to organ, from body to body (via digestion, dysentery, and disease), give a moral history of the Newcastle, Pitt, and Bute ministries. Thus his point of view is, like Chrysal's, internal as well as external.

Smollett allegorizes the humiliating relations between George II and his prime ministers by a daily kick in the posteriors. In his earliest writings, the verse satires "Advice" and "Reproof," he uses such physical equivalents as sexual perversion as metaphors for corruption in political and social morality. So too in the early novels moral instruction is accompanied by practical jokes and beatings, and a character's villainy is suggested by his twisted shape. The terror that is expressed in Newcastle by defecation appears in Commodore Trunnion in similarly physical terms—the knocking of his knees, the bristling of his hair, and the shattering of his teeth. The difference between the allegory of Newcastle's fear and the objectification of Trunnion's is mainly in the degree of extravagance.

In the Adventures of an Atom, however, the moral-physical parallel is not only more obtrusive (and consistent) but more explicitly involved with sickness. One senses behind the atom a medical intelligence asking exactly what is wrong with Newcastle and Pitt, what makes them act the way they do? Like a dissector the atom examines the inside as well as the outside of bodies to discover the secret source of evil: inside Muraclami (the Earl of Mansfield) it finds a "brain so full and compact, that there was not room for another particle of matter. But instead of a heart, he had a membranous sac, or hollow viscus, cold and callous, the habitation of sneaking caution, servile flattery, griping avarice, creeping malice, and treacherous deceit" (p. 309). The mixing of anatomical and moral terms (with the latter enlivened by adjectives of movement) creates a vivid picture of destructive and parasitic evil. But the result is quite different from that of the Travels and of less use in Smollett's search for an effective satirist. Here the satirist has access to the bodies of others and investigates them as vehicles of moral squalor; in the Travels the satirist's own body is the one under scrutiny. Smollett's use of disease in the Adventures of an Atom is still conventional. The disease is an image of Mansfield's evil or, as seems likely from the passage above, the cause of his evil. The atom is looking for "the motives by which the lawyer's [Mansfield's] conduct was influenced."34 It describes the organs in terms which suggest a disease preying on Mansfield; and if Mansfield is diseased, one might argue, he bears less responsibility for his villainy. Even taken merely as an equivalent of his abstract evil, disease must be regarded as reductive decoration; there is no necessary connection between sickness, perversion, and erratic behavior and the Pitt Ministry (except perhaps in Newcastle's physical peculiarities).

Smollett's original touch in the Travels is to attach the physical disorder not to the evil but to the good man. Sickness is a reflection of the evil and filth that affect an ordinary decent man, rather than a descriptive image of the evil itself. The evil person is not sick, Smollett says, but sick-making. As always, Smollett is finally more interested in the evil as it is reflected in the consciousness of an observer than as it exists in itself. He has advanced from portrayals of villainy that is punished by a hero to villainy that is reflected in the punishment of the hero. But when he turns to this second use of punishment, he qualifies it by making it sickness. People do not, as in Joseph Andrews, merely meet "Smollett" and abuse or cheat him; he does not need to have violent contact with people—merely by observing them he suffers the punishment of illness. Moreover, medical and anatomical imagery is not merely decorative when it is involved with a central character who is sick, and the result is a fiction of more compelling belief. On a naturalistic level it is credible that a sick man should be sensitive to his surroundings, and it is the matter of belief, or credibility, that holds the Travels within the area of the memoir, as it holds Humphry Clinker within the area of the novel.

In The Expedition of Humphry Clinker Smollett takes the idea of the valetudinarian traveler from his Travels and uses it to explain Matthew Bramble as a satiric observer and to relate him to the satiric objects that surround him. Bramble's reactions to his environment are more immediate, startling, and emotional than "Smollett's." In the Travels poor accommodations endanger "Smollett's" frail health; in Humphry Clinker Bramble has only to be in the presence of the morally corrupt for his body to react involuntarily: "his eyes began to glisten, his face grew pale, and his teeth chattered" (Apr. 24; 11, 45);35 this is followed by railing and sometimes by physical chastisement. Bramble's sickness is Smollett's most effective equivalent to Juvenal's "Difficile est saturam non scribere," the claim that merely confronted by vice he reacts much as Pavlov's dogs salivated at the ringing of a bell. In a crowded ballroom of Bath, when things got too bad, his "nerves were overpowered, and [he] dropped senseless upon the floor" (May 8; 11, 98). In short, as he says at one point, "my spirits and my health affect each other reciprocally—that is to say, everything that discomposes my mind, produces a correspondent disorder in my body" (June 14; 11, 234); his travels record a search for health which is a search for moral standards in a chaotic world. As Jery notes, "He is as tender as a man without a skin, who cannot bear the slightest touch without flinching" (Apr. 30; 11, 73). Bramble is a man without defenses upon whom the least deviation from normal acts as upon a thermometer. In certain areas, the cities and spas of England, he is sick; the Scottish air brings improvement. Upon leaving Scotland Jery writes, "I never saw my uncle in such health and spirits as he now enjoys" (Sept. 21; 12, 129). And, as the sick man who knows sickness at first hand, Bramble recognizes false cures and sickness in others who do not recognize the symptoms; when he is well, he knows that others must be too.

