Embattled Reason, Principled Sentiment and Political Radicalism: Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
COSTERUS NEW SERIES 209
Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, László Sándor Chardonnens and Theo D’haen
Embattled Reason, Principled Sentiment and Political Radicalism: Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Dragoş Ivana
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Henry Fielding and the Rhetoric of Quixotic Benevolence: Don Quixote in England 21
Chapter 2 The Institutionalization of a New Genre Based on a Productive Tautology: Henry Fielding’s Comic Romance and Quixotism 55
Chapter 3 From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Quixotic Benevolence 81
Chapter 4 Quixotism, Moral Sentiment and Mandevillian Economics in Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last 109
Chapter 5 The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism: Unprincipled Sentiment as Virtue in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling 145
Chapter 6 Feminizing Quixotism: The Politics of Genre and Gender in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote 181
vi Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Chapter 7 A Tale of Faith and Love: Religious Enthusiasm and Natural Affection in Richard Graves’ The Spiritual Quixote 219
Coda: Charles Lucas’ The Infernal Quixote, Radicalism and the Comic Sense of Moral Reform 253
Bibliography 269
Index 287
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has been long in the making and would not have been made manageable without the unstinting support of my professors and colleagues. It initially started life as a graduation paper on Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, which later on acted as a springboard for my further research on Don Quixote’s reception and acculturation in eighteenth-century England, a doctoral project that Mihaela Irimia, my PhD supervisor, welcomed without any doubt. My first thanks go to Mihaela Irimia for her assiduous support, breadth of knowledge and critical acumen which helped me bring this book to a close. I would also like to thank her for always being an indefatigable source of remarkable intellectual and social energy. As the book began to take shape, I benefited from the immense support of the Ratiu Family Foundation in London, which made this book possible. As a recipient of a three-month scholarship at the University of Kent at Canterbury in 2007 and a one-month doctoral research grant at the Bodleian Library and the British Library in 2009 and 2010, I came into contact with reputed English scholars in the field, whose ideas, suggestions, comments and constructive criticism I have greatly appreciated. But, above all, I am profoundly indebted to Donna Landry, of the University of Kent, for her insightful criticism, commitment to the project from beginning to end, meticulous reading of the manuscript and irrepressible affection and to Michael McKeon for his friendship, outstanding erudition and sharp criticism. My special thanks belong to Sorana Corneanu for the endless encouragement and discussions about what this book should look like. She has always been an inspiring influence and a genuine source of energy. A big thank you goes out to my colleagues in the English Department of the University of Bucharest, especially Alexandra Cornilescu, Ioana Zirra, Petruţa Naiduţ, Mihaela Precup and Adriana Mihai for their unfaltering trust in me. Some of the material in this book was previously published as part of the following articles and volume chapters: “‘The Sentimental Tribute of a Tear’: Self-Regarding Emotion, Wrong Sympathy, and Sentimental Irony in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling”, in viii Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
University of Bucharest Review, eds Bogdan Ştefănescu and Roxana Oltean, X/2 (2008), University of Bucharest Press, 117-21; “Unprincipled Sentiment and the Novel”, in British and American Studies, ed. Hortensia Parlog, 17 (2011), Timişoara: University of the West Press, 169-77; “Crossing Cultural Borders, Mingling Generic Categories: Henry Fielding’s ‘Comic Romance’; or, the ‘Veiled’ Rise of the English Novel’”, in Anuarul Institutului Gh. Sincai, ed. Carmen Andraş, 14 (2011), Romania: Târgu-Mureş, 48-62; “Exquisite Sympathy as Quixotism in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling”, in Language, Literature and Culture in Present-Day Context: Contemporary Research Perspectives in Anglophone PhD Studies, eds Renáta Gregová, Soňa Šnircová and Slávka Tomaščiková, The Slovak Association for the Study of English, SKASE, 2011, 148-62; “Transplanting Cervantes onto English Soil; or, Thematising Cultural Identity Issues in Henry Fielding’s Play Don Quixote in England’”, in Analele Ştiinţifice – Seria Filologie, ed. Nicoleta Stanca, XXIII/1 (2012), Constanţa: “Ovidius” University Press, 249-60; “Sentimental Quixotism vs. Mandevillian Economics in Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last”, in Études sur le XVIIIe siècle, eds Coman Lupu and Andreea Vlădescu, University of Bucharest Press, 2013, 69-83. I am deeply grateful to the editors for permission to use and rework that material in this book. I wish to thank Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M University, for granting me permission to reproduce Francis Hayman’s Frontispiece entitled “The Decay of Chivalry” (1755) both as an illustration in the book and for the book cover. I also thank my editor, Cedric Barfoot, for his patience and expert assistance in revising the manuscript. My deepest thanks and gratitude are to my family, who has unfailingly supported me in all my enterprises, and, most of all, to my grandfather to whom I dedicate this book.
INTRODUCTION
In a talk given at the British Academy in 1905, James Fitzmaurice- Kelly extols Cervantes’ literary legacy in England in the following terms:
England was the first foreign country to mention Don Quixote, the first to translate the book, the first country in Europe to present it decently garbed in its native tongue, the first to indicate the birthplace of the author, the first to provide a biography of him, the first to publish a commentary on Don Quixote, and the first to issue a critical edition of the text. I have shown that during three centuries English literature teems with significant allusions to the creations of Cervantes’s genius, that the greatest English novelists are among his disciples, and that English poets, dramatists, scholars, critics, agreed upon nothing else, are unanimous and fervent in their admiration of him.1
Kelly points out three major factors closely related to the aesthetics of Cervantes’ reception in England: translations, a comprehensive critical apparatus for Cervantes’ book elaborated in the eighteenth century and the question of imitation/adaptation. In his compelling study entitled Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter, Ronald Paulson resumes, and improves, Kelly’s argument, explaining that England’s ever-growing interest in Cervantes in the eighteenth century was due to
… the first complete translation into another language (Shelton’s in 1612), the first foreign reference to Don Quixote (George Wilkins, 1606), the first critical edition of the Spanish text (Lord Carteret’s, 1738), the first published commentary (John Bowle’s, 1781), and the first biography and “portrait” of Cervantes (in the Carteret edition).2
1 James Fitzmaurice-Kelly, “Tercentenary of Don Quixote: Cervantes in England”, in Proceedings of the British Academy, III, London: Oxford University Press Warehouse, published for the British Academy by Henry Frowde, 1905, 19. 2 Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England: The Aesthetics of Laughter, Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, ix. 2 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Paulson’s point, to which I shall return, contains a detail which turns out to be highly serviceable for elaborating my argument and explaining my own choice of the period 1742-1801, as well as the Quixotic texts explored in this book. In mentioning that the first reference to Don Quixote dates back to 1606, therefore only one year after the publication of Cervantes’ book in Madrid, and prior to Shelton’s first translation of Part I of Don Quixote in 1612, and of Part II in 1620, Paulson alludes to the first phase of reception of the Spanish hidalgo, who, according to the literature, was interpreted as a fool or a laughing stock, while the work itself passed either for a silly satire or a Romance as obsolete and absurd as the books of chivalry that Cervantes aimed to ridicule. Though widely read in Shelton’s translation until the advent of the Restoration in 1660, Don Quixote stirred some confusion which lasted for some time as regards the goal and gist of the book. Edwin Knowles asserts that “the important literary folk of the day” failed to see the book’s satirical intent because, “except for a few people like Robert Burton and William Vaughan they seem to have taken for granted that the Spanish work was just another yarn like Bevis of Hampton or Palmerin of England; that is, another silly romance”.3 It is not my purpose to provide here an outline of the large number of post-Sheltonian translations,4 nor do I wish to enumerate and delve into the impressive number of pre-Restoration literary productions that treat the Spaniard as a burlesque protagonist or as a butt of satire.5 Much has been said and there would be no point in labouring what already is so obvious. Instead, my concern is to lay stress on a few major cultural and political factors that led to a paradigmatic change in the figure of Don Quixote in early eighteenth-century England.
3 Edwin Knowles, “Don Quixote through English Eyes”, Hispania, XXIII/2 (May 1940), 107. Analogous to Kelly’s reference to Cervantine allusions, Knowles argues that “The picture of the first English attitude toward Don Quixote here sketched out is grounded on the seventy-nine allusions of one sort and another which other searchers and I have unearthed from all types of English books published prior to 1660. Significantly enough, the bulk of the allusions are found in comedies, light verse, and cheap prose” (108). 4 For a thorough discussion of this topic, see Arantza Mayo and J.A.G. Ardila, “The English Translations of Cervantes’s Works across the Centuries”, in The Cervantean Heritage: Reception and Influence of Cervantes in Britain, ed. J.A.G. Ardila, London: Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2009, 54-60. 5 See Clark Colahan’s topical article, “Shelton and the Farcical Perception of Don Quixote in Seventeenth-Century Britain”, in ibid., 61-65. Introduction 3
Thus, I hope to clarify why Don Quixote was considered “a book which attained an authority almost scriptural during the eighteenth century”.6 First, I would like to invoke John Phillips’ translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote in 1687, for it seems to me to be a turning point for the re-evaluation of the Spaniard at the dawn of the eighteenth century. Bent on presenting the hidalgo in a satirical and bawdy manner, Phillips encouraged a reading of the book based both on a vulgar sense of humour and an adamant attitude towards the hero’s foolishness:
Nothing else in the World would serve him, but he must needs Dub himself and turn Knight Errant; with a design to roam about the World in quest of Adventures, and to put in practice whatever he had Read; in imitation of those wand’ring Champions of former times, that trotted from Post to Pillar, Pot valiant and Fool hardy, seeking all occasions to pick Quarrels for the Relief of injur’d Virgins; abus’d Marry’d Women, and opress’d Widows, in defiance of all Danger.7
Clark Colahan has likewise observed that Phillips’ interpretation reveals not only a commonplace – ridiculous or foolish – view of Don Quixote in the seventeenth century but also a stark contrast with the Spanish original, which only Shelton presents “decently garbed in its native tongue”, as Kelly maintains. In the words of Colahan,
Thanks to Shelton’s widely distributed translation, readers would have been aware of the exaggeration involved in the crossing over of the protagonist from Spain to England. Ironically, aside from some sly smiles and belly laughs, the primary result of Phillips’s excessively snide view of the subject was probably the reaction it helped to produce, the eighteenth-century redefinition of Don Quixote as
6 Mack Singleton, “Cervantes, John Locke, and Dr. Johnson”, in Studia Hispanica in Honorem R. Lapesa, Madrid: Editorial Gredos y Cátedra-Seminario Menéndez Pidal, 1972, I, 532. 7 The History of the Most Renowned Don Quixote of Mancha and His Trusty Squire Sancho Pancha Now Made English according to the Humour of Our Modern Language and Adorned with Copper Plates by J. P., trans. John Phillips, London: Thomas Hodgkin, 1687, 3. 4 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
someone not bereft of many good qualities in a world deservedly whipped by Cervantes’s satire.8
Don Quixote’s “many good qualities” in the eighteenth century were to gain John Locke’s acclaim in 1690, when his Essay on the Human Understanding: Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman was published. For Locke, Don Quixote epitomizes the idea of pleasurable reading and exemplary gentlemanly decorum:
There is another use of reading, which is for diversion and delight. Such are poetical writings, especially dramatic, if they be free from prophaneness, obscenity, and what corrupts good manners; for such pitch should not be handled. Of all the books of fiction, I know none that equals “Cervantes’s History of Don Quixote” in usefulness, pleasantry, and a constant decorum. And indeed no writings can be pleasant, which have not nature at the bottom, and are not drawn after her copy.9
Conjoined with Colahan’s characterization of Don Quixote as a man of good quality, Locke’s invocation of “good manners” shapes the image of a modern English Don Quixote patterned, as Alexander Pope writes in The Dunciad, after “Cervantes’ serious Air”.10 By the same token, in the 1700 Preface to his outstanding translation of Cervantes’ masterpiece which I use in the present book, Peter Motteux affirms that the Spanish hero will seek happier adventures in “a more proper Dress”.11 It is in this light that the socio-ethical reconfiguration of the Quixotic paradigm was made possible in the eighteenth century. At the same time, it was buttressed, I contend, by Don Quixote’s “Atchievements”, a term employed by Motteux to translate Cervantes’ book title: The Life and Atchievements of the Renowned Don Quixote
8 Colahan, “Shelton and the Farcical Perception of Don Quixote in Seventeenth- Century Britain”, 65 (my emphasis). 9 “Some Thoughts Concerning Reading and Study for a Gentleman”, in The Works of John Locke, London, 1824, II, 411. 10 Alexander Pope, The Major Works, ed. Pat Rogers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006, 435 (my emphasis). 11 Peter Motteux, “The Translator’s Preface to Cervantes, The History of Don Quixote (1700)”, in English Theories of the Novel: Eighteenth Century, ed. Theo Stemmler, Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1970, II, 1. Introduction 5 de la Mancha. Out goes a farcical, buffoon-like hidalgo, in comes a gentleman Don Quixote. Stuart Tave provides valuable insight into the theories of the comic in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, arguing that Don Quixote is “the great progenitor of … amiable humorists of the eighteenth-century novel”. 12 Tave claims that this hypostasis was augured by Fielding’s Parson Adams, a benevolent and Quixotically ingenuous type of character who poses as a sympathetically applauded comic satirist.13 As regards the rise of the Quixotic novel by way of Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Tave’s study is of paramount importance for the delimitation of the second phase of Don Quixote’s reception in England which, foreseen by Motteux’s 1700 translation, is central to this present book. The mad knight who was initially used as an object of satire becomes a morally, spiritually and intellectually virtuous hero cast in a pre-Romantic light: “Once totally deluded, next odd but good and lovable, [Don Quixote] then became a man with an inner light that shone through his seemingly cracked head, an imagination that opened a more immediate glimpse of the possibilities of human greatness than a merely logical understanding could attain.”14 The considerations about the scriptural authority of Don Quixote in English letters mentioned earlier point to Hans Robert Jauss’ Rezeptionstheorie formulated in socio-historical terms. For Jauss, reception is a process of mediation between “passive reception”, that is standardized aesthetic norms, according to which Don Quixote was perceived as a burlesque character throughout the seventeenth century, and “active understanding, experience formative of norms, and new production”,15 the audience’s response to the text, which is conducive
12 Stuart Tave, The Amiable Humorist: A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960, 151. 13 In his fundamental study entitled Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England, New Heaven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1967, Ronald Paulson maintains that “almost all theories of comedy before the eighteenth century equate comedy and satire, and most theories since then rigorously distinguish ridicule (satiric laughter) from the risible or ludicrous (comic laughter)” (16). 14 Tave, The Amiable Humorist, 160-61. 15 Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, trans. Timothy Bahti, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982, 19. 6 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 to a new critical understanding of it. 16 In light of the latter, Don Quixote becomes a noble hero with a highly moral purpose until the end of the eighteenth century, when he is turned into a Romantic icon of courage and unblemished ideals. Finally, I wish briefly to address the issue of the political implications of the radical change in the eighteenth-century interpretation of Cervantes’ book and protagonist. A fundamental contribution to Tave’s argument, Ronald Paulson’s illuminating reading of Don Quixote in the eighteenth century is grounded in Addison’s creation of an aesthetics of laughter perceived as disinterested mirth, the essence of comedy (as The Spectator describes it), as opposed to the laughter of ridicule. Paulson admirably argues that
Addison’s creation, the aesthetics of laughter, is the recovery of a transgressive category (imagination, ridicule) by turning it into an aesthetic object, that is, taking it out of a moral discourse (though not necessarily out of a rhetorical discourse) and into the aesthetics of pleasurable response, sympathetic laughter, and comedy, an area which he designated as the Novel, New, or Uncommon.17
More importantly, Paulson equates the shift from satirical to comic laughter with the political transition from Tory ideas to Addison’s “blueprint for Whig-Modern politics”.18 It is partly derived from Lord Shaftesbury’s benevolent laughter, instead of ridicule as “a test of truth”,19 which is the cause of affectation theorized by Henry Fielding in the Preface to Joseph Andrews, partly from Addison’s cultural agenda which seeks to counterpoise “the Tory propaganda of Swift’s Examiner by aestheticizing Tory satire as Whig comedy, and Whig
16 In Jauss’ view, the audience’s response to a text means, in fact, a new understanding “through negation of familiar experience or through raising newly articulated experiences to the level of consciousness” (ibid., 25). 17 Paulson, Don Quixote in England, xii. 18 Ibid., 29. 19 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, “An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour”, in Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. John Robertson, Indianapolis and New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1964, 44. To quote Shaftesbury’s definition: “Truth, ’tis supposed, may bear all lights; and one of those principal lights, or natural mediums, by which things are to be viewed, in order to a thorough recognition, is ridicule itself, or that manner of proof by which we discern whatever is liable to just raillery in any subject” (44) (emphasis added). Introduction 7 enthusiasm as the ‘pleasures’ of the imagination”.20 Paulson’s demon- stration revolves around a major political event, in the light of which Don Quixote began to be perceived as a hero of high moral and intellectual worth. According to Paulson, “after the Forty-Five – the last attempt of the Jacobites to recover power – the emphasis shifted toward nostalgia and reflection; inspiration and chivalry were being revived, pointing toward the years when Quixote would be no longer a nexus of theories of laughter but a symbol of sublimity”.21 Notwithstanding the invocation of the Forty-Five, Paulson seems to further what Motteux’s Preface made clear in 1700, namely that a new translation of Don Quixote – at odds with Phillips’ and reverberating Shelton’s – opened new avenues for the interpretation of the Spaniard as a noble hero. His seminal study has the outstanding merit of locating Cervantes’ work in the Whig camp by hinging on both Addison’s and Steele’s theories of amiable laughter and comedy formulated in The Spectator and The Tatler. Furthermore, such a political reading of Don Quixote helps me develop my argument in what follows, since both Tory and Whig factions used the hidalgo as a tool, or as a “mechanism”22 for countering each other’s ideas, prin- ciples, beliefs and doctrines. Where the Tories excoriate his madness and absurd actions, laughing scornfully at him, the Whigs exalt his unbridled imagination and innate good nature, laughing sympathetically with him. It is precisely the Whig ethos that led to the institutionalization of Don Quixote as a comic text and of Don Quixote as an admirable, gentlemanly and good-natured character, the prototype of a “new, modern and democratic hero” who “transcends his condition as a merely comic, burlesque or pathetic hero”.23 This present volume, Embattled Reason, Principled Sentiment and Political Radicalism: Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801, aims
20 Paulson, Don Quixote in England, xiv. 21 Ibid., 185. 22 Michael Irwin, Henry Fielding: The Tentative Realist, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967, 24. 23 Edward Riley, “La singularidad de la fama de don Quixote”, Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, XXII/1 (2002), 35. The translation into English is my own. I quote Riley in the original: “El destino pόstumo de don Quijote ha sido el de ganar mayor fama como héroe literario de lo que jamás pudo haber soñado. Ya no como héroe de tip tradicional, como triunfador glorioso, sino como el prototipo de un héroe Nuevo, moderno y democrático. Con esto trasciende su condición de héroe meramente cómico, burlesco o patético.” 8 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 to conjoin the manner in which Cervantes’ book and protagonist were acculturated in eighteenth-century England through a comic Whiggish aesthetics of laughter with Quixotism proper. I take Quixotism both as an idée fixe or alternative ideology, and as a modus operandi. I spell Quixotism and, by analogy, Quixotic, with an upper-case Q so as to highlight a politicized understanding of the term translated as the Quixotes’ critique of society and their intent on intervening in the socio-ethical renovation of the status quo. Furthermore, Sarah Wood’s analysis of Quixotic fiction as a literary type conducive to the rise of the early American republic proves to be very useful for my demonstration. Wood argues that early-republic novelists perceived Don Quixote as a “locus of contradiction … repeatedly called upon to explore and articulate the complex double-consciousness that permeated both the literary and political landscape of the period”.24 For me, the notion of “complex double-consciousness” is expressive of two conflicting realities – the authority of established norms versus the Quixotes’ belief in their idée fixe which, however anachronistic, is defended by force of rational argument. Though eighteenth-century English Quixotes pose as recalcitrant individuals eager to have a say in the public sphere, they preserve their gentlemanly or gentlewomanly conduct, dismissing, at the same time, normative reason as nonsensical, as long as it urges a uniformity of experience. Concurrently, I couple my own understanding of Wood’s terminology with Eugene Hollahan’s concept of “crisis- consciousness” defined as a trope which “depends not solely upon the data it perceives but primarily and more so upon the perceptual apparatus of the perceiver”.25 Hollahan insists on the etymological sense of “crisis”, which in Greek means “to discriminate”, “to separate”, “to judge”, “to decide”, in order to argue that “crisis-tropes” are predicated on the mingling of “a plot of action with a plot of thought”.26 Hence, my suggestion is that reason becomes embattled and that Quixotism becomes an issue of epistemological controversy, particularly because England sets it against an empirical backdrop. Wendy Motooka remarks that “… it is therefore all the more
24 Sarah Wood, Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 1792-1815, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, viii. 25 Eugene Hollahan, Crisis-Consciousness and the Novel, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992, 5. 26 Ibid., 45. Introduction 9 significant that English quixotic characters are not insane by empiricist standards. The senses of English quixotes are always reliable .… Rather, English quixotes are characterized by their uncommon ways of interpreting the findings of common sense”.27 In this light, I argue that the Quixotes’ madness (their “plot of thought”) may also be regarded as an alternative form of reason mimetically nourished by Romances, obsolete codes of behaviour and moral, religious or economic tenets which constitute their “plot of action”. It becomes self-assertive in the public sphere, precisely because society has abandoned them in the name of custom that holds sway. Retrieved by the moderns in a comic fashion, Don Quixote was readily imported in England in order to serve, morally and epistemologically, as a barometer of human nature. In eighteenth- century England, the Spaniard’s sympathetic laughter-provoking adventures throw him into the realm of probability, in which his exemplary virtue fuelled by chivalric idealism designates him as an actor, not a reader, involved in the way of the world. James Beattie summarizes this point in his 1783 essay, “On Fable and Romance”:
Don Quixote occasioned the death of the Old Romance, and gave birth to the New. Fiction henceforth divested herself of her gigantick size, tremendous aspect, and frantick demeanour; and, descending to the level of common life, conversed with man as his equal, and as a polite and chearful companion. Not that every subsequent Romance-writer adopted the plan, or the manner, of Cervantes; but it was from him they learned to avoid extravagance, and to imitate nature. And now probability was as much studied, as it had been formerly neglected.28
Beattie’s observations, which point to Fielding’s “comic Romance” as “New”, allow me to build my theoretical framework more effectively: it comprises two major approaches which need clarification in what follows. My first research direction is related to novel theory, more specifically to the generic and epistemological questions raised by Quixotism in the novels I have chosen to examine.
27 Wendy Motooka, The Age of Reasons: Quixotism, Sentimentalism and Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Britain, London and New York: Routledge, 1998, 6. 28 James Beattie, “On Fable and Romance” (1783), in Novel and Romance, 1700- 1800: A Documentary Record, ed. Ioan Williams, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970, 320. 10 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Imitated and adapted in England according to “transnational codes”, Quixotism, argues Eve Tavor Bannet, addresses “the crises of individuation and of ‘national character’”, thus negotiating “questions of difference created by imitation itself”. Transformed into a “transnational genre”29 due to numberless translations, imitations and adaptations, Quixotism opened new vistas for questioning how English the rise of the novel was, a line of argument demonstrated by Ian Watt in his epoch-making book, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (1957). My task is not to theorize here about the origins of the English novel, but to follow a historical approach proposed by critics like J. Paul Hunter,30 Margaret Doody31 and Michael McKeon, 32 who are concerned with what the novel borrowed from early or other generic prototypes emerging in specific socio-cultural contexts. But, above all, half of my demonstration heavily relies on the methodological framework proposed in The Origins of the English Novel, for McKeon’s dialectical method 33 enables me to frame Quixotism in the very same terms in which McKeon, supplanting Watt’s model, explains how the novel as a genre emerged into cultural consciousness:
… at a certain moment, novelistic narrative becomes recognized as such in the way its form (or epistemological concerns) can be seen to correspond with its content (or socio-ethical concerns). At this point, during the 1740s, the novel has emerged as a genre in that its abstract generic identity has become discernible as the discursive whole that organizes the disparate instances of narrative discourse – the disparate
29 Eve Tavor Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres”, Eighteenth- Century Studies, XL/4 (2007), 554. 30 J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction, New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1990. 31 Margaret Anne Doody, The True Story of the Novel, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. 32 Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. 33 In The Origins of the English Novel, McKeon defines dialectical method as “a useful means for understanding historical existence not only in its fundamental capacity to disclose the duality of continuity and discontinuity but also more broadly in its capacity to conceive things from a number of different perspectives that are ‘partial’ in the literal sense of being parts of a larger, more ‘comprehensive’ whole” (ibid., xiv). Introduction 11
parts – that heretofore have lacked a totalizing generic categorization.34
From this perspective, I conjoin Don Quixote’s challenging epistemology, la razόn de la sinrazόn, with his socio-ethical ideals pursued in a world that has become disenchanted, a world in which “man became lonely and could find meaning and substance only in his own soul, whose home was nowhere”, a world “released from its paradoxical anchorage in a beyond that is truly present”, which was “abandoned to its immanent meaninglessness”. 35 Similar to Toma Pavel’s characterization of the eighteenth-century novel as a genre imbued with the “charm of interiority”, in which moral ideals are “engraved in man’s heart”,36 Lukács’ ruminations reinforce my posi- tion, in that such a view of modern – qua secular – Quixotic idealism cannot exclude, epistemologically and socio-ethically, “questions of truth” and “questions of virtue”. 37 The former category includes “romance idealism”, that is what is interpreted as already given or authoritative, refuted by “naive empiricism” – empirical epistemology derived from various sources, which, repudiating Romance without any clear points of reference, falls prey to the counter-critique of “extreme skepticism”. The latter rebukes “its empiricist progenitor” by “recapitulating some features of the romance”. 38 “Extreme skepticism”, which corresponds to the former and is embedded in the process of the bourgeoning genre of the novel, accommodates concepts like “aristocratic ideology”, typical of Romance and indicative of the belief that worth is upheld by lineage, “progressive ideology”, which undermines the former by advancing the idea that “worth is determined by internal merit and rewarded by external success”, and, lastly, “conservative ideology”, according to which the
34 Ibid., xvii. 35 Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977, 103. 36 Toma Pavel, Gândirea romanului (Thinking on the Novel), Bucharest: Humanitas, 2008, 145. Both translations are my own. By the same token, in The Subject of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), Anthony J. Cascardi suggests that in “a world that is objective, rational, and real, we find the novelistic subject-hero, whose truth is inward and who remains faithful above all to his heart’s own laws” (97). 37 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, xxi. 38 Ibid., 21. 12 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
“‘new aristocracy’ championed by progressivism is no less arbitrary and unjust than the old”.39 In this light, I claim that the Quixotic characters I analyse promote only formally an “aristocratic ideology” that is replaced by “progressive ideology” because their monomania partly succeeds in being materialized due to personal or internal merit. In Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews and Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, for instance, the main protagonists eventually advocate a “conservative ideology”, for it replicates, as McKeon writes, the rules of Romance. This is what I call the Quixotes’ logic of gain. At the same time, the Quixotes’ “progressive ideology” is shattered by “naive empiricism”, which underlies the secular world of novel. To my understanding, Quixotism appears, in this case, as “extreme skepticism”, inasmuch as their unfaltering efforts to reform the status quo according to the principles dictated by their idée fixe turn out to be useless in a de-essentialized world. This is the Quixotes’ “logic of loss”.40 As regards the other half of my demonstration, I am indebted to Wendy Motooka’s reading of Quixotism in relation to sentimentalism and political and economic thought. More specifically, in The Age of Reasons, Motooka tackles the topic in conjunction with eighteenth- century moral philosophy theories and treatises that enable her to offer a historical view of the relation between rationality and sentimentality. In a nutshell, Quixotism, sentimentalism and reason form the triad taken as “the quixotic problem”, which “is political and epistemological in nature”. Motooka compares a wide array of critical positions on both Quixotism, as described by a plethora of philosophical treatises, and the Quixotic forma mentis representative of characters who populate the novels of Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox and Laurence Sterne. Her point is that the Spaniard’s madness is arbitrary to the extent that Quixotism parodies reason, “satirizing rational authority as a political fiction only as rational as the authority
39 Ibid., xvii, 21. 40 I borrow the concept from Mihaela Irimia’s article, “From the Sublime to the Comic: The Call of the Modern” (keynote address), in Centralitate şi marginalitate. Sesiunea ştiinţifică a Facultăţii de Limbi şi Literaturi Străine: Literatură şi studii culturale (Centrality and Marginality: The Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures Working Papers: Literature and Cultural Studies), eds Mihaela Irimia and Dragoş Ivana, Bucharest: University of Bucharest Press, 2009, 12. Introduction 13 of Don Quixote’s lance”.41 This is because, according to Motooka, Quixotism equals sentimentalism in terms of moral diversity. “Like the meanings of quixotism”, explains Motooka, “the meanings of sentimentalism are variable”42 because judgement becomes subjective. Motooka’s remarks are consubstantial with R.F. Brissenden’s idea that sentimentalists, like Quixotes, readily believe “in the sanctity and authority of their private judgments”.43 Such a relativized view on reason – which should not be understood in a postmodern fashion – undercuts, as I shall argue in the forthcoming chapters, the belief in the universality of reason upheld by the Enlightenment. By fusing McKeon’s theory of the English novel with Motooka’s approach to sentimentalism as Quixotism through a history of ideas approach, the book tries to demonstrate that Quixotism may be fruitfully analysed not only in association with “questions of truth” – there is a vast scholarship dedicated to this topic – but also with “socio-ethical concerns” upheld by moral philosophy treatises, as Motooka’s groundbreaking study does. In this sense, my contribution may be deemed as a step towards understanding the novel as “a diacritical space where other cultural codes, including the literary, intersect and interfere with one another”.44 A few words are necessary to explain the way in which the novels have been selected. The huge number of Quixotic imitations, abridgements and adaptations, which challenges Motteux’s view that Cervantes’ novel was “a Pattern without a Copy”,45 prompts Alex- ander Welsh to affirm that “quixotic novels seldom resemble each other closely enough for systematic comparison”. 46 Indeed, it was impossible to find a thematic unity and, even if this unity were found, any undertaking to speak about the influence of a specific author upon other cultures would not be so productive. I do not deny that unity in variety characterizes many eighteenth-century English Quixotic
41 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 2. 42 Ibid., 19. 43 F.R. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade, London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1974, 24. 44 Michael Holquist and Walter Reed, “Six Theses on the Novel – and Some Metaphors”, New Literary History, 11 (1980), 415. 45 Motteux, “The Translator’s Preface to Cervantes”, 1. 46 Alexander Welsh, Reflections on the Hero as Quixote, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981, 3. 14 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 productions, nor do I claim that my choice of texts exhausts the subject in question. The period I consider is 1742-1801, which represents the second phase of Don Quixote’s reception in eighteenth-century England. The novels under scrutiny are conceived as micro-monographs discussed in chronological order. This is because they lack thematic unity and yet my purpose is to establish a typology of Quixotes marked out as political tools or reformers engaged in both satirizing and renovating an ethically corrupt society. I decided to start with Henry Fielding’s play Don Quixote in England (1734) because Fielding was the first to adopt and popularize the Spanish hero as a comic, amiable protagonist used as a vehicle for unveiling political corruption in England and, furthermore, because he is no madder than the other hobby-horsical characters in the play. I have opted for novels that answer Motteux’s question, “What Quixotes do[e]s not every Age produce in Politics and Religion?”,47 such as Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742), Richard Graves’ The Spiritual Quixote (1773) and Charles Lucas’ The Infernal Quixote (1801). At the same time, I have included Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752), the first novel written by a woman novelist who portrays the Don’s female counterpart and, finally, two novels which expose the fatal effects of commercialism, as opposed to sentimental Quixotism, on David Simple, the eponymous hero of Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple (1744) and her 1753 sequel, Volume the Last, and Harley, the protagonist of Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771). The governing principle of selection implies four important aspects: firstly, the transition from the binomial comedy-satire, typical of the seventeenth century, to comedy and satire in the eighteenth century, 48 and, ultimately, to Romance seen as a complementary, rather than distinct, generic category used by a canonical novelist like Henry Fielding to define “comic Romance” as a genre that today we call the novel;49 secondly, the question of novelty, by which I mean
47 Motteux, “The Translator’s Preface to Cervantes”, 1. 48 See n.13 above. 49 This is why I am not interested in canonical novels like Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Launcelot Greaves or Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In Smollett’s case, Launcelot Greaves’ mad behaviour is far from being comic, since Smollett explains the causes of the protagonist’s insanity by referring to eighteenth-century medical treatises. As Peter Wagner writes, “the novel can be considered as Smollett’s literary assessment, conducted under medical, psychological and moral aspects, of the Introduction 15 that both scholars and students of English literature may be better familiarized with lesser-known authors such as Sarah Fielding (Henry Fielding’s third sister), Henry Mackenzie, Charlotte Lennox, Richard Graves and Charles Lucas in terms of their overt or covert Quixotic characters; thirdly, the fact that these novels indicate that Quixotism, whether male or female, challenges the mainstream by trying to get involved in socio-ethical as well as economic and political affairs; fourthly, these Quixotic fictions display an active political agenda, from political in the sense of society’s clash with the Quixotes’ outdated moral beliefs meant to better the world to politics proper, as is the case of The Infernal Quixote, which I take as a threshold text, as a limit-case of Lucas’ anti-Jacobin appropriation and satire on radicalism and Irish anti-colonialism. It stresses the militant yet genteel nature of Quixotism, which answers satire with social politeness and pedantry, thus turning it into good humour. Tautological as it may seem, Quixotic ideology describes not only the Quixotes’ mimeticism – hence Quixotism itself is ideologically laden because it is built on books of chivalry – but also their capacity to resist secularism through a firm axiological system that pushes them forward in the recalcitrant public sphere without losing their politeness and articulate thinking expressive of their powerful arguments. The Quixotes’ axiological system is extracted from the Latitudinarian Divines’ notion of innate goodness, which perfects Lord Shaftesbury’s definition of “mutual friendship” and “benevolence”, David Hume’s notion of sympathy, Adam Smith’s theory of “the impartial spectator”, and Mandeville’s explication of self-interest. Read like this, the Quixotes are individuals who attempt to reform the public sphere in a “democratic” way, to use Riley’s word, for its modern guiding principle is veritas non auctoritas facit legem. The book is divided into seven chapters and a Coda. Chapter 1, “Henry Fielding and the Rhetoric of Quixotic Benevolence: Don Quixote in England”, analyses the passage from satire to comedy by
variations of lunacy in individuals and society” (Introduction to Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Launcelot Greaves [1762], ed. Peter Wagner, London: Penguin Books, 1988, 25). In Tristram Shandy, Sterne deals with Quixotism as a comic weapon against Lockean epistemology. Instead of describing a benevolent Quixote, the novel mocks Locke’s association principle, ridiculing any endeavour to establish rational standards. 16 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 taking into consideration Cervantes’ and Fielding’s similar views on drama. After placing Don Quixote in the modern paradigm of Whiggish good-natured laughter, it examines Fielding’s play Don Quixote in England in connection with issues of British cultural identity. Chapter 2, “The Institutionalization of a New Genre Based on a Productive Tautology: Henry Fielding’s Comic Romance and Quixotism” elaborates on Joseph Andrews, the first novel which canonizes the figure of Don Quixote as a benevolent activist. The Preface to the novel enables me to read Fielding’s “New Species of Writing” as a “productive tautology” shaped by the juxtaposition of “comic Romance” and Quixotism. The practical side of activist benevolence is expounded in Chapter 3, “From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Quixotic Benevolence”, in which I treat Parson Adams as a “saint-errant” animated by the desire to do good. I will concentrate on the Latitudinarian Divines’ innate goodness of man reflected, later on, in Lord Shaftesbury’s civic humanist aesthetics at work in Fielding’s novel “Written in the Manner of Cervantes”. Chapter 4, “Quixotism, Moral Sentiment and Mandevillian Economics in Sarah Fielding’s Adventures of David Simple and Volume the Last”, argues that the problematic of sentimental Quixotism marks a shift from Richardsonian feminine feeling to the foundation of a new morality encapsulated by the Man of Feeling. First, I refer to the meaning of “moral Romance”, the subtitle of the novel, and to the acclaim Sarah Fielding’s enjoyed thanks to her friend Samuel Richardson and her brother Henry Fielding, who also acted as proof-reader of the novel’s preface. Second, I claim that David Simple’s sentimental nature tries to abolish interpretive differences, that is the others’ perceptions only apparently considered legitimate because they are predicated on the art of intrigue, by seeking to naturalize the language of feeling. David believes in his own delusive rightness, knowing, at the same time, that he tells the naked truth. Hence, the two conflicting types of ethics underlined in the novel: disinterestedness or Quixotic benevolence described as a necessary yet obsolete ideal versus society’s Mandevillian self-interest. Where David Simple exemplifies the logic of gain due to the establishment of a community of feeling, Volume the Last gravitates around scenes of failure and grief caused by the language of commerce. Read in an ironic key, Volume the Last points to gender instability – the crisis of Introduction 17 male identity and the collapse of traditional Romance masculinity, and generic tensions provoked by the emerging narrative forms of sensibility. Chapter 5, “The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism: Unprincipled Sentiment as Virtue in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling”, reads Henry Mackenzie’s novel according to a well-defined “logic of loss” interpreted as excessive feeling. Excoriated by Mackenzie himself, sentimental morality, the basis of the Man of Feeling’s epistemology, proves to be an impractical model because his exceedingly refined sensibility, or delicacy, is at loggerheads with civic and conventional background, as it happens in Volume the Last. Harley is a charitable yet passive Quixote whose sentimental weapon, tears, has no real target in the physical world. Far from being didactic, the novel displays sympathy in the wrong way, if we follow Hume’s model, pathetic emotion as self-regarding and, after all, as sentimental virtue replacing judgement. I claim that Harley is the antithesis of both Hume’s idea of communicable passions and of Adam Smith’s “impartial spectator”. Chapter 6, “Feminizing Quixotism: The Politics of Genre and Gender in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote”, discusses Quixotism in relation to gender and what I call the politics of Romance. An American-born woman novelist, Lennox moved to England, where her literary talent was appreciated by Samuel Richardson, Henry Fielding and Dr Johnson. The novel’s heroine, Arabella, is a female Quixote whose exemplary virtue and high social status enable her to participate in the public sphere and to repoliticize Madame de Scudéry’s Romances and early eighteenth-century popular fiction as a serious literary form. I maintain that Lennox’s goal was to produce a piece of fiction about what the novel really is when seen in close connection with Romance, particularly at the end of the novel, when a clergyman finds it difficult to cure Arabella’s folly because his empirical generalities are at odds with her solid arguments based on the “probable” laws of Romance. The novel accommodates Arabella’s Quixotic pedagogy derived from French Romances after they test her wit, generosity and disinterested affection. Chapter 7, “A Tale of Faith and Love: Religious Enthusiasm and Natural Affection in Richard Graves’ The Spiritual Quixote”, sees Methodism as Quixotism, as illustrated by Geoffrey Wildgoose, a 18 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 handsome young man who wants to revive Nonconformist religion as true Christianity. I argue that Methodism appears as Quixotism in terms of religious enthusiasm and manner of preaching. By blasting the practice of Methodism, not its principles, Graves’ satire, subtitled “a comic Romance” in the manner of Henry Fielding, substantiates Addison’s and Steele’s reform of laughter as amiable and sympathetic. The chapter demonstrates that the Quixotic Wildgoose excels in the art of preaching and oratory, managing, at the same time, to strike a sensitive chord with women, notably with Miss Townsend, his real Dulcinea, to whom he gets married in the end. This chapter also discusses the concept of enthusiasm, as well as the relation between faith and love, which points to the modern interpretation of Quixotism. The Coda, “Charles Lucas’ The Infernal Quixote, Radicalism and the Comic Sense of Moral Reform”, focuses on a veritable political Quixote who is intent on importing the ideals of the French Revolution in Ireland. Read as a comic romp à la Henry Fielding, Charles Lucas’ anti-Jacobin novel, The Infernal Quixote, condemns William Godwin’s anarchist principles underlying the “new philosophy” that would apparently win over the conservative tradition of the ancien régime, were it not for Wilson Wilson, the Christian Quixote opposed to Marauder, the rebellious Quixote, who suppresses the spread of Jacobinism across Britain. The novel is propagandistic to the extent that it unmasks the moral, social and political crisis caused by democratic egalitarianism, which emerged in Revolutionary France in the 1790s. The overall conclusion of the book is inspired by Marauder, who acts as a “political counter in the war of ideas ranging across the British Isles at the turn of the nineteenth century”.50 As we have seen, the admiration that Don Quixote earned in eighteenth-century England in general, and in the eighteenth-century English novel in particular, is tightly connected with the fact that “the demands on people were no less than they were on literary works to be agreeable and cheerful. No longer did Addison have to coax his readers into good-nature, it was a requirement of society.”51 In this context, the new translation of Cervantes’ book by Tobias Smollett in 1755 was accompanied, apart from an explanatory note, by Francis
50 Wood, Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 25. 51 Susan Auty, The Comic Spirit of Eighteenth-Century Novels, Port Washington, New York, and London: National University Publications, Kennicat Press, 1975, 25. Introduction 19
Hayman’s illustrations meant to provide a clearer answer to the question whether the Quixote was a fool or a virtuous hero. On the left of his 1755 Frontispiece entitled “The Decay of Chivalry” (see page 20), Hayman portrays Truth targeting a mirrored shield at the monstrous figures of Romance. On the right stands Comedy gazing at an Arabic shield, with a dragon at her feet, ready to demolish a Moorish building. The masculine Truth’s invisible hands allude to Cervantes’ left arm lost in the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. His mirrored shield, the ultimate expression of reason, scares the grotesque hunchback and the many-handed man. The knight and his damsel are engulfed in smoke. Though Truth seems to be the main actor, he stands behind Comedy, thus leaving her bemused by reason and superstition. As Wood comments, Comedy “is the picture of indecision … one face looks intently at the writing on the romance shield, while the other grins on, blind to her dilemma”. By turning her back on Truth, Comedy may be said to be tempted to enter the Moorish building, being lured by the dragon as well. She does not pull down the edifice that typifies Romance. Rather, she is “susceptible to corruption by designing fictions”.52 Thus, Comedy allies itself with Romance, without forgetting that Truth shines from behind. This is the eighteenth-century emblem of Quixotism.
