Some backround on Humphrey Clinker
2. Humphry Clinker as satire
“Satire”:
Dr Johnson: “a poem [or prose] in which wickedness or folly is censured”;
John Dryden: “the purpose of satire is the amendment of wickedness or folly”.
An active MORAL purpose: presupposes the engagement of this text in the society around it, which it is trying to change, to reform, or at least to criticise.
{comments on Tobias Smollett's Humphrey Clinker from this link: http://www.englit.ed.ac.uk/studying/...hryclinker.htm
is ON a breakdown of traditional distinctions of rank or status in British society (in Bath and London) as a result of huge flow of wealth into Britain as a result of colonial trade and the wars that have been fought to expand it:
All these absurdities arise from the general tide of luxury, which hath overspread the nation, and swept all away, even the very dregs of the people. Every upstart of fortune, harnessed in the trappings of the mode, presents himself at Bath, as the very focus of observation—Clerks and factors from the East Indies, loaded with the spoil of plundered provinces; planters, negro-drivers, and hucksters, from our American plantations, enriched they know not how; agents, commissaries, and contractors, who have fattened, in two successive wars, on the blood of the nation; usurers, brokers, and jobbers of every kind; men of low birth, and no breeding, have found themselves suddenly translated into a state of affluence, unknown to former ages; and no wonder that their brains should be intoxicated with pride, vanity and presumption . . . [A]ll of them hurry here to Bath, because here, without any further qualification, they can mingle with the princes and nobles of the land.
. . .[T]his will ever be the case, till the streams that swell this irresistible torrent of folly and extravagance, shall either be exhausted, or turned into other channels . . .
(Matt Bramble, Bath, April 23)
happens THROUGH a lack of any PHYSICAL gap between Bramble and the world around him. Bramble is physically CONTINUOUS with the society he criticises: he is in pain because it is decaying: he is sick because it is sick.
I think his peevishness arises partly from bodily pain, and partly from a natural excess of mental sensibility; for, I suppose, the mind as well as the body, is in some cases endued with a morbid excess of sensation.
(Jery, Bristol, April 18)
I find my spirits and my health affect each other reciprocally—that is to say, every thing that discomposes my mind, produces a correspondent disorder in my body . . .
(Bramble, London, June 14)
is summed up in the image of the divisions between bodies dissolving in the waters of the spa at Bath, like the divisions between ranks dissolving in the “flood” of wealth from colonies:
. . . [W]e know not what sores may be running into the water while we are bathing, and what sort of matter we may thus imbibe . . .
I can't help suspecting, that there is, or may be, some regurgitation from the bath into the cistern of the pump. In that case, what a delicate beveridge is every day quaffed by the drinkers; medicated with the sweat and dirt, and dandriff; and the abominable discharges of various kinds, from twenty different diseased bodies, parboiling in the kettle below . . .
(Matt Bramble, Bath, April 28)
3. Matthew Bramble in Scotland
Bramble enjoys physical recovery on arrival in Scotland. Why?
To make Scotland look good. Generally represented here as a site of the traditional social hierarchies, of intact sentimental bonds between masters and servants, being eroded in the south.
Scots unpopular in mid-eighteenth century England as a result of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745–6, and an unpopular Scottish Prime Minister (the U.K.’s first), Lord Bute: Smollett ran a pro-Bute newspaper. Horace Walpole: “a party novel, written by the profligate hireling Smollett, to vindicate the Scots.”
See also proven loyalty to Britain of Lismahago in contrast to toleration of a known French spy by the fashionable set in London: “Britain”, a common British identity, emerging from shared project of Empire: a good effect of the empire discovered in contact with Scots, to counteract the bad effects encountered in England.
But in Scotland the physical continuity of Bramble with the society around him also broken.
In England, one of the aspects of modernity satirised is modern science’s calling into question the naturalness of our spontaneous responses to things:
. . . that he himself (the doctor) when he happened to be low-spirited, or fatigued with business, found immediate relief and uncommon satisfaction from hanging over the stale contents of a close-stool, while his servant stirred it about under his nose . . . In short, he used many learned arguments to persuade his audience out of their senses; and from stench made a transition to filth, which he affirmed was also a mistaken idea, in as much as objects so called, were no other than certain modifications of matter, consisting in the same principles that enter into the composition of all created essences, whatever they may be . . .
(Jery, Bristol, April 18)
In this Smollett echoes Swift’s similar ridicule of trying to put nature in reverse:
His employment from his first coming into the Academy was an operation to reduce human excrement to its original food, by separating the several parts, removing the tincture which it receives from the gall, making the odour exhale, and scumming off the saliva. He had a weekly allowance from the Society of a vessel filled with human ordure, about the bigness of a Bristol barrel.
(Gulliver's Travels III.v)
But in Edinburgh, attitudes to excrement are NOT used by Bramble in this way as a measure of the corruption of a society. The custom of emptying chamber-pots into the street at night he classes as
—A practice to which I can by no means be reconciled; for notwithstanding all the care that is taken by their scavengers to remove this nuisance every morning by break of day, enough still remains to offend the eyes, as well as other organs of those whom use has not hardened against all delicacy of sensation.
The inhabitants seem insensible to these impressions, and are apt to imagine the disgust that we avow is little better than affectation; but they ought to have some compassion for strangers, who have not been used to this kind of sufferance . . .
(Bramble, Edinburgh, July 18)
That is, as part of a set of customs, specific to the society in which Bramble finds himself. He is no longer the satirist, continuous with the society around him: he has become instead a detached (sociological) observer of that society, understood as a coherent, knowable, whole, from which he stands apart.
