NO
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into the same name: Matthew Loyd. This curious mutual baptism seems to have been a mythic transference for Smollett, since Matthew Loyd was Bramble’s former name, and will be his son Humphry Clinker’s future name. It is as though the slowly dying Smollett required a double vision of survival: as a Matthew Bramble largely purged of an irascibility close to madness, and as Humphry Clinker, a kindly and innocent youth restored to a lost heritage.
I have found that many of my friends and students, generally very good readers, shy away from Humphry Clinker and from Smollett in gen- eral, because they are repelled by his mode, which at its strongest tends toward grotesque farce. The mode by definition is not pleasant, but, like the much greater Swift, Smollett is a master in this peculiar subgenre. It is hardly accidental that Thomas Rowlandson illustrated Smollett in the early 1790s, because there is a profound affinity between the novelist and the caricaturist. Smollett’s reality, at its most intense, is phantasmagoric, and there are moments early on in Humphry Clinker when the irritable (and well-named) Bramble seems close to madness. His speculations on the ori- gins of the waters at Bath are not less than disgusting, and he is more than weary of mankind: “My curiosity is quite satisfied: I have done with the sci- ence of men, and must now endeavour to amuse myself with the novelty of things.” Everywhere he finds only “food for spleen, and subject for ridicule.”
Bramble satirizes everything he encounters, and is himself an instance of the mocker mocked or the satirist satirized. One can cultivate an amused affection for him, but he is not Don Quixote, and the vivid but unlikable Lismahago, my favorite character in the book, is no Sancho Panza. Smollett evidently identifies with Bramble, but we cannot do so, and sure- ly Smollett intended it that way. We may enjoy farce, but we do not wish to find ourselves acting in one as we stumble on in our lives. I think of my favorite farce in the language, Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta. I have acted on stage just once in my life, playing Falstaff in an emergency, an amateur pressed into service, and played the witty knight more or less in the style of the late, great Zero Mostel playing Leopold Bloom in Ulysses in
Nighttown. The one part I would love to play on stage is Barabas, bloody
Jew of Malta, but in life obviously I would prefer being Falstaff to being Barabas.
When a novel conducts itself as realistic farce, which is Smollett’s mode, we are denied the pleasures of introjection and identification. But a novel is wiser to forsake realism when it moves into farce. Sometimes I wish, reading Smollett, that he had been able to read the Evelyn Waugh of
would have been a good influence upon him. But that is to wish Smollett other than Smollett; one of his strengths is that he drives realistic repre- sentation almost beyond its proper limits, in order to extend the empire of farce. Perhaps his own fierce temperament required the extension, for he was more than a little mad, in this resembling certain elements of tem- perament in Swift, Sterne, and Dr. Samuel Johnson.
Sterne, in A Sentimental Journey, robustly satirizes Smollett as “the learned Smelfungus,” who “set out with the spleen and jaundice, and every object he passed by was discoloured or distorted.” Coming out of the Pantheon, Smelfungus comments, “’Tis nothing but a huge cock pit,” and all his travel adventures lead to similar judgments, provoking Sterne to a good retort: “I’ll tell it, cried Smelfungus, to the world. You had better tell it, said I, to your physician.” All of us would rather travel with Sterne than with Smollett, but reading Smollett remains a uniquely valuable experi- ence. Let us take him at his most ferociously grotesque, in the account of the sufferings of Lismahago and the still more unfortunate Murphy at the horrid hands of the Miami Indians:
By dint of her interrogations, however, we learned, that he and ensign Murphy had made their escape from the French hospital at Montreal, and taken to the woods, in hope of reaching some English settlement; but mistaking their route, they fell in with a party of Miamis, who carried them away in captivity. The inten- tion of these Indians was to give one of them as an adopted son to a venerable sachem, who had lost his own in the course of the war, and to sacrifice the other according to the custom of the country. Murphy, as being the younger and handsomer of the two, was designed to fill the place of the deceased, not only as the son of the sachem, but as the spouse of a beautiful squaw, to whom his pred- ecessor had been betrothed; but in passing through the different whigwhams or villages of the Miamis, poor Murphy was so man- gled by the women and children, who have the privilege of tor- turing all prisoners in their passage, that, by the time they arrived at the place of the sachem’s residence, he was rendered altogether unfit for the purposes of marriage: it was determined therefore, in the assembly of the warriors, that ensign Murphy should be brought to the stake, and that the lady should be given to lieu- tenant Lismahago, who had likewise received his share of tor- ments, though they had not produced emasculation.—A joint of one finger had been cut, or rather sawed off with a rusty knife; one of his great toes was crushed into a mash betwixt two stones; some
Novelists and Novels 41
of his teeth were drawn, or dug out with a crooked nail; splintered reeds had been thrust up his nostrils and other tender parts; and the calves of his legs had been blown up with mines of gunpowder dug in the flesh with the sharp point of the tomahawk.
