CHAPTER 7
A TALE OF FAITH AND LOVE: RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM AND NATURAL AFFECTION IN RICHARD GRAVES’ THE SPIRITUAL QUIXOTE
Religious Nonconformism: Methodism as Quixotism In his 1905 talk, “Tercentenary of Don Quixote: Cervantes in England”, delivered at the British Academy, Fitzmaurice-Kelly affirms that “The Spiritual Quixote of Graves, published in 1773, and similar productions of this period have lost whatever interest that they may once have had”.1 Labelled by the literature as an anti-Methodist satire, a minor novel like The Spiritual Quixote is of interest, I argue, because, like other previous canonical eighteenth-century texts, it takes Quixotism as a critique of Methodism. A Nonconformist Christian confession born within the Church of England, Methodism was, spiritually and politically, a cultural institution “with the sovereign at its head”.2 Graves’ novel fills yet another gap in the Enlightenment cultural critique filtered through the lens of Quixotism, in that it draws attention to the hazardous practice encouraged by a sectarian movement driven by religious enthusiasm as true faith in God. My intention is not to probe the historical and political factors underlying this issue, but to look at Graves’ not wholly satirical treatment of Methodism as religious practice and spiritual reform in an “orthodox Quixotic narrative”,3 as Scott Paul Gordon points out. The Spiritual Quixote is a comic romp born of an incident that took place when Graves was a rector at Claverton. An itinerant preacher, who was a shoemaker by trade, settled in his parish for a while and
1 Fitzmaurice-Kelly, “Tercentenary of Don Quixote: Cervantes in England”, 16-17 (emphasis added). 2 James Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century: The Intellectual and Cultural Context of English Literature, 1700-1789, Longman: London and New York, 1993, 32. 3 Gordon, The Practice of Quixotism, 3. 220 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 began to sing and preach psalms, thus leaving the rector’s church “almost deserted”. 4 But Graves chased him off with alacrity and shortly after this anger-causing event, he set out to write a satire on Methodism built on the modern journals of John Wesley and George Whitefield. Geoffrey Wildgoose, the Methodist Quixote, is the son of a widowed mother who lives in a sequestered village under the Cotswold Hills in Gloucestershire. As a young student at Oxford, he “applied himself to the sciences with great assiduity” (13), gaining the other fellows’ respect and admiration augmented by his agreeable behaviour and simple manners. Compelled to drop out of college because of his father’s death, Wildgoose returns home, where the villagers hold him in high esteem for “his dexterity in managing an argument, on the most trifling occasions, in all the forms of mood and figure, agreeably to the rules of Aristotle or Locke” (15). Blended with simple manners, his knowledge and eloquence are derided – though not without fatal consequences upon “the future conduct of his life” – by Mr Powell, the vicar of the village. The latter humorously refutes Wildgoose’s logical argument, according to which a door should not be taxed as a window, for, says Powell, “that as a glass door conveyed light, it answered the end of a window; and ought to be taxed as such; that its being used as a door, did not destroy the use of it as a window; and, that the name of a thing did not alter its nature”. The vicar’s “pun or a ludicrous expression”, which may be taken as an allusion to Locke’s theory about general words,5 proves to be superior to “the most solid argument” and finally turns into a major reason for “revolution … sprang from a frivolous dispute” (16). Sunk into an unexplainable kind of misanthropy also fuelled by the locals’ suspicion that Wildgoose may have had an amorous adventure
4 C.J. Hill quoted in the Introduction to Richard Graves, The Spiritual Quixote, or The Summer’s Ramble of Mr. Geoffrey Wildgoose: A Comic Romance (1773), ed. Clarence Tracy, London: Oxford University Press, 1967, xv (all further references to this edition will be given in the text). 5 In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke labels general words as signs of general ideas “applicable indifferently to many particular things; and ideas are general when they are set up as the representatives of many particular things: but universality belongs not to things themselves, which are all of them particular in their existence, even those words and ideas which in their signification are general. When therefore we quit particulars, the generals that rest are only creatures of our own making; their general nature being nothing but the capacity they are put into, by the understanding, of signifying or representing many particulars” (III, iii, 11, 414).