The analogy between moral and physical sickness does not end with the invalid Bramble. The chief images he applies to the conditions he sees are drawn from the vocabulary with which he is most familiar. Bath, "which nature and providence seem to have intended as a resource from distemper and disquiet," has now become "the very centre of racket and dissipation" (Apr. 23; 11, 49). London is "a dropsical head, [which] will in time leave the body and extremities without nourishment and support" (May 29; 11, 131). Under London's glittering exterior the sick Bramble can detect "steams of endless putrefaction"; its people have "languid sallow looks, that distinguish [them] from those ruddy swains that lead a country life" (June 8; 11, 181). Beginning with disease, he extends his imagery to imbalance, disorder, and collapse of other kinds. Starting with the unhealthy fumes of the waters at Bath, he goes on to see the new constructions as "the wreck of streets and squares disjointed by an earthquake," the houses "built so slight, with the soft crumbling stone found in this neighbourhood," that you can push a foot through the walls (Apr. 23; 11, 53). Bodies, houses, cities, and the whole nation are organisms that are sick or conducive to sickness.

Bramble's diatribes take the form of letters written, appropriately, to his doctor (his first words are "The pills are good for nothing"). I have said that the epistolary form in the Travels accommodates the catalog form, the static scene, and the cumulative effect of the formal satire Smollett liked to write. Bramble's search for health is similarly compartmentalized. Each of his letters, reporting his condition to Dr. Lewis, is a self-contained satire, and together they produce a powerful cumulative effect. The most impressive of these units are the two tirades on Bath (one on its luxury, the other on its sanitation) and, more fully developed, the two great tirades on London (again, one on its luxury, the other on its unhealthfulness). The latter, reminiscent of Johnson's "London" (or Juvenal's third satire), gives an idyllic picture of the naturalness of Bramble's home in Wales, followed by a nightmarish, kaleidoscopic vision of London's perversion of nature: bread is turned into "a deleterious paste" in order to make it whiter, veal is bleached, greens are colored, soil is produced artificially, and the poultry is more quickly fattened "by the infamous practice of sewing up the gut" (June 8; 11, 182, 183). Both London and Bath are described in terms of a terrible proliferation, with millions of shabby, crumbling, but new houses spreading in all directions, choking and stifling, crowding and crushing out value and even life itself; and paralleling the houses are the great aimless crowds of people. Bramble's descriptions of these cities, piling detail upon frightful detail, are reminiscent of the satires of Juvenal, Swift, and Pope, in which a chaos is described as moving ever outward to engulf all that remains of value and order.

But the general pattern of a formal satire presupposes not only an apocalyptic vision of the multiplicity and complete ruin to come, but also a glimpse of unity in the traditional ideas that are being defeated; this can be a picture of a golden age in the past, as in Juvenal's sixth satire, or simply a reference to the poet's own past, as in Pope's "Epistle to Arbuthnot." Smollett presents the two visions as contemporary in time, and spatially the vision of ruin in England precedes the vision of the golden age in Scotland—a more hopeful progression than is usual in satire. Scotland is still, however, the past in the sense that, because of its backwardness, its feudalism and traditionalism, it is not strictly contemporary with England; its people live (as do Bramble and Sir Launcelot Greaves) according to the standards of an older, simpler time. Bramble's search for health causes the novel to fall into the traditional two-part structure of formal verse satire. The thesis-antithesis contrast is apparent both on the level of the individual letters (as in the opposition of good Wales and vicious London in the satire on London) and on the more general level of the novel's action, in the journey from unhealthy England to healthy, invigorating Scotland.