The Indians themselves allowed that Murphy died with great heroism, singing, as his death song, the Drimmendoo, in concert with Mr. Lismahago, who was present at the solemnity. After the warriors and the matrons had made a hearty meal upon the mus- cular flesh which they pared from the victim, and had applied a great variety of tortures, which he bore without flinching, an old lady, with a sharp knife, scooped out one of his eyes, and put a burning coal in the socket. The pain of this operation was so exquisite that he could not help bellowing, upon which the audi- ence raised a shout of exultation, and one of the warriors stealing behind him, gave him the coup de grace with a hatchet.
Lismahago’s bride, the squaw Squinkinacoosta, distinguished herself on this occasion.—She shewed a great superiority of genius in the tortures which she contrived and executed with her own hands.—She vied with the stoutest warrior in eating the flesh of the sacrifice; and after all the other females were fuddled with dram-drinking, she was not so intoxicated but that she was able to play the game of the platter with the conjuring sachem, and after- wards go through the ceremony of her own wedding, which was consummated that same evening. The captain had lived very hap- pily with this accomplished squaw for two years, during which she bore him a son, who is now the representative of his mother’s tribe; but, at length, to his unspeakable grief, she had died of a fever, occasioned by eating too much raw bear, which they had killed in a hunting excursion.
This is both dreadfully funny and funnily dreadful, and is quite mar- velous writing, though evidently not to all tastes. If it were written by Mark Twain, we would know how to take it, but Smollett renders it with a dan- gerous relish, which makes us a little uncertain, since we do not wish to be quite as rancid as the learned Smelfungus, or even as the dreadful Lismahago for that matter. Reading Smollett is sometimes like eating too much raw bear, but that only acknowledges how authentic and strong his flavor is.
To have inspired Rowlandson and fostered Charles Dickens (who took his origins in a blend of Smollett and Ben Jonson) is enough merit for any one writer. Smollett is to Dickens what Marlowe was to Shakespeare, a
forerunner so swallowed up by an enormous inheritor that the precursor sometimes seems a minnow devoured by a whale. But, considered in him- self, Smollett has something of Marlowe’s eminence. Each carried satirical farce and subversive melodrama to a new limit, and that too is merit enough.
OLIVERGOLDSMITH, VERSATILE AND GRACEFUL IN EVERY GENRE, COMPELS
a critic to speculate upon the disproportion between the writer-as-person and the writer-as-writer. Some (not all) of the most accomplished writers I have known have been the most colorless of personalities, or if more vivid and interesting as people, then they have been remarkably unpleasant or foolish or merely mawkish. Goldsmith appears to have been a luckless indi- vidual and even what Freud called a “moral masochist,” a victim of his own death-drive at the age of forty-four. Indeed, Goldsmith is a fairly classic instance of many Freudian insights, and both The Vicar of Wakefield and She
Stoops to Conquer sustain immediate illumination when Freudian categories
are applied to them. What Freud termed “the most prevalent form of degradation in erotic life” is a clear guide to young Marlow’s backwardness with well-born women, and exuberant aggressivity with inn barmaids, col- lege bedmakers, and others of whom he remarks: “They are of us you know.” And the lumpish Tony Lumpkin becomes an even more persuasive representation when his descent into the company of the alehouse is seen, again in Freudian guise, as a reaction-formation to his dreadful mother, Mrs. Hardcastle.