52 Wood, Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 35.
Francis Hayman, Frontispiece: “The Decay of Chivalry”, 1755. Reproduced by permission of Cushing Memorial Library and Archives, Texas A&M University.
CHAPTER 1
HENRY FIELDING AND THE RHETORIC OF QUIXOTIC BENEVOLENCE: DON QUIXOTE IN ENGLAND
From satire to comedy: Don Quixote in England; or, the sense of Quixotic social morality In Chapters 47 and 48 of Part I of Don Quixote, the Canon of Toledo’s conversation with the barber Nicolás turns into a long-running debate on the pernicious effects of chivalry books legitimately dismissed as a bad genre, as it derogates from present-day literary norms. Inveighing against their lack of proportion between parts and the whole, preposterous or questionable content, unpolished style and cheap delight as their only aim, the Canon recommends the observance of the Aristotelian unity of action1 which adds to the delicacy of style, non-servile imitation, el ingenio and la invención,2 all meant to create
1 The Canon echoes Cervantes’ view on the Aristotelian unity of action informed by Juan de la Cueva’s Filosofía antigua castellana (1582) and Antonio Lόpez El Pinciano’s Philosophia Antigua poetica (1596). Nevertheless, by calling Don Quixote a historia, Cervantes subverts this unity which, corroborated with the Aristotelian principles of the universality of poetry and the particularity of history, mingles poetry and history in a work paradoxically based on a story disguised as history, which claims to be true due to the author’s manipulation of particulars, i.e. adventures, in order to achieve an artistic end. Bruce W. Wardopper’s thought-provoking article called “Don Quixote: Story or History?”, Modern Philology, LXIII (August 1965), 1- 11, provides a lengthy discussion of this aspect by considering sixteenth-century aesthetics as posited by the Spanish philosophers just mentioned: history is natural because it records a logical succession of events based on a cause-and-effect relationship whereas story is artificiosa, since “events are made to happen in a peculiarly satisfactory way” (ibid., 2). Américo Castro’s groundbreaking study, El pensamiento de Cervantes, Madrid: Hernando, 1925, views Don Quixote as a liminal space between vertiente poética (“poetic truth”) and vertiente histόrica (“historical truth”) (ibid., 30). 2 See Stephen Gilman, The Novel According to Cervantes, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Gilman explains the meaning of the two terms by having recourse to Huarte de San Juan’s Examen de ingenios (1575). Seen as part of the artistic process in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ingenio, or mental ability, 22 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 an impression of verisimilitude in a work of fiction whose role is to entertain and, above all, to instruct the reader. Abiding by these rules, the Canon confesses that he experimented with the idea of writing a book of chivalry just for the sake of finding out the opinion of two different types of readers: some learned, prudent and discerning, others ignorant and eager to read foolish things. The Canon is puzzled to notice that the latter type provides the same feedback as the former: flattering approbation. As a good connoisseur of human nature and especially of the kind of fiction that such an uninstructed (Quixotic) readership devours, the Canon sadly concludes that the vulgus deceives him whereas wise people are the ones who praise him honestly and disinterestedly. Surprisingly enough, the Canon makes an unexpected analogy with plays which, whether fashionable or historical, account for the same degrading taste of the vulgar keen on absurd plots that are also financially rewarding. It is playwrights who are to blame, argues the Canon, not the vulgar audience, because playwrights do not master the rules of art as stipulated by Aristotle and write such productions according to the precepts of supply and demand. Deploring the debased condition of theatre performances in Spain, the barber Nicolás replies: “porque habiendo de ser la comedia, según le parece a Tulio, espejo de la vida humana, ejemplo de las costumbres y imagen de la verdad, las que ahora se representan son espejos de disparates, ejemplos de necedades e imágenes de lascivia.”3 By the same token, the poet’s and the player’s criticism of the poor quality of modern English drama in Joseph Andrews (III, x-xi) is actually based on mutual recriminations, with the former blaming the actors because they “know not to give a sentiment utterance” and the
“generates”, whereas invención stands for understanding or judgement. Gilman points out that Huarte subdivides ingenio into “categories corresponding to imagination, memory and understanding, which are indispensable for ‘invention’, understood in the postrhetorical sense” (101). 3 Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico, Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2004, 495. Peter Motteux, The History of the Renowned Don Quixote de la Mancha. In Four Volumes. Written in Spanish by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Translated by Several Hands and Published by Peter Motteux, London: R. Knaplock, D. Midwinter, J. Tonson, 1719, II, 588: “for whereas Plays, according to the Opinion of Cicero, ought to be Mirrors of Human Life, Patterns of good Manners, and the very Representatives of Truth; those now acted, are Mirrors of Absurdities, Patterns of Follies, and the very Representatives of Lewdness.” Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 23 latter making vituperative comments on the lack of “new good plays”. 4 Unfolding as a verbal combat between two speakers, the dialogue takes “the form of a serio-comic agon”5 which substantiates the critique of the professional group of “modern authors” and actors, respectively. Dramatists expect “fame or profit, or perhaps both”, the works of modern authors “are like dead-born children … lifeless, spiritless, low, grovelling stuff” whereas “many of our gentleman” (actors) “are bad enough, and I pity an author who is present at the murder of his works”. Temporarily assuaged by mutual flattery – the poet’s words of praise for the player’s excellent parts and the player’s encomium of the poet’s “manly strokes, ay whole scenes in your last Tragedy which at least equal Shakespear”6 – the dialogue invites a new round of accusations occasioned by the player’s inability to repeat the tender speech in the third Act of the tragedy written by the poet. The player who forgets the speech proves to be as totally unskilled as the poet whose play is hissed from the pit while the actors are pelted with oranges. Claiming that the party of tailors in the pit are only partially responsible for the failure, the poet’s conclusion is actually an echo of the initial bone of contention related to poor players: “For you can’t say it had justice done it by the performers.” The critics’ positive feedback becomes the supreme argument in favour of his successful work, reinforced by, and coupled with, the response given by refined and sensible readers, not by vulgarly empathetic spectators: “But if I should tell you what the best judges said of it – nor was it entirely owing to my enemies neither, that it did not succeed on the stage as well as it hath since among the polite readers.”7 In Tom Jones, the credulous servant Partridge, whose Quixotic mind is full of superstitions, ghosts, devils and witches, mistakes theatrical representation for reality and bad acting for good. His naive response to the performance of Hamlet or to tragic action becomes comic when Fielding shifts the focus of attention from the play proper to Partridge’s empathetic response to it. His genuine tragic fear
4 Henry Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams (1742), London: Penguin Books, 1985, 246. 5 Maurice Johnson, Fielding’s Art of Fiction: Eleven Essays on Shamela, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Amelia, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961, 62. 6 Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, 246-47. 7 Ibid., 249. 24 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 instilled by Garrick’s performance is doubled by his conviction – though he knows that what he watches is only a play – that the old Hamlet’s ghost is wicked and, more significantly, real. Fielding cleverly transforms Partridge’s tragic fear into a good opportunity for Tom and his friends to stop watching the play proper and amuse themselves observing Partridge as a comic spectator and critic of Hamlet: “where Partridge had afforded great mirth, not only to Tom Jones and Mrs Miller, but to all who sat within hearing, who were more attentive to what he said, than to anything that passed on the stage.”8 Partridge’s misrepresentation rooted in fear and superstition thus gives birth to a “generic destabilisation”, that is, “a burlesque version of tragedy” which an empathetic spectator plays for the whole audience.9 Despite the delineation of tones – one serious, the other satirical – used to describe the status of drama in Spain and England, the two introductory comments relate to a politics of playwriting and performance whose fundamental principles are verisimilitude, moral truth and didacticism. Written by two authors who had good credentials as dramatists as well, both episodes speak volumes about the type of theatrical entertainment that was to become – or that had already become in Cervantes’ case10 – a mode of literary represent- ation in their novels. The correspondence between the aesthetically and morally harmful effects of chivalric Romances and the ill-written and ill-suited
8 Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749), London: Penguin Classics, 1985, 760. 9 John Allen Stevenson, “Fielding’s Mousetrap: Hamlet, Partridge and the ’45”, Studies in English Literature, XXXVII/3, “Restoration and Eighteenth Century” (Summer 1997), 559. 10 The writing of plays and novels simultaneously or within a specific period of time clearly shows that Cervantes knew that the function of theatrical entertainment could be exploited in the concurrent or forthcoming novels with a view to foregrounding moral truth as the ultimate force of artistic expression. This process does not imply a temporal distance or a transition from one preoccupation to another, as it happens in Fielding, but a manifestation of concurrent dramatic and novelistic techniques. For instance, some of Cervantes’ first plays were staged between 1583 and 1587, the year when the pastoral novel La Galatea was published. Also, the publication of the second part of Don Quixote in 1615 coincided with that of Ocho comedias y Ocho entremeses nunca representados. Don Quixote is the perfect example of concurrence, particularly in Part II where the duke and the duchess stage the hidalgo’s adventures as burlas for the sake of entertainment. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 25
“lifeless”, “spiritless” and “low” plays should also be read contextually. The Canon, one of the multiple personas of Cervantes in Don Quixote, stresses the paramount importance of drama at the time and its impressive impact upon the Spanish audience. As a renovator and self-appointed founder of la comedia nueva,11 Cervantes’ interest in moral figures as main heroes on stage marks him off from the classic dramatists of his time and becomes a determining force without derogating from the Aristotelian unity of action. Sure enough, Cervantes flinched at the commercial success that his major opponent, Lope de Vega, enjoyed as the real founder of la comedia nueva. Though labelled as bad theatre and, therefore, unacceptable for the seventeenth-century stage dominated by the latter’s anti-Aristotelian conventions, Cervantes’ countervailing comedias and entremeses nunca representados (“comedies” and “interludes never represented”) exerted a strong influence on the reading public. Cory Reed draws attention to the novelistic elements in Cervantes’ plays and insists on their readability by invoking Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the novel and novelized genres. Such novelistic features, argues Reed, made Cervantes’ entremeses unperformable within the context of seventeenth-century Spanish drama. He furthers his argument by showing how such “unconventional” drama, as opposed to Lope de Vega’s theatrical profitability, became eminently readable due to the actors’ and directors’ lack of influence and revision:
Only after his comedias and entremeses had been deemed inappropriate for the stage did he sell his scripts to a bookseller with the intention of releasing them for the reading public .… He was able to draft a prologue as an explanation of his plays’ appearance in print and to direct the reader’s understanding of the dramatic texts that followed. The printed volume of his comedias and entremeses, therefore, cannot be classified along with the published collections of commercially successful plays (like those of Lope de Vega, for example), but rather pertains to a new practice of publishing drama based on its value as readable literature, as a dramatic form which has been redefined for initial consumption by a reading audience.12
11 See Cory A. Reed, “Cervantes and the Novelization of Drama: Tradition and Innovation in the Entremeses”, Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, XI/1 (1991), 61-86. 12 Ibid., 63. 26 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Therefore, Cervantes’ invention vies with the dramatic convention established by Lope de Vega, who wrote for commercial success. However, the dialogue between the poet and the player pinpoints the necessity to write and act well in order to convey true-to-life sentiments. Furthermore, it is highly expressive of the inexhaustible source of Augustan satire whereby Fielding committed himself to denouncing, as Ronald Paulson has shown, “the shoddy literary and artistic world of England from which could be intimated the larger political and moral malaise”.13 Finally, one should not overlook the role played by the vulgar audience to whom both Spanish and English plays were dedicated as part of a cultural supply and demand. Though it is not my intention here to delve into the theatrical careers of Cervantes and Fielding and the types of audience they attracted in their day, I contend that the pre- eminence of such a category of spectators in the two metonymic illustrations of both the Spanish and English modus operandi in drama is fundamental to the generic configuration of comedy and to didacticism, moral reformation of society and reconciliation between the hero and society as its prerequisites.14 Though Cervantes pleaded for a prudente and discreto lector able to understand the Aristotelian rules of art and well-constructed plots required for the composition of chivalric Romances, he was aware that la comedia nueva appealed, as Otis Green claims, to “the pueblo todo who took direct contact with humble reality”. 15 Moreover, Green suggests that, unlike Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina, who did not consider the vulgo (the “vulgar”) as a prevailing force in the history of Spanish drama but as a merely profitable consumer of entertainment, Cervantes “endowed them with discreción as well as with intellectual and artistic creativeness”.16 It is worth mentioning that Green does not refer to the vulgo as the pobre (the “poor”), but to the attitude of the Spanish
13 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 53 (emphasis added). 14 In Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957, Northrop Frye argues that discovery and reconciliation throw comedy towards a happy ending to which the audience’s response is “this should be” (167) and that the second phase of comedy, “the quixotic phase”, portrays a weak society “constructed by or around a hero who is partly a comic humour or a mental runaway, and we have either the hero’s illusion thwarted by a superior reality or a clash of two illusions” (180). 15 Otis H. Green, “On the Attitude toward the Vulgo in the Spanish Siglo de Oro”, Studies in the Renaissance, IV (1957), 200. 16 Ibid., 196. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 27
Golden Age towards the villano (the “peasant”) seen as analogous to the necio-discreto (the “herd”). Claiming that villanos began to be culturally valued in the sixteenth century as a consequence of their songs (villanescas) performed in moments of relaxation and their proverbs (refranes) that came to be regarded as genuine sources of wisdom, virtue and eloquence, Green stresses the important artistic contribution that this class brought to the writings of the cortesanos and comments on Cervantes’ definition of the vulgar in intellectual terms in Don Quixote: “Do not think, sir, that I apply this name of vulgo only to folk of humble and plebeian station; for every man who knows not, be he great lord or prince, may and indeed should come under this designation.” Similar to Fielding’s noisy audience, they are positive musketeers (mosqueteros), meaning “the groundlings of the pit” made up of “tailors, shoemakers, coachmen, puppeteers and others of similar classification”17 who have the power to decide the fate of theatrical works. According to Jusepe Antonio González de Salas, a friend of Quevedo, the mosqueteros “did not permit the mistake of a single syllable; it was always a master which dealt severely with those who failed to satisfy it”. By defending sins as conveyers of pleasure to the audience, Salas acclaims “our own comic poets” who “have departed from precept … motivated by a prudent desire to obtain the approbation of the popular ear”.18 Like Cervantes, Fielding relies on a good-natured audience whose sympathy and admiration for comic heroes should prevail,19 despite their violence inflamed by bad per- formance or by the empathetic effects of the poet’s tragedy. One may argue, in this respect, that Fielding imagines an audience whose response complements the one given by the vulgo discreto, and by readers, whose quality of being “polite” encompasses a disposition
17 Ibid., 194 (emphasis in the original). Green quotes José Alcázar’s unpublished Ortografía castellana composed at the end of the seventeenth century, in which he details the occupations of the vulgo as a social class. 18 Ibid., 199. 19 This point will be enlarged in the next chapter on Joseph Andrews, in which I shall elaborate on the meaning of charity, good nature and benevolence by having recourse to Shaftesbury’s theory of moral sense formulated in Characteristics, which draws on the Latitudinarian Divines’ doctrine of good deeds and faith as means of salvation. 28 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 towards disinterested sociability as well as aesthetic and ethical concerns.20 It is my aim to argue in what follows that eighteenth-century England gave Don Quixote an enthusiastic reception primarily occasioned by dramatic adaptations, “for which Fielding was the most important vehicle”,21 notwithstanding the broad range of translations, allusions and satirical imitations accumulated over time. Provoked by theatrical malpractice – cheap, unrealistic and commercial playwriting and poor acting – supported by a vicious society, moral malaise was amended by Fielding’s predilection for dulce and utile figures, such as Don Quixote who became through him the English representative of what I call the theatre of moral sense, which deliberately departs from precepts in order to allow spectators to assess “the utterance of a sentiment” by means of unflattering admiration or boisterous disapprobation. Giving it currency in An Inquiry Concerning Virtue, Shaftesbury defines moral sense as a purveyor of universal good based on the doctrine of natural affections which, discerned by an inward eye, engender instinctively good actions for the benefit of the others. Such a sentimental reading of moral sense as “utilitarian humanism” 22 becomes compelling evidence of Fielding’s sympathetic view of Don Quixote not only in Joseph Andrews, “Written in the Manner of Cervantes”, where Parson Adams is a perfect embodiment of Cervantes’ hero, but also in his comic play Don Quixote in England, a literal imitation I analyse in the following pages. Applied to Don Quixote in England, the theatre of moral sense acquires a dual function: it differentiates between moral and vicious figures on stage and applauds the moral figures’ spur-of-the-moment ethical resolutions of the allegedly judicious yet socially ignoble actions
20 In the Introduction to Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, Laurence E. Klein defines Shaftesburian politeness as follows: (1) the art of “pleasing in company”; (2) a “dextrous management of words and actions”; (3) “refined sociability” based on an exchange of opinions and feelings, “bringing aesthetic concerns into close contiguity with ethical ones” (3-4). 21 Brean S. Hammond, “Mid-Century English Quixotism and the Defence of the Novel”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, X/3 (April 1998), 250. 22 A.R. Humphreys, “‘The Friend of Mankind’ (1700-1760): An Aspect of Eighteenth-Century Sensibility”, The Review of English Studies, XXIV/95 (July 1948), 207. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 29 performed by all the other characters in the play. At the same time, it relates to the audience’s sympathetic response to such resolutions. Used as a metaphor for questioning and destabilizing what appears to be rationally right in the eyes of a secular society in which vested interests prevail, the theatre of moral sense upholds Fielding’s final decision to distinguish the good-natured, sympathetic audience of comedy from the ill-natured spectators of satire for the purpose of reinforcing social harmony:
Each Spectator Of Good-Nature With Applause will entertain .… Don Quixote and Squire Sancho.23
The interplay between Don Quixote’s ethical measures and benevolent readers’ responses is instrumental in grasping the Fieldingesque idealized meaning of social morality and embattled reason – a reasonable Quixote or reasonable society? – and accounts for the early eighteenth-century reception of Don Quixote as an admirable moral figure.24 All in all, discreción (“judgement”) is a must-have for the “polite” readers of the “vulgar” literary genre, the novel, who have already been taught by the readers-cum-spectators of another moralistic genre, satire, to pass judgement on man’s degenerate daily actions only after interpreting them on the basis of motives and extenuating circumstances.25 Good nature generates a harmonious space, comedy, upheld by sensus communis, according to Shaftesbury’s terminology, established by the spectators’ sympathetic response to the theatrical moral reformation of society.
23 Henry Fielding, Don Quixote in England, As it is Acted at the New Theatre in the Hay-Market, London: J. Watts, 1734, 64 (all further references to this edition will be given in the text). 24 The admiration for Cervantes’ hero prevailed until the emergence of the anti- Jacobin novel that propelled a reactionary Quixote into action. Charles Lucas’ novel, The Infernal Quixote, is a telling example that will be thoroughly examined in the last chapter of the book. 25 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 3. 30 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Approaching Don Quixote in England As a dramatic and novelistic vehicle, Fielding institutionalized the figure of Don Quixote in early eighteenth-century English literature both as an “amiable humorist” regarded with sympathy, as Tave has noted, and as a “mechanism”, in the words of Michael Irwin, used to condemn the follies of society. By this understanding, Fielding becomes an outstanding member of the “‘soft school’ that sees Don Quixote as the protagonist of Cervantes’ novel, governed by an invincible sublime motivation”.26 The two conflated features, “amia- ble humorist” and satirical “mechanism”, assigned to the Spanish knight enabled Fielding to unfold a politics of imitation which departed from the pre-Restoration narrow view of Don Quixote as a simple jest-book resembling the absurd books of chivalry ridiculed by Cervantes himself.27 Three things in particular deserve notice in Fielding’s comic play, Don Quixote in England. First, Don Quixote was a model bluntly imitated by Fielding in order to scrutinize the status quo in England, to compare and negotiate the difference between Spanish and English cultural identity and, consequently, to underline a “crisis of individuation and of national character”, in Bannet’s terms.28 Second, “the most literal of the literary imports”29 into England buttressed the authority of Quixotism construed as a metonymy30 of sound judgement and ethical conduct. In lieu of acting as the same hobby-horses urged by the Quixote’s blind obedience to Amadís de Gaula’s chivalric code, right judgement and ethical conduct become fully-fledged qualities praised at the end of the play by all the other characters whose idiosyncratic views and actions are actually the butt of Fielding’s satire. This is indicative of the positive value of Quixotism displayed by comedy in conjunction with its good-natured
26 Oscar Mandel, “The Function of the Norm in ‘Don Quixote’”, Modern Philology, LV/3 (February 1958), 154. 27 Much like Stuart Tave in The Amiable Humorist, Edwin B. Knowles, Jr. refers to this issue in his article, “Don Quixote through English Eyes”, in which he sketches out the reception of Don Quixote from a laughing-stock character before the Restoration to a noble figure until the end of the eighteenth century when he acquired a Romantic aura. 28 Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres”, 554. 29 Wood, Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 16. 30 See Hollahan, Crisis-Consciousness and the Novel, 3; and 238, n.5. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 31 spectators to whom Fielding addresses in the final air called “All mankind Are Mad, ’tis Plain”. Third, Fielding’s imitation – which markedly denounces Horace Walpole’s corrupted political system in order to sustain the “crisis of individuation” – capitalizes on the politics of comic representation launched by Dryden under the form of utile and dulce, with the latter as the final aim. Strengthened by Shaftesbury’s philosophy of good nature and universal benevolence, the Horatian pronouncement of moral didacticism and delight determined Addison and Steele to oppose, as Ronald Paulson points out, “a ‘good-natured’ Whiggish satire to the ‘ill-natured’ satire of the Tories”, and “a rehabilitating to a scornful laughter”.31 Though the new sympathetic laughter of pure comedy encouraged, according to Addison, dulce rather than utile, my argument is that Fielding linked the moral sanction of the Tory satire to the Whiggish new meaning of humour as “an amiable foible” and of comedy as release.32 Emerging from the metaphor of “the world as stage”, the “reflexivity” of Fielding’s drama thus overlaps with “an epistemological ingratiation of the senses evident in the wholesale reliance on theatrical ‘spectacle’” with the purpose of juxtaposing questions of truth and questions of virtue. 33
Thematizing problems of British cultural identity Written in Leiden in 1728 but never acted or published until 1734, Don Quixote in England, As it is Acted at the New Theatre in the Hay- Market is a ballad opera which replicates Peter Motteux’s interpretation of Don Quixote as an “exemplary” 34 figure in his
31 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 68. 32 Ibid., 69-71. 33 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 383. 34 See François Rigolot, “The Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity”, Journal of the History of Ideas, LIX/4 (October 1998), 557-63. Investigating the epistemological nature of examples in the Renaissance, Rigolot views them as culturally and historically embedded in two Latin terms, “example” and “exemplum”, tightly related to rhetoric. Thus, “example” has a less didactic meaning whereas “exemplum” serves a demonstrative purpose. Given the technical transformation of both terms under the pressure of common usage, Renaissance orators made their speeches more appealing by using exemplars, i.e. demonstrative models of ancient virtue or moral fortitude, worthy of being imitated in a period of “crisis” characterized by a wide range of unpredictable human actions which stemmed from “the new attractiveness of a more ‘natural’ mimetic discourse that tended to turn the study of models away from duplication” (558-59). Similar to Fielding, Motteux’s reconsideration of the Quixotic 32 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 groundbreaking 1700 translation and the universal pattern of Quixotic thought and action with specific application, says Motteux, to politics and religion:
Every man has something of Don Quixote in his Humour, some darling Dulcinea of his Thoughts, that sets him very often upon mad Adventures. What Quixotes do[e]s not every Age produce in Politics and Religion, who fancying themselves to be in the right of something, which all the World tells ’em is wrong, make very good sport to the Public, and shew that they themselves need the chiefest Amendment …. I have ingag’d to rescue the Hero of Cervantes out of the hands of his former Translators, and to set him at large to seek happier Adventures in a more proper Dress.35
Wilbur Cross informs us that Fielding “met Motteux’s translation as a boy” and read Cervantes and Swift before his departure from Eton in 1724 and his writing of Love in Several Masques (1728). Though there is no evidence that he read Cervantes in Spanish, “he probably read [James] Ozell’s revised version of the one by Motteux, some of whose phrasings he apparently emulated in the 1728 early play, Don Quixote in England, which met with considerable success when it opened at the Haymarket in 1734”. Far from needing the “chiefest Amendment” staunchly advocated by Quixotic novels in an effort to reintegrate the eccentric Spaniard into the dominant culture, Don Quixote sniffs out political corruption in England and is thus “tested” as a potential candidate for parliamentary elections. Unmasking Fielding’s bitter anti-Walpolean opposition, the play concentrates on political matters that are to be solved by Don Quixote’s righteous “amendments”. Though Motteux’s goal was to adapt Don Quixote to “a more proper dress”, particularly amplified by the urge to achieve a new translation faithful to the original and to provide a clear understanding of Cervantes’ novel that previous translators had obliterated “thro haste or want of skill”,36 Fielding’s play shows how the “happier” English adventures retain by paradigm at the dawn of the eighteenth century stands solid proof of these socio- ethical changes, particularly due to his translation of adventures as “Atchievements”. 35 Motteux, “The Translator’s Preface to Cervantes”, 1. 36 Wilbur Cross, History of Henry Fielding, quoted in Eric J. Ziolkowski, The Sanctification of Don Quixote: From Hidalgo to Priest, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991, 46-47. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 33 means of comedy the Spanish hero’s moral dress that enables him to pour scorn on the venality of English society. Consequently, the acculturation of Don Quixote in England was meant to give birth to a “sympathy or contagion of manners among neighbouring nations” that “maintain a close society or communication together”.37 In the “Dedication to the Right Honourable Philip Lord of Chesterfield, Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter”, Fielding translates the “contagion of manners” as “powerful examples” and hastens to declare corruption the central theme of the play:
My Lord,
However unworthy these Scenes may be of your Lordship’s Protection, the Design with which some of them were written, cannot fail of recommending them to ONE who hath so gloriously distinguished Himself in the Cause of Liberty, to which the Corruption I have here endeavoured to expose, may one Day be a very fatal Enemy .… The Freedom of the Stage is, perhaps, as well worth contending for as that of the Press. It is the Opinion of an Author well- known to Your LORDSHIP, that Examples work quicker and stronger on the Mind of Men than Precepts. This will, I believe, my LORD, be found truer with regard to Politicks than to Ethicks: The most ridiculous Exhibitions of Luxury and Avarice may likely have little Effect on the Sensualist or the Miser; but I fancy a lively Representation of the Calamities brought on a Country by general Corruption, might have a sensible and useful Effect on the Spectators. (fol. A2-A3)
Notwithstanding the praise for Lord of Chesterfield as a fighter for the “Cause of Liberty”, Fielding’s blunt exposure of the imminent damaging effects of political rather ethical corruption is subtly fuelled by his own political bias. As Thomas R. Cleary has shown, though the political satire against Horace Walpole in the play does not unravel Fielding’s anti-ministerial bias, the 1734 “Dedication” to Chesterfield as a defender of liberty “only referred to his resistance to the Excise Bill, which cost him the lucrative, minor posts that had rewarded his support of the ministry in the Lords, driving him into opposition”.
37 David Hume, “Of National Characters”, in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects, Edinburgh: Bell and Bradfute, 1825, I, 198 and 199. 34 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
As a “standard jargon of opposition through the 1730s and 1740s”,38 “general Corruption” as a natural subject represented on the free stage may easily rival, intimates Fielding, general corruption as a topical issue exploited by the free press. The competition between the two fields of representation, the stage and the press, is articulated by the dramatist in order to underline the superiority of the former in terms of powerful visual experimentation, buttressed by Fielding’s implicit political beliefs revealed in the play. The “Freedom of the Stage” is a subtle allusion to the Opposition’s vehement reaction against the government’s decision to support the censorial power of Lord Chamberlain, the “Giant Cajanus who deferred the Don’s appearance so long” (page unnumbered). Since the Opposition refused to help Walpole impose new controls in 1735, Sir John Bernard, the London opposition stalwart, introduced a bill to ratify Lord Chamberlain’s powers, thus hoping to curb the immoral influence of London theatres and to reduce their number. Nonetheless, Walpole’s amendment augmented Lord Chamberlain’s censorial powers once with the enforcement of the Licensing Act of 1737, which meant the end of Fielding’s theatrical career mainly foreshadowed by Pasquin (1736), a notorious attack on the Walpole government. Unethical politics is just one of the topical matters staged by wit, which, “like Hunger”, as Fielding confesses, “will be with great Difficulty restrained from falling on, where there is great Plenty and Variety of Food” (page unnumbered). This is a metaphor for significant miscellanies later on recorded by his novels. The political status quo criticized in the “Dedication” and adopted as a major theme in the play finds its ethical counterpart in the Preface, where Fielding voices his feeling of inferiority to Cervantes and “despair” at being incapable of imitating his model: “The Impossibility of going beyond, and the extreme Difficulty of keeping pace with him, were sufficient to infuse Despair into a very adventurous Author” (page unnumbered). Like Motteux’s categorical statement that Don Quixote “is an Original without a Precedent, and will be a Pattern without a Copy”, which finally proves “to entice any man to an imitation” due to the “many Graces in the Original”, 39 Fielding, far from contradicting
38 Thomas R. Cleary, Henry Fielding: Political Writer, Waterloo, Ont: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1984, 69. 39 Motteux, “The Translator’s Preface to Cervantes”, 4. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 35 himself, manages to introduce successfully, though not effortlessly, a topical English Quixote. Despite his recalcitrance, the Quixote comes across as a gentleman-like figure – so most noble characters in the play perceive him – who no longer inhabits the ideal world of Romance: “I soon found it infinitely more difficult than I imagined, to vary the Scene, and gave my Knight an Opportunity if displaying himself in a different manner from that wherein he appears in the Romance” (page unnumbered). Initially brought to England for Fielding’s personal amusement, Don Quixote gradually defines the dramatist’s politics of imitation by complying with the rules of gentlemanly/gentlewomanly decorum and by getting involved in, and reforming, a bewildering array of issues defining British cultural identity. Though self-ironic with respect to his allegedly unsuccessful play and dramatic plot flimsily inspired by his “too little Knowledge of the World” and “too small Experience”, Fielding cleverly concludes the Preface with a reference to the universality of human nature, in spite of specific local customs – a remark that reminds us of Motteux’s opening lines of his Preface to the new 1700 translation of Don Quixote – “Human Nature is every where the same. And the Modes and Habits of particular Nations do not change it enough, sufficiently to distinguish a Quixote in England from a Quixote in Spain” (page unnumbered). The great endeavour to surpass the Spanish model inevitably finds a satirical response and a comic reward in the English “Modes and Habits” that polarize questions of British identity. Implying that human nature is as universally unstable as Quixotic conduct, Fielding transforms Quixotism into a trope specific to sentimentalism in order to prove that English society’s views are as partial as Don Quixote’s and that they “operate more by the force of situation”. 40 Rational authority, which asserts moral truth without considering empirical evidence, is subverted by the “quixotism of rationalism”41 seen as a sentimental alternative, deriving moral ideas from sensations experienced hic et nunc. Thus, in the Introduction, Fielding juxtaposes the familiar presence of the mad Don with England as a country of mad people:
40 Cleary, Henry Fielding: Political Writer, 98. 41 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 75. See also her seminal discussion of the “quixotic problem” epistemologically rooted in the triad Quixotism-sentimentalism-reason (ibid., 2-6). 36 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
The Audience, I believe, are all acquainted with the Character of Don Quixote and Sancho. I have brought them over into England, and introduced them at an Inn in the Country, where, I believe, no one will be surpris’d that the Knight finds several People as mad as himself. (page unnumbered)
In other words, madness – meant as a variety of particular views, opinions or alternatives to the unattainable Lockean ideal of universal reason and moral conformity – blurs the difference between “us” and “them” 42 and interprets the real through the lens of a welter of idiosyncrasies. According to Motooka, the Quixote trope is “a critique of empirical method itself, displaying how differing interpretive principles can make one person’s experientially derived probabilities look like another person’s madness”.43 The play begins in medias res with the innkeeper Guzzle calling Don Quixote “an arrant Rogue” who runs the risk of being imprisoned because he refuses to pay the bill. The reference to Don Quixote as a satirical type of “Rogue” or villain is counterpoised by Sancho’s firm response which opposes his master’s arbitrary power of doing good as a Don who is “above the law” to the English venality urged by the law of commerce (Communio mercium) as “the new form of human community”:44 “My Master fears no Warrant, Friend; had you ever been in Spain, you would have known that Men of his Order are above the Law” (1). Rebuking Sancho for his foolish words, Guzzle warns him about the imminent danger of “laying [Don Quixote’s] Spaniardship fast in a Place”, since “no one is above the Law” in England. The clash between Spanish and English cultural identity is amplified by Guzzle’s allusion to the political tension between the two empires at the time: “And if your Master does not pay me, I shall lay his Spaniardship fast in a Place, which he shall find it as difficult to get out of, as your Countrymen have found it to get into Gibraltar” (2).
