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Smollett and the Benevolent Misanthrope Type

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Thomas R. Preston
Thomas R. Preston*
Affiliation:
University of Florida Gainesville
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Extract

The success of smollett's Humphry Clinker has been attributed largely to the novel's central character, the misanthropic sentimentalist from Wales, Matthew Bramble. In Matt Bramble, Smollett finally created an acceptable, nonmalicious satirist who could express benevolently and yet virulently the satire he had been striving to write in his earlier novels. Matt's misanthropy, which evokes from him the invective of the traditional railing satirist, derives from several interrelated causes. In the first place, Matt is a valetudinarian who has not dwelt in the busy haunts of men “within these last thirty years.” Matt often appears as somewhat of a querulus laudator temporis acti, even though he wishes to deny it. He admits that the “rotten parts of human nature” have probably always existed, but his sudden reappearance into the world suggests to him that mankind has “contracted an extraordinary degree of depravity” since his youth. In the second place, Matt suffers physically from the gout and the spleen, so that, as his nephew, Jery, writes, “his peevishness arises partly from bodily pain, and partly from a natural excess of mental sensibility” (xi, 20). Matt is, then, in part an eighteenth-century splenetic humorist whose misanthropy can be traced medically to the humorous melancholy cynics and misanthropes of the Renaissance character-books and Stuart drama. In Con-greve's words, the “character of a splenetic and peevish Humour” displays itself in a “satirical wit.”

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 79 , Issue 1 , March 1964 , pp. 51 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1964

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References

1 See, e.g., Alan D. McKillop, The Early Masters of English Fiction (Lawrence, Kansas, 1956), pp. 172 ff. For an illuminating study of Smollett's attempt to incorporate the satiric persona of verse satire into realistic fiction, see Ronald Paulson, “Satire in the Early Novels of Smollett,” JEGP, lix (1960), 381–402.

2 The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, in The Works of Tobias Smollett, ed. George Saintsbury, 12 vols. (London, 1895), xi, 139. All further references are to this edition.

3 There are several essays on the melancholy and spleen of the misanthrope and malcontent. See particularly Oscar James Campbell, “Jacques,” HLB, viii (1935), 71–102; Cecil A. Moore, “The English Malady,” in Backgrounds of English Literature, 1700–1760 (Minneapolis, 1953), pp. 179–235; Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady (East Lansing, Mich., 1951).

4 William Congreve, “Concerning Humour in Comedy” (1695), in Dramatic Essays of the Neo-Classic Age, ed. Henry Hitch Adams and Baxter Hathaway (New York, 1950), pp. 172–173. As a “humor” character, the misanthrope's physiological aspects are usually emphasized. Psychologically, of course, he derives from the great literary misanthropes, Lucian's Timon, Shakespeare's Timon, and Molière's Alceste.

5 David Hume, “Of the Dignity or Meanness of Human Nature,” in Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T.H. Green and T. H. Grose (London, 1912), i, 151. The standard essay on the man of feeling and his background remains that by Ronald S. Crane, “Suggestions Toward a Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’,” ELH, i (1934), 205–230.

6 See Stuart M. Tave, The Amiable Humorist (Chicago, 1960), esp. pp. 164–165.

7 The imitations of Matt Bramble are almost legion. I list only a few of the better ones: Mortimer in Richard Cumberland's The Fashionable Lover (1772), in Bell's British Theatre (London, 1797), Vol. xviii; Rueful in Cumberland's The Natural Son (London, 1785); Samuel Sarcastic in Courtney Melmoth's (Samuel Jackson Pratt) Shenstone-Green, 3 vols. (London, 1779); Partington in Melmoth's Family Secrets, 5 vols. (London, 1797); Sir Howell Henneth in Robert Bage's Mount Henneth (1781), Ballantyne Novels Series (London, 1824), Vol. ix; Wyman in Bage's Barham Downs (1784), op. cit.; Uncle Paul in Bage's James Wallace (1788), op. cit.;

Lindsay in Bage's Man as He Is, 4 vols. (London, 1792); Albany in Fanny Burney's Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, 5 vols. (London, 1782); Colonel Caustic in Henry Mackenzie's Lounger, in The British Essayists, ed. Alexander Chalmers (Boston, 1856), Vols. xxx-xxxi, esp. Nos. 4, 6, 14, 31, 32, 33.