Goldsmith aped Johnson in most things, even to the copying of the critic’s manner, according to Boswell. Johnson spoke the last word upon his friend and follower: “If nobody was suffered to abuse poor Goldy but those who could write as well, he would have few censors.” Yet it is a curious sad- ness that the best lines in any poem by Goldsmith, the concluding passage of The Deserted Village, were written by Johnson himself:
That trade’s proud empire hastes to swift decay, As ocean sweeps the laboured mole away;
43
(1730–1774)
Oliver Goldsmith
NO VELISTS AND NO VELSWhile self-dependent power can time defy, As rocks resist the billows and the sky.
An ironical reading might interpret that humanly constructed break- water, “the laboured mole,” as Goldsmith’s ego, in contrast to Johnsonian self-dependence, the great critic’s rock-like ego. Still, Goldsmith’s laboured breakwater has defied time also, though not quite with the mas- sive Johnsonian force. Goldsmith’s writing survives on its curious grace, curious both because it resists strict definition and because it extends across the genres: from the Popean verse of The Traveller, through the Bunyanesque revision of the Book of Job in the sentimental novel The
Vicar of Wakefield, on to the elegiac pastoralism of The Deserted Village, the
permanently successful stage comedy She Stoops to Conquer, and the urbane good nature of the posthumously published poem Retaliation, a gentle satire upon the members of Dr. Johnson’s Club.
The strongest case for Goldsmith was made by William Hazlitt, sec- ond only to Johnson in my estimate, among all critics in the language:
Goldsmith, both in verse and prose, was one of the most delight- ful writers in the language.... His ease is quite unconscious. Everything in him is spontaneous, unstudied, yet elegant, harmo- nious, graceful, nearly faultless.
A kind of natural or unconscious artist, Goldsmith prevails by disarm- ing his reader. He seems the least tendentious of all authors, writing as though he had no design upon us. Even now he has not lost his audience, although critics sometimes treat his works as period pieces. He is strange- ly close to popular literature, though he hardly can sustain comparison with the far more powerful Bunyan. Perhaps he moves us now primarily as an instance of our continuity with a past that we seem otherwise wholly to have abandoned.
The Vicar of Wakefield
The canonical status of The Vicar of Wakefield is beyond doubt, though I do not advise rereading it side by side with Bunyan’s far stronger The Pilgrim’s
Progress as I have just done. But then, Bunyan is so powerful a visionary as
to claim the company of Milton and Blake. Goldsmith gives us a gentle theodicy in the Vicar, and theodicy is hardly a gentle mode. Henry James, writing an introduction to the novel in 1900, called it “the spoiled child of our literature,” a work so amiable that it seemed to him “happy in the
Novelists and Novels 45
manner in which a happy man is happy—a man, say, who has married an angel or been appointed to a sinecure.”
Like the Book of Job, the Vicar brings a good man, here Dr. Primrose, into the power of Satan, here Squire Thornhill. Some recent revisionist readings of the Vicar have attempted to give us a Dr. Primrose who is more self-righteous than virtuous, more smugly egoistical than innocent. These seem to me weak misreadings because they overlook Goldsmith’s most sur- prising revision of the Book of Job. With singular audacity, Goldsmith makes his Job the narrator. Whatever you have Job do, you ought not to make him the hero of a first-person narrative. Consider the aesthetic and spiritual effect that even the opening would then have upon us:
I was a man in the land of Uz, and my name was Job; I was per- fect and upright, and I feared God, and eschewed evil.