42 In the Introduction to The Practice of Quixotism: Postmodern Theory and Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, Scott Paul Gordon defines the Quixote trope as “a depiction of another’s deluded perceptions that implies the objectivity of one’s own – precisely to dismiss others’ beliefs”, thus generating the sheer difference between “us” and “them” (1, 2). 43 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 93. 44 Anthony Ascham, Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments (1649), quoted in McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 204. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 37
The historical indication of the war between England and Spain in 1728-1729 allows Fielding to blast both Walpole’s trade policy and the English law of Communio mercium which characterizes English commoners like Guzzle. Horace Walpole’s “appeasement on Spain”45 and the dispute over trading regulations between Spain and England and Gibraltar led to the Treaty of Seville in 1729. Conversely, in 1734, when the play was first staged, “the Opposition paper, The Craftsman, was calling stridently for renewal of war with Spain to protect British trade with the sugar islands in the Caribbean from the depredations of Spanish ships”.46 Guzzle concludes the first scene of Act I on the same note, voicing his animosity towards foreigners (that is, Spanish) like Don Quixote and Sancho whose familiar Spanish appearance and behaviour become two roguish replicas of their mounts, Rozinante and Dapple:
The Don is just such another lean Ramscallion as his – what d’ye call him – his Rozinante; and thou art such another Squat Bag of Guts as thy Dapple. Send my House and my Stable once well emptied of you, and if ever I suffer a Spaniard to enter my Doors again, may I have a whole Company of Soldiers quartered on me; for if I must be eaten up, I had rather suffer by my own Country Rogues, than foreign ones. (2)
Guzzle’s invocation of justice, yet also imperial rivalry prepares the ground for the unravelling of various British identity issues, despite Fielding’s initial feeling of frustration with respect to servile imitation. Early on in the play (I, 2), Don Quixote tells Sancho that he “smells an Adventure” (3). As a result of his moral renovation of English manners, he firmly declares that “No Place abounds more with them. I was told there was a plenteous Stock of Monsters … ” (61). In spite of Don Quixote’s wild imagination, Guzzle belongs to this “Stock” because of his rapacity evinced until the last scene of the play. Claiming his financial rights in the name of the English law, Guzzle concurrently proves that, unlike the nobility, common countrymen like him, particularly innkeepers, mistreat Don Quixote in England as much as in Spain. If “the Favours of the Generous English always outstrip Merit, and ’tis the Character of the Nobility to be kind to
45 Cleary, Henry Fielding: Political Writer, 70. 46 Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres”, 556. 38 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Strangers”, 47 Guzzle’s initial demand and menace show that his vehement hostility and xenophobic discourse “have slipped beneath the reach of polite transnational imitations” and that the presence of Don Quixote in England “highlights those cultural and political differences between England and Spain upon which jingoism fed”.48 Such an interpretation underpins Fielding’s acculturation of the Spanish master and servant as a couple of madmen whose moral noblesse collides with the mad and monstrous greediness and pragmatism of English commoners. Each party perceives its own forma mentis as embattled reason: ethical judgement versus the give- and-take scheme as norm and vice-versa. The former makes Don Quixote deplore the base attitude the English adopt towards men, whose “Quality” cannot defend them against unlawful acts or imprisonment: “Gaols in all Countries are only Habitations for the Poor, not for Men of Quality” (4). The latter determines Guzzle to “have a Warrant” for Don Quixote because he is taken for “an arrant Rogue” (1). Fielding’s satire against the rich is rounded out by Don Quixote’s wise social criticism and remarks on virtue seen as the result of the “Protestant ethic” 49 which lays stress on intellectual ability and professional merit and considers honour as “goodness of character”. 50 These are the prerequisites for true nobility or “pro- gressive ideology”51 which discredits the idea that virtue and honour are essentially inherited titles of rank or the intrinsic products of what McKeon calls “aristocratic ideology”:52
’Tis pity then, that Fortune should contradict the Order of Nature. It was a wise Institution of Plato to educate Children according to their Minds, not to their Births; these Squires should sow that Corn which they ride over. Sancho, when I see a Gentleman in his own Coach- box, I regret the Loss which some one has had on a Coachman; the Man who toils all Day after a Partridge or a Pheasant, might serve his
47 Peter Motteux, “Dedication to Henry Thynne”, in The History of the Renowned Don Quixote de la Mancha, fol. A5. 48 Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres”, 555. 49 See Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1902), trans. Stephen Kalberg, Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 50 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 156. 51 Ibid., 150-59. 52 Ibid., 131-40. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 39
Country by toiling after a Plough; and when I see a low, mean, tricking Lord, I lament the Loss of an Excellent Attorney. (5)
The crucial point about the education of the mind substantiates the new social ethics and moral pedagogy heralded by “progressive ideology”. The question of rank inherited by birth is a form of external virtue that makes room for internal and secular virtù, which is the embodiment of “human will and energy”,53 two significant clues to personal merit resulted from worldly industry. By the same token, it is important to understand Don Quixote only as a mad man deprived of his social condition as a knight who follows in Amadís de Gaula’s footsteps. His fabricated knightly virtue and honour upheld by the inappropriate title of Don is no more credible than the world of Romance in which he lives. In England the Quixote has become a “good character” and, above all, “civil a Gentleman” (24) whose worth is unquestioned and internalized because his ethical code, which in Spain is as external – since it is mimetic – as inherited honour, proves its efficiency when applied to mundane matters. In spite of the visible practicality of Don Quixote’s recommenda- tions and moral sanctions, his madness astonishes both Sancho and the rest of the characters only when knight-errantry is brought into question. The imitation of Cervantes is literal at this point. The inn is taken for a castle, the country gentleman who is staying at the inn with “his Kennel of Fox-Hounds” appears as “Giant Toglogmoglogog, Lord of the Island of Gogmogog that marches at the Head of his Army” (4), whereas Dorothea, Sir Thomas Loveland’s daughter, turns into an unhappy princess “kept invisible” from Don Quixote’s eyes by a “cursed Inchanter” (10). Reminding of the battle with the wineskins in Cervantes’ novel, Don Quixote’s attack on the inn’s walls and
53 Ibid., 185. My argument is informed by McKeon’s excellent discussion on the concepts of honour and virtue correlated with status inconsistency caused by the passage from Tudor absolutism, which bestows authority upon the sovereign “to order hierarchy” (182) and preserves the genealogical tradition based on royal succession, to “true nobility” favoured by Renaissance humanism. “True nobility”, argues McKeon, relates to the education of a gentleman as a privilege owed to civic responsibility, which considers worth, not birth, as a refined civic conception of gentility. Furthermore, the Machiavellian notion of virtù understood as “human will” and “ability” will be highly influential in moulding the capitalist spirit forged by the Calvinist Protestant ethic, according to which earthly works ensure both material success and spiritual salvation. See The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, especially 176-212. 40 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 windows leads to the escalation of the conflict with the enraged Guzzle who scolds him for trying to destroy his house. Sancho remains in part the same “proverb-cracking glutton”54 who fears that the blanketing episode occurring in the Spanish original at Palomeque’s inn may repeat in England because of the impossibility to pay a thousand English guineas to Guzzle. Besides, he refuses to go to the Court of Dulcinea del Toboso as a “bassadour”, since “I fancy your Bassadours fare but ill at your chanted Courts” (8). However, he realizes that his materialistic view of life – broadened by Don Quixote’s promise to give him a salary and an island to rule – allows him to sniff better opportunities in England and, consequently, supports its jingoistic remarks. Sancho tells Dorothea that “I am so fond of the English rost Beef and strong Beer, that I don’t intend ever to set my Foot in Spain again, if I can help it: Give me a Slice of rost Beef before all the Rarities of Camacho’s Wedding” (14). Air V called “The King’s Old Courtier” eulogizes “rost Beef” as an emblem of English national identity and urges Britons to refrain from importing foreign delicacies in order to emerge victorious over their “effeminate” foes:
Then, Britons, from all nice Dainties refrain, Which effeminate Italy, France and Spain And mighty Rost Beef shall command on the Main. (14)
Though Sancho relishes the idea of governing a little island as utopian as the Island of Barataria in Spain, he confesses that he would feel more comfortable if his master set him up in an inn where he should make a “rare Landlord”, which is “a very thriving Trade among the English” (20). These main targets naturalize Sancho as a good connoisseur of English imperial goals rather than Quixotic affairs and transform him from a simple “proverb-cracking glutton” into a “commoner with an eye to the main chance” 55 grabbed in England by both greedy innkeepers like Guzzle and the nobility. Fond of two emblems of British identity – “rost Beef and strong Beer” –
54 Edwin B. Knowles, “Cervantes and English Literature”, in Cervantes across the Centuries: A Quadricentennial Volume, ed. Angel Flores, New York: Gordian Press, 1947, 292. 55 Thomas Durfey, The Comical History of Don Quixote, as it was Acted at the Queen’s Theatre in Dorset Garden, quoted in Eve Tavor Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres”, 556. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 41 that also stand for the anti-ministerial election scenes, Sancho confesses that he follows his master into foreign errantries in order to gain various advantages that align him with Squire Badger, Thomas Loveland, the Mayor and Mr Retail who apply the law of Communio mercium whenever money, land acquisition and political offices are at stake. Accused by Don Quixote of having robbed Dorothea, Thomas Loveland’s daughter, of her jewels and plate in the inn taken for a castle, Guzzle pleads for honest business and makes no bones about revealing that the only jewels in his house “are two Bobs that my Wife wears in her Ears, which were given her by Sir Thomas Loveland at his last Election” (11). Guzzle’s nonchalant comment on Loveland’s bribed election as a leader of the country opposition interest equals Sancho’s proverb, “One gets an Estate, another gets a Halter” (13), which metaphorically identifies Squire Badger – initially perceived as a “Giant at the Head of his Army” – with Horace Walpole and “his dominion over England”56 with a “kennel of Fox-hounds” (4). Such references to political corruption are highly suggestive, according to Eve Tavor Bannet, of the “crisis of individuation and of national character that transnational imitation was perceived now to create”.57 I correlate Bannet’s statement with the notion of crisis as a “plot of action” and a “plot of thought”, according to Hollahan, which proposes Don Quixote as a foreign cultural metonymy used to unmask and punish social and political abuses in England. The English “plot of action” Don Quixote strongly opposes is triggered by the Mayor and a voter, Mr Retail, in Act I, scene 8, where the former thinks that the mad Spaniard with “a large Estate” has come to England “to stand for Parliament-man”. Bewildered by such a statement, the voter contradicts him and invokes the already hatched plot to choose Sir Thomas Loveland and Mr Bouncer. Together with Guzzle they take fright of being sold and stolen by Sir Thomas, since he will not represent their country opposition interests. In spite of the insignificant aspect of Don Quixote’s madness while “He’s out of Bedlam” (17), they support him as Loveland’s rival in order for “the other Party to come down handsomely with the Ready” (18) and, therefore, to offer them bribes.
56 Cleary, Henry Fielding: Political Writer, 70. 57 Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres”, 554. 42 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Inserted because the Drury-Lane actors begged Fielding to revise the play with the purpose of serving as a political rather than ethical example, as we learn from the “Dedication”, the election scene instructs the reader by means of its political corruption and because the theme, Fielding confesses, “laid the Foundation for introducing POLITICKS on the stage”,58 comically treated in Pasquin. Furthermore, politics as a major theme turns into what Fielding ironically calls “pollitricks” – a mixture of Machiavellianism and political chicanery59 applied to the case of Jonathan Wild as a representative of mercantile honour – described as an “art of which, as it is the highest excellence of human nature, perhaps our great man was the most eminent master”.60 According to the Mayor, “pollitricks” means securing substantial bribes camouflaged by principled duty, judicious decisions and patriotic drives. His wish to be sold “by any but Myself”, which is the “Privilege of a free Briton” (18), ranges from mere personal profit to collective welfare based on Mandevillean selfish designs whereby “private vices” become “public benefits”, as The Fable of the Bees (1714, 1723) shows. Self-interest is pursued when the individual satisfies the others’ interests in a rationalized give-and-take relationship which, as the Mayor contends, defines the national ethos:
Ay, ay, Mr. Guzzle, I never gave a Vote contrary to my Conscience. I have very earnestly recommended the Country-Interest to all my Brethren: But before that, I recommended the Town-Interest, that is, the Interest of this Corporation; and first of all I recommended to any
58 Henry Fielding, “An Adventurer in Politicks”, published in The Daily Gazetteer, 7 May 1737, in The Critical Heritage: Henry Fielding, eds Ronald Paulson and Thomas Lockwood, London: Routledge, 1969, 98. 59 I endorse here McKeon’s view on the Machiavellian notion of virtù as “human will” and “ability”, corroborated with Thomas Keymer’s insight into the term “pollitricks” in his article entitled “Fielding’s Machiavellian Moment”, in Henry Fielding (1707-1754): Novelist, Playwright, Journalist, Magistrate. A Double Anniversary Tribute, ed. Claude Rawson, Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008, 58-91. Keymer elaborates on Fielding’s interest in Machiavelli, with particular reference to the Champion papers from 1739-1740 and his novels Shamela and Jonathan Wild, where hypocrisy, corruption, self-determination and vile conduct are camouflaged as “industrious honour”, according to McKeon (The Origins of the English Novel, 386), a mode of conduct to which Fielding refers as “pollitricks” (62). 60 Henry Fielding, The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild, in The Novels of Henry Fielding, Esq., ed. Robinson Hurst et al., London: Cheapside, 1821, 746-47. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 43
particular Man to take a particular Care of Himself. And it is with a certain way of Reasoning, That he that serves me best, will serve the Town best; and he that serves the Town best, will serve the Country best. (19)
Such a demagogical discourse is actually a reversed reading of the opinions that Fielding voiced with utmost seriousness in “‘Pasquin’ Common Sense: or, the Englishman’s Journal, 21 May 1737”:
I am far from asserting that all Government is a Farce but I affirm that, however the very Name of Power may frighten the Vulgar, it will never be honoured by the Philosopher, or the Man of Sense, unless accompany’d with Dignity .… I have not ridiculed patriotism but have endeavoured to shew the several Obstructions to a proper exerting this noble Principle; and that corruption alone is equal to all the rest. I have endeavoured to represent the Consequence thereof, and to shew, that whoever gives up the Interest of his Country, in fact gives up his own.61
The Mayor’s practice of realpolitik inevitably unleashes Don Quixote’s social and political diatribe against the secular Weltanschauung of selfishness, power hunger and lack of moral virtue which throw the present mode of action and thought into a national identity crisis:
Hypocrisy is the Deity they worship .… Each Man rises to Admiration by treading on Mankind. Riches and Power accrue to the One, by the Destruction of Thousands. These are the general Objects of the good Opinions of Men; Nay, and that which is profess’d to be paid to Virtue, is seldom more to any thing than a supercilious Contempt of our Neighbour. What is a good-natur’d Man? Why, one, who seeing the Want of his Friend, cries he pities him .… Sancho, let them call me Mad; I’m not mad enough to court their Approbation. (21)
The Spaniard objectively abhors so dishonest a deal, which entitles him to judge Sir Thomas Loveland as a “Knight of the Long Purse” and to deny his position as a “Patron of a Place so mercenary” (24). He is an uncompromising good-natured man who believes that sympathy – of the Shaftesburian type – is the corollary of collective
61 See The Critical Heritage: Henry Fielding, 104-105. 44 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 well-being, the spring of all benevolent human actions and the means of defusing the crisis of good practice and moral thought. If Sir Thomas Loveland appears as “good-natured and civil” as Don Quixote, it means that such congenial terms that “express Quixote’s code of honour are translated into the shabbiest metaphors for political venality, and his timeless quest to combat injustice is skewed towards specific contemporary conditions”.62 It is in this manner that the etymological meaning of “crisis” – “to judge”, “to decide” – contributes to the Quixotic resolution of the conflict in England, as a result of the unaltered correspondence between his own “plot of action” and “plot of thought”. Similarly, Don Quixote succeeds in easing the tension provoked by Thomas Loveland who forces his daughter Dorothea into marrying the unprincipled Squire Badger. Nevertheless, before delivering his speech on what virtuous marriage really means, Don Quixote relishes the adventures plotted in a Cervantine manner by Dorothea and her servant Jezebel. Disguised as Princess Indoccalambria, Dorothea reveals her true love for Fairlove, her future husband. She claims to be the counterpart of Cervantes’ Dorothea, alias Princess Micomicona, who tried to persuade Don Quixote to leave Sierra Morena. She also preserves her exemplary virtue unblemished even after Don Fernando had seduced and abandoned her, being finally conducive to their happy reunion at Palomeque’s inn in Don Quixote (I, 36). At the same time, she feigns a “romantick” kind of madness – like Arabella in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote – as a strategy to test her lover Fairlove and also to protest over her father’s imposed contractual marriage and patriarchal society until she is “tamed” by the man she disinterestedly loves. In this way Dorothea’s crisis- consciousness, like Don Quixote’s, is in fact a “form of self- consciousness”63 or a decision-making process that underpins female virtue as constancy of character. Planning to elope with Fairlove in order to avoid the unfortunate marriage to Badger, Dorothea says:
Oh, Jezebel! I wish my Adventure may end as happily as those of my Name-sake Dorothea’s did; I am sure they are very near as romantick .… Well, I’m a mad Girl: Don’t you think this Husband of mine, that is to be, will have a delightful Task to tame me? .… To confess a
62 Hammond, “Mid-Century English Quixotism”, 251. 63 Hollahan, Crisis-Consciousness and the Novel, 3. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 45
Truth to you, while I am still under Apprehensions of the Match my Father intends for me, I have too great Cause to try to divert my Grief. (16)
Dorothea takes advantage of the knight of the woeful figure’s presence and sets up a comic plot by having Jezebel acting as Dulcinea at the inn. Now fond of “rost Beef and strong Beer”, Sancho is thus spared from being sent after her, becomes involved in Dorothea’s tricks and explains to her the meaning of Don Quixote’s madness as shown by his adventures in the hypotext.64 The result is the re-enactment and adaptation of the Quixotic motif, now suitable for real social and love affairs:
Adod! Your Princess-ship has hit it; for he has never seen this Dulcinea, nor has any body else that I can hear of; and who my Lady Dulcinea should be, I don’t know, unless she be One of your chanted Ladies. The Curate of our Parish and Mr. Nicholas the Barber, have often told me there was no such Woman, and that my Master was a Madman; and sometimes I am half at a loss to guess whether he be mad or no. (15)
The scene is absorbed in the main plot which mingles unfair elections (Loveland and Badger), electioneering (Guzzle, the Mayor and Mr Retail), Dorothea’s and Jezebel’s show – a literal imitation of the Cervatine episode – and, finally, marriage regarded as another means of “pollitricks” that now buttresses Loveland’s “landed” honour. For instance, Dorothea excitingly tells Fairlove that “there was something so lucky in your coming hither without having received my Letter” and puts his love to test since he had been a “Rover” until then (44-45). Yet her diversion occasioned by both the ridiculous knight and squire and Fairlove’s surreptitious presence at the inn is darkened by the arrival of her father who learns about her daughter’s plot of running away with Fairlove. This thwarts Dorothea’s father’s plans because Badger’s great estate sparks his
64 Cf. Gérard Genette’s definition in Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (1982), trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky, Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997: “Any relationship uniting a text B (which I shall call the hypertext) to an earlier text A (which I shall call the hypotext), upon which it is grafted in a manner that is not that of the commentary” (5). 46 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 interest and also because he has “no Notion of refusing an Estate, let the Man be what he will” (48). Ironically enough, though a “Philosophical Pimp”, as Loveland characterizes him, Don Quixote’s discourse of social – just like political – reform functions as a deus ex machina that intervenes to restore harmony and virtue. It is delivered in order to convince Sir Thomas Loveland of his fatal mistake when the whimsical Badger proves to be a drunk and offensive rascal, completely ignorant of Dorothea’s worth:
Sir Tho. Let me beseech you, Sir, to attack her in no rude manner. Badg. .… Come on, Madam, since I have promis’d to marry you, since I can’t be off with Honour, as they say; why, the sooner it’s done, the better; let us send for a Parson and be married, now I’m in the Humour. Sbod-likins! I find there’s nothing in making Love, when a Man but once got well into’t. I never made a Word of Love before in my Life; and yet it is as natural, seemingly, as if I had been bound Prentice to it …. Quix. The usual Madness of Mankind! Do you marry your Daughter for her sake or your own? If for her’s, sure ’tis something whimsical, to make her miserable in order to make her happy. Money is a Thing well worth considering in these Affairs; but Parents always regard it too much, and Lovers too little. No Match can be happy, which Love and Fortune do not conspire to make so. Sir Tho. What we have here, a Philosophical Pimp! I can’t help saying, but the Fellow has some Truth on his Side. (58)
The state of anagnorisis experienced by Loveland defuses the crisis of thought and action and fosters the sense of a comic ending. As Raimund Borgmeier rightly points out: “there is a certain irony, of course, in the fact that such important and serious considerations are uttered by a character who is in other respects mad; yet this irony may be necessary to make the otherwise obtrusive moral preaching bearable and entertaining for the audience.”65
65 Raimund Borgmeier, “Henry Fielding and His Spanish Model: ‘Our English Cervantes’”, in Cervantes in the English-Speaking World: New Essays, eds Darío Fernández-Morera and Michael Hanke, Kassel and Barcelona: Edition Reichenberger, 2005, 48. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 47
The resolution of the social conflict legitimizes the Quixotic chivalric code and proves its practicality in England as an ultimate purpose of good nature. Don Quixote concludes:
Here are the Fruits of Knight-Errantry for you. This is an Instance of what admirable Service we are to Mankind. I find, some Adventures are reserv’d for Don Quixote de la Mancha. (61)
His final remarks are doubled by Fielding’s definition of “good- nature” as Quixotism formulated by Worthy in the Coffee-House Politician (1730) when pondering the follies of society:
I begin to be of that philosopher’s opinion, who said, that whoever will entirely consult his own happiness must be little concerned about the happiness of others. Good-nature is Quixotism, and every Princess Micomicona will lead her deliverer into a cage. What had I to do to interpose? What harm did the misfortunes of an unknown woman bring me, that I should hazard my own happiness and reputation on her account?66
Fielding equates good nature with Quixotism in order to eradicate the crisis of personal and national identity by “inverting the position of foreigner and native”, and presenting “the Spaniard as triumphant”67 in his morally judicious endeavour to reshape English identity by creating a “contagion of manners”, according to Hume, through the virtues of the chivalric code and by comically curing, by means of experience, different manifestations of madness coalesced into a hobby-horsical pool of English commoners and gentry alike.
“All Mankind are mad” Notwithstanding Don Quixote’s moral victory over Loveland’s much craved contractual marriage, the Knight of the Woeful Figure continues to resist and better the status quo and, at the same time, to make the recalcitrant public sphere realize that it is no less prone to confident private judgements and opinions than he is. While agreeing that hunting is a “proper recreation” for all knights in England, though the mission of a Knight-errant is “to rid the World
66 Henry Fielding. Plays (1728-1731), ed. Thomas Lockwood, The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 460. 67 Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres”, 555. 48 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 of other sort of Animals than Foxes” (30), the Spaniard’s subtle hint about Badger’s foxy nature culminates in his portrayal of the squire as a “base blood … Impostor” (30) eager to marry into money. Though Quixote prepares to hit him for failing to confess that Dulcinea’s beauty is unrivalled, Badger’s rage is appeased by John, a gentleman belonging to “the Beau Monde” (35), totally unknown to a country squire like Badger. This is the episode that prefigures the analogy between Badger and Don Quixote. As a topos of all Quixotic fictions, the rural milieu ironically and satirically proves to be unpropitious for an adequate recognition of urban degraded fashionable manners and customs. Hence Badger’s inability to tell the difference between a servant and a gentleman:
Badg. Oh, Sir, I ask your Pardon; your Dress, Sir, was the Occasion of my Mistake. John. Probable enough; among you, Country Gentleman, and really in Town, Gentleman and Footmen dress so very like one another, that it is somewhat difficult to know which is which .… John. Oh, Sir! we of the Beau Monde are never offended at Ignorance. (34-35)
The dialogue with Guzzle proves the same confusion insofar as the meaning of “squire” is concerned. Ignorant of its connection with the code of chivalry, Badger’s question, “What, has the Squire a Master?” (25), legitimizes the modern landed squire’s surprise when he hears Guzzle putting a curse on squire Sancho and his master Don Quixote for the damage they have caused at the inn. His status is now socially translated as possession, acquisition and financial power or, according to David Hume, as an “interested affection” 68 upon which “pro- gressive ideology”69 is based. The Quixotic ethos forged by the beneficial and good-natured “Fruits of Knight-Errantry” does not entirely conceal Don Quixote’s folly and absurd associations of persons and things manoeuvred by
68 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2003, III, 350. 69 In his discussion on absolutism and capitalist ideology and the role they played in the making of the English novel, McKeon argues that “if aristocratic ideology might be reduced to the quantitative proposition that the best man was he who possessed the longest lineage, the progressive alternative was that he who had the most money was the best man” (The Origins of the English Novel, 207). Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 49 different evil enchanters. Fielding comically transforms such “Fruits” of Quixotic eccentricity into English social, political and, at the close of the play, professional fixations or “deliriums”, as he calls them in the Coffee-House Politician (1730). The “deliriums” inform the politics of eighteenth-century Quixotic imitations and explain the Quixotic paradigm as a “species of madness” synonymous with an “essentially private and subjective”70 epistemological system. Though only temporarily, such a system is responsible for the pulverization of common morality enslaved by habit and custom into numberless idiosyncrasies:
The greatest part of mankind labour under one delirium or other: and Don Quixote differed from the rest, not in madness, but the species of it. The covetous, the prodigal, the superstitious, the libertine, and the coffee-house politician, are all Quixotes in their several ways.71
While John updates Badger on city matters like the exquisite taste of the frivolous “Beau Monde”, Don Quixote butts in and, far from regaling the audience with his silly desire for adventures and fights with fictitious giants as well as with his praise for Lady Dulcinea – which makes John assert that “this is the most comical Dog I ever saw in my Life” (36) – he becomes “a Cid in arms”, as Cervantes portrays him in Don Quixote (I, 22). Thus, he confounds Guzzle’s visitors when his hazardous imagination takes a couch nearing the inn for a giant, compelling Guzzle to open the gates so that they could face off. The characters halting at the inn are Mr Brief, a lawyer, Drench, a physician, Mr Sneak, Mrs Sneak and Miss Sneak, but only the first two are of arresting importance as their narrow yet objective professional way of interpreting things is obviously seen as an occupational hazard. Scaring Mrs Guzzle to death because his devilish behaviour “has caused all this Rout” (37), Don Quixote’s madness is now questioned scientifically by both law and medicine:
Brief. The Law provides a very good Remedy for this sort of People; I’ll take your Affair into my Hands. Dr. Drench, do you know no neighbouring Justice?
70 Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, 24. 71 “Coffee House Politician” (1730), in Henry Fielding. Plays (1728-1731), 458. 50 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Drench. What, do you talk of a Justice? The Man is mad and Physick is properer for him than Law. I’ll take him in hand my self, after Supper .… Drench. Poor Man! poor Man! He must be put to Bed. I shall apply some proper Remedies. His Frenzy is very high, but I hope we shall be able to take it off. Brief. His Frenzy! his Roguery; the Fellow’s a Rogue; he is no more mad than I am; and the Coachman and Landlord both have very good Actions at Law against him. (37-38)
These conflicting scientific discourses related to guilt (law) versus insanity (medicine) have nothing to do with the Curate and the barber’s careful selection and burning of chivalry books or to other tricks inspired by such absurd fiction and played by Cervantes’ characters in the hope of healing the hidalgo. However, Fielding abides by the same pattern of Don Quixote’s post-factum recognition of his having been punished by an evil enchanter so as to create the targeted comic effect triggered by Brief’s realization that “he is no more mad than I am”. After Badger informs him that Drench is not “the Prince of Sarmatia” and Brief is not “the Prince of the Five Mountains” (38), Don Quixote furiously qualifies the enchantment as “monstrous” because Merlin transformed the “greatest People” like Drench and Brief into “odd Shapes” (38). Brief’s “odd Shape” of his statement, “no more mad than I am”, emphasizes the sentimental doctrine of empirically derived sensations conveyed as private opinions. At the same time, the symptoms Drench identifies when he examines Don Quixote’s frenzy are just a bunch of resembling impressions 72 subsumed to a naive yet realistic interpretation of reality: “Pretend Madness! give me leave to tell you, Mr. Brief, I am not to be pretended with; I judge by Symptoms, Sir!” (62). According to the interpretative grid either of them idiosyncratically applies, Don Quixote is a “Rogue” and/or a mad patient treated sympathetically by Drench because “Physick is properer for him than Law”. Don Quixote’s madness very much
72 In A Treatise on Human Nature, David Hume employs the Lockean empiric principles in order to explain the relationship between the association of ideas and impressions. Ideas, says Hume, “are associated by resemblance, contiguity or causation, whereas impressions only by resemblance” (II, 202). Thus, Dr Drench’s “judgement by symptoms” is as impressionistic and unverifiable as lawyer Brief’s mere accusation of roguery and invocation of justice without solid evidence. Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 51 resembles the reasonable judgement they pass on him. As Wendy Motooka observes, “Drench and Brief are as singularly focused as the mad knight … and find patients and rogues respectively, as readily as Don Quixote, in his sphere of knight-errantry, finds giants, caitiff knights and damsels in distress”.73 This understanding of madness as fixity or “delirium” is coupled both with the “Madness of Mankind” deplored by Don Quixote himself when he exposes Loveland as an irresponsible father who wishes to marry his daughter to the offensive drunkard Badger and with Mrs Guzzle’s hilarious comment made in connection with her excitement at the show Dorothea and Jezebel are about to put on: “I begin to doubt which of my Guests is the maddest” (44). They finally climax in Sir Thomas Loveland’s state of comic bewilderment: “Ha, ha, ha! I don’t know whether this Knight, by and by, may not prove us all to be more mad than himself.” It is provoked by Don Quixote’s reasonable “Fruits of Knight-Errantry” overtly enumerated in a series of rhetorical questions meant to stress that England is as mad as he is and that the deeply flawed status quo of a rival empire is under the Spaniard’s moral sway:
Who would doubt the noisy boist’rous Squire, who was here just now, to be mad? Must not this noble Knight here have been mad, to think of marrying his Daughter to such a Wretch? You, Doctor, are mad too, ’tho not so mad as your Patients. The Lawyer here is mad, or he wou’d not have gone into a Scuffle, when it is the Business of Men of his Profession to set other Men by the Ears, and keep clear themselves. (63)
Therefore, as a satirical filter of reality, Quixotic madness becomes in Fielding’s play a reasonable strategy for reforming English mores. Rather than cause and perpetuate the same epistemological tension derived from Cervantes’ novel, that is, Don Quixote’s refracted sense of reality informed by chivalry books, the play conflates and handles two types of crisis – of “thought and action” and of “individuation and national character”, respectively – as part of a fervent politics of doing good, not of “arbitrary power”74 typical of Quixotic novels. Last but not least, Don Quixote’s madness translated as civic and “utilitarian
73 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 61. 74 Ibid., 3. 52 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 humanism” represents the ethical response to the generalized state of madness entailed by his presence in England. Most importantly, such a response resonates with the one given by the good-natured spectators who advocate the sense of comedy.
Epilogue: The good-natured spectator and the meaning of social morality In this first chapter, I have insisted on the significant role the audience played for both Cervantes and Fielding. By analogy with Jusepe Antonio González de Salas’ praise of contemporary comic poets “motivated by a prudent desire to obtain the approbation of the popular ear”, the final air of the play entitled “All Mankind are mad, ’tis plain”, which celebrates Don Quixote’s denunciation of English madness as self-interest, personal advantage and particular ways of acting and judging, confirms the audience’s indisputable influence and unconditionally kind feedback and approval of a spirited and high, rather than “spiritless” and “low” play:
All Mankind are mad, ’tis plain; Some for Places, Some Embraces; Some are mad to keep up Gain, And others mend to spend it. Courtiers we may Madmen rate, Poor Believers In Deceivers; Some are mad to hurt the State And others mad to mend it …. Since your Madness is so plain, Each Spectator Of Good-Nature, With Applause will entertain His Brother of La Mancha; With Applause will entertain Don Quixote and Squire Sancho. (64)
The play elicits a response from “each” good-natured spectator belonging to the Shaftesburian tradition of universal benevolence and, consequently, establishes a blatant opposition between spectators of Whiggish comedies who laugh sympathetically and spectators of Tory satires who laugh scornfully. Quixotic good nature is rewarded by Henry Fielding’s Don Quixote in England 53 good-natured spectators whose sympathy for the Spaniard is markedly nourished by their brotherly spirit. Sympathy, explains Hume, is a feeling shaped by external conversational – a term connected with Don Quixote’s oratory in England, where violent physical actions are non-existent – and physiognomic signs that initially convey an idea of it, which afterwards turns into an impression converted into an emotion alternative to any original affection experienced by a specific individual. Since “all human creatures are related to us by resemblance”,75 it means that the community of feeling embodied by good-natured spectators can easily and lively comprehend the emotions produced by their “Brother of La Mancha”. This community of feeling contributes to the restoration of sympathetic behaviour and social morality by firmly encouraging the theatre of moral sense founded on Don Quixote’s ethical decisions applauded by a good- natured audience, thus giving a sense of accomplishment to comedy in the Greek sense of κόμος (“revelry”, “celebration”, “merry-making”). Also, by dismissing “the bad nature of the critic, rather than the badness of the play”, comedy “offers sentimental consensus as the corrective to the quixotic conflict”.76 Being a “warm-up for what was to come in his novels”,77 Quixotic social morality is instrumental in revealing and criticizing a conglomeration of topical British cultural identity issues. Structurally, Don Quixote is an “in-between space where cultural contingencies clash”78 and it is particularly this in-betweenness that accounts for his judicious cultural and moral renovation of the public sphere. At the same time, the structure of Fielding’s play prepares the ground for his future novels, notably Joseph Andrews, in which “our English Cervantes”, 79 retains a “commentator, a victim, and a series of aggressive characters, with the emphasis shifting from one element to
75 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, II, 262. 76 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 19. 77 Howard Mancing, The Cervantes Encyclopaedia, s.v. “Fielding, Henry”, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004, II, 293. 78 Myriam Yvonne Jehenson and Peter N. Dunn, The Utopian Nexus in Don Quixote, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006, 2. 79 William Owen, “An Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Mr. Fielding: with a Word or Two upon the Modern State of Criticism” (1751), in Novel and Romance, 1700-1800, 159. 54 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 another”.80 The in-betweenness comically presented in Don Quixote in England is highly suggestive of, and responsible for, the crisis – be it social, religious, sentimental, economic or political – of “thought and action”, of which the novel’s consciousness is acutely aware.
80 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 90. In thoroughly analysing Fielding’s plays and novels, Paulson traces their satiric structure back to the etymological meaning of satura, or formal verse satire, in which a thoughtful first-person speaker – the commentator – describes vicious aspects of society, “whether sitting in the solitude of his study or standing on a crowded Roman street” (19).