But with the pattern of a satire apparent, and the bitter denunciations of London and Bath, one might ask why the overall effect of the novel is not so disturbing as that of The Dunciad or Gulliver's Travels. One answer is that Smollett softens the force of his satire by delivering his criticisms of society through a mouthpiece whose habit of criticism he attributes to disease. A second answer is that Smollett, in various ways, subordinates Bramble to the larger plan of his novel. We shall take up others later.

It is clear that Smollett was conscious of the implications of Bramble's position. He balances the accuracy—or the truth—of Bramble's satire against the sickness of the man. Bramble's niece Lydia, for one, substantiates the truth of his observations. To her Bath appears to be "a new world. All is gaiety, good-humour, and diversion." Nevertheless the noise, heat, smells, and conversation give her "the head-ache and vertigo the first day" (Apr. 26; 11, 57, 58). Even Tabitha Bramble's dog Chowder gets sick in these surroundings. So much for Bramble's accuracy; the sickness of the man—as opposed to the satirist—is closely bound up with the figure of Humphry Clinker. Humphry too is a reformer, though of an altogether different sort from Bramble: his proposal for stopping "profane swearing … so horrid and shocking, that it made my hair stand on end" is to "Make them first sensible that you have nothing in view but their good, then they will listen with patience, and easily be convinced of the sin and folly of a practice that affords neither profit nor pleasure" (June 2; 11, 151, 152). However inadequate this is as persuasion, it offers a revealing contrast to Bramble's misanthropic railing, particularly when one notices that it takes Humphry to budge Bramble into action on the notorious Chowder, and that it is Humphry who more than once rescues Bramble from drowning. Near the end, when the coach overturns a second time (the first time occasions the introduction of Humphry), Humphry hauls Bramble out of the river onto the bank nearest Dennison's property; this leads, with Dennison's arrival and the use of Bramble's former name "Loyd," to Humphry's being revealed as his son. With the baptism in the river Bramble loses his misanthropy and takes upon himself the responsibility for his past actions by acknowledging Humphry as his son. Humphry, in fact, offers a commentary on satirists of Bramble's type. His enthusiasm and visionary quality are necessary to get Bramble successfully through his travels, and the reader may recall, by contrast, the more usual role of the servant in holding down to earth the fancies of his master. Smollett has reversed the Quixote-Sancho Panza roles, giving the master the skepticism and the servant the enthusiasm, in order to emphasize the incompleteness of the sceptical character.

Bramble's sickness betrays a certain weakness in his position: however much his satire reveals about his surroundings and other people, it is really only a concern for his own comfort; the people he rails at are keeping him from being well. Thus, finding a simpler, more congenial countryside relieves only the symptoms of his disease. Ultimately he must find the cure in himself by turning from railing at others to recognizing the disorder within himself. His railing (we finally see) is a luxury roughly analogous to the one he secured from Humphry's mother, passing on (as he does from Bath to London) without accepting any responsibility for his pleasure.

Observation as Theme

Second, Bramble is only one of five letter writers (though he is the most important one). Their points of view qualify his own and contribute significantly to the novel's overall form and theme.

In Peregrine Pickle Smollett introduced at least one other satirist—Cadwallader Crabtree—as a contrast to Peregrine. In Sir Launcelot Greaves he again included other satirists along the way for comparison. Most reprehensible is the political lampooner, the misanthropic Ferret, who looked "as if his sense of smelling had been perpetually offended by some unsavoury odour; and he looked as if he wanted to shrink within himself from the impertinence of society" (Chap. 1; 10, 2). A Hobbesian, he believes that all men and laws are corrupt, but instead of seeking to correct them he tries to exploit their corruption to his own ends. After a speech reviling quacks he shows that he himself is one by selling an "Elixir of Long Life" to the crowd. Throughout the novel he questions the whole idea of the knight-errant and his efficacy. At the very beginning, at the Black Lion, he argues that a knight-errant is ridiculous, mad, and no more than a vagrant, and he stands face to face with Greaves—the satirist as cynic vs. the satirist as corrector of wrongs, the two figures who were one in Peregrine. At the end of the novel Sir Launcelot provides an apartment for Ferret at Greavesbury Hall (which Ferret leaves, however, disgusted with seeing his fellow creatures too happy).

Dick Distich, another satirist, is confined to a madhouse; he "reviled as ignorant dunces several persons who had writ with reputation, and were generally allowed to have genius." Confining Greaves in an asylum with an insane satirist has the same effect as putting him in Greavesbury Hall with Ferret. Then there is the secondary Quixote, Captain Crowe, who is closer to Quixote than Sir Launcelot because he is older, madder, and more often defeated. He attacks coaches containing beautiful maidens he fancies are in distress and (like Quixote) is beaten down by the realities of their servants. But, since he is a Smollettian satirist, however wrong or mad he may be, his satiric instinct is correct. It turns out that the lady is in distress, for she is Sir Launcelot's beloved Aurelia who is held captive by her evil guardian Antony Darnel.