No one proclaims his own virtues without alienating us, and no one recites his own sufferings without embarrassing us. The opening of The
Vicar of Wakefield is not quite like that of a first-person Book of Job, but it
is problematic enough:
I was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who contin- ued single and only talked of population. From this motive, I had scarce taken orders a year, before I began to think seriously of matrimony, and chose my wife, as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy surface, but such qualities as would wear well. At best, poor Primrose sounds a pompous fool; at worst, a bore ram- pant. Why did Goldsmith take the risk? Was Primrose intended to be a satiric butt and Burchell a reality instructor? Dickens evidently did not think so, and something of Primrose got into Mr. Pickwick. Unlike Goethe and Dickens, we do not find Primrose to be altogether comically lovable. However, we also ought not to fault him. Perhaps he does represent a sec- ularization of the figure of Job or a Johnsonian allegory of an education in true humility, but I suspect that he is primarily Goldsmith’s introjection of Job. This is not to suggest a composite figure, Job/Primrose-Goldsmith as it were, but to intimate that Primrose is a loving self-satire on Goldsmith’s part, or an amiable Jobean parody directed against the feckless writer’s own penchant for catastrophe.
Goldsmith takes the risk of first-person narration because he knows that the Vicar Primrose is his own somewhat ironic self-portrait and that
his personal Jobean tribulations do not exactly achieve sublimity. Yet Goldsmith, in life, and the Vicar, in the novel, cannot refrain from self- praise, from a kind of snobbery of virtue, even as they are altogether the passive victims of fortune. Goldsmith, though an impossible personality, was a literary genius, but Dr. Primrose is simply not very clever. An unin- telligent Job startles us, if only by reminding us what a formidable moral psychologist and reasoner the biblical Job was, so much so that he finally infuriated John Calvin, his greatest commentator. Calvin, in his sermons on the Book of Job, is finally provoked to cry out that God would have had to make new worlds to satisfy Job. No one would say that God would have had to make new worlds to satisfy Dr. Primrose. Goldsmith himself, I sus- pect, was about halfway between Job and the Vicar in this regard.
She Stoops to Conquer
The Citizen of the World, The Vicar of Wakefield, and the three major poems
may be the best of Goldsmith, but I myself prefer She Stoops to Conquer. It has held the stage for more than two hundred years and may well be the authentic instance of a popular drama in English after Shakespeare. Though it was intended as a parody upon what Goldsmith called Sentimental as opposed to Laughing Comedy, we have lost the satire with- out losing the value of the work. It remains very funny and evidently always will be funny. Goldsmith did not intend farce, but that is what She
Stoops to Conquer assuredly is: major farce. There is something
Shakespearean about Kate Hardcastle, though to compare her to the Rosalind of As You Like It is an offence against literary tact, as is any com- parison of Tony Lumpkin to Puck.
Goldsmith had the literary good sense to keep his farce simple, reduc- tive, and almost primitive; the portrait of Mrs. Hardcastle has a kind of unrelenting savagery about it. And Tony Lumpkin’s ordeal-by-fright for her is not less than sadistic, with a cruelty in which we are compelled to share:
TONY. Never fear me. Here she comes. Vanish. She’s got from the
pond, and draggled up to the waist like a mermaid. Enter Mrs
Hardcastle.
MRS HARDCASTLE. Oh, Tony, I’m killed. Shook. Battered to death.
I shall never survive it. That last jolt that laid us against the quickset hedge has done my business.
TONY. Alack, mama, it was all your own fault. You would be for
running away by night, without knowing one inch of the way.
Novelists and Novels 47
many accidents in so short a journey. Drenched in the mud, overturned in a ditch, stuck fast in a slough, jolted to a jelly, and at last to lose our way. Whereabouts do you think we are, Tony?
TONY. By my guess we should be upon Crack-skull Common,
about forty miles from home.
MRS HARDCASTLE. O lud! O lud! the most notorious spot in all the