Bramble and Jery’s letters discuss both the distinct nature of Scottish Law, education, and religion, and the modernisation of Scotland with the rise of Glasgow as a commercial centre, agricultural improvement, industry, and colonisation.
But also using the CATEGORIES of Enlightenment historiography to understand this change. E.g. Highland society is based
on something prior to the feudal system, about which the writers of this age have made such a pother, as if it was a new discovery, like the Copernican system. Every peculiarity of policy, custom, and even temperament, is affectedly traced to this origin . . . The connection between the clans and their chiefs is, without all doubt, patriarchal.
(Bramble, Sept 6.)
The feudal system marks that stage of human history, prior to the commercial stage, when the economy is based on agriculture and the power on the ownership of land, with the whole culture and legal systems that go with this; the patriarchal system marks the stage before this, when production is based on herding animals (a pastoral economy). These categories, these distinctions, are straight out of the Scottish speculative historians such as Adam Ferguson and William Robertson.
Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker
Chapter 25
To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. at Oxon.
Oct. 3.
DEAR KNIGHT,
I BELIEVE there is something mischievous in my disposition, for nothing diverts me so much as to see certain characters tormented with false terrors. We last night lodged at the house of sir Thomas Bullford, an old friend of my uncle, a jolly fellow, of moderate intellects, who, in spite of the gout, which hath lamed him, is resolved to be merry to the last; and mirth he has a particular knack in extracting from his guests, let their humour be never so caustic or refractory. Besides our company, there was in the house a fat- headed justice of the peace, called Frogmore, and a country practitioner in surgery, who seemed to be our landlord’s chief companion and confidant. We found the knight sitting on a couch, with his crutches by his side, and his feet supported on cushions; but he received us with a hearty welcome, and seemed greatly rejoiced at our arrival. After tea we were entertained with a sonata on the harpsichord by lady Bullford, who sung and played to admiration; but sir Thomas seemed to be a little asinine in the article of ears, though he affected to be in raptures, and begged his wife to favour us with an arietta of her own composing. This arietta, however, she no sooner began to perform, than he and the justice fell asleep; but the moment she ceased playing, the knight waked snorting, and exclaimed, ‘O cara! what d’ ye think, gentlemen? Will you talk any more of your Pargolesi and your Corelli?’ At the same time, he thrust his tongue in one cheek, and leered with one eye at the doctor and me, who sat on his left hand. He concluded the pantomime with a loud laugh, which he could command at all times extempore. Notwithstanding his disorder, he did not do penance at supper, nor did he ever refuse his glass when the toast went round, but rather encouraged a quick circulation, both by precept and example.
Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker
Chapter 26
To Sir Watkin Phillips, Bart. of Jesus college, Oxon.
Oct. 4.
DEAR WATKIN,
I YESTERDAY met with an incident which I believe you will own to be very surprising. As I stood with Liddy at the window of the inn where we had lodged, who should pass by but Wilson a-horseback! I could not be mistaken in the person, for I had a full view of him as he advanced; I plainly perceived by my sister’s confusion that she recognized him at the same time. I was equally astonished and incensed at his appearance, which I could not but interpret into an insult, or something worse. I ran out at the gate, and seeing him turn the corner of the street, I dispatched my servant to observe his motions, but the fellow was too late to bring me that satisfaction. He told me, however, that there was an inn, called the Red Lion, at that end of the town, where he supposed the horseman alighted, but that he would not inquire without further orders. I sent him back immediately to know what strangers were in the house, and he returned with a report that there was one Mr. Wilson lately arrived. In consequence of this information I charged him with a note directed to that gentlemen, desiring him to meet me in half an hour in a certain field at the town’s end, with a case of pistols, in order to decide the difference which could not be determined at our last rencounter: but I did not think proper to subscribe the billet. My man assured me he had delivered it into his own hand; and, that having read it, he declared he would wait upon the gentleman at the place and time appointed.
from The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler
This comes from Ch. Forty-Six of The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler (1903) in which Ernest has evoked
a bit of a "sensation" at the University over an essay he'd
written with the angle that Greek dramatists were under-rated.
The speaker is Overton, the book's narrator:
"[T]his was his one idea (I feel sure he had caught more than half of it from other people), and now he had not another thing left to write about. . ."
". . .He did not understand that if he waited and listened and observed, another idea of some kind would probably occur to him someday, and that the development of this would in turn suggest still further ones. He did not yet know that the very worst way of getting hold of ideas is to go hunting expressly after them. The way to get them is to study something of which one is fond, and to note down whatever crosses one's mind in reference to it, either during study or relaxation, in a little notebook kept always in the waistcoat pocket, but it took him a long time to find out, for this is not the kind of thing that is taught at schools and universities.
"Nor yet did he know that ideas, no less than the living beings in whose minds they arise, must be begotten by parents not very unlike themselves, the most original still differing but slightly from the parents that have given rise to them. Life is like a fugue, everything must grow out of the subject and there must be nothing new. Nor, again, did he see how hard it is to say where one idea ends and another begins, nor yet how closely this is parallelled in the difficulty of saying where a life begins or ends or an action or indeed anything, there being a unity
in spite of infinite multitude, and an infinite multitude in spite of unity. He thought that ideas came into clever people's heads by a kind of spontaneous germination, without parentage in the thoughts of others or the course of observation; for as yet he believed in genius, of which he well knew he had none, if it was the fine frenzied thing he thought it was."
Gunter Grass, "Peeling the Onion"
from "Encapsulations", ..."But because so many kept silent, the temptation to great to discount one's own silence, or to compensate for it by invoking the general guilt, or to speak about oneself all but abstractly, in the third person: he was, saw, had, said, he kept silent...and what's more, silent within, where there is plenty of room for hide and seek."