Greaves himself, the crusading satirist, an ideal by which the passive or foolish satirists are tested, is only one aspect of a larger theme. The novel, Smollett's most thoughtful if not most successful to this time, is about the individual's relation to society, with its crux the question of justice in reality vs. justice in law. At the beginning justice and law are separate entities. Civil laws do not accord with real justice, and even natural law appears to be unjust in Greaves' loss of Aurelia. The most potent contrast is between the people in prison or the madhouse and the people who put them there. Distich explains of the madhouse "That it contained fathers kidnapped by their children, wives confined by their husbands, gentlemen of fortunes sequestered by their relations, and innocent persons immured by the malice of their adversaries" (Chap. 23; 10, 310).

The satirist and the knight-errant are the traditional punishers of crime unreached by the law, and Greaves is both. Smollett uses Greaves to show that the situation is so bad that a madman is necessary to demonstrate exactly how bad. But while Greaves is an improvement and does set some things right, he is lawless. On the one hand there is the idealist Greaves, and on the other the exploiter of the law, Justice Gobble; in the middle is the honest lawyer Tom Clarke—at first another Quixote with his legal terminology, but ultimately sensible. He acts as a restraining influence on Greaves, interposing when the knight lifts a bench to dash open the cell door and "assuring him he would suggest a plan that would avenge himself amply on the Justice Gobble, without any breach of the peace" (Chap. 10; 10, 138). Near the end Greaves, locked in the madhouse, comes to the realization that knight-errantry is futile against the legal chicanery that put him there and returns to his senses; he is released by Clarke's careful legal work. Once free, Greaves uses legal means to extricate Aurelia; to get Sycamore and Dandle he "practiced a much more easy, certain, and effectual method of revenge [than the satirist's], by instituting a process against them" (Chap. "The Last"; 10, 332). Sad as it may be, Smollett says, legal restitution is the only true kind. Satire then has become part of a larger theme concerning the law, and the good and bad satirists become examples along a spectrum of judges running from the unjust Gobble to the good justice who frees Aurelia.

In Humphry Clinker, within the frame of an extremely conventional plot concerning the reunion of lovers and the reunion of a father and son, Smollett presents letters from five observer-correspondents visiting a series of cities—Bristol Hot Well, Bath, London, Edinburgh—which are the occasions for their meditations. He takes the device of the multiple letter writers from Christopher Anstey's verse satire, The New Bath Guide, published in 1766.36 As in his earlier adaptations, however, Smollett's own intention is made clear by a look at the radical changes he makes in Anstey's form. Anstey employs a series of rather bland poetic epistles written by the members of a family sojourning in Bath; the chief letter writer is Sim B-n-r-d, a young man bothered with the wind, but there are also letters (hardly distinguishable from his) by his sister, their "Cousin Jenny," and their maid Tabby Runt. Perhaps the most obvious difference between the two books, in terms of what we have already seen of Smollett's satiric method, is that Sim quickly becomes a part of Bath and is absorbed into the satiric object. Smollett's commentators in Humphry Clinker are in varying degrees outside the object and remain critical. The second difference between the two books is that Smollett has grouped his letters around central incidents and locations. The characters move from Bristol Hot Well to Bath to London to Harrogate to York, and they give their separate comments about each city. This form is an improvement on the picaresque novel as a vehicle for Smollett's satire because the emphasis is of necessity shifted from the protagonist as actor to the object satirized and his opinion of it. Third, in terms of his interest in the nature and function of the satirist, Smollett's use of the collection of letters brings a number of different points of view (in varying degrees satiric) to bear on each situation; unlike Anstey, Smollett does not let slip the opportunity for utilizing grotesquely various temperaments in his letter writers. Their different views of an object act as spotlights on the various aspects of the evil. This is also a more economical solution to the problem of the satiric anatomy than presenting a long series of adventures that reveal the object's different aspects, as Smollett had done earlier in Roderick Random.