8 See Lewis Knapp, Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners (Princeton, 1949), pp. 306–307, 322; George M. Kahrl, Tobias Smollett: Traveller-Novelist (Chicago, 1945), pp. 125 ff.

9 The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. J. W. M. Gibbs (London, 1908), iii, 95. All further references are to this edition. Alan D. McKillop briefly notes the resemblance between Matt and Drybone (Early Masters, pp. 176–177).

10 L'Ecossaise, in Œuvres complètes de Voltaire (Paris, 1899), v, 439, 445–446.

11 See Louis de Boissy, Le François à Londres, in Chefs-d'œuvre dramatique de Boissy, Répertoire du théâtre français, 2nd series (Paris, 1824), Vol. xvii.

12 “Sur La Comédie,” in Lettres philosophiques, Œuvres, xxii, 158. Voltaire's attitude was typically French: see Harry Kurz, European Characters in French Drama of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1916), pp. 186 ff. The English, of course, blamed their tendency towards misanthropy on the ever popular English malady, the spleen.

13 See The Works of Voltaire, ed. Tobias Smollett, rev. William F. Flemming (New York, 1901), Vol. ix. Thomas Francklin probably translated the play, not Smollett. See Eugène Joliat, “Smollett, Editor of Voltaire,” MLN, liv (1939), 429–436.

14 The English Merchant (London, 1768), Act i, p. 6. All references are to this edition.

15 Lessings Werke, ed. Franz Vornmüller (Leipzig, n.d.), iv, 56.

16 Mémoires de [Carlo] Goldoni, intro. M. Moreau, 2 vols. (Paris, 1822), ii, 241.

17 Ibid., p. 240. Goldoni translated Voltaire's L'Ecossaise rather freely into Italian: see his comments, ibid., pp. 135–143.

18 Louis de Boissy, Le François à Londres, trans. [anonymous] (London, 1755), p. iv.

19 Miss Fielding shares the honor with Mary Collyer, who created the man of feeling, Lucius, for her Letters from Felicia to Charlotte. See the discussion in James R. Foster, History of the Pre-Romantic Novel in England (New York, 1949), pp. 85 ff. and n. 3.

20 All references are to The Adventures of David Simple, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (London, 1744). Miss Fielding did not allow the country to become merely a means of escape. In her sequel the outside world intrudes on David and his companions and finally destroys them. See Foster's discussion, Pre-Romantic Novel, p. 75.

21 Miss Fielding is not, however, above mildly satirizing David at times. See, e.g., her depiction of David's reaction to being jilted by Miss Johnson (i, 61).

22 Corbyn Morris, An Essay Towards Fixing the True Standards of Wit, Humour, Raillery, Satire, and Ridicule (London, 1744), rptd. in The Augustan Reprint Society, ed. James L. Clifford, Series 1, no. 4 (Los Angeles, 1947), p. 12. Morris argues that “If a Person in real Life, discovers any odd and remarkable Features of Temper or Conduct, I call such a Person in the Book of Mankind, a Character. So that the chief Subjects of Humour are Persons in real Life, who are Characters.” A few pages later Morris makes it quite clear that his humorist is only one species under the genus character; he writes that a man of humor is one “who can happily exhibit and expose the Oddities and Foibles of an Humorist, or of other Characters” (ibid., p. 15). See the discussion in Tave, pp. 118 ff.

23 Essay, p. 22.

24 Ibid., pp. 15–20.

25 Ibid., p. 20.

26 Ibid., pp. 21–22.

27 See the Critical Review, i (February 1756), 83–85.

28 The Englishman Returned from Paris, in The Works of Samuel Foote, Esq., ed. Jon Bee, Esq. (London, 1830), i, 137–138. All references are to this edition.

29 See Tave, pp. 164 ff.

30 Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick (London, 1808), ii, 296.

31 See Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Trans. David F. Swenson (Princeton, 1944), esp. pp. 48–58.