CHAPTER 2
THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF A NEW GENRE BASED ON A PRODUCTIVE TAUTOLOGY: HENRY FIELDING’S COMIC ROMANCE AND QUIXOTISM
The impressive number of imitations and adaptations of Don Quixote since Thomas Shelton’s first translation of the first volume of the book in 1612, and of the second one in 1620, until Fielding’s time undoubtedly shows that Don Quixote was far from being “a Pattern without a Copy”, as Motteux claims in his 1700 “Translator’s Preface to Cervantes”.1 Yet Motteux’s assertion that the Spanish hero “kept the best and Noblest Company”2 was to be first enjoyed and heralded by Fielding in his comic play Don Quixote in England, analysed in the previous chapter, and, notably, in his second novel, Joseph Andrews (1742), “Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes”, as the title page of the book indicates. Similarly, in his essay “Of Poetry”, William Temple admires the “matchless” Cervantes, not Rabelais, for having made up “so excellent a Composition of Satyr and Ridicule without those Ingredients [malicious, smutty and profane remarks]”3 considered ignoble by polite readers. Accordingly, Don Quixote was imported by Fielding as an example of literature meant to entertain and to teach the neoclassical reader a moral lesson. Crossing the boundaries of the burlesque, Fielding turned Cervantes’ novel into a paradigm of comic writing that was fully established in the Covent-Garden Journal for 4 February 1752:
When Wit and Humour are introduced for such good Purposes, when the agreeable is blended with the useful, then is the writer said to have succeeded in every Point. Pleasantry, (as the ingenious Author of
1 Motteux, “The Translator’s Preface to Cervantes”, 1. 2 Ibid., 4. 3 William Temple, “Of Poetry”, in Essays on Ancient and Modern Learning and Of Poetry, ed. J.E. Spingarn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909, 72. 56 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Clarissa says of a Story) should be made only the Vehicle of Instruction; and thus Romances themselves, as well as Epic Poems, may become worthy the Perusal of the greatest of Men: But when no Moral, no Lesson, no Instruction is conveyed to the Reader, where the whole Design of the Composition is no more than to make us laugh, the Writer comes very near to the Character of a Buffoon …. On the contrary, few Men, I believe, do more admire the Works of those great Masters who have sent their Satire … laughing into the World. Such are the great Triumvirate, Lucian, Cervantes, and Swift.4
I do not wish to talk about the “Triumvirate” who influenced Fielding’s writing since this issue has long been resolved by the literature.5 Instead, I intend to elaborate upon what has long been food for thought for many and known as the rise and paternity of the English novel attributed to Fielding. I am primarily interested in the intriguing question of Romance as genre that this lengthy quotation addresses, conjoined with Fielding’s revaluation of Quixotism as good nature. I argue that the conflation of Romance and Quixotism, or what I call a productive tautology, contributes substantially to reading the “New Species of Writing”, in William Owen’s terms, or the new genre not yet named the novel, in cultural specificity – which explains Fielding’s Cervantic imitation – and to understanding, as J. Paul Hunter pertinently observes, how “formal issues and historical ones come to seem more interdependent”.6 I also argue that the new kind of Romance institutionalized by Fielding through Cervantes in the Preface to Joseph Andrews, or what we now call a novel, is predetermined by the comic essence of both sympathetic laughter “into the World” and of good nature, the basic Quixotic moral quality which underlies Fielding’s own moral views. The mingling together of a comic form of Romance with comic substance (rehabilitating laughter) explains both the ideological importance of Fielding’s “noble and public-spirited design of Reformation”7 and the Whiggish aestheticization of laughter that “created a modern Quixote”.8
4 Henry Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal, No. l0, 4 February 1752, ed. G.E. Jensen, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1915, I, 194. 5 I find Ronald Paulson’s study, Satire and the Novel, extremely illuminating from this point of view. See Chapter 2, “Fielding the Satirist”, 52-99, and Chapter 4, “The Lucianic Satirist”, 132-41. 6 Hunter, Before Novels, 6. 7 Owen, “An Essay on the New Species of Writing”, 151. 8 Paulson, Don Quixote in England, 23. The Institutionalization of a New Genre 57
Fielding, like Cervantes, never calls Joseph Andrews a novel, but a “history”. The opening lines of the Preface, however, challenge the reader’s horizon of expectation, directing attention to Fielding’s redefinition of Romance. He says that “the mere English reader”, who knows only the English Romances, “may have a different idea of romance with the author of these little volumes”. Aiming to train the “mere” yet not credulous English reader, the author proudly engages in framing the form and structure of the “new kind of writing, which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language”.9 Such an undertaking is even more ambitiously materialized in Tom Jones, in which Fielding overtly asserts that “I am, in reality, the Founder of a new Province of Writing … and am at liberty to make what Laws I please”.10 Fielding invokes Aristotle’s classical taxono- mies in order to support this illusive Anglo-centric view of the rise of the novel prompted by the possessive pronoun “our”: the epic and the dramatic are genres categorized as modes – the tragic and the comic. Basically interested in comedy as a “species of poetry” in which events “are made to happen in a peculiarly satisfactory way” meant to achieve an artistic end,11 the author writes in the Preface to Joseph Andrews that Homer, the author of the satirical epic Margites, as Aristotle puts it in his Poetics, “gave us a pattern of both these” (comedy and tragedy), though “that of the latter kind is entirely lost”. The same taxonomic algorithm is applied to the tragic or comic species of poetry which may be in verse or prose, according to formal and expressive means. Homer’s lost epic pattern is reinvented by Fielding under the form of comic Romance defined as a “comic epic- poem in prose”, an apparently confusing hybridized genre that seems to bear no connection with the term “history” in the title. Concurrently, he excoriates the “voluminous works commonly called Romances, namely, Clelia, Cleopatra, Astraea, Cassandra, the Grand Cyrus” both because they lack a coherent epic pattern, and because they fail to offer “instruction or entertainment” (25). Similar to Cervantes, Fielding appears as a raro inventor who creates something new which, in effect, is old. He rejects the idealism
9 Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, 25 (all further references to this edition will be given in the text). 10 Fielding, Tom Jones, 88. 11 See Chapter 1, n.1. 58 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 of the Romance genre in favour of “naive empiricism”, the epistemological ingredient of the novel disguised as comic Romance:
Now a comic romance is a comic epic-poem in prose; differing from comedy, as the serious epic from tragedy: its action being more extended and comprehensive; containing a much larger circle of incidents, and introducing a greater variety of characters. It differs from the serious romance in its fable and action, in this: that as in the one these are grave and solemn, so in the other they are light and ridiculous: it differs in its characters, by introducing persons of inferior rank, and consequently of inferior manners, whereas the grave romance, sets the highest before us. (26)
Different from the “serious” or “high-mimetic mode”, 12 comic Romance belongs to the “low mode”13 invested with a meaning of social reformation and fulfilment. We already find it in Don Quixote, which foregrounds a hidalgo, a representative of minor nobility, whose upward mobility is artificially ensured by the particle Don in an effort to emulate famous knights like Amadís de Gaula. Hence, Don Quixote’s adventures prove to be both violent and, more often than not, comic incidents of the road, since his dangerous bookish mimeticism finds no correspondent in the mundane world of commoners. Nonetheless, unlike Fielding’s insistence on social reformation and fulfilment as the sine qua non for comedy, Don Quixote “is governed by the logic of systematic loss, of contradicting the pleasures of the world, of the irreversible thinning out of life”.14 I am trying to suggest that the features of comic Romance enumerated by Fielding already exist in the first modern novel that aims “to cannibalize and incorporate bits of other forms – the traditional and canonic genres as well as aberrant, ‘non-literary’ writings – in order to compose its own conventionality”. 15 Giving birth to what Mikhail Bakhtin calls heteroglossia,16 each of the three forms “novelized” by Cervantes – chivalric books, the pastoral and the
12 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 48. 13 Ibid., 34. 14 Irimia, “From the Sublime to the Comic”, 12. 15 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 11. 16 See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, 259-422. The Institutionalization of a New Genre 59 picaresque – offers a critical perspective on the others, though none of them is privileged. They critique the epic thread typical of Romance or the old epos whose idealistic dimension clashes with the novelistic representation of the real, with the individual self and consciousness or with what Ian Watt has labelled as “formal realism”.17 In a nutshell, Don Quixote is an intersection of three pre-novelistic discourses that participate in the establishment of the “conventionality” of the new genre that Cervantes himself never calls a novel, but a history or, more accurately, a parody of chivalric books. Their “cannibalization” – the source of comic adventures and style – turns the static and the mimetic condition of Romance into Erlebnis (“lived experience”) through ingenio and invención and correlates it with Erfahrung (“travel experience”), characteristic of the picaro. As an individual, Don Quixote is the Knight of the Sad Countenance, whose ideals of benevolence and justice are undercut by the real world of desengaño (“disenchantment”) that is responsible for the hidalgo’s “logic of loss”. He himself is a text, a repository of Romances, which becomes comic when placed in the context of “laughing into the World”. To paraphrase Alexander Pope, we laugh with Don Quixote as a friend as much as we laugh at his eccentric adventures.18 Thus, good-natured entertainment and the role it plays in abhorring the absurdities of Romance prefigure Fielding’s new pattern of comic Romance as the patent of the English novel. In the Preface to Novelas ejemplares, Cervantes declares that “Yo soy el primero que ha novelado en lengua castellana”.19
17 In The Rise of the Novel, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957, Ian Watt defines “formal realism” as “the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience, and therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms” (32). 18 Alexander Pope, Correspondence, quoted in Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 70. 19 Cervantes, Novelas ejemplares, in Obras completas de Cervantes, ed. Don Cayetano Rosell, Madrid: Don Manuel Rivadeneyra, 1864, I, xi. I use Lesley Lipson’s translation of Cervantes’ Exemplary Stories, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, for the sake of terminological accuracy: “I am the first to write short stories in Castilian” (ibid., 5). When Don Quixote came out, the Italian word “novella”, borrowed by Cervantes to make it “exemplary”, and, implicitly, to teach a high moral lesson to the reader, still meant a work of lengthy fiction. 60 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Fielding institutionalized a species of writing “hitherto unattempted in our language” (30) because of the loss of Homer’s epic pattern that the novelist, however, imitated “in the Manner of Cervantes”. Don Quixote thus functions as a tertium datur or as a supplement which simultaneously parodies chivalric Romances, backs the proliferation of the low mode confined to comedy and intellectualizes the picaresque adventures of a benevolent hero, not of a mere rogue, who “makes conventional society look foolish” while “trying to set up a positive standard”.20 The text of Joseph Andrews and, particularly, the metatext (the Preface as well as the author’s intrusions in the text) unfold this conglomerate which actually is a reiteration and imitation of a set of features well-established by Cervantes. As a result, Fielding’s coinage of comic Romance “written in the Manner of Cervantes” is a productive tautology whose focal point is Quixotism. James Beattie explains the point very well: “This form of Comick Romance has been brought to perfection in England by Henry Fielding; who seems to have possessed more wit and humour, and more knowledge of mankind, than any other person of modern times, Shakespeare accepted; and whose great natural abilities were refined by a classical taste, which he had acquired by studying the best author of antiquity.”21 In the process of re-patterning the genre of Romance on English soil, Fielding takes issue with what had already been clumsily and dangerously attempted on the Continent. He vilifies French Romances like Clelia, Cleopatra, Astraea, Cassandra, the Grand Cyrus and invokes the writers of antiquity on political grounds as well.
20 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 229. The intellectualization of Don Quixote’s picaresque adventures is tightly connected with his moral reformation of society. It is the presence, not the absence, of a “positive standard” that applies, as Northrop Frye points out, to the picaresque hero always seen as a rogue. The famous “Discourse on Arms and Letters” is extremely revealing at this point because it represents Don Quixote’s manifesto for the pre-eminence of arms, the emblem of national justice and defence, over letters which, he says, despite their laying down the rules of war, do not have the same moral weight that, according to chivalric principles, impels soldiers to sacrifice themselves for their country. As a knight-errant, Don Quixote glorifies the arms, namely the anachronistic soldier’s lance versus gunpowder as illustrative of modern war technology, because they underlie the chivalric Romance ideology he enacts in order to help those in distress. 21 Beattie, “On Fable and Romance”, 326. The Institutionalization of a New Genre 61
Fielding’s “politics of the classic”22 consists in forging a “different idea of romance” based on Aristotelian taxonomies and in condemning seventeenth-century French amatory Romances because of their length and lack of an epic pattern, probability, instruction and entertainment: “For I would by no means be thought to comprehend those persons of surprising genius, the authors of immense romances, or the modern novel and Atalantis writers; who without any assistance from nature or history, record persons who never were, or will be, and facts which never did nor possibly can happen: whose heroes are of their own creation, and their brains the chaos whence all their materials are collected” (184). Though “nature” and “history” are the raison d’être of the new species of Romance, or what we call a novel today, Fielding’s use of the term “modern novel” as an alternative to Romance generates the same terminological confusion that can be found in William Owen’s “Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Mr. Fielding”:
Sometime before this new Species of Writing appear’d, the World had been pester’d with Volumes, commonly known by the Name of Romances, or Novels, Tales, etc. filled with any thing which the wildest Imagination could suggest. In all these Works, Probability was not required .… In short, the most finish’d Piece of this kind, was nothing but Chaos and Incoherency. France first gave Birth to this strange Monster, and England was proud to import it among the rest of her Neighbour’s Follies.23
Targeting Romances (“modern novels”) written by French female authors like Madame de Scudéry, La Calprenède or Mary de la Rivière Manley, the “politics of the classic” contributes to the theorization of the mid-eighteenth-century English novel and to its transformation into “a serious art form”.24 The lack of a clear delinea- tion between Romance and novel and, therefore, their inter- changeability until the end of the eighteenth century allowed male novelists to reuse women writers’ sensational and pseudo-erotic plots
22 In order to develop my argument, I make use of the second half of the title of Chapter 6, “Joseph Andrews and the Quixotic. The Politics of the Classic”, of Walter Reed’s study, An Exemplary History of the Novel: The Quixotic versus the Picaresque, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981, 117-36. 23 Owen, “An Essay on the New Species of Writing”, 151. 24 Hammond, “Mid-Century Quixotism”, 249. 62 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 of high courtly Romance. In addition, the dismissal of “this strange Monster” is embedded in the tensions that shook the mid-century Anglo-French political landscape. For instance, Charles Jarvis’ Preface to the 1725 translation of Don Quixote ridicules French Romances,25 for they are as obnoxious as the books of knight-errantry parodied by Cervantes. As Brean Hammond suggests, the male novelists “‘overwrote’ romance elements deployed by the women and included improving discourse from more respectable literary modes … praised for the coherent subjectivities, cohesive structures, and consistent ethics that earlier women’s writing was said to lack”.26 The cultural specificity of Romance as “the modern novel” must be understood in terms of gendered prose writing and, first of all, as an interdependence of “formal and historical issues”, according to Hunter. As a tricky and unstable term, the eighteenth-century novel, as shown by Fielding and Owen, was paired with Romance in order to characterize the old fictional conventions. Though shorter than Romances, the English novels did not follow the French (roman), Italian (novella) and Spanish (novela) patterns that did away with traditional plots. Despite their name, “they most often looked backward rather than forward”.27 Fully aware that he was producing innovation within a genre, bringing about a generic mutation, Fielding preserves a “monstrous” species de-monstered by a classical mode, the comic, centred on what is topical. In short, he laid the foundations of a species that “had become the latest lasting novelty, writing to a public hungry for the combination of delight, instruction, information, and cultural satisfaction”.28 Rooted in nature and history, and designed to teach and entertain, Fielding’s new species theorized in the Preface to Joseph Andrews became known by the more common name of “the comedy of
25 The parody of French Romances becomes a topical theme in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, an overt Cervantic imitation which portrays the first Quixotic female character, Arabella, whose follies provoked by the voracious reading of French Romances shape a politics of reading whereby a woman resists the petrified customs and conventions of the patriarchal English society. Lennox’s novel will be thoroughly examined in Chapter 6. 26 Hammond, “Mid-Century Quixotism”, 249. 27 Hunter, Before Novels, 26. 28 Ibid., 27. The Institutionalization of a New Genre 63 romance”29 in Samuel Johnson’s Rambler No. 4 for 31 March 1750. Split from earlier prose fiction, Fielding’s new species marks the “second rise” 30 of the novel as the literary institution of the new modernity. In Hunter’s view, the new modernity defines the fourth and fifth decade of the eighteenth century, when the second wave of writers started to represent modern experience in a series of inexhaustible fictional experiments and innovative forms and directions. I personally mean the phrase “second rise” as the full configuration of the novel as genre in eighteenth-century England by way of Fielding’s imitation of Cervantes. Don Quixote is modern to the extent that a plurality of pre-novelistic discourses – mainly chivalric Romances, the pastoral and the picaresque it aims to parody – become the hybrid terminus in which an individual’s ideals derived from chivalric Romances lack any pragmatic content, whereas their enactment in the “immanent meaningless” of the novelistic world is seen as a validation of truth and authentication of Don Quixote’s experience. The rift between values and facts throws Don Quixote into the world of Enzauberung (“disenchantment”) as a subject whose belief in “art” – the world of Romance as an emblem of virtue and justice – “compensates for the disenchantment of the world”.31 Don Quixote participates in the making of the modern genre, once it has particularized experience and set a boundary between “representation as a measure of the real and our tendency to project an absolute telos of desire that would transcend the empirical world”.32 This boundary that Georg Lukács calls “irony” stands for the “normative mentality”33 of the novel. Its counterpart in English literature is Fielding’s imitation of Cervantes, a mixture of formal realism and honestum, which means the “true character of moral goodness”.34
29 Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, 4 (31 March 1750), in The Works of Samuel Johnson, London: F.C. and J. Rivington, 1823, II, 20. 30 Hammond, “Mid-Century Quixotism”, 253. Hammod’s argument is informed by Hunter, who contends in Before Novels that the second generation of writers “claimed for a ‘new species’ or ‘new province’ of narrative fiction in the 1740s, and it followed a far more general claim for novelty at the turn of the century” (ibid., 11). 31 Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity, 73. 32 Ibid., 77. 33 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 84. 34 Henry Fielding, Miscellanies, ed. Henry Knight Miller, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972, I, xviii-xix. Fielding deplored the collapse of truly heroic values, which 64 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Notwithstanding the apparent lack of connection between comic Romance and history, Fielding tells us that the former must derive from nature and history so as to be a credible copy of life and manners. This idea was also formulated by Dr Warburton, quoted by Arthur Murphy in his 1762 “Essay on the Life and Genius of Henry Fielding”: “Mons. De Marivaux, in France, and Mr. Fielding in England stand the foremost among those, who have given a faithful and chaste copy of life and manners, and by enriching their romance with the best part of the comic art, may be said to have brought it to perfection.”35 Infused with comic art, the “copy of life and manners”, or what Ian Watt calls “formal realism”, becomes the fundamental tenet of the new species recommended by Samuel Johnson as the modern work of fiction meant to cultivate the mid-century English readership’s taste:
The works of fiction, with which the present generation seems more particularly delighted, are such as exhibit life in its true taste, diversified only by accidents that daily happen in the world, and influenced by passions and qualities which are really to be found in conversing with mankind. This kind of writing may be termed not improperly the comedy of romance, and is to be conducted nearly by the rules of comic poetry. Its province is to bring about natural events by easy means, and to keep up curiosity without the help of wonder.36
“True taste” defies the “wonders” of heroic Romance, being nourished by everyday experience or variegated circumstances and incidents that sensible readers interpret as a modern form of the marvellous created by Fielding’s well-arranged architecture of the plot – enchanted Romance adventures turned into disenchanted “natural
urged him to distinguish between “false greatness” taken as vanity, ostentation and even villainy, and “true greatness” understood as a combination of genius and virtue typical of great men like Socrates and Brutus. Though “true greatness” represents Fielding’s ethical ideal, it was never embodied by any of his characters but under the form of the honnête homme’s goodness, a synonym for spontaneous benevolent and charitable social actions indicative of moral rectitude. 35 Arthur Murphy, “An Essay on the Life and Genius of Henry Fielding. Esq.” (1762), in English Theories of the Novel, 96 (emphasis in the original). 36 Johnson, The Rambler, 4 (31 March 1750), in The Works of Samuel Johnson, II, 20. The Institutionalization of a New Genre 65 events” by means of metatextual prompts in the style of Cervantes37 – and the manipulation of characters. Much like the Spanish writer, Fielding’s reuse of classical forms is an instance of “extreme skepticism”, a satirical critique of both traditional aristocratic and modern progressive claims. Since aristocratic “romance idealism” is no longer valid as an ideology, it remains useful, as Scott Black argues, “as a device” adopted by the novel as “a failed ideology that can no longer, and should no longer, be practiced”. 38 Ian Duncan points out that Cervantes “had exorcised overnight the baneful magic of the last age by a harmless, essentially comic power of common sense”.39 As an imitator and inventor alike, Fielding exploits the “comic power of common sense” in order to render “an accurate observation of the living world”.40 In Joseph Andrews, the comic abides by the rules of common sense because it “confines itself strictly to Nature from the just Imitation of which, will flow all the Pleasure we can this way convey to a sensible Reader” (26). Radically different from the burlesque, which exhibits the monstrous and the unnatural, the comic insists on the general truth about human nature derived from the neoclassical ideal of la belle nature, which discloses an exemplary pattern in line with the truth of empirical observation. Fielding adopts this ideal by shifting attention from the hero of the epic to the hero of the mock-epic whose familiarity is “as much a moral and epistemological as a literary matter”.41
37 For instance, the fortune-teller monkey, the enchanted head or the tricks the duke and the duchess play on Don Quixote are a number of significant episodes in which the other characters’ comic narratives about enchantment take the form of secular magic and, moreover, of “extreme skepticism”. The metaphorical half of the title of Leopold Damrosch’s 1985 book, God’s Plot and Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985, is also telling in this respect, in that the confluence of the divine meaning of human life and the traditional ways of thinking has become highly problematic under the pressure of the modern world. 38 Scott Black, “Anachronism and the Uses of Form in Joseph Andrews”, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, XXXVIII/2-3 (Spring 2005), 153. 39 Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transfigurations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 11. 40 Johnson, The Rambler, 4 (31 March 1750), in The Works of Samuel Johnson, II, 21. 41 Jerry C. Beasley, “Romance and the ‘New’ Novels of Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett”, Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, XVI/3, “Restoration and Eighteenth Century” (Summer 1976), 444. 66 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
As new as comic Romance, the type of hero privileged by Fielding’s novels is the man of “good sense, good parts, and good nature” (43) who becomes a credible pattern of exemplarity in a secular world. His idealistic quest for Christian truth and spiritual happiness – the ultimate expression of the summum bonum – is now quixotically accommodated by the “meaningless world forsaken by God”.42 He gets out of the abstract world of divine virtue characteristic of the super-hero of Romance and enters the concrete realm of civil virtue representative of the novelistic hero whose mission is to act according to the principles of “utilitarian humanism”.43 This deter- mines Samuel Johnson to applaud his uncompromising good-natured character in a plausible yet hostile environment: “I cannot discover why there should not be exhibited the most perfect idea of virtue; of virtue not angelical, nor above probability, for what we cannot credit, we shall never imitate, but the highest and purest that humanity can reach, which, exercised in such trials as the various revolutions shall bring upon it, may, by conquering some calamities, and enduring others, teach us what we may hope, and what we can perform.”44
42 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 103. 43 My argument is complemented by both Thomas Mareska’s examination of the concept of “wisdom” in Epic to Novel, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1974, and Northrop Frye’s analysis of the context of Romance in The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1976. As regards “wisdom”, Mareska considers the term to be indispensable for defining traditional epic and the epic hero from Homer through to the Restoration period, when their didactic purpose – initially set by the Renaissance – concerned man’s capacity to obtain felicity (summum bonum). Thus, he is right in arguing that “wisdom was moving from divinity to near-worldliness, from an attribute of God and knowledge of things divine shared by men only through a kind of divine in-flowing and participation in Christ who was Wisdom, to philosophical knowledge naturally obtainable, to morality, to prudence” (Epic to Novel, 182) (emphasis in the original). Frye’s comprehensive investigation of the taxonomy Romance-novel underlines the former’s anti-representational, abstract, non-referential and mythical – mythos as wish-fulfilment story – aspects that place it “out of inherent probability” into the “‘then’ narrative” and the latter’s formulaic structures adapted to a credible, ordinary context which thus parodies and displaces the structure of romance in order to transform it into a “‘hence’ narrative” (The Secular Scripture, 47) highly concerned with causality, referentiality, characters rather than plot, the story of human nature and the “ambiguities of ordinary life, that is, the mixture of good and bad” (ibid., 50). 44 Johnson, The Rambler, 4 (31 March 1750), in The Works of Samuel Johnson, II, 26. The Institutionalization of a New Genre 67
The good-natured man is a replica of the benevolent Don Quixote who leaves the English stage of moral sense and starts preaching virtue to readers of the novel still disguised as modern comic Romance. His melioristic view of the secular and corrupted world is to be fully reciprocated only by good-natured readers who, replacing good-natured spectators, are now responsible for averting the crisis of value and judgement triggered by the ordinary characters of the new genre. In this sense, Fielding says: “Nay, I will appeal to common observation, whether the same companies are not found more full of good-humour and benevolence, after they have been sweeten’d for two or three hours with entertainments of this kind, then when soured by a tragedy or a grave lecture” (30). Benevolence is a productive tautology itself, not only because it has a Quixotic essence but also because it is operative within the realm of the comic, which is common and natural and, consequently, credible. Furthermore, the comic, according to Fielding, is also a matter of manners which, if not natural, become ridiculous affectation resulted both from vanity and hypocrisy. This is where the crisis of value and judgement lies: natural virtue and undeterred benevolence versus self-interest and virtue as personal merit. I consider the former to be the nature of Quixotic ideology, which no longer means a servile imitation of chivalric models to be inculcated in the eighteenth- century Quixotic characters’ mind. Eighteenth-century English Quixotes reactivate contemporary issues – socio-economic (Communio mercium as a consequence of the rise of capitalism), religious (Latitudinarianism and Methodism), literary (French Romances) and political (anti-Jacobinism) – in order to redress, re- enchant and critique the corrupted everyday experience. This is what underlines the crisis-consciousness inaugurated by the modern genre of the novel that ridicules the doctrinaire Quixotes and satirizes their manias. The novel explodes such lame manias because they contain “useless ex-centricities, ex-crescences of the pragmatic referential”.45 Be it an attribute of Parson Adam’s or Joseph Andrew’s Quixotic ethics, or of moral philosophy as such, virtue prevails as the necessary guarantee for Fielding’s comic realism while vice is eradicated by satire. Paradigmatic of the idealistic reconciliation of Quixotic ideology with the pragmatic secular discourse of modernity,
45 Irimia, “From the Sublime to the Comic”, 13. 68 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 the good-natured hero stands high in Fielding’s novels, “partly due to his reformer’s instinct, his career in the law, his belief in man’s positive potential and his interest in the causes and motives – in the lure of fashion and emulation”.46 Samuel Johnson urges that virtue should be “steadily inculcated as the highest proof of understanding, and the only solid basis of greatness”.47 Though derived from Romance conventions, greatness strives to give the “Godforsaken world”48 of the novel the meaning of man’s story of Christian heroism. However, greatness should not be understood as an exaltation of the self, as is the case of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, nor should it lead to an empathetic identification of the reader with great characters. Paulson observes that the readers’ blind identification with a character “inflicted by fashion and the conventions of ‘greatness’ and ‘great men’ … was, of course, a prime ingredient of romance, the same danger that Cervantes perceived in Amadís de Gaula”.49 Conversely, greatness is given by the “true sublime of human nature” deeply rooted in the character’s performance of good works for the benefit of society and is an active participant in the establishment of sensus communis, for “nothing can be so interesting to men as man”.50 The apparent incongruity between comic Romance and history weakens when the author’s objective is to present a “copy of life and manners”. Fielding’s irony becomes evident when, claiming to hit out
46 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 99. 47 Johnson, The Rambler, 4 (31 March 1750), in The Works of Samuel Johnson, II, 26- 27. 48 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 103. 49 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 102. It is worth mentioning that in his Introduction to Joseph Andrews, New York: Modern Library College Editions, 1950, Howard Mumford Jones points out that Richardson was a moralist who “brought the gift of psychological insight to the novel whereas Fielding described and demonstrated the form” (vii). Fielding thought that Pamela’s excessive privacy, the epistolary form that upheld the claim to historicity and the character’s particularized experience imperilled the readers’ objectivity by luring them into empathizing with the character’s experience and thoughts. Fielding thus dismissed Richardson’s patent of the modern novel because his creation was a simple mixture of Romance, realism and morality. He sensed the danger of the privacy of reading, since it made readers turn the conduct of a specific character into their own. 50 John Moore, “A View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance” (1797), in Novel and Romance, 1700-1800, 441. The Institutionalization of a New Genre 69 at the conventions of the pernicious genre of Romance, he actually makes use of “traditional clothing to obscure the fact that he is subverting the tradition as then understood”.51 William Owen sum- marizes these insights in “An Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Mr. Fielding”:
As this Sort of Writing was intended as a Contrast to those in which the Reader was even to suppose all the Characters ideal, and every Circumstance quite imaginary, ’twas thought necessary, to give it a greater Air of Truth, to entitle it an History; and the Dramatis Personae (if I may venture to use the Expression) were christened not with fantastic high-sounding Names, but such as, tho’ they sometimes bore some Reference to the Character, had a more modern Termination. At the same Time Mr. Fielding ordain’d, that these Histories should be divided into Books, and these subdivided into Chapters; and also that the first Chapter of every Book was not to continue the Narration, but should consist of any Thing the Author chose to entertain his Readers with. These if I don’t forget, Mr. Fielding himself has nominated, the several Stages of his History, which he metaphorically calls a Journey, in which he and his Readers are Fellow-Travellers.52
The “more modern Termination” of the story disguised as history is ensured by its liaison with natural circumstances, natural names and the protagonists’ picaresque adventures that become consubstantial with the readers’ metaphorical journey through the book. The author’s narrative technique guides the readers and “holds” them “at some distance from the action”, so that “the air of artifice is compensated for by the sanity of the exposition, the clarity and, in that sense, realism of the picture”.53 Like Cervantes’, Fielding’s historia artificiosa shows the reader not only what happens but also how it happens. Eric Macphail cogently argues that the hidalgo “marks an important stage in the decline of providence as a principle of coherence in history and fiction” and turns providence into chance deemed as “the hidden god
51 Hunter, Before Novels, 20. 52 Owen, “An Essay on the New Species of Writing”, 153 (emphases in the original). 53 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 105 (emphasis in the original). 70 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 of a modern world fallen from its once assured order”.54 Chance as providence is the hidden god of modern times ironically disclosed by Fielding’s omniscience and manipulative comments. As a parodic and sceptical historian who writes “this new kind of Biography restrain’d within Laws which should ever after be deem’d sacred by all that attempted his Manner”, 55 Fielding repudiates traditional Romance replete with disconnected episodes and idealizing aristocratic histories and lays down the modern rules of the Romance of “naive empiricism” whereby he both comically describes high and low life alike and teaches the reader how to believe. He celebrates both a moral Zeitgeist inspired by the Latitudinarian doctrine of acting well in society and the comic, which militates for social resolution and moral rejuvenation. Philip Stevick understands Fielding’s image of society as the “cosmological plenitude of the Great Chain invested with … a deep feeling for his fellow human beings”, which, along with “a generous common sense” and “concrete reality”, is the basic element of Fielding’s sceptical view of history that does not owe allegiance to the “tendentiousness of a doctrinaire philosophy of history”.56 His firm belief that every individual can contribute to the general good of society becomes the real “goal to be pursued in history, not to be submitted to”.57 Hence, the new “Province of Writing” can be referred
54 Eric Macphail, “Don Quijote and the Plot of History”, Comparative Literature, XLVII/4 (Fall 1995), 300. It is authorial providence, or what McKeon calls “poetic justice” in The Origins of the English Novel, that compensates for providence as a “principle of coherence in history and fiction” (407). Fernández de Avellaneda’s false History of Don Quixote is a case in point. According to Avellaneda’s version, the false Quixote reached Zaragoza, where Don Quixote attended a public running at the ring. By choosing to go to Barcelona, Cervantes’ Don Quixote proves that Avellaneda wrote a spurious history about him and embarks on a mission to defend the veracity of the History recorded by the chronicler Cide Hamete Benengeli and, consequently, to show the world that the historian Avellaneda is a notorious liar. 55 Owen, “An Essay on the New Species of Writing founded by Mr. Fielding”, 152. 56 Philip Stevick, “Fielding and the Meaning of History”, PMLA, LXXIX/5, (December 1964), 566-67. Stevick claims that Fielding embraces an idealistic, Christian view of the world in which history, far from regressing or progressing, is a “contemplation of the historian’s own time” (ibid., 565). He links this idea with comic Romance and points out that traditional Romance elements are “tested” by a new form “concretely of the author’s time” and “critically historical”, in which the unexpected twists in the plot – far from the generous realm of possibility – mirror “the art of life” in a celebratory manner (ibid., 567). 57 Ibid., 566. The Institutionalization of a New Genre 71 to either as a “new Biography” or a true “history of development which is one with life and respects it, since each of its moments bears within itself its own raison d’être”.58 The comic, or what is natural, demolishes Romance and sets it against the background of mundane life historicized in terms of social morality. To conclude, I wish to consider briefly the question of “exquisite mirth and laughter” that comic Romance prescribes. In The Amiable Humorist, Stuart Tave proclaims Fielding as the first English writer who turned Don Quixote into a noble symbol, though “it took him some time to develop that”.59 In order to better understand Fielding’s comic reconfiguration of the Quixotic paradigm in the latter half of the eighteenth century, we need to probe the period of time that elapsed until Fielding succeeded in making Don Quixote a noble symbol. Cervantes has democratized laughter in the low mode articulated by comedy as a dramatic genre. Edward Riley maintains that, according to baroque precepts, “admiratio in the reader and spectator was highly expected of literature in Cervantes’ time, comparable with the traditional functions of instruction and entertainment”.60 Associated with movere, admiratio was experienced whenever something new, exceptional and marvellously admirable passed the test of Aristotelian verisimilitude. As a good, rather than malicious humorist, Cervantes valued comic laughter prescribed by the meanings of both discreción (“wit”, “taste”) and propriedad (“natural conformation to what is said, done or represented”, “artistry”, “judgement”). Similarly, burlas – bellaquerías or socarronerías – originating in jovial mischief and disregard for decorum – desenfado, desenvoltura 61 – were devised by Cervantes in accord with the epistemological and aesthetic implication of the two terms whose collocation “gives us the idea of good comedy … and a further overlap between the former and his theory of the prose epic”.62 Therefore, good comedy is the result of Cervantes’ association of high burlesque – Don Quixote’s affectation of gravity – and low
58 Raymond Aron, quoted in Stevick, “Fielding and the Meaning of History”, 565. 59 Tave, The Amiable Humorist, 155. 60 Edward Riley, Cervantes’s Theory of the Novel, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962, 89. 61 Anthony Close, Cervantes and the Comic Mind of His Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 17. 62 Ibid., 21. 72 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 burlesque – the other characters’ roughness and malevolence – in the comic mode regulated by his regocijado ingenio (“delightful ingenuity”).63 Both the satirical and the sentimental interpretation of Don Quixote in eighteenth-century England became two mutually constitutive parts of a social and literary whole. In Rachel Schmidt’s view, this dialectic approach accounted for “the canonization of the novel” and, more importantly, enabled neoclassical critics “to consider it a satire, not burlesque, thus considering Cervantes a critic of literature and society through the text”. 64 This also explains why I have chosen Peter Motteux’s 1700 translation of Don Quixote. Motteux’s goal was to put the hidalgo “in a more proper Dress” and to render accurately Cervantes’ “noble Sentiments of Love and Honour”,65 thus initiating the process of transforming the Spanish knight into a noble symbol. Julie Candler Hayes argues in favour of this idea: “What is more telling than Motteux’s actual practice is his need to distance himself from the burlesque tradition as well as from John Phillips’s second- hand translation, neither of which corresponded to the norms and expectations of translation among his audience.”66 In Fielding’s case, we remember that the burlesque bears the mark of ridiculous affectation induced both by vanity and hypocrisy. Lord Shaftesbury, as we learn from the Preface to Joseph Andrews, finds the resultant behaviour utterly repellent. In comparison, Fielding has “less abhorrence” for unnatural conduct because it “contributes more to exquisite mirth and laughter” (27). The adjectival addition points to a radical change in the meaning of laughter that may be subsumed to the famous quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns. Disregarding the Tory satirical attack aimed, according to Dr Johnson’s definition, at “particular persons, wickedness or folly”,67 Addison and Steele alleviated the harsh and malicious tone of the
63 Adolfo Bonilla y San Martín, Cervantes y su obra, Madrid: BiblioLife, 1916, 181. 64 Rachel Schmidt, Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the Eighteenth Century, Montreal and Kingston, London, Ithaca: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999, xiv. 65 Motteux, “The Translator’s Preface to Cervantes”, 4. 66 Julie Candler Hayes, “Eighteenth-Century English Translations of Don Quixote”, in The Cervantean Heritage, 69. 67 Johnson’s definition is taken from Comprehensive Johnson’s Dictionary: An Enlarged Edition of Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, London: Thomas Nelson, 1849, pages unnumbered. The Institutionalization of a New Genre 73 genre à la mode by reusing, in a Fieldingesque manner, a classical convention – notably of Horatian and Juvenalian origin – to distinguish false (ill-natured and personal) from true satire (good- natured and generally placed). The true good-natured satirist looks at human weaknesses, vices and follies with wit, moderation and sympathy. Consequently, in The Tatler No. 242 for 26 October 1710, Steele celebrates good nature as an essential quality in a satirist: “Good Nature produces a Disdain of all Baseness, Vice and Folly, which prompts them (satirists) to express themselves with Smartness against the Errors of Men, without Bitterness towards their Persons.”68 The “Errors of Men” are imperatively appealing to man because they are connected with “daily unfortunate circumstances”, not with “natural imperfections” (29). In tune with Addison’s true satire, Fielding asserts that “it is a much greater and nobler applause” that the figures portrayed by a comic painter “appear to think” (28), despite man’s faulty discrimination between vice as virtue and virtue as vice. From this point of view, true satire gives birth to a new worldview, according to which human nature is dignified as it is. Put it differently, true satire is the catalyst that changes the ancient Tory forma mentis into the modern Whiggish comedy shaped by Addison and Steele. Ronald Paulson acknowledges that the new literary formula is “a more generous comedy, which laughs at (or even with) general types”. 69 Similarly, the ancient Tory approach to Don Quixote in terms of false satire is substituted by the modern depoliticized version of true satire now esteemed as comedy, which canonizes the Spaniard as an “amiable humorist”, as well as noble symbol. I use the term “depoliticized” to stress the fundamental shift from the literary practice of ridicule-laughter inculcated by conservative satirists like Dryden, Pope and Swift – defined by Hobbes in The Leviathan as “sudden glory” caused “by the apprehension of some deformed thing in another by comparison whereof they [grimaces] suddenly applaud themselves” 70 – to Addison’s and Steele’s naturalization of Whig laughter as a “pleasure of life” 71 typical of comedy. Briefly, the