In contrast to the Juvenalian spirit of Bramble, there is the Horatian satire of his nephew Jery Melford (the Sim B-n-r-d of Humphry Clinker).37 After describing his uncle's violent reaction to a situation Jery adds, "But this chaos is to me a source of infinite amusement.… These follies, that move my uncle's spleen excite my laughter" (Apr. 30; 11, 73).38 While his uncle scourges, Jery lets folly speak for itself and condemn itself. But with his objectivity he lacks his uncle's moral purpose and the personal involvement occasioned by his ill health; thus such an object of satiric contemplation as Lieutenant Lismahago he finds merely "a high-flavoured dish… It was our fortune to feed upon him the best part of three days" (July 13; 12, 18). As Bramble expresses the seriousness of his concern in his choice of a correspondent, so Jery characteristically corresponds with an Oxford chum who merely wishes to be entertained.

The other letter writers have considerably less to say. Lydia Melford is the naíve, impressionable young girl whose instincts (physical reactions) tell her that Bath is appalling, but whose sense of fashion makes her adjust to it. Winifred Jenkins, representing the servant's point of view, is all eager acceptance, to the extent that appearances dupe her fearfully. Tabitha Bramble, on the other hand, reflects her environment as much as a stone wall; her only concern as a letter writer is back at Brambleton-hall in her belongings, the price of flannel, and the affairs of her servants (she corresponds with her housekeeper). When she happens to mention Bath or Hot Well it is only as it affects Brambleton-hall. As a character (as opposed to a letter writer) Tabby's railing (reminiscent of her brother's) is directed toward getting a husband. In short, she rejects all the world but the narrow demesne of her current prospect (who again has reference only to her concerns back at Brambleton-hall).

Tabby's total rejection is one end of the spectrum, the other end of which is Win Jenkin's total acceptance of Bath and London. Between these extremes are the various degrees of acceptance and rejection of Jery and Bramble. Also along this spectrum are the points of view registered by the characters whom Bramble and Jery meet in their travels. Many of them have satiric inclinations—some bad, like Bulford, who exposes his guests' weaknesses with practical jokes; and some good, like S—t (Smollett himself), whom Jery meets in London. S—t simply invites the fools and knaves to dinner, observes their follies, and privately draws their attention to them; he suggests a resignation that is perhaps closest to the feelings of Smollett the author—at least those Smollett wishes associated with himself.39 The most important of these satirists-within-the-action is Lismahago, the Scot who has lost a scalp to the American Indians, has his wisdom entirely from the experience of bloody deeds in the wilderness, and takes pains to qualify every apparent truth. Refusing to make a choice between England and Scotland, he acts as a corrective to Bramble, the seeker of health and comfort, and broadens the sick man's perspective during the crucial Scottish tour. But looking at the scenes between Bramble and Lismahago (reported by Jery) one has to conclude not that Lismahago is simply seeing a truth Bramble does not see, but that he is a disputatious malcontent, as Jery says. Lismahago, like Bramble, tells the truth or an important part of it, but for the wrong reasons: they are both incomplete men, only less so than others like Holder and Bulford or even Paunceford. Both have to be cured at the end of the book; once Lismahago is married and has the security he seeks, "His temper, which had been soured and shrivelled by disappointment and chagrin, is now swelled out and smoothed like a raisin in plum-porridge" (Nov. 8; 12, 260).

The relation of points of view and satiric objects thus creates a reciprocal theme—the moral significance of the scene and the moral significance of the observer. Because the focus is usually on the scene rather than on the characters, the questions the reader tends to ask about the characters are in relation to the scene he observes; for example, what is X's reaction and what does it reveal about him qua observer? One character's point of view acts as a commentary on another's. Jery's Horatian attitude shows up an inadequacy in Bramble's Juvenalian; Bulford with his practical jokes and Jack Holder, who manufactures satiric situations for his own amusement, point up Jery's shortcomings; Tabby's self-centered railing is the most damaging commentary on her brother's.

The characters analyze not only the situations, but each other. Jery follows his uncle's every reaction with disapproval or admiration, and Bramble anatomizes all of the characters: Jery is "a pert jackanapes, full of college-petulance and self-conceit, proud as a German count, and as hot and hasty as a Welsh mountaineer"; Lydia "has got a languishing eye, and reads romances"; and sister Tabby, "that fantastical animal," is "the devil incarnate come to torment me for my sins" (Apr. 17; 11, 15). Even when one character is contemplated in action by another, both maintain their roles of observers: ensnared by the romantic Wilson, Lydia (according to Bramble) is "a simple girl utterly unacquainted with the characters of mankind" (Apr. 17; 11, 18); the nature of her reaction is the main thing in question.