68 Richard Steele, The Tatler, ed. Donald F. Bond, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, III, 241. 69 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 61. 70 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, or The Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-Wealth, Ecclesiastical and Civill, London: Andrew Crooke, 1651, 45. 71 Joseph Addison, The Spectator, 249, in Essays in Criticism and Literary Theory, ed. John Loftis, Northbrook, IL: AHM Publishing Corporation, 1975, 27. 74 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 modernity of Don Quixote lies in Addison’s and Steele’s excoriation of “abused ridicule” 72 and recovery of Quixotic Spanish gallantry interpreted as English gentlemanliness: “It has been said that the History of Don Quixote utterly destroyed the Spirit of Gallantry in the Spanish Nation; and I believe we may say much more truly, that the Humour of Ridicule has done as much Injury to the true Relish of Company in England.”73 As a central tenet of the fledgling true satire now appreciated as general comedy, laughter “as a pleasure of life” – later on theorized by Shaftesbury and novelized by Fielding – contains a psychological dimension ingrained in Addison’s examination of the spectator’s or reader’s aesthetic response. Addison affirms that pleasurable laughter “is in itself both amiable and beautiful. For this reason likewise Venus has gained the title of the laughter-loving dame … and is represented by Horace as the goddess who delights in laughter.”74 It is the product of a writer’s “pleasures of the imagination”75 given not by the “poor appearance of objects to the eye”,76 or, in terms of comedy, by the presence of persons “drawn in their proper characters”77 but by the praise of man’s beautiful “ornaments”78 of the soul, suck as virtue, charity and benevolence, as well as by the tolerant attitude towards vice or folly. Both are highly suggestive of Jauss’ aesthetics of reception. Such is the case of Addison’s modern Don Quixote and of Fielding’s reception of Cervantes. In Fiction and the
72 According to the subtitle of Addison’s Spectator, 249, “Uses and Abuses of Ridicule”, in ibid., 26-30. 73 Steele, The Tatler, 219, III, 146. 74 Addison, The Spectator, 249, in Essays, 29. 75 I am referring to The Pleasures of the Imagination, the title of Addison’s collection of essays in which he elaborates an aesthetic theory according to which the pleasures of the imagination “proceed from the sight of what is great, uncommon, or beautiful” (412, in ibid., 141), which “raises in us a secret delight and a kind of fondness” consisting in “the gaiety and variety of colours”, sounds, smells or perfumes (ibid., 145). I use the phrase metaphorically in order to strengthen the writer’s pleasure to imagine a harmonious fictional universe whose “fondness” consists in cultivating exemplary virtue and exposing vice and folly with “wit and mirth”, that is, with “true humour” (The Spectator, 35, in ibid., 20), as opposed to “false humour”, which encourages “nonsense, apish tricks, buffooneries, mock-representations’ and ‘is merry where he can, not where he should” (ibid., 20-21). 76 Addison, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 413, in ibid., 147. 77 Addison, The Spectator, 249, in ibid., 28. 78 In The Pleasures of the Imagination, 413, Addison states that “ornaments” such as lights and colours “make the universe more agreeable to the imagination” (ibid., 147). The Institutionalization of a New Genre 75
Shape of Belief: A Study of Fielding with a Glance at Swift, Johnson and Richardson, Sheldon Sacks connects the novelist’s achievement of an artistic end with the readers’ critical response induced by his moral views:
When we have read a good novelist’s work it is as if we have had an opportunity to hear him speak to us of his beliefs and also have been able to observe for years how in fact he reacts to people we have been allowed to know performing actions whose motives have been made comprehensible to us for ends with which we sympathize or which we dislike. And it is not that he may do this, he must do it if he is to write a novel of any value.79
Laughter as a “pleasure of life” appears to be the natural extension of the Latitudinarian risus ex serenitate conscientiae80 upheld by the novelist’s benevolence, not by harsh judgements. Addison strips laughter of puritanical rigidity and transforms it into an aesthetic object. As Ronald Paulson remarks, “he takes it out of a moral discourse (though not necessarily out of a rhetorical discourse) and into the aesthetics of pleasurable response, sympathetic laughter, and comedy, an area which he designated as the NOVEL, NEW, or UNCOMMON”.81 In his analysis of Addison’s understanding of entertainment, William Warner suggests that the meaning of the word “is developing toward the sense of an ‘entertainment’ as a structured representation that we consume for pleasure”.82 In the prefatory pages of Joseph Andrews, for instance, Fielding declares that
… the vices to be found here, are rather the accidental consequences of some human frailty, or foible, than causes habitually existing in the mind …. They are never set forth as the objects of ridicule but
79 Sheldon Sacks, Fiction and the Shape of Belief: A Study of Fielding with a Glance at Swift, Johnson and Richardson, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1964, 271-72 (emphases in the original). 80 Isaac Barrow, quoted in Tave, The Amiable Humorist, 7. As a major representative of the Latitudinarian group, Barrow preached the optimism about human nature and considered mirth to be the social expression of good humour and cheerfulness, similar to the amiable and sociable spirit of religion. 81 Paulson, Don Quixote in England, xii. 82 William Warner, Licensing Entertainment: The Elevation of Novel Reading in Britain, 1684-1750, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 233. 76 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
detestation …. They are never the principal figure at the time on the scene …. They never produce the intended evil. (30)
The vehemence of Fielding’s argument against the “very ill-framed mind, who can look on ugliness, infirmity, or poverty as ridiculous in themselves” (29) undoubtedly betrays his indebtedness to Addison’s depoliticized true humour ready to be imposed as a reaction to Hobbes’ laughter perceived as the observation of some deformed thing in others. As a comic painter, Hogarth, Fielding’s friend commended in the Preface for his ingenuity, scrutinizes the sordid, vice-stricken reality of his day in canvas that exhibit the same exultant and sympathetic “art of life”. It is wrong to think of Hogarth as a burlesque painter, writes Fielding, as he does not portray the absurd or the monstrous but, on the contrary, “expresses the affections of men on canvas” (27). Fielding’s optimistic view of man’s innate goodness and the “cosmological plenitude” of society enabled Arthur Murphy to observe that “an air of philanthropy breathes throughout his work”, that “this circumstance … renders it an image of truth, as the Roman orator calls a comedy”. 83 Addison renders this truthful image of philanthropy by establishing a dialectical relationship between empiricism and the sanguine perception of the imagination. Paulson contends that “the reader begins with the old satiric assumption that imagination is judged by an empirical norm and found wanting; but then one notices that empiricism is also judged by the norm of the imagination – and, after that, at length, there is nothing to do but balance imagination and empiricism, replacing satire with an incongruity that came to be the distinguishing feature of comedy”.84 Moreover, Addison’s invocation of “the Supreme Author of our being” who “has so formed the soul of man that nothing but himself can be its last, adequate and proper happiness”85 is what I believe to be the key element in viewing the writer as a designer of a benevolent microcosmic model that imitates the idea of “cosmological plenitude”. Man’s aesthetic response to the divine creation of “the great, the
83 Murphy, “An Essay on the Life and Genius of Henry Fielding”, 96 (emphasis in the original). 84 Paulson, Don Quixote in England, xii. 85 Addison, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 413, in Essays, 146. The Institutionalization of a New Genre 77 uncommon, and the beautiful”86 is constructed by means of a com- bination of theological arguments with natural philosophy – Locke’s “secondary qualities”, of which light, smell and colours are the most significant. The “pleasures of the imagination” sustain in this way the isomorphism between “the Supreme Author of our being” and the power of the novelist eager to accomplish an artistic end that echoes unconditional providential goodness. Addison’s modern version of generous laughter generated an “anti- splenetic attitude” 87 emblematic of Fielding, Smollett and Sterne. Interested in its impact on eighteenth-century English society, Susan G. Auty maintains that readers demanded enjoyable literary works meant to foreground good-natured characters and annihilate the satirical input of biting laughter. We remember that “exquisite laughter” is “a more wholesome physic for the mind”, especially when either the burlesque or the ridiculous takes centre stage. As for the former, Fielding agrees with Shaftesbury that “there is no such thing to be found in the writings of the antients” (27) but, I would say, in the “imitation of the Manner of Cervantes”. The duke’s and the duchess’ prodigious and good-humoured burlas engineered in Part II of Don Quixote – similar to the priest’s and the barber’s manoeuvres in Part I – find their malevolent counterpart in Book III, Chapter 7 of Joseph Andrews, in which Parson Adams plays the role of Socrates. Here he is the butt of several repulsive burlesque scenes plotted by a hunter who “took a strange delight in every thing which is ridiculous, odious, and absurd in his own species” and a set of fellows “whom we have before called curs; and who did indeed no great honour to the canine kind” (232-33). Fielding’s burlas appear to be coextensive with the caustic and ridiculous description of the hunter who “was in the common opinion one of the finest gentlemen of his age” (232). This kind of burlesque, explains Judith Frank, “was an important genre in the chapbooks that circulated among the semiliterate and literate of the working classes and a theatrical form, in which the neoclassical and the heroic were uttered by the low”.88 Fielding admits the burlesque when used to describe “the Battles, and Some other Places, not necessarily to be pointed out to the
86 Addison, The Pleasures of the Imagination, 412, in ibid., 141. 87 Auty, The Comic Spirit of Eighteenth-Century Novels, 25. 88 Judith Frank, “The Comic Novel and the Poor: Fielding’s Preface to Joseph Andrews”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, XXVII/2 (Winter 1993-1994), 222. 78 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Classical Reader; for whose Entertainment those Parodies or Burlesque Imitations are chiefly calculated” (26). They are designed, therefore, to produce pleasure and are “calculated” for the sake of decorum specific to the “Classical Reader”. Yet Fielding draws attention to the danger of “cross-class imitation”,89 another form of legitimate ridiculous affectation, since manners and social status are interdependent: “nor do I believe any man living who meets a dirty fellow riding through the streets in a cart, is struck with an idea of the ridiculous from it; but if he should see the same figure descend from his coach and six, or bolt from his chair with his hat under his arm, he would then begin to laugh, and with justice” (29). Affectation proceeding from vanity or hypocrisy or from the plebeians’ misappropriation of patrician manners is recognized as such, once it is subject to the Shaftesburian ridicule “as a test of truth”. Shaftesbury’s “test of truth” applied by Fielding is used to distinguish true from false gravity which, notes Shaftesbury,
… is of the very essence of imposture …. We can never be too grave, if we can be assured we are really what we suppose. And we can never too much honour or revere anything for grave, if we are assured the thing is grave, as we apprehend it.90
The disinterested, non-judgemental laughter prescribed by Addison, then by Shaftesbury and, ultimately, by Fielding is counterbalanced by ridiculous satirical laughter immersed in a moral discourse which condemns vanity, hypocrisy and rank misappropriation as raillery or as “an obsession which usurped all the person’s vital impulses”.91 Don Quixote becomes a noble symbol revered by the Whig ethos of good- natured ridicule, which sees his social and intellectual eccentricity in commendatory terms. In strong opposition to Swift’s conservative critique of Don Quixote’s enthusiasm as fanaticism, Shaftesbury reiterates Addison’s doctrine of innocent laughter as a solution to the matter:
It was … the wisdom of some wise nations to let people be fools as much as they pleased, and never to punish seriously what they
89 Ibid., 229. 90 Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm to My Lord*****”, in Characteristics, 10. 91 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 62. The Institutionalization of a New Genre 79
deserved only to be laughed at, and was, after all, best cured by that innocent remedy .… Good-humour is not only the best security against enthusiasm, but the best foundation of piety and true religion.92
The source of good-humour is the Latitudinarian claim that man’s goodness is natural while evil is contrary to nature. This also explains why Fielding, in the same Latitudinarian vein, asserts that “vices never produce the indeed evil”. Evil, according to Shaftesbury, is something ephemeral, a folly, “a hazard or mere chance” separate from “a designing principle, who is the cause only of good”.93 Far from being real, Paulson proposes, evil is “an illusion that can be separated from the real by a breadth of laughter”.94 “In the Manner of Cervantes”, as well as of Addison and Shaftesbury, Fielding shapes Parson Adams’ enthusiastic individuality according to the Whig rules of comedy, to the Latitudinarian doctrine of sympathy and goodness as part of the divine nature – Shaftesbury’s optimistic, even Quixotic opinion that “all enthusiasms have their consummation in the free and voluntary love of God”95 stressed the same idea – and to the new model of Romance, a reinterpretation of the classical epic in the low mode sensitive to the strengths (virtues) and weakness (follies) of human nature. The scaffolding of Fielding’s fictional design is built on a penchant for odd but virtuous characters like Parson Adams, on tolerance of vice and on ridicule provoked by the violation of norms and lack of good sense, not by virtuous conduct and practice of benevolence in a world of Communio mercium. Both his consideration for good-natured readers who respond sympathetically to the “silent specular intensity of reading”96 and Fielding’s utopian view of a morally sound society which contributes to the general good have a profound impact upon a
92 Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm”, in Characteristics, 17 (emphases in the original). 93 Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit”, in ibid., 240. 94 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 65. 95 Stanley Grean, Introduction to Characteristics, xxi. 96 Judith Frank, “The Comic Novel and the Poor”, 225. Frank quotes from Peter Stallybrass’ and Allon White’s The Politics and Poetics of Transgression in order to demonstrate that Fielding’s shift from the burlesque theatre to neoclassical literature is a shift from low to high “that is simultaneously a transition in modes of experiencing culture: from the collectivity watching the stage to the more culturally prestigious activity of the individual reading”. 80 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 fictional universe governed by the narrator’s providential justice inextricably bound up with the unparalleled genre of comic Romance: “It is no wonder that he [Fielding] has been able to raise himself to the top of the comic character, to be admired by readers with the most lively sensations of mirth.”97 The time span that elapsed until Fielding turned Don Quixote into a noble symbol witnessed both the naturalization of the modern version of laughter “as a pleasure of life” and of good-humour emerging from disinterested benevolence. Steele appreciated Cervantes’ “delicacy of humour”.98 The Addisonian “pleasures of the imagination” became a shield against the wildest imagination of the world of Romance. Shaftesbury thought of Cervantes as “a successful comic author”.99 Fielding put into practice the “aestheticized Whig ideology” 100 of laughter in the new “Province” of comic Romance patterned after Cervantes with the purpose of highlighting Quixotic virtue as a reformer of manners and social morality. All in all, the “English Cervantes” patents the comic novel on the basis of a tautological meaning of Quixotism – comedy, romance, good-nature and amiable laughter – whose productivity is tested by the disenchanted world of the novel (vida), rather than Romance (sueño).
97 Murphy, “An Essay on the Life and Genius of Henry Fielding”, 98 (emphasis in the original). 98 Steele, The Tatler, 252, III, 281. 99 Shaftesbury, “Miscellaneous Reflections”, in Characteristics, 313. 100 Paulson, Don Quixote in England, 30.
CHAPTER 3
FROM DON QUIXOTE’S LANCE TO PARSON ADAMS’ QUIXOTIC BENEVOLENCE
The Golden Age as a Quixotic topos In Joseph Andrews (III, 3, 4), Mr Wilson entertains Parson Adams with the initially tumultuous and eventually harmonious history of his life. Wilson speaks in a sharp satirical tone when he describes in detail the rotten morality prevailing in London at the time. Wilson is a gentleman from a good family, with fine knowledge of Latin and Greek and also an inheritor of a small fortune to be received at the age of twenty-five. His social and professional background proves to be at odds with his “impatience to be in the world”1 from the age of sixteen, when his father died. It is the lack of a guide, complains Wilson, that led to all his future misfortunes in London, a degenerate city in which the young Wilson discovers fashionable public spaces populated by hypocrites, coquettes who use their affected charms to hunt les beaux for their considerable fortune, harlots “inhabited by disease and death” (202), mercantile booksellers who send him to prison for failing to pay his debts, corrupted wine merchants and assemblies of young philosophers who are all masters of outright deceit, despite their theories about Deist right rule. Perverted by vanity and egoism acquired from the external morally corrupted world, Wilson’s mind is cleansed of vice due to his innate good nature and good breeding. Like Tom Jones’ kindness, sociability and love, Wilson’s may be interpreted as signs of his self-indulgence, for, in a Quixotic manner, “he fastens his attention on one aspect of the object and makes it into the whole” and, consequently, “breaks with both prudence and moral laws”. 2 The deceptive London life,
1 Fielding, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of His Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, 196 (all further references to this edition will be given in the text). 2 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 138. 82 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 however, teaches Wilson to act prudentially in his pursuit of happiness that is finally rewarded not by the receipt of a 200-pound lottery ticket sold to a former acquaintance in order to procure himself bread, but by “the dear name of the generous girl that sent it to me … and for whom I had long had a passion, which I never durst disclose to her” (212). After his marriage to the virtuous Harriet Hearty, Wilson retires from a world “full of bustle, noise, hatred, envy, and ingratitude, to ease, quiet, and love” (215). Wilson’s story can be read as a parable of the Golden Age invoked by Parson Adams at the close of the story. Similar to Don Quixote’s glorification of it, the Golden Age appears as an idealistic way of life within English society: “Then they departed [Wilson and Harriet], Adams declaring that this was the manner in which people had lived in the golden age” (220). Wilson’s lifestyle alone is the realization of the Quixotic ideal of providential justice, harmony and social welfare underlying the Latitudinarian sermons preached by Parson Adams to his country fellows in the hope of reforming their degraded morals. Wilson’s interpolation is a mise en abîme for the fulfilment of “cosmological plenitude”.3 Adams’ nostalgic words echo Don Quix- ote’s laudatory discourse on the Golden Age as a topos which social conscience must reconstruct in the present world of “transcendental homelessness”,4 in which man, abandoned by God, finds the ultimate meaning in the world itself and justifies his actions from within himself:
– Dichosa edad … a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados, y no porque en ellos el oro, que en esta nuestra edad de hierro tanto se estima, se alcanzase en aquella venturosa sin fatiga alguna, sino porque entonces los que en ella vivían ignoraban estas dos palabras de tuyo y mío. Eran en aquella santa edad todas las cosas communes …. Todo era paz entonces, todo amistad, todo concordia …. No había la fraude, el engaño ni la malicia mezcládose con la verdad y llaneza. La justicia se estaba en sus proprios términos, sin que la osasen turbar ni ofender los del favor y los del interese, que tanto ahora la menoscaban, turban y persiguen. (I, 97)5
3 Stevick, “Fielding and the Meaning of History”, 566. 4 Lukács, The Theory of the Novel, 41. 5 This is Motteux’s English version: “O happy Age … which our first Parents call’d the Age of Gold; not because gold, so much ador’d in this Iron Age, was then easily purchas’d; but because those two fatal Words Mine and Thine were distinctions From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 83
Wilson’s fulfilment of the Quixotic ideal – his refuge in an Arcadian landscape – counterbalances Don Quixote’s effort to simulate Arcadia as part of “his uchronia in which he installs his utopian project”.6 The gallant shepherds’ intention to renew or imitate the Pastoral Arcadia was a new and ingenious conceit that Don Quixote and Sancho employed in order to become Shepherd Quijotiz and Shepherd Pancino, putting the profession of arms aside. Unlike Quixote’s “logic of loss”7 prefigured by his provisional break in the profession of arms, Wilson’s story relies on a logic of gain that is intrinsic both to Fielding’s providential pattern and to man’s actions justified from within himself. In fact his interpolated story is a history8 – therefore dislocated by the apparent historical linearity of comic Romance – because it presents Wilson’s life as it is and, what is more, as an ethical lesson, as what is morally believed to give the impression of vraisemblance. Wilson is a concrete exemplum, a sample used for demonstrative purposes inserted in the structure of comic Romance as a validation of Parson Adams’ Quixotic ideal of union, love and friendship in the world. In this light, I make the case that Mr Wilson’s interpolated story is crucial in analysing Parson Adams’ Quixotism as saint-errantry and civic or “utilitarian humanism”9 and Joseph And- rews’ chastity as constancy of character given by his faithful love for Fanny, not as emulation of his sister Pamela’s ideal of virtue, which her letters urge him to attain. unknown to the People of those fortunate Times. For all Things were in common in that holy Age .… All then was Union, all peace, all Love and Friendship in the World .… Imposture, Deceit and Malice had not yet crept in and impos’d themselves unbrib’d upon mankind in the disguise of Truth and Simplicity. Justice, unbias’d either, by Favour or Interest, which now so shamefully pervert it, was equally and impartially dispens’d” (Don Quixote, I, 94). 6 Jehenson and Dunn, The Utopian Nexus in Don Quixote, 9. 7 Irimia, “From the Sublime to the Comic”, 12. 8 In “The Novel between 1740 and 1780: Parody and Historiography”, Journal of the History of Ideas, XLVI/3 (July-September 1985), 405-16, Hamilton Beck argues that eighteenth-century novelists resorted to different aspects of historiography – a respected genre at the time – and rhetorical devices for the purpose of foregrounding a moral lesson in a persuasive way. What matters is “what should be, not what was true” (ibid., 406). When historical authenticity became a convention, novelists no longer endeavoured to demonstrate that then story was true: “The novel no longer needed to legitimize itself in terms of historical authenticity alone. Instead, it began to justify itself increasingly on the grounds of its greater effectiveness in imparting moral principles through examples that are concrete” (ibid., 409). 9 Humphreys, “‘The Friend of Mankind’”, 207. 84 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Interpolations or digressions – an apparently superfluous structural artifice already present in Cervantes’ Don Quixote – were readily accepted as features of the eighteenth-century novel whose tendency was “to involve the story-within integrally into the larger whole”.10 Wilson’s withdrawal to the countryside at the end of the story is actually the starting point of most Quixotic fictions in which the rural milieu is the leitmotif of fantasy induced by the reading of Romances, fables in which the Golden Age is replicated as a microcosmic utopian space or locus amoenus. The logic of gain and the whole in itself are due to the fact that Wilson is a former gentleman who ends up as a middle-class individual settled in a rural place where he starts a family and makes a small fortune which testifies to his progressive acquisition of honour. Metaphorically, he ends up as a real exemplary Quixote represented by the squire of the parish “as a madman, and by the parson as a Presbyterian because I will not hunt with the one, nor drink with the other” (215). He does not read Romances, nor does he preach sermons on the contemporary corrupted spirit of society like Parson Adams. Instead, he acts as Parson Adams’ alter-ego well- versed in worldly affairs. Testing Adams on Alexander Pope’s translation of Homer, Wilson is surprised to learn that “he had never read any translation of the classicks” (192). He is nevertheless delighted to hear Adams discoursing on the beauty of Homer’s poetry, which makes him wonder – this time appreciatively – “whether he had not a bishop in his house” (194). Also, his suspicion of Adams and Joseph is entertained by the former’s cassock falling down under his greatcoat and the latter’s shabby livery as “he knew too much of the world to give a hasty belief to professions” (191). His sharp critique of present- day society, manners and morality recommend him as a Quixote not in, but of the world, who grasps its complexity in a prudential manner. In spite of his impracticable knowledge of society, Adams’ legitimate vilification of English morals comes complete with Wilson’s acute observations of the money-oriented world and meaning of human actions:
… for I know not whether you have observed it, but there is a malignity in the nature of man, which when not weeded out, or at least covered by a good education and politeness, delights in making
10 Hunter, Before Novels, 48. From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 85
another uneasy or dissatisfied with himself. This abundantly appears in all assemblies, except those which are filled by people of fashion, and especially among the younger people of both sexes, whose birth and fortunes place them just without the polite circles; I mean the lower class of the gentry, and the higher of the mercantile world, who are in reality the worst bred part of mankind. (209)
Apart from his position as a true prop for Parson Adams’ Quixotic nature, Wilson’s parable is engaged in the strenuous process of unmasking and banishing affectation. Coming from “a different world of time, space, and probability”,11 Wilson takes part in the comic plot of development as a pivotal figure whose power to construct an Eden- like world for himself and his family adds to Fielding’s “poetic justice”12 done by his comic sense of wish-fulfilment or happy-ending. According to Hunter, interpolations “domesticate” the already existent material “to quite other uses” that are far from assuming “a communal response for all in a synecdoche of consensus gentium”.13 In my terms, Wilson’s interpolated story “domesticates” the use of Quixotism as everyday practical experience based on good nature and good sense to Parson Adams’ discourse on saint-errantry. As John K. Sheriff shows, “duty arises out of love and love arises out of duty not only in relation to other members of the family but also in relation to guests and neighbours”.14 Duty “illuminates by its uniqueness the nature of dis- course and the status of ideas as they are transformed by Fielding’s comic fiction”15 in which Quixotism has the capacity to transcend the world’s meaninglessness. Wilson’s digression occupies a central place in the economy of Joseph Andrews as a microcosmic reconstruction of the topos of the Golden Age which strengthens the comic resolution of Romance and, implicitly, supports the fulfilment of Fielding’s ideal of moral and social order. Despite a life of plenty, the abduction of the eldest son “by some wicked travelling people whom they call Gipsies” (215) causes Wilson’s unremitting grief. But the polite, good-natured
11 Ibid., 326. 12 See Chapter 2, n.54. 13 Hunter, Before Novels, 48. 14 John K. Sheriff, The Good-Natured Man: The Evolution of a Moral Ideal, 1660- 1800, Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1982, 98. 15 John Richetti, The English Novel in History, 1700-1780, London and New York: Routledge, 1999, 131. 86 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 readers trained by Fielding’s new writing recipe can guess, even from these few words, that Joseph is Mr Wilson’s eldest boy who can ultimately marry Fanny, the daughter of Gaffar and Gammar Andrews.
Theory in action: Quixotism, Latitudinarian “saint-errantry” 16 and civic humanism
– Mira, Sancho – dijo don Quijote –: dondequiera que está la virtud en eminente grado, es perseguida. Pocos o ninguno de los famosos varones que pasaron dejó de ser calumniado de la malicia.17
In a study entitled “Written in the Manner of Cervantes”, Gerhard Buck states that “in the development of feelings of identification, pity, and admiration regarding Don Quixote, and in his early idealization, no author played a more crucial role than Fielding”.18 The veracity of Buck’s statement is confirmed by Fielding’s adoption of Don Quixote’s physical and moral features for the construction of the comic protagonist of Joseph Andrews. Like Don Quixote, Parson Adams is fifty-years of age, long-legged and thin. Not only is he “a man of good sense, good parts, and good nature” (43), he is “an excellent scholar” trained in Greek and Latin, who can read and translate French, Italian and Spanish. His utmost simplicity, ignorance of the ways of the world, excessive generosity, friendship and bravery, lack of envy and malice are all the causes of his
16 Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm”, 5-39. Shaftesbury applies the test of spontaneous ridicule to love, gallantry and knight-errantry, three types of enthusiasm that master Don Quixote’s mind shaped by chivalric Romances. Though they are “well declined in these latter days of wit”, says Shaftesbury, “something of this soul-rescuing spirit and saint-errantry prevails still” and, consequently, “we need not wonder, when we consider in how solemn a manner we treat this distemper, and how preposterously we go about to cure enthusiasm” (ibid., 16). Shaftesbury stands up against any preposterous political intervention of the government or magistracy to cure saint-errantry and insists on the force of good-natured ridicule as the only remedy for this “distemper”. 17 Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, II, 564. Motteux’s translation reads as follows: “Consider Sancho, said Don Quixote, that the more Eminently Vertue shines, the more ’tis exposed to the Persecution of Envy. Few or none of those Famous Heroes of Antiquity, could escape the Venomous Arrows of Calumny” (Don Quixote, II, 21). 18 Gerhard Buck, quoted in Ziolkowski, The Sanctification of Don Quixote, 46. From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 87
Quixotism as long as the others interpret them as such. His virtue and his other qualities make him “an agreeable and valuable companion” (43) whose knowledge of life is gained both from the Bible and from the books of ancient philosophers and poets like Homer and Aeschylus. Lastly, the horse Adams borrows from his clerk is the spitting image of Don Quixote’s Rozinante, as he has “so violent a propensity to kneeling, that one would have thought it had been his trade as well as his master’s” (124). Notwithstanding the striking similarity between the two characters, which makes Homes Dudden consider Parson Adams as “a thoroughly English incarnation or embodiment of the basic idea of Cervantic Quixotism”,19 Fielding tailors “Cervantes’ method”20 to the needs of the new species “unattempted” in a Protestant middle-class background. The result is not a servile Cervantes imitation but an innovative approach to the rhetoric of Quixotism. Parson Adams is the benevolent activist who endeavours to resurrect virtue in the world of probability, not of angels, to paraphrase Samuel Johnson’s comment made in The Rambler, No. 4 for 31 March 1750. He does not copy models of bad conduct inspired by books of knight-errantry, whose telos is non-existent in daily life. On the contrary, he acquires fruitful knowledge from Homer and Aeschylus and delivers Latitudinarian sermons on the Whole Duty of Man. Alonso Quijano reinvents his identity as a knight-errant, as a crusader for the defence of virtue and of those in distress. Adams is a parson characterized by natural, even if excessive, spontaneous generosity. The hidalgo’s lance, which is suggestive of his delusive physical power of handling arms, becomes the expression
19 Homes Dudden, Henry Fielding: His Life, Works and Times, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966, 338. 20 Alexander Welsh, “The Influence of Cervantes”, in The Cambridge Companion to Cervantes, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 80. Welsh claims that Cervantes’ method and hero have become “closely associated with realism in the novel” and that imitators of Cervantes “have been engaged with the formal and philosophical problems of realism or with justice … as an ardent desire. Only very exceptional novels, original in their own right, draw upon both lessons in Cervantes.” I personally think that “hero” is a term implied by the novelist’s method moulded by the social, cultural and intellectual context of his time. In Before Novels, Hunter observes that now there is a more complex relationship between “literary phenomena and other cultural artefacts” (ibid., 6) ingrained in the context and culture of a specific literary period. This relationship bears full responsibility for the novelist’s choice of method. 88 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 of letters taken as the parson’s discursive practice of universal benevolence. Adams, whose countenance is far from being woeful or melancholic, is in rapture when Fanny and Joseph find each other. When Fanny hears Joseph’s voice, she faints and Adams, who “flung up his Aeschylus into the fire”, jumps up to help her come back to her senses. Despite managing to save “the sheepskin covering of his dear friend” (156) from the fire, Adams undoubtedly proves that his humanity and honest simplicity of his heart take priority over the Romance world of unattainable ideals. From this point of view, John Richetti pertinently sustains that “unlike his bookish predecessor, Don Quixote, Adams understands in practice at least the difference between life and books, and his journey through the English countryside dramatizes his capacity for spontaneous moral action, for good works and generous sentiments that mark him as an embodiment of the activist Christian ethic that Fielding admired”.21 Therefore, the parson, like Wilson, is conceived as a model of inimitable moral action, as a paragon of good nature and a yardstick against which the novelist measures satirically the social and moral degeneracy of society. Regarding the difference in structure and meaning, Cervantes’ naive empiricism – the translation from Arabic of a manuscript written by Cide Hamete Benengeli – degenerates into extreme scepticism. Epistemological insecurity is generated by the insertion of apocryphal parts into Benengeli’s text by Don Quixote’s enchanted world of Romance – la razόn de la sinrazόn – doubled by the problematic story of what he has seen in the Cave of Montesinos or by the publication of the first part of his adventures as a proof of authenticity against Avellaneda’s false history. Fielding’s Joseph Andrews “depicts persons of incorruptible innocence in a corrupt but knowable and ‘solid’ world”. 22 My purpose here is to examine and connect this probable unblemished innocence with the Cervantic picaresque structure23 which equals Parson Adams’ saint-errantry with a mission-
21 Richetti, The English Novel in History, 128. 22 Andrew Wright, quoted in Borgmeier, “Henry Fielding and His Spanish Model”, 57. 23 In the Introduction to Joseph Andrews and Shamela, London: Methuen, 1965, Martin Battestin argues that it is the Harmotton, Homer’s epic regularity, not the “aimlessly constructed” picaresque which preceded Joseph Andrews, that keeps the balance between the structure and meaning of the novel (xxix). Despite the fact that Homer’s epic regularity is praised in the Preface and adopted by Adams as a model of From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 89 aristic sally – the equivalent of Don Quixote’s three salidas made to seek adventures outside the village of La Mancha. Parson Adams is the epitome of naked virtue defined by Fielding in Tom Jones as follows:
On the contrary, I declare, that to recommend goodness and innocence hath been my sincere endeavour in this history. This honest purpose you have been pleased to think I have attained: and to say the truth, it is likeliest to be attained in books of this kind; for an example is a kind of picture, in which virtue becomes, as it were, an object of sight, and strikes us with an idea of that loveliness, which Plato asserts there is in her naked charms. (37)
Fielding’s Hogarthian sharp eye sees the “naked charms” of virtue as a powerful remedy for a system of Mandevillean naked designs upon which social relations are established. Even so, the word “example” is very intriguing because it presupposes the imitation of a certain model and also because it appears itself as the golden standard of right ethical conduct. The first chapter of Joseph Andrews opens ironically with an apology of the emulation of examples, which gradually slides into a parody of Pamela’s exemplary chastity as a model to be followed by her brother, Joseph Andrews:
It is a trite but true observation, that examples work more forcibly on the mind than precepts: and if this be just in what is odious and blameable, it is more strongly so in what is amiable and praise- worthy. Here emulation most effectually operates upon us, and inspires our imitation in an irresistible manner. A good man therefore is a standing lesson to all his acquaintance, and of far greater use in that narrow circle than a good book … since it will appear that it was by keeping the excellent pattern of his sister’s virtues before his eyes,
exemplary reading and knowledge, I suggest that the picaresque structure of Don Quixote is highly relevant to the understanding of Adams’s experience of the road – because he is “ignorant of the ways of the world” – which enables him either to exercise his natural and undeterred – not unprudential – benevolence or to critique the vanity, venality and hypocrisy of the landed gentry or professions such as lawyers, clergymen and doctors. The picaresque endorses the idea of universal benevolence by engaging Adams’ self in a series of social undertakings or works understood as civic humanism. The self thus becomes socialized and plays a major role in the pursuit of happiness as wish-fulfilment. 90 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
that Mr Joseph Andrews was chiefly enabled to preserve his purity in the midst of such great temptations. (39)
Superior to the didacticism propounded by “a good book”, Adams is a role-model only for “a narrow circle”. His example of autonomous, naked virtue – the result of his intrinsic good nature – raises the problem of particularity (a small community) versus universality (“a good book”) of exemplary conduct. As a paragon of summum bonum, the parson is an exemplum legitimized by a system of “historically grounded analogies”24 produced both by a new historical conscious- ness and by the emergence of the modern subject endowed with free will, which is essential “to our understanding of the representation of contingency and singularity – two central elements in the questioning of exemplarity”.25 Joseph’s emulation of Pamela’s chastity is a parody of Richardson’s narrow-scoped formula, which brings forth a secluded woman dominated by fantasies and unpredictable impulses.26 In spite of the fact that the emulation of examples has become a truism, both Joseph’s unprompted constant love for Fanny and Adams’ inimitable benevolence are in fact admirable substitutes for Pamela and Cibber constructed according to Fielding’s own conception of moral fortitude and happiness. Fielding’s programme, Richetti comments, “aims to demystify the individual, to apply moral analysis and to make satiric
24 Rigolot, “The Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity”, 562. Rigolot argues that Boccaccio’s, Rabelais’ and Cervantes’ characters “no longer seem to bridge the human time and historical difference which separate them from their ancient model”. Don Quixote stands for the emergence of the modern individual due to his own morally justified decision to emulate Amadís de Gaula. For example, he hopes that his penitence in Sierra Morena – a proof of faithful love for Dulcinea in her absence – will be rewarded by Dulcinea’s declaration of her true love for him, of which Sancho will inform Don Quixote when back from La Mancha. His penitence is modelled on the same ritual performed by Amadís, the emblem of chivalric virtue and perfection. By following the dictates of Latitudinarian Apostolic Christianity, Parson Adams commits himself to implementing a virtuous model of life. 25 Ibid., 563. 26 Paulson’s summary of this point in Satire and the Novel is compelling: “Fielding conceives Joseph Andrews less as a parody, like Shamela, than as an alternative. He starts with Colley Cibber’s Apology and Richardson’s Pamela, just as Cervantes started with the Romances of chivalry; here, says Fielding, we are shown an ‘ideal’ male and female, models for their respective sexes. But they, like those knights and ladies, are neither real people nor real ideals; Joseph Andrews will show what a true ideal is and what real people are like” (112). From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 91 judgements that classify persons in terms of their actions and circumstances, their practical relationships, reciprocal obligations to others … or, in the noblest instances, their desire for virtuous happiness”.27 Joseph and Adams make great strides to pursue “virtu- ous happiness” as an alternative to the pedagogical project based on the imitation of good books. As original, though whimsical and eccentric characters, their inimitable behaviour is meant to teach a probable ethical lesson and to elicit the sympathetic laughter of good- natured readers who perceive them as “touchstones of authenticity”, who “offer an alternative to the unconscious mimicry and ductile characterlessness of the modern citizen”.28 Alluding to the ridiculous model established by Richardson’s Pamela – the universal acknowledgement of exempla – or to precepts leads to unconscious mimicry or uneducated empathy caused by greatness as the praise of the self. At the same time, “a good book” like Joseph Andrews inflames the vanity of its readers because they hypocritically claim to know and follow the models this book proposes, when in fact they ignore the applicability of fictional examples to real life. The real ductility of their character is guaranteed by mercantilism and self-interest. On the contrary, genuine examples are a pragmatic means of disseminating virtue to ordinary individuals – the other particular yet active face of the same coin. This understanding of the educational process based on inimitable examples draws well-defined boundaries within which Quixotism manifests itself as proactive and indefatigable moral reform applied to the large mass of characterless modern citizens. Don Quixote’s imitation of Romances of chivalry is preposterous because of the “excessive proximity to the model established by excessive distance”29 while Parson Adams’ Christian ideals point out the incom- patibility between their everlasting validity and the failure of the modern moral and public sphere to fulfil them. Don Quixote resurrects cultural forms of belief in the absence of authentic, secular belief,
27 Richetti, The English Novel in History, 122. 28 Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 251-52. 29 Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres”, 558. 92 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 which explains why the novel, in Lukács’ terms, is a product of secularization.30 In Joseph Andrews, Mrs Tow-wouse, Barnabas and Trulliber are hypocrites who claim to carry out their duty as Christians or preachers of Christian values. In reality, their charitable acts are, as Mrs Tow- wouse puts it, “a f—t”, “common charity teaches us to provide for ourselves and our families” (72). According to Bannet, Adams’ picaresque adventures show that “any common culture the English share is founded on affectation and vice rather than on imitation of Christian models”, that Parson Adams can be taken as “an argument for a peculiarly Latitudinarian kind of muscular Protestant Britishness, which ridiculed ideological pretensions of unity by showing how just little either Protestantism or patriotic valor united regions and ranks”.31 Parson Adams is the promoter of probable exemplarity, of which society has become completely oblivious and whose meaning can rescue the world from secular meaninglessness. Thus, Christian ethics – “religion”, in Motteux’s words – is Adams’ form of Quixotism. According to McKeon, Abraham Adams is the exponent of “the conservative wisdom of the utopian social reformer” who translates questions of virtue “in terms of the problem of charity”.32 Urged by “the natural temper entirely good”,33 the parson’s charity is naturalized as Quixotic practice in an effort to establish a rapprochement between forlorn models of ethically impartial action and their latter-day nullification. Fielding’s reconciliation of the two points at issue – old versus new Quixotic virtue – takes place in the context of the Latitudinarian Divines’ doctrine, which stipulates that Christianity must govern man’s life confronted with the new capitalist ethos. It is the same doctrine which prepared the ground for Addison’s amiable laughter and Shaftesbury’s definition of good nature as a propensity to contribute disinterestedly to the public welfare. These are two indispensable derivatives on which Fielding’s optimistic project of social and moral reform is grafted.
30 For an excellent discussion of Weber’s thesis of the disenchantment of the world and its effect on Lukács’ theory of the novel, see Cascardi, The Subject of Modernity, 94-103. 31 Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations and Transatlantic Genres”, 559. 32 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 400. 33 Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue and Merit”, in Characteristics, 250. From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 93
The onomastic identification of Abraham Adams and Joseph Andrews with the Old Testament figures of exemplary charity and chastity metonymically portrays the two amiable characters. The first signs of instinctive good nature appear when the parson – pleased to hear young Andrews singing psalms and to discover his excellent knowledge of the New Testament – decides to teach Joseph Latin in the hope that he will thus “be qualified for a higher station than that of a footman”. Furthermore, Adams makes Joseph persevere in his innocence and industry learnt from good books, rather than from “his condition in this world” (45) and in Christian submission to providence. Adams’ assumed responsibility for Joseph’s spiritual evolution is more of a quixotization of Sancho and less a sanchification of Don Quixote. This is why I focus almost exclusively on Parson Adams as an offshoot of Cervantes’ hero. Joseph is Quixotically uncorrupted and adamant in his resistance to Lady Booby’s, Mrs Slipslop’s and Betty’s amorous advances – a replica of his Biblical counterpart who rejects the sexual advances of Potiphar, his master’s wife abducted by Egyptians – as a result of the initial ridiculous imitation of Pamela’s virtue “asked in social”, that is upward mobility through marriage, “rather than sexual terms”34 which are expressive of her subordinated status as a woman. Though he remains a constant and passionate lover reunited with Fanny, Joseph “is an equally Quixotic figure in this economically oriented society”.35 Joseph’s gentility becomes a fact when Mr Wil- son, a highly-esteemed gentleman, proves that he is Joseph’s father. Once again, it is Fielding’s providential design – in contrast to Richardson’s Pamela – that grants Joseph the reward of a respectable social status. The big-bellied Sancho is a down-to-earth and sharp- minded peasant who asks for a salary, dreams of, and finally succeeds in, becoming the ruler of the island of Barrataria, which is the most significant benefit of his quixotization. Conversely, Joseph remains under Adams’ wing and, married to Fanny, celebrates the “art of life”, a projection of Fielding’s optimism camouflaged as providential justice. Andrew Wright points out that
… at the end of Don Quixote the hero dies because life is no longer art: Don Quixote cannot believe in the romances upon which he has
34 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, xxix. 35 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 120. 94 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
based his entire career of knight-errantry. When life is no longer the picture that Don Quixote himself had painted, he dies of a broken heart. But Joseph Andrews’s life begins, at the end of his book.36
Parson Adams’ saint-errantry is synonymous with the modern form of the picaresque developed from the epic of the Odyssey and populated with inns and cottages as symbols of the epic on the road. Mareska argues that it is as important as the notion of Harmotton, whose subject “is constancy, and its action, like the Odyssey’s, a much-interrupted journey home”.37 Abraham Adams goes to London to sell three volumes of sermons. Dismissed by Lady Booby, Joseph comes back from London to Booby-Hall. Robbed, cudgelled and left naked in a ditch on the way home, he recovers in Mr Tow-wouse’s inn, where Parson Adams briefly sojourns. This coincidental meeting planned by the providential author marks the beginning of a journey from one inn to another and finally home, on which the parson – accompanied by Joseph from now on, until Fanny makes the circle of exemplary characters complete – enters upon the scene as an embodiment of the Good Samaritan: the three volumes of sermons forgotten at home and his refusal to continue his journey to London without them favour his juxtaposition with Joseph. Notwithstanding his absent-mindedness and simplicity – Fielding’s alternatives to Cervantes’ Quixotism as madness – responsible for his naive way of acting well in the world, Parson Adams is an excellent orator endowed with sound judgement and moral sense, who “brings the book to life and transforms it from a satiric and homiletic exercise into a novel”.38 Practised in accordance with the Latitudinarian prec- epts of moderation and sobriety, Adams’ homiletic exercise conveys the moral value of religion as well as all-encompassing love – the modern translation of New Testament’s agape – and charity – King James’ version of the Vulgate’s caritas.39 In a dialogue with the cor- rupt superior clergyman Barnabas and the incompetent surgeon who pretends to look after Joseph’s wounds, Adams is trying hard to stand up against the profane world, of which Barnabas is a part, completely
36 Wright, quoted in Borgmeier, “Henry Fielding and His Spanish Model”, 58. 37 Mareska, Epic to Novel, 185. 38 R.F. Brissenden, Introduction to Joseph Andrews, London: Penguin Books, 1985, 12. 39 Donald Greene, “Latitudinarianism and Sensibility: The Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’ Reconsidered”, Modern Philology, XLV/2 (November 1977), 161. From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 95 ignorant of high-quality sermons. Convinced that he can sell his sermons for a large sum, Adams is readily discouraged by Barnabas, who says that “the age was so wicked, that no body read sermons”. The surgeon’s comment on John Tillotson, an outstanding Latitudinarian representative of pragmatic Christianity, ironically and secularly stresses man’s duties and earthly works through which he can earn his salvation: “I used to read one Tillotson’s sermons; and I am sure, if a man practised half so much as is in one of those sermons, he will go to Heaven.” Barnabas’ reply reveals both the profane individual’s sense of duty and his talent to compose sermons as good as Tillotson’s:
“Doctor”, cried Barnabas, “you have a profane way of talking, for which I must reprove you. A man can never have his duty too frequently inculcated into him. And as for Tillotson, to be sure he was a good writer, and said things very well: but comparisons are odious, another man may write as well as he – I believe there are some of my sermons.” (89)
Adams’ talk with the bookseller demonstrates that man’s duty “too frequently inculcated into him” is to gain profit from the serialized commercialization of plays and popular books, which Adams blames for their bad instruction. The capitalist ethos, which in this context means modern book trade rules, is in direct contradiction to Adams’ much revered readings and classical erudition: “For my part, the Copy that sells best, will be always the best Copy in my Opinion; I am no Enemy to Sermons but because they don’t sell: for I would as soon print one of Whitfield’s, as any Farce whatever” (93). Thus, Adams’ old-fashioned way of reading and writing is counterpoised by the bookseller’s “discipline and efficient judgement of that ultimate arbiter of what is ‘best’, that is, the market”.40 Adams might gain profit and public acclaim, says the bookseller, if the inferior clergyman’s sermons appeared under the name of Whitfield or Wesley – the founders of the Methodist sect, whose fanatic enthusiasm is severely criticized by Adams and Barnabas alike – or of a superior curate like Barnabas.
40 Warner, Licensing Entertainment, 244. 96 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
At the end of Chapter 17, the parson’s good nature – the “moral basis”41 of both his character and saint-errantry – encapsulates the sacred teachings popularized by the Cambridge theologian Daniel Waterland’s book entitled A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament. Concurrently, the protagonist’s good nature aims at attacking objectively the designs – “the visible motives appearing as physical actions”42 – of contemporary clergy, which causes Barnabas’ fit of anger and immediate departure from Tow-wouse’s inn, where Adams seems to be the personification of the Devil:
… but if you mean by the clergy, some few designing factious men, who have it at heart to establish some favourite schemes at the price of the liberty of mankind, and the very essence of religion, it is not in the power of such persons to decry any book they please; witness that excellent book called A Plain Account of the Nature and End of the Sacrament; a book written (if I may venture on the expression) with the pen of an angel, and calculated to restore the true use of Christianity, and of that sacred institution: for what could tend more to the noble purposes of religion, than frequent cheerful meetings among the members of a society, in which they should in the presence of one another, and in the service of the supreme Being, make promises of being good, friendly and benevolent to each other? .… and he (Barnabas) expected to hear the Alcoran, the Leviathan, or Woolston commended, if he staid a few minutes longer. (94)
The equivalent of Amadís de Gaula, Waterland’s book sums up the basic characteristics of Adams’ Latitudinarianism first embraced by the group of the Cambridge Platonists, as has been conventionally termed by the literature: (1) the “amelioration”43 of society through faith and works as comprehensive virtue against Hobbes’ and Mandeville’s self-interest; (2) good – the symbol of immutable morality – is required because it is part of the divine nature, not of the divine will, as Locke claims; (3) the natural sociability of man, which manifests itself as sympathy, benevolence, beneficence, charity and humanity to his fellows; (4) anti-Stoicism and the emphasis on agape
41 Cf. Martin Battestin’s book title, The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press 1959. 42 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 134. 43 Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art, 14. From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 97 as a natural feeling; (5) charity as “spiritual heroism”; 44 (6) the allegory of the good man as “an exiled pilgrim”;45 (7) the acknow- ledgement of man’s weakness, not sin, after the Fall and of his free will and, consequently, the belief that he can earn his salvation through faith and grace conjoined with acts of compassion, love and benevolence – a doctrine influenced by Arminianism, which rejects Calvinist predestination and preaches salvation for all, anti-Trinitarian Socinianism and, to a certain extent, Pelagianism defined as the denial of the original sin and the freedom to do either right or wrong; (8) the natural goodness of the heart or “self-approving joy”, defined by R. S. Crane as “personal recompense for the good man’s labours in behalf of others”; 46 (9) the “tropological sense of Scripture” 47 meant to awaken man to the importance of Christian devotion and to raise his awareness of supreme goodness; (10) the meaning of faith “reduced to an epistemological question”.48 Adams uses this Latitudinarian rhetoric when he becomes bitterly disappointed at Mr Tow-wouse’s refuse to accept a volume of his sermons as a loan to pay the reckoning at the inn and, most notably, at Parson Trulliber’s stinginess and uncharitable way of understanding and carrying out his religious duties. In a situation in which a parson needs another parson’s help, Adams’ charitable discourse is the judicious and reasonable yardstick of value against which Trulliber’s moral destitution is measured:
“I am sorry,” answered Adams, “that you do know what charity is, since you practise it no better; I must tell you, if you trust to your knowledge for your justification, you will find yourself deceived, tho’ you should add faith to it without good works.” (168)
Shaftesbury believes good works and good nature are the essentials of what he calls moral sense. Moral sense implies both a reflective dimension, which recommends the unconditional and constant care for
44 Ibid., 28. 45 Ibid., 41. 46 Crane, quoted in ibid., 70. 47 W.M. Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 1660-1700, Athens, GA and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1993, 111. 48 Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660-1780, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, I, 66. 98 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 the public good, and an intuitive process whereby one can immediately discern good or bad moral objects:
So that if a creature be generous, kind, constant, compassionate, yet if he cannot reflect on what he himself does, or sees others do, so as to take notice of what is worthy or honest, and make that notice or conception of worth and honesty to be an object of his affection, he has not the character of being virtuous; for thus, and no otherwise, he is capable of having a sense of right or wrong, a sentiment or judgement of what is done through just, equal, and good affection, or the contrary.49
Shaftesbury repeats the Latitudinarian Divines’ idea that the practice of good works is reasonably right and intuitively pleasant and in man’s best interest, that is, self-love and self-interest as a trigger of outgoing beneficence. Benjamin Whichcote, the leading figure of the Cambridge Platonists, explains that
There is in man, a secret genius to humanity; a biass that inclines him to a regard of all his own kind. For, whatsoever some have said, man’s nature is not such an untoward thing (unless it be abused), but that there is a secret sympathy in human nature, with vertue and honesty; with fairness and good behaviour, which gives a man an Interest even in bad men.50
Intent upon reforming the bad Men he encounters on the road or in various inns, Parson Adams quixotically conjoins his “enclosed self with outgoing sympathy”.51 Utopian as it may seem, Adams’ well- motivated saint-errantry based on reflection performs the hermeneutic role of giving a rational answer to the question of action per se. In An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men, Fielding confesses that the meaning of action is confusing because “we take the colour of a man’s actions, not from their own visible tendency, but from his public character: when we believe what others say of him, in
49 Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit”, 253. 50 Benjamin Whichcote, “The Obligations and Advantages of Good-Will”, in The Works of the Learned Benjamin Whichcote, D.D., Rector of St. Lawrence Jewry, London, Aberdeen: J. Chalmers, 1751, IV, 212-13 (emphases in the original). 51 Morris Golden, Fielding’s Moral Psychology, Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1966, viii. From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 99 opposition to what we see him do”.52 He knows very well that wicked persons are educated in public schools, where vice and immorality prevail, that discipline and good breeding are indicative of both moral quality and of the eagerness to act for the common good. In spite of his ignorance of the world, Adams is able to identify the evil persons’ despicable designs, which Fielding emphasizes for satirical purposes: the corrupt lawyer who unjustly favours Fanny’s rapist, sentences Adams to prison and transforms Aeschylus into “a fictitious name” (151); Lawyer Scout and Justice Frolick, two “pests of society and a scandal to a profession” (269), who are ready to violate the settlement laws in order to banish Joseph from the parish at Lady Booby’s command; Lady Booby’s abusive power, contempt for the needy and uncontrollable passions hardly tempered by vanity; Mrs Slipslop’s false pretence to literacy and gentility; the squire who entraps the poor with promises of upward mobility and whose pretended hospitality burdens Adams and Joseph with debt; the “gentlemen of curlike disposition” (233) addicted to practising bad jokes on Adams; the hunter who runs for his life when he hears the violent shrieks of Fanny, though he would have cowards hanged for refusing “to lay down their life to serve the country” (140) or the steward Peter Pounce, who says that charity is not an act, but the “disposition to relieve the distressed” (258). Along with Barnabas, Trulliber, Mr and Mrs Tow-wouse, these characters commit “the sins of the selfish gentry”.53 According to his forma mentis, Adams interprets them as morally astounding experiences or anecdotes, totally at odds both with the constancy and virtuous life of Joseph, Fanny and Adams himself and with the simplicity and sexually charitable nature of Betty. Good and bad actions are explained in accordance with the rational and intuitive process that moral sense implies or “tautologically”, as Bannet observes, “by attributing them to a good or a vicious nature, and thus to an accident of birth”.54 Good and evil, therefore, are innate attri- butes intuitively discriminated according to what is morally right or wrong. The Latitudinarian precepts filtered through the Shaftesburian
52 Henry Fielding, An Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men, in The Works of Henry Fielding, Complete in One Volume, With Memoir of the Author, ed. Thomas Roscoe, London: Henry Washbourne, H.G. Bohn, 1840, 646. 53 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 400. 54 Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres”, 558. 100 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 coinage of moral sense stipulate that the good-natured man – the paragon of moral exemplarity – should be “interested in bad Men” as well. This type of behaviour is not, or cannot, be considered imprudent. Parson Adams’ naivety and “ignorance of the ways of the world” are ostensible signs of his unadulterated benevolent self concerned with public reformation. His social activism, in the words of the Latitudinarian preacher Isaac Barrow, points to the idea of virtue as spiritual pleasure or self-fulfilment: “… nothing indeed carrying with it a more pure and savoury delight than beneficence. A man may be virtuously voluptuous, and a laudable epicure by doing much good.”55 The lack of prudence noticed by many seems unjustified if judged in the realm of the Latitudinarian and Shaftesburian debate on the meaning of religion. Adams’ conduct is entrenched in a “virtue- centred view”56 of the world. Adams undeniably applies the funda- mentals of Scripture without being able to take account of the disadvantages or weaknesses of his ethical actions because of his blatant ignorance. His natural affections – not his non-existent “reasoned calculation of probabilities based on the best and most
55 Isaac Barrow, “The Duty and Reward of Bounty to the Poor”, in The Sermons and Expository Treatises of Isaac Barrow, D.D., Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson, 1839, I, 299. 56 J.B. Schneewind, “The Misfortunes of Virtue”, Ethics, CI/1 (October, 1990), 42-63. Dismissing the idea that virtue was a neglected topic in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Schneewind argues that the replacement of virtue ethics with Christian ethics marks a sheer difference between virtue-centred views and act-centred views. Thus, the Christian duty to God and our neighbour is the substitute for the ancient virtues of prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice. Duty implies rules, laws or principles whereas virtue – the tendency to contribute to the public good – has a life of its own and, consequently, “lacks any algorithm” (ibid., 43). Schneewind suggests that natural law was not a misfortune for virtue because it “provided for an aspect of the moral life where action is not governed by rules and where the agent’s character and motives are central” (ibid., 49). According to Pufendorf, Schneewind claims, natural law distinguishes between perfect (compelled performance) and imperfect (the law of love concerning the good of the others) duties, an opposition reformulated by David Hume in terms of artificial versus natural virtues. Artificial duties “involve the thought that others will similarly exercise them and that these others will have the thought that I and others will exercise them, and so on. This is not true of natural virtues, which need not involve the virtuous person’s awareness of participating in a social practice” (ibid., 52, n.33). Hence, Parson Adams’s innate, natural virtue rather than imprudent character. From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 101 complete information and evidence available”57 – actually support his conscious effort to preach and practise benevolence. McKeon suggests that “Fielding’s Latitudinarian beliefs are very close to Mandeville’s argument that the autonomous purity of virtue is a pleasing fiction”.58 I rephrase McKeon’s “pleasing fiction” as Fielding’s pleasing Quixotic practice of redressing a tainted society in a modern version of Romance built on the idea of “poetic justice”, which metamorphoses chance into providence.59 Moreover, Fielding’s epist- emological problem, Morris Golden affirms, is “to perceive and act well in the outside world”,60 in which evil actions, however morally astounding they may appear to Parson Adams, are grasped through experience. The parson acts on behalf of charity, which springs from his autonomous motivation for fulfilling his moral goal prompted by the auspicious relationship between religion and reason. Tightly connected with external motivation, prudence accounts for “selfish defence against others”.61 Adams’ benevolent ethics try to destroy the relationship between private Mandevillean self-interest and public, or allegedly ethical, behaviour described by Fielding in terms of affectation and hypocrisy. Aware of his “boniform faculty”, 62 the parson is a metonymic embodiment of human love and beneficent potential regarded as replicas of “Divine perfection”:
There is nothing in nature more amiable, than the character of a truly Good man; a Man, whose principal Business and Pleasure is to make all Men easy, with whom he has any concern, in the present life; and to promote, as far as in Him lies, their Happiness likewise in That
57 Barbara Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983, 105. 58 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 402. 59 Similarly, in the Prologue of Exemplary Stories, Cervantes perceives the comic mode as a mesa de trucos (a “billiard table”) “set up in the public square of our nation, where anyone may come and amuse himself without injuring anyone else” (4). The phrase metaphorically encapsulates the author’s providential power disguised as chance translated by the random and unexpected changes and permutations occurring on the billiards table. This mode d’emploi, as Barbara Fuchs terms it in Passing for Spain: Cervantes and the Fictions of Identity, Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003, enables the reader to become “an accomplice to the text’s ironic mode and political nuances” (ix). 60 Golden, Fielding’s Moral Psychology, 117. 61 Ibid., 61. 62 Humphreys, “‘The Friend of Mankind’”, 205. 102 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
which is to come .… But of all Characters, That of Goodness is the most lovely; and approached nearest to the Similitude of a Divine Perfection.63
Though labelled by criticism as imprudent and, implicitly, ridiculous, Adams’ behaviour is in fact a mixture of traditional Romance elements, such as sturdiness and physical power, Stoic discipline when teaching or reciting the Catechism, inoffensive erudite vanity and natural, spontaneous feeling. Akin to the latter feature is the issue of modern bourgeois Romance sensibility as distinguished from old Romance:
The older aristocratic and landed conceptual order, articulated in Augustan literature and in the older romance, validates human experience rationally, with reference to ethos and to the fixed and objective social order; the emerging bourgeois conceptual order, articulated in the new romance, validates human experience with reference to pathos and to the private emotions of the individual, trusting to natural instinct over received traditions.64
It is Adams’ liminal position between ethos – the sermons and discourse on the essentials of Scripture, the sensible advice given to his parishioners and the plea for unstinting submission to providence – and pathos – scholarly vanity and natural passions – that triggers the comic incongruity between Adams in public and Adams in private. The dichotomy between ethos and pathos, private and public develops from the mismatch between man as he is and man as he ought to be or, according to Alasdair MacIntyre’s use of the Aristotelian view on ethics, between “man-as-he-happens-to-be and man-as-he-could-be-if- he-realised-his-essential-nature”.65
63 Samuel Clarke, quoted in Battestin, Fielding’s Basis of Moral Art, 27 (emphases in the original). 64 Gary Gautier, “Henry and Sarah Fielding on Romance and Sensibility”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, XXXI/2, 30th anniversary issue (Spring 1998), 199. Gautier admirably examines the incorporation of Romance into the novel genre, with particular emphasis on the tense epistemological framework for relating genre, gender, conservative, liberal and radical ideologies. I find the article very illuminating for my forthcoming chapters on Sarah Fielding’s David Simple and Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote. 65 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd edn, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984, 52. From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 103
In the economy of the novel, these discrepancies are translated as telos-free versus telos-bound, “seem” versus “is” 66 while in the construction of Parson Adams’ personality we witness a harmonization of such polarities. Christian unworldliness, rather than imprudence, goes together with Adams’ spontaneous feeling of joy and gratitude when, for instance, he is convinced that the apparently generous and well-intended squire – willing to take Adams as his chaplain – behaves like “a Christian divine”, whose principles “I heartily wish they were universal” (172). The parson is slow in detecting the gentleman’s design disguised as benevolence due to his unerring skills in physiognomy acquired from books: “… nature imprints such a portraiture of the mind in the countenance, that a skilful physiognomist will rarely be deceived” (181). Adams is deceived at the end by the innkeeper’s story of the squire’s pernicious actions, supplemented by the remark that the parson’s skills are completely futile:
“Ah! master, master,” (says the host,) “if you have travelled as far as I have, and conversed with the many nations where I have traded, you would not give any credit to a man’s countenance. Symptoms in his countenance, quotha! I would look there perhaps to see whether a man had had the small-pox, but for nothing else!” (180)
John K. Sheriff argues that Parson Adams “reacts to appearance as his good nature and sensibility dictate in a society where one succeeds through prudence”.67 Though he rightly complains about the unnatural management of trade, he fights for a noble cause on the approach of an election by pulling strings in favour of his neighbour, esquire Fickle, because “it was a season when the church was in danger, and when all good men expected they knew not what would happen to us all” (137). The others’ encomium of virtue and Christian ethics are reciprocated with Adams’ utmost sympathy and even tolerance of Catholic priests, such as the one he meets at the New Inn: “‘Whatever you are,’ cries Adams, ‘you have spoken my sentiments …’” (240).68
66 Ibid., 78. 67 Sheriff, The Good-Natured Man, 31. 68 Interestingly enough, the same tolerant attitude towards religion – this time of Catholicism towards Protestantism – appears in Cervantes’ novella La española inglesa (The English-Spanish Lady), in which Elizabeth I is a surprisingly tolerant and sympathetic queen who not only suffers, but also favours Catholics. The queen speaks 104 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
When Fanny is abducted, the parson warns Joseph that “a man and a Christian” should “summon reason as quickly as he can to his aid … and she will teach him patience and submission” (250). Such a Stoic argument against Joseph’s “brutal lusts and affections” (289) for Fanny is at loggerheads with Adams’ own unorthodox feeling of anguish experienced when somebody acquaints him that his youngest son was drowned: “ … he went on lamenting whilst the tears trickled down into his bosom” (291). Abraham Adams’ mixture of ethos and pathos rephrases Alasdair MacIntyre’s concept of character, which presupposes the “coincidence of social type and psychological type”.69 Adams’ identity as a parson and as a man remains intact due to his constancy of character, the synonym for self-knowledge. Attached to his conduct, “virtuous” and “ridiculous” are two conflicting adjectives designating two different paradigms – the neoclassical and the sentimental – reunited in Fielding’s comic Romance. From Gary Gautier’s point of view, Fielding’s protagonist mitigates “the direct proof of the need for sensibility” with “an equally powerful indirect proof of the need of the old Augustan trait of shrewd judgement”. 70 As a vivid sample of Latitudinarian civic humanism, his political agenda of doing good and justice, which also fosters the idea of character engaged in public action, plays the central role of turning a meaningless world into a meaningful, non-satirical one. Inhumanity, the real focus of Fieldingesque satire and the source of vanity and hypocrisy, becomes marginal. In his famous Dictionary (1755), Samuel Johnson defines “political” as a two-sided term: “related to politicks; related to the administration of publick affairs” and “cunning; artful; skilful”.71 The entry is important because it helps us decode crisis-consciousness in an appropriate context. Thus, Parson Adams is the exiled pilgrim whose difficult political – in the sense of civic – mission is to promote public welfare, conventionally understood as, and based on, private interests, cunningly and artfully designed as public virtue. John
Spanish and kindly invites Isabella – the Catholic heroine raised by an English Catholic noble family and acculturated by a Catholic background disguised as Protestant – to speak in her mother tongue. 69 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 29. 70 Gautier, “Henry and Sarah Fielding on Romance and Sensibility”, 201. 71 Comprehensive Johnson’s Dictionary, page unnumbered. From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 105
Barrell’s challenging study on the relationship between civic humanist discourse and eighteenth-century English painting lays stress on the “individuality” of personality – a phrase almost identical with MacIntyre’s notion of “character” – as the yardstick by which the individual “as a politikon zoon identifies his interests with those of his fellow-citizens, considered in their ideal fulfilment”.72 As an “individ- ual personality”, Adams identifies his interests with Joseph, Fanny and Mr Wilson, deploring, at the same time, the fact that his fellow- citizens’ “ideal fulfilment” means nothing but the baseness of uncharitable and hypocritical gentry or of venal innkeepers like Mr and Mrs Tow-wouse, who are real enemies, rather than the product of Don Quixote’s imagination. Only the poor are charitable, honest and virtuous in a society in which the modern cultural institution of law “tends to replace physical with financial violence … and to deteriorate peacekeeping institutions like Christianity”.73 This is why the parson disappointingly exclaims that “… he almost began to suspect that he was sojourning in a country inhabited only by Jews and Turks” (177) or, conversely, is the mouthpiece of the Latitudinarian Benjamin Hoadly, who says that we might be sure that “a charitable and good- natured Pagan has a better title to [God’s] Favour, than a cruel and barbarous Christian”.74 In terms of civic humanism, Adams is both the embodiment of natural moral sense and the saint-errant who exhorts the others to be benevolent in a social, not abstract, context. Grafted on the Latitudinarian model composed of “explication (rational), confirmation (proofs), application (affections)”,75 his sermons, like his exhortations, are the morally legitimate means of fulfilling universal human nature in political life, according to the first part of Johnson’s definition, or public good, the core of Shaftesbury’s civic humanist theory:
A public spirit can come only from a social feeling or sense of partnership with human kind. Now there are none so far from being
72 John Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public”, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1986, 4. 73 McKeon, The Origins of the Novel, 401. 74 Benjamin Hoadly, Lord Bishop of Winchester, “The Good Samaritan”, in Twenty Sermons. The First Nine of Them Preached Before the King in Lent, London: John and Paul Knapton, 1755, 332 (emphases in the original). 75 Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, 51. 106 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
partners in this sense, or sharers in this common affection, as they who scarcely know an equal, nor consider themselves as subject to any law or fellowship or community. And thus morality and good government go together. There is no real love of virtue, without the knowledge of public good. And where absolute power is, there is no public.76
In Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, Don Quixote’s reactive knight-errantry and absolute yet self-created power of his lance makes room for Abraham Adams’ proactive saint-errantry and benevolence. As a parson, Adams is highly individualized in the realm of religion dominated by moneyed clergymen’s unorthodox behaviour, moral corruption, interests, designs and uncharitable nature – the social and conventional imperatives of, or for, gaining public authority and acclaim. He embarks on a physical, picaresque and spiritual pilgrimage that ends in a comic way. It means gain, not loss. As Mareska observes, “the straight line (the journey) that the conclusion of the novel curves into a circle … is not symbolic … is not the vehicle of meaning; it is meaning”.77 His gentlemanliness, his out- dated yet virtuous knowledge of Scripture and the classics and natural moral sense counterbalance Don Quixote’s aggressiveness and nonsensical punishments inflicted upon the public sphere. I have endeavoured to show that good nature is Parson Adams’ Quixotic forma mentis and modus vivendi in a society in which virtue comes to designate the modern ethos of Communio mercium, that his ethical, civic humanist programme – corresponding to Fielding’s abstract design of plenitude – appears as morally sensible and legitimate, in spite of society’s malevolent and ridiculous treatment of him. I have also insisted on his cultural, moral and social role so much urged by the combination of ethos and pathos, which defines the exemplary status of his character, as described by MacIntyre. Abraham Adams acts both as Fielding’s practical, novelistic version of the “man-of-latitude” eager to act well in order to contribute to the public good and as the practical and rationalized version of Deity “in a self-regulating order that seemed to be coextensive with God’s spiritual order”.78
76 Shaftesbury, “An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour”, 72 (emphasis added). 77 Mareska, Epic to Novel, 195. 78 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 199. From Don Quixote’s Lance to Parson Adams’ Benevolence 107
Parson Adams thus confirms Samuel Johnson’s belief that exemplary virtue can be accommodated by the probable world of the novel called “comic Romance”. Spellman suggests that man’s melioristic view of the disenchanted world replaced the religious impulse and “signalled the eclipse of the ecclesiastical world and all its ancillary concerns”.79 Adams is the civic hero satirized by men-as- they-happen-to-be – the real target of Fielding’s satire – and applauded by the good-natured reader who turns him into an “amiable humorist” and progenitor of the good-natured man “judged by a predominantly concrete social standard” 80 and involved in social reformation. He is the first copy of Don Quixote in religion and the first “etic”, namely the external and impartial observer of the “emic”, that is, local, indigenous, issues represented in the novel. 81 Unlike Cervantes, Fielding offers “a specific and personal view of the world more inspired by Christian values and his contemporary reality than by Cervantes”.82 However, writing in the style of Cervantes means adopting a transnational model with a purpose. In Essays Moral and Literary, Vicesimus Knox explains that “the imitation, however, must not be servile. A servile imitation is that which obeys the dictates of the master without venturing to inquire into the reason of it.”83 Fielding’s obvious reason was to transform Don Quixote from a hero of the ibi et tunc world of Romance into a hero of the hic et nunc world of the novel, in which he practises a type of Christian benevolence epistemologically grounded in the Latitudinarians’ perspective on religion, which had a definite
79 Spellman, The Latitudinarians and the Church of England, 159. 80 Sheriff, The Good-Natured Man, 93. 81 “Etic” and “emic” are terms coined by the linguist Kenneth Pike in 1954. Largely used in the field of cultural anthropology, “etic” designates a neutral or impartial description of behaviour, cultural practices, customs and beliefs by an observer or an outsider, whereas “emic” refers to behaviour, social practices, customs and beliefs described by someone within a given culture. In Mirror for Humanity, New York: McGrow Hill, 2006, Conrad Kottak claims that “The emic approach investigates how local people think …. The etic (scientist-oriented) approach shifts the focus from local observations, categories, explanations, and interpretations to those of the anthropologist. The etic approach realizes that members of a culture often are too involved in what they are doing to interpret their cultures impartially” (47). 82 Pedro Javier Pardo, quoted in Borgmeier, “Henry Fielding and His Spanish Model”, 59. 83 Vicesimus Knox, “Essays Moral and Literary”, in The Works of Vicesimus Knox, D.D., With a Biographical Preface, London: J. Mawman, 1824, I, 24. 108 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 impact upon Shaftesbury’s theory of moral sense and civic humanism.