Smollett has presented in Humphry Clinker a dramatic essay on the values of various kinds of satire, much as Ben Jonson did with Asper, Macilente, and Carlo Buffone, the objective satirist, the envious malcontent, and the mere buffoonish railer in Every Man Out of His Humour. But Smollett has also included many characters whose reactions fall outside the satiric range. The satiric attitude toward the world is simply the most critical; it is one end of the spectrum I have postulated; the other end is total acceptance or, worse, affected acceptance.

As in Roderick Random's satirizing, Bramble's diatribes are closely related to a theme concerning ways of looking at the world. "Sophistication" is the word he applies to all he hates in England: it is "a vile world of fraud and sophistication," to which he opposes "the genuine friendship of a sensible man" (like Dr. Lewis, Apr. 23; 11, 55) or the time "about thirty years ago" when Bath was a healthy, simple spa, and the most crowded parts of London were "open fields, producing hay and corn" (Apr. 23, May 29; 11, 49, 130). Sophistication for Bramble involves the change from a genuine, true form to something that may appear good but is really false, useless, and harmful. He attacks the fantastic shapes that are replacing the ordinary, functional houses of Bath; the idea that ordure can, if called perfume, be pleasant to smell; that Harrogate water owes "its reputation in a great measure to its being so strikingly offensive" (June 26; 11, 247); that sickness requires so many doctors and so many elaborate (and actually unhealthful) cures. The theme extends beyond Bramble's and Jery's commentary. Because the indefatigable Wilson disguised himself in the first place he is not accepted as a suitor for Lydia. He is doing what he thinks is expected of a lover, according to the sophistication of London and Bath: part of this is disguise; part is the idea of elopement and the flowery letter that starts, "Miss Willis has pronounced my doom," and continues, "tossed in a sea of doubts and fears" (Mar. 31; 11, 20). If Wilson had simply gone up to Bramble and announced his true name and intentions he would have had Lydia at once, and there would have been no novel (just as there would have been no novel if Bramble had given his true name to Humphry's mother).

The antithesis of British sophistication is the underdeveloped Scottish land and the old-fashioned Scottish customs; and so Bramble finds the immediate antidote to England in Scotland. But it is also the naked Humphry, without clothes or parents; Lismahago, scalped and exposed in his nakedness by Bulford; and, of course, Bramble himself, who is "a man without a skin."40 Thus far Smollett is developing a conventional satiric contrast between false and true, affected and sincere, artificial and natural, apparent and real.41 His originality lies in his noticing that, if the opposite of sophistication is the bare forked animal Bramble, it is also his act of stripping off the illusions of others. The sophisticate and the satirist are thesis and antithesis.

There is still some question, however, as to the exact value attached to the satiric attitude within Humphry Clinker. The word "original," which is applied both to satirists like Bramble and to some of the fools he observes, gives an idea of Smollett's intention. Applied to Bramble and the people he admires, "original" has the meaning of having existed from the first or of being "a thing (or person) in relation to something else which is a copy" (OED). This meaning connects "original" with that other key word "sophistication," a change from the genuine to something that appears good but is false."42 Since the evil anatomized in Humphry Clinker is the conforming to a false standard and form, being what one is not, an original is at least a more valuable person than the sophisticates of Bath and London. Bramble admires S—t as an original because he "had resolution enough to live in his own way in the midst of foreigners; for, neither in dress, diet, customs, or conversation, did he deviate one tittle from the manner in which he had been brought up" (July 4; 12, 5). In this sense an original is true to himself, and Bramble, Humphry, and Lismahago are all originals. Gradually, however, it becomes apparent that whatever its meaning in a particular context, "original" in general refers to an eccentric or an oddity, and whatever the emphasis intended, it does not designate an ideal."43 This is clear enough from the inclusion of Tabitha Bramble or Micklewhimmen or Newcastle within its ranks. Those to whom the word is not applied are, significantly, very bad or very good; noticeably missing are the affected and sophisticated, such as the Pauncefords, the Burdocks, and the Oxmingtons, as well as the unmistakably good people like Moore, Captain Brown, Dennison, the Admiral, and S—t.