CHAPTER 4
QUIXOTISM, MORAL SENTIMENT AND MANDEVILLIAN ECONOMICS IN SARAH FIELDING’S THE ADVENTURES OF DAVID SIMPLE AND VOLUME THE LAST
A problem of generic redefinition: The Adventures of David Simple as a moral Romance Inspired by the feminine sensibility that her friend Samuel Richardson portrayed in Clarissa, Sarah Fielding, the third sister of Henry Fielding, is the author of one of the early sentimental novels in which a male protagonist of moral sense, benevolence and sympathy is set against the backdrop of an emerging middle-class commercial order.1 He foreshadows the figure of the Man of Feeling,2 the eponymous
1 See also John Mullan’s article, “Sentimental Novels”, in The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. John Richetti, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 236-54, in which he remarks that the “new ‘hero’” of the sentimental novel “had to be virtuous, but had to be a private, and in this sense unheroic, person” (243). 2 Other mid- and late-eighteenth-century authors who portrayed the Man of Feeling in their novels are, to mention only the major ones, Mary Collyer (Felicia to Charlotte, 1744), Samuel Richardson (The History of Sir Charles Grandison, 1753), Henry Brooke (The Fool of Quality, 1766), William Goldsmith (The Vicar of Wakefield, 1766), Laurence Sterne (A Sentimental Journey, 1768), Henry Mackenzie (The Man of the World, 1773; Julia de Roubigné, 1777), Frances Burney (Evelina, 1778). My intention is to focus only on Sarah Fielding’s David Simple (1744), the sequel she published in 1753, Volume the Last, and Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (see Chapter 5), since I take them to be the extremes of the Man of Feeling: Sarah Fielding’s emergent sentimental hero actively involved in the way of the world versus Mackenzie’s protagonist as an ultimately passive observer of life epitomizes the productive and unproductive facets of sentimental Quixotism because they suggest that the practice of benevolence in society is either rewarded by the establishment of a small community of feeling (David Simple) or merely regarded as a failure (Volume the Last and The Man of Feeling). This is why I believe that the presence of this type of character under various circumstances in the novels mentioned above is only a 110 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 hero of Henry Mackenzie’s novel published in 1771. Adopted by a woman writer whose brother was the rival of her friend and source of inspiration, Richardson’s “feminization of discourse” 3 underlies the moral basis of the Man of Feeling, inasmuch as the nascent type of the sentimental, or effeminate, hero proposed by Sarah Fielding enriches “the mid-eighteenth-century cult of the ‘man of feeling’”, which originates in “the propaganda of benevolence and tender feeling carried on with increasing intensity by the anti-Puritan, anti-stoic, and anti-Hobbesian divines of the Latitudinarian school”.4 Along with “moral young women like Charlotte Lennox, Sarah Scott … and Frances Burney”, Sarah Fielding, claims Hunter, “dared ventured into public under its auspices with the approval of figures as venerable as Johnson”.5 As regards Sarah Fielding, Hunter’s idea is worth being developed by taking into account two crucial, though inimical, novelists who add to the venerable figure of Dr Johnson: Richardson and Sarah’s brother, Henry Fielding. In a letter dated 7 December 1757, Richardson commends Sarah Fielding’s sentimental mode and psychological insight, heralding, at
matter of unity within variety, as is the case with a large number of minor eighteenth- century Quixotic fictions. 3 Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, 14. See also Michael McKeon’s article, “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660-1760”, Eighteenth-Century Studies, XXVIII/3 (Spring 1995), 293-322, in which he makes the case that, though the woman of feeling was not accepted as a model, female virtue as inner virtue coalesced both with the mid-eighteenth-century “reformative powers of domesticity” and with the “institutionalization of female authorship” (313). McKeon demonstrates that there is a complementary relationship between female virtue and men’s newly internalized sense of male honour because female virtue is “one consequence of early modern cultural efforts to replace aristocratic notions of value. And it is not surprising that projects to establish normative masculine roles should have poached upon feminine virtue even as they sought to establish a differential masculine standard of value. From this perspective, Richardson’s impersonation of the virtuous Pamela Andrews and Fielding’s characterization of the feminized Joseph Andrews are two sides of the same coin” (ibid., 313-14). As an effeminate hero, the Man of Feeling “reclaimed a now recognizably feminine model of virtue as a distinctively male possession, reincorporating the newly normative gender traits within what a patriarchal culture persisted in seeing as the normative sex” (ibid., 314). 4 R.S. Crane, “Suggestions Toward A Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’”, ELH, I/3 (December 1934), 206, 230. 5 Hunter, Before Novels, 22. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 111 the same time, the inclusion6 of her work in the traditional literary canon:
What a knowledge of the human heart! Well might a critical judge of writing say, as he did to me, that your late brother’s knowledge of it was not (fine writer as he was) comparable to your’s. His was but as the knowledge of the outside of a clockwork machine, while your’s was that of all the finer springs and movements of the inside.7
Richardson’s famous celebration of Sarah Fielding’s tour de force sentimental fiction alludes to both Dr Johnson and, more importantly, to Henry Fielding. Despite qualifying Fielding as a “fine writer” in the light of his mastery of the new species which banks on the scrutiny of “the outside of a clockwork machine”, Richardson discredits such fictional mathematical and mechanical precision in favour of his sister’s penetration of “the inside”. But it is precisely Fielding’s writing style, most notably his revision of his sister’s second edition of David Simple that stirred praise from Richardson, Dr Johnson or Arthur Murphy, who confessed that Sarah Fielding’s novel,8 that is, the final version proofread by her brother, made her “well known to the literary world”, throwing into sharp relief “her lively and penetrating genius”.9 She also earns the plaudits of her brother who uses the term “genius” in the Preface to the novel so as to characterize
6 In the Introduction to The Adventures of David Simple. Containing an Account of His Travels through the Cities of London and Westminster in the Search of a Real Friend (1744), Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, Malcolm Kelsall writes that Sarah Fielding’s novel “was listed in the current publications in the Gentleman’s Magazine for May 1744” and “acquired a ‘classic status’, however, by its inclusion in 1782 in the ninth volume of The Novelist’s Magazine where it was bound up in excellent company with Gulliver’s Travels and A Sentimental Journey” (x-xi). All further references to this edition will be given in the text. 7 The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding, eds Martin Battestin and Clive Probyn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993, 132. 8 I quote here Sarah Fielding’s Advertisement to the Reader: “The following Moral Romance (or whatever Title the Reader shall please to give it) is the Work of a Woman, and her first Essay; which, to the good-natured and candid Reader will, it is hoped, be a sufficient Apology for the many Inaccuracies he will find in the Style, and other Faults of the Composition.” Since these lines are missing from the edition I use, I had recourse to the Project Gutenberg Consortia Center Collection: http://ebooks.gutenberg.us/WorldeBookLibrary.com/davidsimp.htm (accessed 30 July 2012). 9 Arthur Murphy quoted in Kelsall, Introduction to David Simple, xi. 112 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 her work as “a vast penetration into human Nature, a deep and profound Discernment of all Mazes, Windings and labyrinths, which perplex the Heart of Man to such a degree, that he is himself often incapable of seeing through them” (5). The ensuing discussion does not aim to dwell on Fielding’s revision of his sister’s spelling, punctuation, grammar and style,10 but on his insertion of the Quixotic motif.11 Taken as the search for a real friend, Quixotism unravels the Shaftesburian “moral sense” as well as the Humean concept of “sympathy” coupled with the generic category of Romance. Designed as a moral Romance, David Simple may be regarded as a liminal work characterized both by the Richardsonian cultivation of the “knowledge of the heart”12 and the Fieldingesque
10 See Kelsall’s Introduction to David Simple (xix-xxiii) and, most comprehensively, Janine Barchas’ article, “Sarah Fielding’s Dashing Style and Eighteenth-Century Print Culture”, ELH, LXIII/3 (Fall 1996), 633-56. Barchas’ outstanding study draws attention to the fact that Henry Fielding’s editorial adjustments, particularly the correction and deletion of his sister’s dashes in David Simple, did not minimize her authorship, since they were made “according to masculine standards of correctness” (ibid., 634) and, I would add, according to masculine literary mastery, since in the Preface to the novel Fielding is amazed to see “how one so young, and, in appearance, so unacquainted with the World, should know so much both of the better and worse Part” (ibid., 8). Barchas backs her argument by invoking the lack of specific eighteenth-century rules for punctuation and, most significantly, by referring to Henry Fielding’s abusive revisionism of Sarah’s dashes as a critical tool against their visual effect in the novels of his literary adversary, Samuel Richardson: “When placed within the visual and historical context of print culture, Henry Fielding’s elimination of a seemingly insignificant punctuation mark thus indicates larger concerns about printerly influences, possibly including Richardson’s, on the novel’s physical form. Perhaps by criticizing his sister’s use of the dash, Henry Fielding implicitly attacks the Richardsonian style that depends more heavily than does his own on printerly strategies and visual impact. He is able to say things about his sister’s writing that he could not about Richardson’s: that it is unlearned, non-aristocratic, immature, and feminine. Henry Fielding’s ‘corrections’ of his sister’s text allow him indirectly to strike at his most formidable literary rival” (ibid., 651). 11 In “Note on the Text”, Kelsall quotes the passage in which Fielding introduced the figure of Don Quixote in order to liken David Simple’s ardent wish to find a real friend with the Cervantic hero’s madness. The fragment will be quoted at length when I deal with the analysis of David Simple’s virtuous sentiment as Quixotism. 12 In his article “David Simple and the Fallacy of Friendship” published in Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, XLIV/3 (2004), 525-44, Richard Terry connects Sarah Fielding’s idea of friendship explored in her novel with the occasional time she spent in Richardson’s house together with her friend Jane Collier. Her indebtedness to Richardson, explains Terry, originates in her perception of his house “as a living example of the utopian society of friends she had imagined in David Simple”. He Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 113 mark of virtuous benevolence and good nature as triggers of communal happiness in a society that Fielding perceived as “cosmological plenitude”. 13 Although David Simple is generally referred to as a sentimental novel, one may argue that Sarah Fielding practises a form of “narrative transvestism”,14 in that the novelistic genre – read as the representation of everyday incidents as well as commercial and self-interested people – incorporates Romance read by means of virtuous affections. More specifically, the novel, which is part of the epistemological category of “naive empiricism”, is disguised as “romance idealism” typical of Quixotic characters like David, who succeeds in forming a small community of feeling together with Cynthia, Camilla and Valentine. From a socio-ethical viewpoint, moral Romance, a modern bourgeois genre, according Gary Gautier, “validates human experience with reference to pathos and to the private emotions of the individual, trusting to natural instinct over received traditions”.15 Sarah Fielding’s Romance mixes the Richardsonian [female] sensibility with the Fieldingesque conception of communal happiness in an attempt to write a type of fiction that is didactically legitimate not only due to its exploration of the “finer springs of the inside” but also to their convergence in a pool of sympathy meant to nurture disinterested sociability. I would say that Sarah Fielding amends the morally harmful sentimental novel excoriated by Vicesimus Knox in his essay “On Novel Reading”:
quotes from a letter Sarah Fielding wrote to Samuel Richardson on 26 June 1755, in which she thanked him “for being able ‘To live in a family where there is but one heart … and to have a place in that enlarged single heart’” (ibid., 528). 13 Stevick, “Fielding and the Meaning of History”, 566. 14 The phrase is coined and discussed by Madeleine Kahn in her book, Narrative Transvestism: Rhetoric and Gender in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel, Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1991. For Kahn, narrative transvestism, which is a conjunction of a literary and a psychoanalytical term, describes “a realm in which it is possible to talk about the formal demands and constraints of gendered imaginations and gendered voices as eighteenth-century England constructed them” (ibid., 8). Unlike Kahn, I use the term in order to show that the novel is disguised as a moral Romance whereby Sarah Fielding, by means of Henry Fielding’s insertion of the Quixotic motif, points out that David Simple’s Quixotism can be rewarding: David’s moral sentimentality is eventually shared by Cynthia, Camilla, his future wife, and Valentine, Camilla’s brother. 15 Gautier, “Henry and Sarah Fielding on Romance and Sensibility”, 199. 114 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Such books [sentimental compositions], however pernicious their tendency, are the most easily attained. The prudence of their publishers suggests the expediency of making them conveniently portable. Every corner of the kingdom is abundantly supplied with them. In vain is youth secluded from the corruptions of the living world. Books are commonly allowed them with little restriction, as innocent amusements: yet these often pollute the heart in the recesses of the closet, inflame the passions at a distance from temptation, and teach all the malignity of vice in solitude.16
Knox’s remarks would have made Henry Fielding happy if we consider the latter’s aversion to Richardson’s institutionalization of sensibility “in the recesses of the closet”. Though fond of Richardson’s house, under whose roof genuine friendship prevails, the fiction of Fielding’s sister abandons the idea of “solitude”. Contingent on the morality of feeling, she transforms it into public virtue in order to substantiate “an ideal moral fiction”, namely a Quixotic moral Romance, “rather than a fiction which strives to be moral by testing precept against ‘real’ experience”.17 Through the publication of a Quixotic novel like David Simple, Sarah Fielding’s “lively and prestigious genius” attests to the fact that her assimilation, like that of other women novelists, to the eighteenth- century literary canon “would allow us to hear the voice of the other side of the literary and cultural dialogue that produced the English novel”.18 Henry Fielding’s acclaim itself serves as yet another guaran- tee for the successful exploration of the world of “noble and elevated” sentiments by a young woman novelist (7). Enmeshed in the world of novelistic “naive empiricism”, David Simple’s “romance idealism” constitutes an early instance of male sentimental Quixotism built on Richardsonian feminine sensibility, which is seen as an ongoing effort to search for, and finally taste the fruit of, friendship understood as sentimental sociability fostered by sympathy.
16 Knox, “On Novel Reading”, in Novel and Romance, 306 (my emphases). 17 Kelsall, Introduction to David Simple, xiii. 18 Kahn, Narrative Transvestism, 3. For an extensive and substantive discussion of the contribution of women writers to the development of the English novel, see Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Oxford: Blackwell, 1986, and Janet Todd, The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800, London: Virago, 1989. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 115
Moral sentiment as Quixotism In The Progress of Romance, Clara Reeve, an advocator of the female literary tradition, lumps together Sarah Fielding’s literary merit, the core theme of her fiction and the prestige she acquired after her novels had been published:
Miss Sarah Fielding’s works are not unworthy next to be mentioned after her brother’s, if they do not equal them in wit and learning, they excel in some other material merits, that are more beneficial to their readers .… The distinguishing marks of her best characters are simplicity of manners and benevolence of heart .… Miss Fielding was one of those truly estimable writers, whose fame smells sweet, and will do so to late posterity, one who never wrote “A Line that dying she would ‘wish to blot!’”.19
“Simplicity of manners” and “benevolence of heart” are expressive of the moral make-up of Sarah Fielding’s protagonist. “In the portrayal of simplicity”, comments Kelsall, “she was concerned with a central moral issue of the times, and here she shared a common outlook with her brother”.20 From the start, David Simple appears as a naive and tender-hearted male character. Enjoying “the most perfect Unity and Friendship” (9) with his brother Daniel while they live together at a public school, the ingenuous and inexperienced David is, unlike his cunning, suspicious and sagacious brother, devoid of any “ill Designs on others” (10). The sons of a merchant and a beautiful country woman, David’s and Daniel’s moral and financial “State of Happiness” secured by their honest and industrious parents comes to an end with the death of their father. The small community of feeling they embody is destroyed when David discovers that friendship, in his brother’s case, is actually driven by self-interest:
It will perhaps surprise the Reader as much as it did poor David, to find that Daniel, notwithstanding the Appearance of Friendship he had all long kept up with his Brother, was in reality one of those Wretches, whose only Happiness centres in themselves; and that his
19 Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (1785), New York: The Facsimile Text Society, 1930, I, 142-43. 20 Kelsall, Introduction to David Simple, xvii. 116 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Conversation with his Companions had never any other View, but in some shape or other to promote his own Interest. (11)
Determined to forge their father’s will in order to disinherit David, Daniel is far from being the Shaftesburian benevolent individual fond of “private friendship”.21 Rather, he is the “selfish, interested, manip- ulative knave described by Mandeville”. 22 He is assisted by two servants in stealing the will, but one of them finally reveals the villainy to David. Though David re-enters into possession of his father’s fortune, he is utterly disappointed at his brother’s treachery and morally despicable selfishness that force him to transform into a sentimentally Quixotic picaro whose ardent wish is to find a sincere and disinterested friend. I shall quote here the passage in which Henry Fielding introduced the figure of Don Quixote in order to highlight David Simple’s ideal sympathetic benevolence interpreted as sentimental Quixotism:
The only Use he had for Money, was to serve his Friends; but when he reflected how difficult it was to meet with a Person who deserved that Name, and how hard it would be for him ever to believe any one sincere, having been so much deceived, he thought nothing in Life could be any great Good to him again. He spent whole Days in thinking on this Subject, wishing he could meet with a human Creature capable of Friendship; by which Word he meant so perfect a Union of Minds, that each should consider himself but as a Part of one entire Being; a little Community, as it were of two, to the Happiness of which all the Actions of both should tend with an absolute disregard of any selfish or separate Interest. This was the Fantom, the Idol of his Soul’s Admiration. In the Worship of which he at length grew such an Enthusiast, that he was in this Point only as mad as Quixotte himself could be with Knight Errantry. (26-27)
21 Shaftesbury, “An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour”, 67. John M. Robertson’s thorough explanation of the concept is helpful here: “By private friendship no fair reader can here suppose is meant that common benevolence and charity which every Christian is obliged to show towards all men, and in particular towards his fellow-Christians, his neighbour, brother, and kindred, of whatever degree; but that peculiar relation which is formed by a consent and harmony of minds, by mutual esteem and reciprocal tenderness and affection; and which we empathically call friendship” (ibid., n.1). 22 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 111. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 117
This passage raises two important problems regarding the conditions in which the “benevolence of the heart” fulfils its potential. One, economic in essence, is that benevolence is coupled with David’s disinterested sharing of money with potential friends, whereas the other, sentimental by excellence, is related to the discovery of a real friend who can only be envisaged by David under the present circumstances. Sceptical as he is, David’s desire is as Quixotic – a “Fantom”, an “Idol of his Soul’s Admiration” – as his eccentric, imprudent idea of charity. His understanding of friendship hinges on Shaftesbury’s belief that in the case of integrity, or “entire affection”, “the consciousness of just behaviour towards mankind in general casts a good reflection on each friendly affection in particular, and raises the enjoyment of friendship still the higher, in the way of community or participation”.23 For David, human interaction, which is thought to lead to the establishment of “a little Community”, or to a “Union of Minds”, is based on an exclusively sentimental reading of outward appearances “in a credulous, literal manner that is the very hallmark of quixotism”.24 The moment he resolves “to travel through the whole World, rather than not meet with a real Friend” in order to “find out the Sentiments of others, which was all he wanted to know” (27), David’s mind takes a Quixotic turn, for he evades experience in the name of his own sentimental imaginings. Imprudent by nature like Parson Adams, David’s prospect of sympathizing in society fails because his naivety precludes any objective interpretation of selfishness feigned as friendly affection. Incapable of recognizing Daniel’s malign designs, which should have been an opportunity for him to learn to be prudential, David will continue to undergo a stasis of behaviour25 provoked by his firm tenet that “Generosity, Good- nature, and a Capacity for real Friendship were to be found in the World” (46). The meaning of the term “simplicity” is useful at this point because it clearly indicates David’s basic moral feature presented in the tradition of Henry Fielding. “Simplicity” was at the time a synonym
23 Shaftesbury, “An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit”, 300 (my emphases). 24 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 113. 25 In his study, “Sentimental Novels of the Later Eighteenth Century”, in The Columbia History of the British Novel, ed. John Richetti, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, 181-98, G.A. Starr points out that the sentimental hero has “a child’s eye view of the world”, being unable to reach maturity because “the onset of adulthood, the goal of the Bildungsroman, is obstructed, evaded, or undone” (181). 118 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 not only for “artlessness”, “plainness”, “not cunning”, “not subtilty” but also for “absence of or freedom from luxury”.26 Without having the “Mask” and “Baseness” of his brother’s heart (11) and being cut off – like any Quixotic character – from the maelstrom of urban life, David decides to take a journey to London with the purpose of finding a real friend and helping “those who had been thrown into Misfortunes by the ill Usage of others” (27). David’s desire to know the world is perfectly framed within the context of his naked “simplicity” which incorporates both the meaning of “artlessness” and “freedom from luxury”, since he probes “all the Classes and Degrees of Men” (28). Similar to Henry Mackenzie’s hero, Harley, David starts playing the role of “the idealistic ingénu”,27 whose sentimental Quixotism turns him into an emerging figure of the Man of Feeling. In fact, what David Simple does is to search empirically what cannot be searched, that is, the others’ feelings. Motooka explains that sentimentalism is an imitation of “the new philosophy” because it offers “a serious and ambitious response to the problem of moral diversity, a fulfilment of Sprat’s promise that moral truth and empirical method could be reconciled. The method of sentimentalism … established ‘a faith of seeing’ that gave meaning to the mute signs of human nature, and subordinated all other interpretations to its own.”28 Like any other sentimental hero, David is inept at decoding “mute signs of human nature”, but he never ceases to foist his virtuous sentiments upon the London society under the guise of sympathy. For instance, a broker David encounters at the Royal Exchange is read as a
26 Comprehensive Johnson’s Dictionary, pages unnumbered. The reference also appears in Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 1740-1800: The Price of a Tear, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999. She also makes the point that “the word was used during the period both as a pejorative term and a term of approval, and it is in the light of this doubleness, ironically, that we should see the character of David Simple” (ibid., 28). My reading of David, however, is not entirely ironical because his Quixotic nature projects him at the end in the world of “romance idealism” perceived, much like the Fieldingesque happy-ending, as a reward for his pessimism and Bildung-free adventures. I read David Simple as yet another instance of a meaningful type of Quixotism. 27 Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction, London: Methuen, 1986, 108. The whole sentence underlines the Quixotic dimension of the sentimental novel whose plot centres around the figure of the Man of Feeling: “The novels of the sentimental man are offsprings of Don Quixote, with its portrait of the idealistic ingénu” (108). 28 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 94. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 119
“good Man” (29), but he proves to be a crook skilled at tricking the sentimental Simple into buying stocks whose price plummets about thirty minutes after they see each other. What is crucial here is that David does not, and cannot, understand the language of commerce used by a rival of the stockjobber who informs him of the latter’s treachery. The naive and tender-hearted David finds out that “good” means that the broker
… was worth a Plumb. Perhaps he might not understand that neither; (for he began to take him for a Fool) but he meant by a Plumb 100,000l. David was now quite in a Rage; and resolved to stay no longer in a Place, where Riches were esteemed Goodness and Deceit, Low- Cunning, and giving up all things to the love of Gain, were thought Wisdom. (30)
Indeed, “Wisdom” becomes the logic of the emerging commercial order against which David opposes his private, not public, feeling. As the last part of this passage suggests, his Quixotism acts as a satirical measure of the pervasive force of Mandevillian self-interest that forms the basis of Communio mercium. As a Quixotic “friend to mankind”,29 David belongs to the senti- mental paradigm that tries to impose the language of feeling as universal. Detecting corruption, treachery and moneyed interests all around, he rails against the status quo, for he considers himself to be the paragon of public virtue, which is, in fact, only a fantasy of his private, innately incautious and exaggerated emotions. Yet Sarah Fielding “acknowledges the moral diversity represented by egoistic philosophy, but does so in order to discount it”.30 Motooka’s idea thus coincides with my belief that David Simple cannot be entirely read in an ironical key. In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume builds his epistemological system on the assumption that “Morality … is more properly felt than judged of. Though this feeling or sentiment is commonly so soft and gentle, that we are apt to confound it with an idea, according to our common custom of taking all things for the same, which have any
29 Shaftesbury, “The Moralists: A Philosophical Rhapsody Being a Recital of Certain Conversations on Natural and Moral Subjects”, in Characteristics, II, ii, 41. 30 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 110. 120 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 near resemblance to each other.”31 In this light, sympathy rendered as sentimental sociability undergirds what Hume calls the “Science of Man”.32 It may be consubstantial with Francis Hutcheson’s morality which discards reason as the absolute yardstick of moral truth, pulverizing it into emotions as value judgements: “If there be any other Meaning of this Word Reasonable, when apply’d to Actions, I should be glad to hear it well explained; and to know for what Reason, besides a Moral Sense and Publick Affections, any man approves the Study of Public Good in others, or pursues it himself, antecedently to Motives of his own private Interest.”33 Both Hume’s and Hutcheson’s philosophical enquiries echo Shaftesbury’s “moral sense” as a means of propagating benevolence in a society which should be built on fellow-feeling.34 Consequently, David Simple may account for the ground zero of benevolent sentimentalism, as long as “the World was to begin again with him; for he could find no Pleasure in it, unless he could meet with a Companion who deserved his Esteem” (45). A benevolent agent, rather than a simple spectator like Mackenzie’s Harley, David discovers the world with the help of a few guides of a doubtful morality, who belong to the modern commercial, not sentimental, society. They show David a sordid “Generality of Scenes … he could never mention without a Sigh, or think of without a Tear” (46). Yet these guides do not act as teachers of prudence, as they can only offer David an unpalatable description of public immorality. They are unreliable news providers who fail to explain to David how “to avoid
31 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, III, ii, 335. 32 Ibid., x. 33 Francis Hutcheson, “An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections” (1728), in The Collected Works of Francis Hutcheson, ed. Bernhard Fabian, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1971, II, 32-33. 34 In Chapter 5 dedicated to Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling, I shall provide an extensive discussion about Humean sympathy seen in connection with Adam Smith’s theory of “the impartial spectator”, because Harley, unlike David Simple, is a mere sentimental observer of the world, deprived of any potential to participate in the process of experimenting with, and gaining knowledge of, the world. In Harley’s case, sympathy by way of Adam Smith binds together the “spectator” and the person involved in the sympathetic process. In David’s case, sympathy by way of David Hume means social utility, that is, the exposure of delicate sentiments finally shared by a small group of sentimental characters with whom David forms a perfect “Union of Minds”, which was initially an “Idol of his Soul’s Admiration” opposed to everyday society’s union of commercial interests. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 121 the snares which are laid by Treachery for Innocence, without infusing any wish for that superiority with which the betrayer flatters his vanity … and to increase prudence without impairing Virtue”. 35 This is because the sentimental novel, writes Liz Bellamy, “rejects the role of experience and empiricism in the development of moral codes, and stresses the importance of simple Christian precepts, reinforced by natural moral feelings”.36 Mr Orgueil, a gentleman David meets near Covent-Garden, poses as an upright person worthy of being considered “the Completion of all his [David’s] Wishes” (57). He is a sensible man, but, as its name suggests, his vexing pride is camouflaged by rectitude and “strictest Rules of Reason” which, emphasizing his Stoic attitude, never allow him to be sensitive to the “Frailties of Human Nature” (57-58). Orgueil is a middle-class man devoid of Christian precepts, for he is always prone to condemning the others’ actions in the most vehement manner. In the economy of the whole novel and of the 1753 sequel, Volume the Last, Orgueil is the character that best illustrates the opposition between David’s small community of feeling and a society in which human bonding abides by the rule of commercial rectitude. After he introduces David to a society of gentlemen in a London tavern, Orgueil explains to him that such people should never be trusted because of their selfishness, envy, treachery and ingratitude masked by the force of wit. In fact, they embody exactly what Orgueil veils under “the Love of Rectitude”, which is “the Motive of all my Actions” (71). His utter want of benevolence – which climaxes in Volume the Last, in which his posture as David’s benefactor is only an illusion entertained by David’s credulity – and sympathy for people in distress is proven when he tells David the story of a young boy whose indolent father leaves him “upon the wide World to shift for himself” at the age of fifteen (60). Adopted by an old gentleman who procures him a commission in the army and raises him as his own son, the young boy becomes a disgraceful seducer of the gentleman’s daughter who dies after she has a few fainting fits. Orgueil’s account of the old gentleman’s miserable life occasions David’s “Sighs and Tears at the Idea of such a Scene” (63). Unlike Harley, the “eponym of
35 Johnson, The Rambler, 4 (31 March 1750), II, 24. 36 Liz Bellamy, Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, 138. 122 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Sensibility”37 whose tears gush out at every scene of human distress, the even-tempered David cries from “Tenderness, tho’ he would have thought it much too effeminate to be moved to Tears by any Accident that concerned himself only” (63). Soon after the story is related, David becomes acquainted with Orgueil’s “Laws of Society and right Reason” (71), which are, for David, powerful obstructers of sentimental benevolence and, for society, signs of self-regard and artful design deemed as “good Action” (75). Mr Spatter, David’s next guide through scenes from high-society, sketches the Stoic conduct of men like Orgueil as “a continual war with their passions” (74) that must be subdued on behalf of public esteem. On this note, Spatter, the practitioner of raillery and defamation, informs David about the fashionable assemblies of rogues who win or lose money at whist in private houses. If Orgueil simply boasts about his rectitude and prudent nature as guarantors of real virtue and wisdom, without imparting any practical knowledge to David on how to penetrate people’s characters, Spatter gives him a clue when both visit an assembly of card players. “People’s minds, and the Bent of their Inclination”, says Spatter, “is no where so much discovered as at a Gaming-Table: for in Conversation, the real Thoughts are often disguised; but when the Passions are actuated, the Mask is thrown off, and Nature appears as she is” (78). Orgueil is a master of artful conversation, which allows him to conceal his wicked thoughts, while Spatter is a carping champion who offers David the opportunity to tap into experience. David, however, deprecates gaming as a “Proof of the selfish and mercenary Tempers of Mankind” (79), disdains envious and conceited “No-bodies” (92) and, more dramatically, refuses to go along with Spatter’s never-ending “Animadversions” (90). The literal interpretation of “animadver- sions”, which he initially refuses to entertain because his Quixotic delusion tells him that Spatter’s raillery is actually “his Love of Mankind” (82), is occasioned by his maliciousness and revengeful nature. His need for empirical evidence is not meant to teach David to be society-wise but to supply him “Matter of Laughter” (94). Spatter is alien to sympathy and “moral sense”, the only moral qualities suggestive of benevolent sentimentalism and sociability.
37 Susan Manning, “Sensibility”, in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830, eds Thomas Keymer and Jon Mee, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 93. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 123
Mr Varnish is the last guide whose moral principles are the opposite of Spatter’s baneful ones. In terms of moral types, he emblematizes hypocrisy and deceptive appearances. Introduced to David by Spatter, Varnish wears a mask of good-nature which, unfortunately, is not separated from prudence: “… he dropped all their [the well-known gentlemen in town] Faults, talking of nothing but their good Qualities, and sought out good Motives for every Action that had any Appearance of bad. He turned Extravagance into Generosity, Avarice into Prudence, and so on, through the whole Catalogue of Virtues and Vices” (93). Varnish’s “Generosity” is, on the face of it, proven by his firm intention to divulge to David the harsh words that Spatter used to portray his Quixotic nature: “… Spatter had represented him in several publick Places as a Madman, who had pursued a Scheme which was never capable of entering the Brain of one in his senses; namely, of hunting after a real Friend. This, Sir, says Varnish, he ridiculed with more Pleasantry than I can remember; and, in the end, said, you was as silly as a little Child, who cries for the Moon” (96). According to Spatter, David is a sentimental simpleton who anticipates Mackenzie’s ironic image of Harley as “a child in the drama of the world”.38 Similarly, the narrative voice that rails against David somewhat resonates with Mandeville’s characterization of “honour” as Quixotic:39 “for his Man of Goodness and Virtue was, to him [David], what Dulcinea was to Don Quixote; and to hear it was thought impossible for any such thing to be found, had an equal Effect on him as what Sancho had on the Knight, when he told him, ‘His great Princess was winnowing of Wheat, and sifting Corn’” (96-97). This observation furthers the point that “the quality of sensation … represented a detached abstraction from sense experience, the virtuality of emotional experience rather than the actuality of sensible
38 Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771), ed. Brian Vickers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 14. 39 Mandeville, “Remarks”, in The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, London: C. Bathurst, C. Nourse, 1795: “The Men of ancient Honour, of which I reckon Don Quixote to have been the last upon Record, were very nice Observers of honour” (117), which Mandeville considers “a Chimera without Truth or Being” (116). 124 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 experience”. 40 Judged through this “virtuality”, David’s sympathy remains a moral idiosyncrasy, as he is only able to observe the world and draw pessimistic conclusions about it. Not even Varnish succeeds in improving David’s interpreting skills because, “notwithstanding the Appearance of Good-nature … yet, in reality, he [Varnish] was not at all affected with others Sufferings” (124). David’s moral code clashes with the three guides’ manner of reading the world, as “each man’s assumption of his own rightness guarantees the ridiculousness of his opponent’s position”.41 Until David comes to sympathize with Cyn- thia, Camilla and Valentine in the last volume of the novel, his journey through the world of various types of urban characters furthers the “logic of loss” 42 and lack of plenitude reliant on the language of the heart as a natural, not artificial, means of sociability in a small community cut off from the mechanisms of Communio mercium.