Primitivism is not the ideal of Humphry Clinker. Bramble's misanthropy is as extreme a state as sophistication. Humphry is "innocent as the babe unborn," "a great original" (May 24, June 8; 11, 128, 162), but that this is not altogether an ideal situation becomes obvious when we see that it has left Humphry open to the influence of Whitefield's sermons and to exploitation by the Tabitha Brambles and Lady Griskins of this world. Similarly, Lismahago, however free of illusions, has to compromise and find a wealthy wife and security for his old age. Even Scotland itself, which is "original" in the old sense and which has usually been taken as Smollett's ideal in Humphry Clinker, does not receive unstinted praise from either Bramble or Lismahago. Bramble tells the story of the stones that mar the fields in Scotland: the peasants leave them and grow their scanty crops; the philosopher has them removed, whereupon his crops decrease; when he returns the stones to his fields the crops again grow. The point seems to be that things should be left as they are. When the philosopher offers his rational explanation for the effectiveness of the rocks—that they restrain the perspiration of the earth and act as protectors from the winds or reflectors of the sun—Bramble adds:

But surely this excessive perspiration might be more effectually checked by different kinds of manure.… As for the warmth, it would be much more equally obtained by enclosures; one half of the ground which is now covered would be retrieved; the cultivation would require less labour; and the ploughs, harrows, and horses would not suffer half the damage which they now sustain. (Aug. 28; 12, 103)

This procedure of showing the virtue of originality, which now comes to mean primitivism, and then qualifying his admiration is employed by Bramble throughout the Scottish sections. The virtue and limitation of primitivism is shown in Bramble's discussion of the clans. He admires the patriarchal system, the solidarity of the family, and the loyalty to a clan chief on purely family grounds which cannot be destroyed by passing laws that free the family from legal ties, but he regrets the clans' lack of property and independence. Jery, a few pages earlier, while admiring the same qualities ("the simplicity of ancient times") and even claiming he had never slept so well as on the rush-strewn floor of the Campbells' great hall, laughs at the useless and unpleasant traditions of the bagpiper (Campbell, the clan chief, stuffs his ears with cotton) and the carousing funeral. Bramble's praise of Scottish naturalness is balanced by his praise of the progress of cities like Lieth and Glasgow.

If we notice that the travelers, having visited the bracing air of Scotland and being improved in health by the contrast, return to England and there encounter examples of the true ideal, we will see that, instead of employing the thesis-antithesis mode of formal verse satire, Smollett goes one step further and, presenting two extremes, ascertains the golden mean.44 In Humphry Clinker he offers a progression from sophistication in Bath and London to an opposite primitivism in Scotland and finally to a compromise in northern England. The ideal estate, Dennison's, was put in order by Englishmen who withdrew from the city to a traditional home and "restored" it, and the chaos of Baynard's estate is being repaired by the same Englishmen. Running parallel to the progression of the journey are three kinds of people: the good, hospitable, wise people, scattered along the way (for contrast) but concentrated in the scenes at the end; the "originals," eccentric but better than the third group; and finally the affected, the poor hosts, the ungrateful, and those who affect originality. Members of the second group can, by losing their eccentricity, become members of the first, the most obvious example being Bramble with the recovery of his health.

Bramble's Juvenalian satire falls with Bramble into the second group (as does Jery's Horatian). Satire is one reaction to a sophisticated, corrupt world, and a useful one, but not sufficient in itself. It is needed as a jolt back to reality, as an extreme like Scotland. When this extreme has been seen, however, it must be qualified into a useful, livable reality like the Bramble or Lismahago at the end of the novel. Thus, in his last novel, Smollett has placed the satiric temperament in a world of various other attitudes and temperaments.…

Notes

28 For other examples of the author's overemphasis of evil in his hero's actions, see [The Works of Tobias Smollett, ed. G. H. Maynadier (12 vols. New York, Sully & Kleinteich, 1903)], Chaps. 42, 49; 9, 32, 107-08. [References to Smollett's works are based on this text.]

29 The possibilities of the criminal as satiric observer were glimpsed near the beginning of Roderick Random, where the highwayman Rifle recounts his latest robbery: "I likewise found ten Portugal pieces in the shoes of a Quaker, whom the spirit moved to revile me with great bitterness and devotion" (Chap. 8; 1, 65). The source of this episode, incidentally, is probably the robbery in Joseph Andrews in which the highwayman reveals the prudish lady's secret penchant for alcohol (Bk. 1, Chap. 12). Smollett explored the possibilities of the confidence man as satirist in Peregrine Pickle in the fortune-telling hoax set up by Peregrine and Crabtree and in the figure of Peregrine himself.

30 This sentimental use of the tincture of goodness, ending in regeneration, should be contrasted with Fielding's use of Wild's "weaknesses."

31 In this respect he is related to the Quixote who claims he "was born, by Heaven's will, in this our age of iron, to revive what is known as the Golden Age" (Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Putnam, 1, 146). Cf. Samuel Butler's observation, "A Satyr is a Kinde of Knight Errant," etc. (Characters, ed. A. R. Waller [Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1908], p. 469).

32Travels (London, 1766), 1, 1-2. Smollett's complaints do, of course, like the journey itself, have a basis in facts: his work for the Bute ministry involved him in attacks and counterattacks, and his only child Elizabeth died in April 1763. When he reaches the general situation of England, however, he may be indulging in the pathetic fallacy. In spite of what he says about England as he sets out, his homeland remains a standard by which he judges the other countries he visits; every unsatisfactory place is "inconvenient, unpleasant, and unhealthy," and when he returns to England at the end he praises it as "the land of liberty, cleanliness, and convenience" (1, 33; 2, 254).

33 The tradition in which both Chrysal and the Adventures of an Atom are written probably owes more to the French descendants of the chronique scandaleuse, Crebillon fils' Sopha (1740) and Diderot's Bijoux indiscrets (1748), than to the English specimens of Addison and Fielding.

34The History and Adventures of an Atom, in Works, ed. Saintsbury, 12, 252.

35 Cf. Commodore Trunnion, whose "eye glistened like that of a rattlesnake" when his indignation rose (Pickle, Chap. 2).

36 The Travels is a series of letters written by one man, while Humphry Clinker is a series of letters written by five different people. As a satiric device, however, the difference is more apparent than real. The singleness of a series of letters from one correspondent is dissipated in the Travels by addressing the letters to different audiences—to a woman for a satiric description of French fashions, to a man for a discussion of French politics, and so on.

37 It is interesting that the figure in The New Bath Guide who may possibly have suggested to Smollett the role Bramble plays is the object of Sim's amused scrutiny. Sim and his companions dance in his room, disturbing "Lord Ringbone, who lay in the parlour below, / On account of the gout he had got in his toe." They hear him beginning "to curse and swear," sounding very much like Bramble. In Humphry Clinker the same situation is seen from the point of view of Jery Melford, whom Bramble sends up to quiet the dancers (as Ringbone sends his French valet); and it is Bramble who, a few pages later, rails. In short, Ringbone may have suggested to Smollett the possibility of his own favorite kind of satiric persona in this situation, the possibility of using the valetudinarian of the Travels, as well as the need for keeping this figure one of a group of observers.

38 Jery's connection with a Fielding commentator like Medley is suggested by his frequent use of the stage metaphor. After Humphry's appearance in court, Jery writes that "the farce is finished, and another piece of a graver cast [is] brought upon the stage" (June 23); after describing Lishmahago at some length (in two letters), he remarks, "I suppose you are glad he is gone off the stage for the present" (July 18; 12, 45). At the end he calls the journey a comedy on which the curtain has at last fallen (Nov. 8; 12, 259).

39 Smollett is following the practice of Pope, Swift, Prior, and other eighteenth-century satirists by inserting a self-portrait (a "good-humoured and civilized" man Jery calls him), which represents a norm of behavior from which the deviations of the other characters can be measured.

40 For a fuller discussion of nakedness, and a slightly different interpretation of it, see M. A. Goldberg, Smollett and the Scottish School (Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1959), pp. 171-75.

41 Sophistication is also attacked in Smollett's Travels: women's paint and dress; vanity that makes a soldier wear fashionably long hair in spite of the inconvenience to fighting; the "absurd luxury" of having fifty scullions to cool an army meal; the empty and pernicious forms of dueling; false honor and gallantry.

42 See Jery's remark to his correspondent Watkins that "I was much pleased with meeting the original of a character, which you and I have often laughed at in description" (Apr. 18; 11, 28); also, "perusing mankind in the original" (Oct. 14; 12, 239).

43 The OED cites Humphry Clinker for the sense of "original" as "oddity," perhaps because in at least two cases "original" appears in close proximity to "oddity" (June 8, 10; 11, 186, 188). There also appears to be a distinction between kinds of "original" in Smollett's novel: Bramble speaks of "Those originals [the authors who praise themselves and damn others, who] are not fit for conversation" (June 2; 11, 161), and on the next page Humphry "turns out a great original." The difference between good and bad originals is again implicit in Bramble's comment, "if you pick up a diverting original by accident, it may be dangerous to amuse yourself with his oddities. He is generally a tartar at bottom" (June 8; 11, 186).

44 Smollett uses the dialectical structure elsewhere in details, but Greaves is his only novel that anticipates Humphry Clinker in its general structure. The failure of law and Graves' lawless corrective are both shown to be excesses that must be resolved in the proper administration of law.

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