Quixotism rewarded: friendship and the true meaning of sentimental plenitude In An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, David Hume defines sympathy as a communication of refined sentiments to observers able to reciprocate in the same gentle manner:
It will also be allowed, that the very softness and tenderness of the sentiment, its engaging endearments, its fond expressions, its delicate attentions, and all that flow of mutual confidence and regard, which enters into a warm attachment of love and friendship: it will be allowed, I say, that these feelings, being delightful in themselves, are necessarily communicated to the spectators, and melt them into the same fondness and delicacy.43
We have seen that “mutual confidence and regard”, which constitute the preparatory ground for “love and friendship”, substantiate David Simple’s forma mentis and his unabated quest for a real friend in the
40 Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge, Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, 673 (my emphases). 41 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 115. 42 Irimia, “From the Sublime to the Comic”, 12. 43 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), ed. J.B. Schneewind, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983, vii, 66. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 125 metropolis. Presupposing the exercise of soft and tender feeling, such moral qualities are jettisoned by Orgueil, Spatter and Varnish on behalf of utmost prudence. David’s moral epistemology, I argue, subtends Sarah Fielding’s “romance idealism” in terms of adequate sympathy predicated on sentiments that “are readily visible on the body, not hidden in the breast”.44 The close of the novel encourages a logic of gain which imposes sentimental Quixotism as rewarding, rather than preposterous, in spite of being short-lived45 and manifest- ing itself within a small group of real friends. David’s sentimental errantry will soon lead him to discover visible feelings of sympathy in the hypocritical high society. Before ceasing to be David’s companion on account of being an unfeeling person, Varnish takes him to the house of a patronizing lady freshly returned from abroad. Attended by a young woman, in whose countenance “a fix’d Melancholy … made [David] uneasy”, the lady denigrates her in public for her contempt shown when her landlady “sends her out of the Room for some Trifle”. David is tempted to qualify the servant’s gesture as rude and, therefore, thinks of parting “with such a Wretch” (99), whose impoliteness is moralized through another lady’s story about the ungratefulness of a wench towards her landlady. Instead of wishing to join the assembly of ladies in condemning the “monstrous Ingratitude” (100) of the miserable girl presented in the story, David is curious to hear the story of the landlady’s servant who will soon become part of his sentimental community. The life story of the young woman called Cynthia is a long chain of suffering and misfortunes. Deprived of happiness, teased by her parents and her sisters for being wittier than they are, Cynthia has a passion for attaining knowledge divorced from the “silly Story or Romance” (101). Perceived as outlandish because of her intellectual pursuits which transgress the realm of needlework and other household chores, she does not belong to “the community of mindless women”.46 In terms of friendship, Cynthia is envied by her sisters for her wit and excluded from any share in their father’s fortune, just as
44 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 123. 45 The “logic of gain” does not last long, for Volume the Last tackles the gradual collapse of sensibility and social disintegration of David’s community because of financial distress and ruthless commercial relations. 46 Patricia Meyer Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003, 45. 126 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
David’s father’s fortune is abusively claimed by his brother Daniel. Delighted with Cynthia’s manner of talking, David begins to sympathize with her the moment she says that “Good-humour, and a Desire to please, is all I wish for in a Companion; for, in my Opinion, being inoffensive goes a great way in rendering any Person agreeable” (103). Cynthia reciprocates David’s tender feelings in the end, being convinced that his curiosity was stirred by his good-nature and compassion for those in distress. As a Man of Feeling, David can now practise sentimental benevolence to the full. Persecuted by her lady for not being able to understand her whims and for daring to accept her nephew’s proposal of marriage – which is interpreted as Cynthia’s “worst of Crimes” (119) – Cynthia, well-versed in the way of the world, immediately realizes that men like David act “from pure Friendship”. But Cynthia’s flair prompts her to recognize that there is more to it than mere generosity, for “altho’ he paid her all imaginable Respect, yet she plainly saw that he liked her” (123). This episode suggests that his altruism practised in the presence of real friends really is spontaneous when coalesced with friendship.47 After finding Cynthia a place to live out of town, David resolves to explore “the Lower Sort of People”. The shift in focus examination furthers David’s cause, since, as a Man of Feeling, he poses as a benefactor for the poor who are by disposition “naturally good” (125). Ann Jessie Van Sant quotes a 1735 source in which “philanthropy” is mentioned as an early use of the term “sensibility”:
Humanity, in its first and general Acceptation, is call’d by Holy Writers Good-will towards Men; by Heathens, Philanthropy, or Love of our Fellow Creatures. It sometimes takes the name of Good- Nature, and delights in Actions that have an obliging Tendency in them: When strongly impress’d on the Mind, it assumes a higher and nobler Character, and is not satisfy’d with good-natured Actions alone, but feels the Misery of others with inward Pain. It is then deservedly named Sensibility.48
47 This is how Henry Fielding describes “good-nature” in his essay “Of Good-Nature” published in Miscellanies: “Good-nature often we those Actions name, / Which flow from Friendship, or a softer Flame” (31). 48 The Prompter, 17 June 1735, quoted in Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 5. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 127
David’s emotional experience thus passes for spontaneous charity, which means that his emotional experience is far from being a matter of virtue. So Gerard Barker emphasizes this idea by saying that “David’s pleasure stems not only from identifying ‘with the sufferer’ but also from the realization that he has been the source of his relief”. 49 When a cruel and ill-natured woman is ready to force Camilla and Valentine out of her house because of their poverty, David’s identification “with the sufferer” is symbolized partly by tears, partly by unconditional generosity: “During the time she was speaking, David’s Tears flowed as fast as hers; his Words could find no Utterance, and he stood motionless as a Statue” (126). As a benefactor of Camilla and Valentine, David understands benevolence as an act of both “self-approbation”50 and materialized public relief: “He fancied them entirely happy, and their Happiness was owing to him. None but Minds like David’s can imagine the Pleasure this Consideration gave him” (277). The story of Camilla and Valentine replicates Cynthia’s story in terms of victimized characters endowed with an unblemished sentimental morality. Bereft of their beloved mother at a tender age, Camilla and Valentine experience the “mean Arts” (143) of their stepmother, Livia, who succeeds in turning their father against them “in such a manner, as in my Father’s sight always to make us appear in the wrong” (144). An expert in artful designs, Livia is not the kind of abusive landlady who mistreats Cynthia, subduing, at the same time, all her feelings and inclinations. Rather, Livia is the embodiment of Mandevillian egoism, ready to take advantage of her husband’s Quixotic sentimental benevolence: “… for that Tenderness and Good- nature, which made him really love the Object that gave him Pleasure, was the Cause of all his Errors” (150). Camilla’s account of her and her brother’s misery caused by the guileful Livia, who manages to impose her artifices on their father, entitles David to believe that “a perfect Character was nowhere to be found” (156). He continues to listen to Camilla’s story of misfortunes experienced in the house of her aunt, who contrives an incestuous plot – similar to the imperious landlady’s conviction that they are lovers, not siblings – meant to spark their father’s self-contempt, as “he was sorry he had been the
49 Gerard Barker, “‘David Simple’: The Novel of Sensibility in Embryo”, Modern Language Studies, XII/2 (Spring 1982), 71. 50 Crane, “Suggestions Toward a Genealogy of ‘The Man of Feeling’”, 229. 128 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Cause of such Creatures coming into the World” (163). The acme of David’s benevolent sentimentalism occurs when, relating Cynthia’s story to Camilla, he finds out that they are very good friends: “David was melted into Tenderness at the sight of her Tears; and yet, inwardly, rejoiced at the Thoughts of her being capable of shedding them on so just an Occasion” (173). The establishment of a community of feeling is prepared by what Richard Terry calls “good-natured amicability”.51 Modelled on Henry Fielding’s “cosmological plenitude” and “poetic justice”, 52 Sarah Fielding’s novel brings Cynthia, Camilla and Valentine together after their interpolated stories heard by David confirm their natural feeling of sympathy. After Cynthia’s cousin dies, she becomes the heiress of thirty pounds a year and returns to London. Travelling in the same coach with Cynthia, Daniel, David’s brother, confesses that he is “the most wretched of all Mortals. To this Conduct I owe my Ruin” (290). Camilla and Valentine meet their father who regains his heart-hearted nature after Livia’s death. David confesses his love for Camilla whereas Valentine discloses his tender feelings to Cynthia. Eventually, everything culminates in “a Company where so much Goodness reigned” (294). Terry is right in saying that marriage cannot be divorced from friendship in the end because “the kind of companionate marriage into which David enters with Camilla is based on friendship, rather than on any well-developed romantic or sexual interest”.53 It is true that David begins his quest as a sentimental knight-errant in search for a friend and ends up as a virtuous husband, but he never forgets that sentimental plenitude cannot be fulfilled without the existence of reciprocated friendly affections. Camilla’s happiness, for instance, is complete because she has her friend “for her Companion” (303). Besides, the simple and Quixotic David possesses not only the language of the heart, which he is now capable of naturalizing within the newly established community but also “the language of sight”,54 which is likely to spur delicate feelings because they are physically exteriorized. Such feelings are noticeable “by representing moral
51 Terry, “David Simple and the Fallacy of Friendship”, 528. 52 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 407. 53 Ibid., 527. 54 Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel, 96. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 129 worth as though it were empirically accessible”.55 David’s peregrina- tions come to an end when benevolence, sympathy and love become the common denominator between David, Cynthia, Camilla and Valentine. Consequently, their “Union of Minds” stands living proof that David’s Quixotism is rewarded as a result of his steadfast belief that “Generosity, Good-nature, and a Capacity for real Friendship, were to be found in the World” (46). The novel ends on a Shaftesburian tone of “moral sense” and Humean sympathy which underpin the rhetoric of David Simple’s moral sentimentalism, or what Motooka terms as “sentimental methodology”:56
Every little Incident in Life was turned into some delicate pleasure to the whole Company, by each of them endeavouring to make every thing contribute to the Happiness of the others .… In short, it is impossible for the most lively Imagination to form an Idea more pleasing than what this little Society enjoyed, in the true Proofs of each other’s Love: And, as strong a Picture as this is of real Happiness, it is in the power of every Community to attain it, if every Member of it would perform the Part allotted him by Nature, or his Station in Life, with a sincere Regard to the Interest and Pleasure of the whole. (304)
This much quoted passage brings forth not only the concepts of tenderness and benevolence as purveyors of sentimental plenitude but also the question of fair management of the oikos, which guarantees the welfare of “this little Society”. This utopian perspective of “the dissolution of self into community”57 mirrors the good company that Sarah Fielding enjoyed in Richardson’s family considered to be “but one heart”. 58 It is also analogous to the story and conduct of Mr Wilson in Joseph Andrews, inasmuch as his exemplary morality cultivated in a rural space keeps “bustle, noise, hatred, envy, and
55 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 119. 56 Ibid., 123. Stirring heated debates in the second half of the eighteenth century, the term “sensibility” remained a vaguely defined term. Hannah More summarizes this point by underlining sensibility’s “subtle essence” as the very “methodology” Motooka speaks about: “Sweet sensibility / Thy subtle essence still eludes the chains / Of definition, and defeats her pains” (quoted in Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel, 2). 57 Terry, “David Simple and the Fallacy of Friendship”, 528. 58 See n.12. 130 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 ingratitude” away (215). By establishing a little community predicated on a “Union of Minds”, David demonstrates that feeling is, in this case, principled. Virtue exists only in what MacIntyre calls “character”, that is, a “man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his- essential-nature”.59 In David Simple, the “little” sentimental “Society” is formed by individuals as they are because their essential nature is untouched. My own reading explains even better the meaning of Sarah Fielding’s moral Romance and, along with it, McKeon’s concept of “romance idealism”. Sarah Fielding’s moral Romance in which Quixotism is rewarded through principled sentiment connects the virtue-based scenario proposed by the close of the novel with the readership’s virtue-building one: “In short, it is this Tenderness and Benevolence, which alone can give any real Pleasure, and which I most sincerely wish to all my Readers” (305). Readers are supposed to sympathize with David, Cynthia, Camilla and Valentine precisely because they are sentimental too. As Spacks has shown, “the telling of intimate stories appears to constitute a primary activity of virtuous people .… The small community of readers seeks the pleasure of intimate knowledge about imagined figures, a trope for such sharing in actual experience.” 60 In addressing the novel primarily to sentimental readers, Sarah Fielding tries, in a didactic way, to establish a liaison between David’s community’s unadulterated language of feeling and readers’ expected sympathy. However, she simultaneously addresses self-consciously rational and reasonable readers – who are on a par with Orgueil – in an effort to reform their interpretive competence. Sarah Fielding does so by rejecting the Tory idea of “insulting and satirising others”, attuning readers to their own “Share of Wit” and “Talents for the Advantage and Pleasure of the Society” (305) inscribed in the Whiggish paradigm of amiability doubled by generous amicability. Motooka’s suggestion that “Fielding’s art teaches sensible readers to be sentimental quixotes” 61 is just another suggestion correlated with the Shaftesburian meaning of moral sense. With Quixotism rewarded for a short while, Sarah Fielding consolidates the tradition of those novels which prevent Quixotic satire from being meaningless. Though David’s community is too
59 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 52. 60 Spacks, Privacy, 49. 61 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 124. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 131 small to pass for a true propagator of virtue in society, it is built on a seamless Christian morality conducive to sentimental plenitude, the enemy of Stoic “Rectitude” and “strictest Rules of Reason”. In this sense, Donna Landry’s characterization of David Simple may be very helpful by way of conclusion:
Repairing inequality through the redistribution of wealth, acting on the basis of empathetic imagining of another’s calamity – the politicisation of fellow feeling – denouncing obligation, abandoning self-interest for a compassion overriding all hope of return, a direct blow struck against the language of trade in charitable dealings: all these ingredients of active material benevolence will return in Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744).62
Mandevillian economics and the shortcomings of benevolent sentimentalism I begin this section by quoting Susan Manning’s conclusion to her article on sensibility, as it views feeling and commerce as overlapping, rather than antagonistic, terms: “Sensibility’s capacity to voice the aesthetic possibility of the excess of pleasure over use value – an emotional economy of expression surviving in an ethical and commercial climate of prudent exchange – remains equally challenging.”63 Indeed, the “emotional economy of expression” is meant to be at loggerheads with “prudent exchange”, as Mr Orgueil makes clear from his first encounter with David Simple. Although complementary on the face of it in David Simple, sentimentalism and economics become separate discourses in Volume the Last, with the former acting as “a critique of economic or political issues”. 64 In the long run, sentimentalism is, I contend, confined to a failed Quixotic project in Volume the Last, as it separates moral worth taken as disinterested benevolence from economic worth interpreted as Mandevillian self- interest. It is precisely in this sense that, as I argued earlier, David’s small group of friends is short-lived as a utopian community radically
62 Donna Landry, “Picturing Benevolence Against the Commercial Cry, 1750-1798, or, Sarah Fielding and the Secret Causes of Romanticism”, in The History of British Women’s Writing, 1750-1830, ed. Jacqueline Labbé, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, V, 155-56. 63 Manning, “Sensibility”, 97. 64 Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 3. 132 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 opposed to society because, as Spacks says, “virtue makes one vulnerable in society”.65 My claim also is that the “emotional econ- omy of expression” cannot entail any objective interpretation of outward signs as prudence does. Whereas in David Simple the protagonist is not trained into suspecting the world, though he has “some prudence” which makes him “distinct from the negative prudential figures”66 in the novel, in Volume the Last he learns what suspicion is – and this happens only late in the novel – as a result of his economically miserable experience. Notwithstanding David’s decision to abandon people like Orgueil, Spatter and Varnish, once experience shows him something different from what his Quixotic frame of mind allows him to see, his interpretive capacity remains the same: he cannot read outward signs but at face value because of his inherent sympathy unsupported by reasoning. By perceiving experience as pre-constructed, since it is sentimentally Quixotic, David is an “affected yet not changed”67 sentimental hero, in that he cannot become a worldly-wise individual. We read in David Simple that money is the only “Wisdom” (30) in an emergent bourgeois order. After getting out of the Royal Exchange, where the sentimental hero is about to be fooled by an apparently supportive stockjobber into buying low-rated stocks,68 David meets a jeweller, Mr Johnson, who fancies him as a perfect husband for his younger daughter, Nanny. But David’s prospective happiness is soon shattered by the visit of a rich yet monstrous-looking Jew, Mr Nokes,
65 Spacks, Privacy, 49. 66 Gordon, The Practice of Quixotism, 72. 67 Starr, “Sentimental Novels of the Later Eighteenth Century”, 190. 68 See James Kim, “Mourning, Melancholia, and Modernity: Sentimental Irony and Downward Mobility in David Simple”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, XXII/3 (Spring 2010), 477-502. I find Kim’s interpretation very thoughtful with respect to market credibility, for it draws closer, in economic terms, to McKeon’s “naïve empiricism”: “The first [stock-jobber] offers to protect him [David] from the machinations of the other brokers and tries to sell him a stock that promptly plummets. The second discloses that the first knew the stock would plummet all along, and the third reveals that the second had spoken against the first largely out of envy for his personal fortune. According to stock-jobber number three, David would have done best to trust stock-jobber number one from the beginning …. The lesson we learn here is that the credibility of each jobber’s character, like the value of the stocks they are hustling, relies on a logic of citation and counter-citation. Value accrues through the furious circulation of self-reinforcing discourses, just as devaluation occurs through the even more furious circulation of aggressive counter-discourses” (ibid., 483). Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 133 who visits Johnson’s shop. The jeweller’s venality stands side by side with Nanny’s vanity entertained by “more Pleasure from the Purse that the Person of her Lover” (37). The morally-laden message of the story touches David to the extent that he only discovers “the Thought of a mercenary Woman” (44-45). Without suspecting anything, David is permanently the same naive who does not interpret things experientially, but post-factum: “Now was David in the same Condition as when he discovered his Brother’s treachery” (45). In David Simple, Cynthia is the only character whose profound knowledge of the world permits her to describe commercialism with pinpoint accuracy:
She said, she was considering, amongst the variety of Shops she saw, how very few of them dealt in Things which were really necessary to preserve Life or Health; and yet that those things which appeared most useless, contributed to the general Welfare: for whilst there was such a thing as Property in the World, unless it could be equally distributed, those People who have little or no share of it, must find out Methods of getting what they want, from those whose Lot it is to have more than is necessary for them; and, except all the World was so generous, as to be willing to part with what they think they have a right to, only for the pleasure of helping others; the way to obtain anything from them is to apply to their Passions. As, for instance, when a Woman of Fashion goes home with her Coach loaded with Jewels and Trinkets, which, from Custom, she is brought to think she cannot do without, and is indulging her Vanity with the Thoughts of out-shining some other Lady at the next Ball, the Tradesman who receives her Money in Exchange for those things which appear so trifling, to that Vanity perhaps owes his own and his Family’s Support. (189-90)
Cynthia’s observations oppose frugality, namely what is really necessary “to preserve Life or Health”, to luxury understood as society’s “Passions”, which are, in Mandeville’s terminology, the equivalent of private interest or private vices. Private vices lead to public benefits as a consequence of a one-to-one correspondence between buyer and supplier. Though Cynthia also prefigures an economic “Union of Minds” meant to ensure the welfare of communal wealth, she is, paradoxically, the only one in this sentimentally benevolent – and micro-economically stable – “Union” who speaks about Mandevillian economic thought. As Skinner has noted, this discourse, which is “quite outside a woman’s ‘economic’ sphere, the 134 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 household … removes the moral stigma traditionally attached to vices, here proposed by a woman … whose own morality could therefore, potentially, be challenged by opponents”.69 None of her sentimental friends reacts against her realistic account of the economic state of affairs because the “equally distributed” property is a matter of Quixotic benevolence, not of mercantilism based on the exchange of goods for money, which is the new interpretation of the public good – the civic humanist discourse of disinterested benevolence as public virtue has been replaced by the Mandevillian discourse of commercialism labelled as a private cure for public needs:
… the greater variety there was of wants, the larger number of individuals might find their private interest in labouring for the good of others and, united together, compose one body. Is there a trade or handicraft but what supplies us with something we wanted? This want certainly, before it was supplied, was an evil, which that trade or handicraft was to remedy, and without which it could never have been thought of.70
It is, therefore, the labour “for the good of others” – as opposed to the Shaftesburian pleasure of helping others – through which people fulfil their private interest. We remember that Mandeville repudiates honour as “a Chimera without Truth or Being”, which means that his goal is to relocate it from the world of “ancient Men of Honour” to the ground of a utilitarian ethos, the hallmark of “progressive ideology”. Self-interest is the engine of the modern world, in that it has been institutionalized as the new barometer of virtue. As McKeon has pointed out “Mandeville’s demonstration that what we call virtue is really vanity, that selflessness is self-service, aims to demystify and humanize virtue so as to reclaim it from the aristocrats and saints and make it the property of real people engaged in the daily pursuits of modern life”.71 In Volume the Last, the demystification and humanization of modern Mandevillian virtue turn the members of David’s community
69 Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 23-24. 70 Mandeville, “A Vindication of the Book, from the Aspersions contained in a Presentment of the Grand Jury of Middlesex, and an Abusive Letter to Lord C––”, in The Fable of the Bees, 251. 71 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 204. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 135 into sentimental victims ravaged by the effects of the new economic system. In Manning’s terms their “excess of pleasure” fades in an ethical and commercial milieu based on prudence. The 1753 publication of Volume the Last did not enjoy the same critical acclaim as David Simple. Richard Terry attributes the unwelcome reception of the sequel to the fact that “in 1782, two decades after Fielding’s death, when the story of David Simple was once more issued to the reading public, only the Adventures appeared, as if Volume the Last were being discarded as a regrettable aberration”.72 In the Preface, Jane Collier, Sarah Fielding’s friend and collaborator in The Cry (1754), makes clear the purpose and content of the book, since “Sequels to Histories of this kind are so generally decried, and often with such good Reason”.73 Sarah Fielding, says Collier, integrates the same David Simple into the world of “natural and common Distresses” so as to exemplify “that well known Observation, that ‘The Attainment of our Wishes is but too often the Beginning of our Sorrows’”. Thus, Volume the Last becomes the very opposite of David Simple in terms of dissolved benevolent sentimentalism and solid Mandevillian economics, one of the “new situations” in which “known and remarkable Characters” 74 find themselves. Collier’s conclusion relates the meaning of “the Beginning of our Sorrows” to the tragic fate of David, who “would support himself under the worldly Misfortunes and Afflictions to which human-kind is liable”.75 Indeed, David plunges into misfortune and affliction as a consequence of his Quixotic turn, which makes him elude the worldly nature of human transactions. In this context, Collier’s explanation is, however, surprising, for “every Evil may be lessened and alleviated”76 only within a small community like the one established by David. Conversely, not only does Volume the Last show that “every Evil” is caused by malignant and mercantile figures like Orgueil, Mr Ratcliff or Mr Nichols, it shows how the small community falls into ruin and finally to death, except for Cynthia and David’s daughter, Camilla,
72 Terry, “David Simple and the Fallacy of Friendship”, 526. 73 Sarah Fielding, Volume the Last (1753), ed. Malcolm Kelsall, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, 309. 74 Ibid., 310. 75 Ibid., 311. 76 Ibid., 309. 136 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 who are the only survivors with an uncertain future. Such a sceptical, even dystopian vision of the life of “known” yet not “remarkable” characters cements the “logic of loss” exploited by the 1753 sequel. The story of the “little Society” which lives in a peaceful rural landscape keeps the reader’s attention throughout the first pages of the novel. Yet Sarah Fielding introduces an apparently insignificant detail that will turn the story of “romance idealism” into a saga of financial distress conducive to the destruction of David’s community. Despite David’s Quixotic conviction that “the Union of Hearts … was sufficient to compensate every common outward Evil”, the eleven years of social happiness are shadowed by “some pecuniary Losses” which gradually develop into a financial crisis. 77 The frugal community assiduously preoccupied with the management of their household cannot help regretting the loss of Camilla’s and Valentine’s father’s ten thousand pounds “laid out on a bad Mortgage”.78 David’s benevolence sings its swan song with his involvement in a protracted law suit over an estate belonging to his uncle which is claimed by a clerk to an attorney well-versed in legal machinations. Incurring “a heavy Load of Debts”, 79 David is glad to accept the offer of the seemingly obliging lawyer Mr Ratcliff and also to renew his friendship with Orgueil. David’s role as a benefactor of Cynthia, Camilla and Valentine is over from now on and, consequently, “the sentimental model breaks down almost completely”.80 Ironically enough, in David Simple, the protagonist depends on Orgueil, who “has made a God of himself” (72). Ratcliff’s empty promises of assisting David in his law suit and Orgueil’s immoderate rectitude cannot possibly ease the distress of the sentimental David, who, “like Job, patiently submitted to the temporary Sufferings allotted him”.81 What David believes to be “temporary” is, however, permanent because of his Quixotic trust. Even the narrator, who was sympathetic in David Simple, becomes very critical of David’s folly and sheer imprudence in the face of worldly experience:
77 Ibid., 313-14. 78 Ibid., 315. 79 Ibid., 323. 80 Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 27. 81 Fielding, Volume the Last, 334. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 137
… but if, after some Experience of the World, he should, in his future Transactions, be guided by that Experience, to act consistently with it, and should thereby avoid those Evils to which his Inexperience rendered him liable, he is suddenly metamorphosed into a cunning Fellow; and those very Persons, who had before laughed at his Folly, can now clearly enough distinguish the Meaning of the Word Simplicity, to blame him for his Want of it; without considering the essential Difference there is between the proper Caution built on Experience, and that unjust Suspicion of all Mankind, which often, if not always, arises from the Knowledge of harbouring in our Bosoms a false and malignant Heart.82
David finds out what a proper “Degree of Suspicion” is only when the “structural need for his duping disappears when other characters’ experiences substitute for his experience (in the original volumes) or when he is close to death (in Volume the Last)”.83 It is no wonder that David’s lack of suspicion, the equivalent of his “Timidity of Mind”,84 permits Ratcliff and Orgueil to get “an Ascendancy over the Mind of David Simple, that no Creature on Earth could ever have obtained, had SELF alone been his Consideration”.85 Mandeville avers that “the disagreement between the words and actions of men is at no time more conspicuous, than when we would learn from them their sentiments, concerning the real worth of things”. On this note, the discourse of the sentimentally Quixotic David is counterpoised by that of economic self-interest, for, continues Mandeville, “To expect that others should serve us for nothing, is unreasonable: therefore, all commerce that man can have together, must be a continual bartering of one thing for another”.86 Judged from a Mandevillian perspective, the unreasonable David epitomizes sensibility read in an ironical key. For Mandeville, “men, as without complying with any weakness of their own, can part from what they value themselves, and, from no other motive but their love to goodness, perform a worthy action in silence”.87
82 Ibid., 324. 83 Gordon, The Practice of Quixotism, 78. 84 Fielding, Volume the Last, 323. 85 Ibid., 352. 86 Mandeville, “The Sixth Dialogue”, in The Fable of the Bees, 513. 87 Mandeville, “An Inquiry into the Origin of Moral Virtue”, in ibid., 21. 138 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Mandeville’s economic thought may be linked with James Kim’s insight into sentimental irony. According to Kim, sentimental irony “lingers over that grief-stricken moment of disintegration, registering the melancholy of something nevermore about to be”.88 The dissolu- tion of David’s family and community is thus enmeshed in the cult of pathos or nostalgia for a Golden Age metaphorically interpreted as class stability. For instance, David’s parents’ accumulation of wealth is a worthy action because it is performed steadily and with industry. Where they are eager to save, David is eager to spend benevolently. His actions performed “in silence” are worthy in a Quixotic way, radically divorced from men’s “bartering of one thing for another”. Along with them, the world of “romance idealism” is shattered and replaced by practical worth on which progressivism depends while sensibility is stifled by “a cold Neo-Stoicism”.89 Confronted with the egoistic principles that lay the foundations of Communio mercium, David realizes that sentimental plenitude cannot last when menaced by economic scarcity. The “logic of loss” intimated by Collier’s common observation that “The Attainment of our Wishes is but too often the Beginning of our Sorrows” is deployed by Sarah Fielding as a chain of tragic events. Without being “lessened and alleviated”, evil manifests itself through a number of deaths brought about either by disease or financial distress. Cynthia’s daughter dies because of the cruelty inflicted upon her by Mrs Orgueil, Orgueil’s cunning and rancorous wife who indulges herself in
88 Kim, “Mourning, Melancholia, and Modernity”, 501. Kim’s article opens new vistas for recent criticism on Sarah Fielding. Kim looks at David Simple as a novel dealing with early modern value crisis informed by Robert Markley’s theory of the new economic criticism. He correlates his theory with the Freudian concept of “melancholia” defined as an object-loss that still persists in consciousness. The resultant view is, in the words of Kim, an attempt “to take a step towards devising what might be called ‘negative history’. Inspired by Walter Benjamin’s famous meditation on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, this anti-teleological mode of historiography strives to tell the story of what did not happen, of Utopian longings left unfulfilled, trajectories set but not pursued, worlds imagined but never built” (ibid., 480). 89 Gautier, “Henry and Sarah Fielding on Romance and Sensibility”, 205. For a discussion of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century anti-Stoicism as a philosophical doctrine which proposed an ethical system based on human nature and, as such, an escape from “a state of apathy” dictated by ecclesiastical rule, see also Henry W. Sams, “Anti-Stoicism in Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-Century England”, Studies in Philology, XLI/1 (January 1944), 65-78. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 139 false and often foolish emotional scenarios. The death of young Cynthia is followed by that of Camilla’s and Valentine’s dear father and of Fanny, the daughter of Camilla and David. Their son Peter dies of smallpox while severe consumption kills the young David and their daughter Joan. Valentine dies of fever in Jamaica while his sister Camilla “survived her Child but two Months”. 90 Similar to Don Quixote, David dies only after he recognizes the shortcomings of benevolent sentimentalism. In such a morally and affectively barren landscape, the two survivors, Cynthia and Camilla, David’s remaining child, stand a chance to better their life lived “on borrowed time”,91 thanks to “the kind Protection of one whose Power assisted his Inclination to confer the highest Benefits”.92 Though everything happens according to a “logic of loss”, towards the end of the novel David learns to suspect and even doubt the presupposed benevolent acts performed by Orgueil and his wife. At first, David’s timidity hampers him from declining Mrs Orgueil’s offer to take his daughter Camilla into her house so as to educate her properly. Mrs Orgueil pretends to be kind to Camilla only to fuel her hatred for Cynthia. But David, as “a fit Object of his [Orgueil’s] Pity”, decides to “no longer give Faith to such cruel Promises of Friendship”, 93 especially after Orgueil’s wife mistreats the young Camilla at Bath. Orgueil understands pity in a Mandevillian way, namely as a frailty of human nature of which he cannot approve, given its incapacity – as opposed to reason alone – to avoid grief. “The weakest minds”, says Mandeville, “have generally the greatest share of it, for which reason none are more compassionate than women and children”.94 As a feminized hero, or as a “child in the drama of the world”, David hardly suspects anybody’s ill-designs and hardly abides by the rules of commercial ethos dependent on “use value”. As Gordon puts it: “The text may describe David as ‘blind’, since indeed he does not see what he should see, but he is blinded from seeing these phenomena because, like a quixote, he sees reality by means of a particular lens that reshapes whatever he encounters into what he
90 Fielding, Volume the Last, 413. 91 Terry, “David Simple and the Fallacy of Friendship”, 532. 92 Fielding, Volume the Last, 427. 93 Ibid., 356-57. 94 Mandeville, “An Inquiry into the Origin of Virtue”, 21. 140 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 wants to see: proofs of generosity.”95 This is why David’s “virtue- centred view”96 of life precludes any understanding of the language of trade. Not only is David ignorant of the meaning of “plumb”, he is completely at a loss when Mr Nichols, a “Steward to most of the Men of Fashion in that Country”,97 informs him that he lends out money on interest only if the lender makes proof of “proper Security”,98 which means, according to Mandeville, “the bartering of one thing for another”. Therefore, Mr Nichols exudes sympathy when loans are secured by bonds or notes, not by the absurd language of feeling:
David. “You don’t talk our Language, Sir”. Here Nichols sneers. Nichols. “Not your Language, Sir? I think I talk plain English; and only want to know what Security I should have, should I advance any Monies?” David. “If you will lend me only so small a Sum as ten Pounds, I am very willing to give you my Note, or Bond, for treble that Money; and will thankfully repay it, if it pleases God to bless Valentine: but I have no other means of so doing.99
By the same token, Cynthia and Valentine cannot be better-off in Jamaica, where they travel in order to earn a good living and, implicitly contribute to the welfare of the little – and now financially distressed – community. In Jamaica, Valentine dies of fever while Cynthia experiences “more Inhumanity and Insult than I could have expected from the different Reception we at first met with”.100 Here, unfortunately, they have to face the same English commercialism that tramples on any feeling for humanity. Far from being a welcoming place, Jamaica “turns out to be a colonial outpost that perpetuates domestic injustice”.101 Analogous to Don Quixote’s cure, David finally realizes that the shortcomings of friendship and sentimental benevolence are caused by
95 Gordon, The Practice of Quixotism, 86. 96 See Chapter 3, n.56. 97 Fielding, Volume the Last, 367. 98 Ibid., 368. 99 Ibid., 369. 100 Ibid., 391. 101 Bellamy, Commerce, Morality, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 135. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 141 the prudent commercial world’s creed that “Interest Will Not Lie” defined by Albert Hirschman as follows:
A maxim such as “Interest Will Not Lie” was originally an exhortation to pursue all of one’s aspirations in an orderly and reasonable manner; it advocated the injection of an element of calculating efficiency, as well as of prudence, into human behaviour whatever might be the passion by which it is basically motivated.102
Disengaged from “a masculine, competitive economic ethos”103 that implies calculation and prudence, the sentimental hero’s fulfilment – the forging of a “Union of Minds” at the end of David Simple – turns into a loss in Volume the Last, a loss that needs to be both remembered and criticized. David’s post-Quixotic, namely critically reasonable, thinking interprets the concatenation of nostalgia for what has been and disparagement of what is as a result of his actual experience:
Yet I found, by Experience, that there are some Pleasures with which Friendship pays her Votaries, that nothing in this World can equal. But the same experience has also convinced me, that when Fortune turns against us, she can point her Arrows with so much the sharpest Stings in her Quiver, that, when placed in the Balance, more than weighs down all her highest Enjoyments …. Thus my fancied Friends became my Plagues, and my real ones, by their Sufferings, took up my Heart by the Roots, and frightened me into the bearing the insolent Persecutions of the others – I found my Mind in such Chains as are much worse than any Slavery of the Body.104
David prepares to die, yet not without praising God’s plenty, which will help him “lessen and alleviate” the evil embodied by persons like Orgueil, his wife and the perfidious Ratcliff: “… with a strong and lively Hope in the Revelation God has pleased to send us, and with a Heart swelling with Gratitude for that revelation, I can carry my Project beyond the Grave.”105 This proof of Christian morality and
102 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977, 42. 103 Bellamy, Commerce, Morality, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 132. 104 Fielding, Volume the Last, 430-31. 105 Ibid., 432. 142 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 consolation is what Terry terms a “deathbed anagnorisis”,106 meant as a purge of his sufferings inflicted by “the insolent Persecutions of others”. Consequently, Christian consolation appears as the pinnacle of David’s sentimental benevolence and quest for friendship in the afterlife, in spite of the fact that they lead to worthy actions performed “in silence”, as Mandeville asserts. But these silent actions, the Quixotic counterpart of Mandevillian economics, have the merit of being “virtue-centred” and as simple as the surname of David, who “is escaped from the Possibility of falling into any future Afflictions”107 provoked by commercial rectitude. The major purpose of this chapter has been to investigate the incongruence between the discourse of sentimental benevolence – coextensive with a logic of gain in David Simple – and that of Mandevillian economics in line with a “logic of loss” in Volume the Last. An early novel of sentiment in which the figure of the main character – filtered through Richardson’s Clarissa’s feminine sensibility – inaugurates the “cult of the Man of Feeling”, David Simple is a moral Romance that deploys the idea of sentimental knight-errantry, a derivation of the Don Quixote motif that her brother, Henry Fielding, inserted in the novel in order to distinguish between David’s good nature and the other characters’ falsity insisted upon in the 1753 sequel. Acclaimed by her brother, like Richardson, for “a vast Penetration into human Nature”, Sarah Fielding transforms the Quixotic motif into a productive one in David Simple, in the sense that amicability based on refined feelings leads on to the set-up of a “little Society” in which common wealth, affection and disinterested benevolence become an unwritten rule. In David Simple, the protagonist’s possession of “more of what Shakespear calls the Milk of Human Kind” (100) “intimately corporealizes what is represented otherwise more abstractly as an exchange of money”.108 Where sentimental plenitude starts at the end of David Simple and lasts for eleven years, thus indicating that David Simple’s Quixotic benevolence is finally rewarded, it gradually crumbles in Volume the Last, as a consequence of the powerful influence of Mandevillian economics encapsulated by the burgeoning
106 Terry, “David Simple and the Fallacy of Friendship”, 536. 107 Fielding, Volume the Last, 432. 108 Landry, “Picturing Benevolence”, 159. Quixotism in Sarah Fielding 143 belief that “Interest Will Not Lie”. David’s sentimental Quixotism grounded on Shaftesbury’s moral sense and Hume’s sympathy is counteracted and dissolved by the morally-corrupt logic of the market built on self-interest. Under these circumstances, “romance idealism” falls prey to actual experience, in which virtue as practical worth is opposed to pathos, thus articulating the discourse of mercantilism. Read in this way, sentimentalism acquires an ironical dimension in Volume the Last, inasmuch as it corroborates David’s downward mobility with the value crisis penetrating his small community and, eventually, with Christian consolation as the only means of “carrying my Prospect beyond the Grave”. As Kim suggests, “plagued by the contemporary value crisis, affected by rampant status inconsistency, and confronted with the imminent demise of her social group, Fielding deploys sentimental irony as a language for grieving the losses wrought by early modernity, daring in the process to imagine another, radically different world”.109 The establishment of a sentimental com- munity (David’s rewarded Quixotism) versus the loss of his friends (the trigger of melancholia) coupled with financial loss, which is the result of masculine competitive commercialism, are enough proofs for Sarah Fielding to show that “sentiment is a surplus in the economy with no exchange value”. 110 In stark opposition with Mandevillian commercial ethics, sentiment as a “surplus” prefigures, in stricto sensu, the excessive, completely baleful affective energy of Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling tackled in the next chapter.
109 Kim, “Mourning, Melancholia, and Modernity”, 494. 110 Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction, 97.
CHAPTER 5
THE BAD EFFECTS OF SENTIMENTAL QUIXOTISM: UNPRINCIPLED SENTIMENT AS VIRTUE IN HENRY MACKENZIE’S THE MAN OF FEELING
Quixotic implications of the Man of Feeling’s moral epistemology Far from being an “orthodox fiction”1 relying on the Cervantic model, Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling takes Quixotism both as forma mentis and disinterested social practice, thus aiming to defuse “an alarming crisis in the corruption of the state”.2 However, the Man of Feeling’s “plot of action”, ironically deployed by Mackenzie as inaction, conjoined with “a plot of thought”,3 marks the shift from the paradigmatic Good-Natured Man to the problematic Man of Sensibility,4 whose moral epistemology translates feeling per se as virtue. The language of chivalry responsible for Don Quixote’s razόn de la sinrazόn is replaced by the language of the heart resulting both from “the change in the base of morality in mid-eighteenth century sentimental ethics” and “the change in the connotations of the term ‘sentimental’ from morality to feeling”.5 Harley, the protagonist of
1 Gordon, The Practice of Quixotism, 3. 2 Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling (1771), ed. Brian Vickers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001, 62 (all further references to this edition will be given in the text). 3 Hollahan, Crisis-Consciousness and the Novel, 45. 4 See Susan Manning’s article, “Sensibility”, in The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830, 99, n.1. She distinguishes between “sensibility”, i.e. sentiments as bodily signs, emotions and moral worth, and “Sensibility” understood as a set of “literary modes” that exploit and question “sensibility”. Throughout the present chapter, and more to my purpose, I shall use this distinction in order to examine the problematic of the Man of Sensibility’s emotional excess as regress and failure, as portrayed by Mackenzie’s politics of feeling. This is translated as the instruction of sentiment, with reason or principle playing a fundamental role. 5 Sheriff, The Good-Natured Man, 73. 146 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Mackenzie’s novel, is Quixotic to the extent that he witnesses the fall of aristocracy and the rise of the capitalist spirit heralded by “progressive ideology” 6 in a world dominated by commercial ex- change and consumption as the only material virtues. Furthermore, he endeavours, discursively rather than actively, to get involved in the reformation of society through an exchange of tears. Like Quixote, who attaches the particle don to his low rank as a hidalgo7 in order to imitate and perpetuate the chivalric code of justice, Harley is a mere aristocratic relic that “pictures benevolence against the commercial cry”.8 Instead of performing righteous actions, Harley has recourse to “feeling in excess”,9 particularly tears,10 in order to sympathize inap- propriately with characters overcome by social wrongs, financial distress and sentimental deceit. His acts of charity attempt to establish a sensus communis understood as Communio mercium, “the new form of human community”.11 Thus, The Man of Feeling is, I propose, the ultimate expression of the Quixotic “logic of loss”12 read in terms of feeling as principled public virtue. In contradistinction with what I call Henry and Sarah Fielding’s logic of gain, the novel is seen as “a
6 See McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 150-59. 7 In seventeenth-century Spain, the title of hidalgo designated the lowest rank of nobility, of which Don Quixote was a part. Also, it literally meant hijo de algo, which translated the individual’s full responsibility for his actions. 8 According to the title of Donna Landry’s article, “Picturing Benevolence Against the Commercial Cry, 1750-1798, or, Sarah Fielding and the Secret Causes of Romanticism”, in The History of British Women’s Writing, 1750-1830, V, 150-71. I use part of Landry’s title as a compelling argument for my analysis. See also Donna Landry, “Picturing Benevolence: The Picturesque and Radical Charity”, in University of Bucharest Review, X/2 (2008), University of Bucharest Press, 87-96. 9 Dragoş Ivana, “Exquisite Sympathy as Quixotism in Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling”, in Language, Literature and Culture in Present-Day Context: Contemporary Research Perspectives in Anglophone PhD Studies, eds Renáta Gregová, Soňa Šnircová, Slávka Tomaščiková, The Slovak Association for the Study of English, SKASE, 2011, 155. 10 Appendix 3 to the 2001 edition of The Man of Feeling contains Henry Morley’s “Index to Tears” published in The Man of Feeling by Henry Mackenzie, London, Paris, New York and Melbourne: Cassell and Company, 1886, which counts 49 references to “tears”. They are meant as a useful indication of Harley’s excessive and concurrently inappropriate feelings that transform him into “an idiot savant”, as Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave call him in the Introduction to The Man of Feeling, xii. 11 Anthony Ascham, Of the Confusions and Revolutions of Governments (1649), quoted in McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 204. 12 Irimia, “From the Sublime to the Comic: The Call of the Modern”, 12. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 147 terminal formula” because, “with all its talk of virtue, it cannot reflect at all on the problems of conduct, the practices of any existing society”.13 We remember Janet Todd’s suggestion that “the novels of the sentimental man are offsprings of Don Quixote, with its portrait of the idealistic ingénu”. 14 Since Quixotism as forma mentis and modus operandi is itself a type of ideology practised in order to resist the status quo, I argue that the Man of Feeling is ideologically involved in both the observation and understanding of a mercantile society. By ideological involvement I understand Harley’s unconditional yet incautious benevolence of Latitudinarian origin which, coupled with wrong sympathy,15 highlights his “logic of loss”. By the same token, Harley’s misinterpretation of society’s interested feelings translated as false charity and benevolence unravels a socio-ethical problem caused, in the words of McKeon, by “the replacement of status by class”.16 Harley, the representative of the now collapsed “aristocratic ideology”, is a hopeless eye-witness to the rise of “progressive ideology” meant as upward mobility based on “internal merit and rewarded by external success”.17 I contend that it is this understanding of ideological involvement that best explains why the Man of Sensibility is a problematic individual guided by a problematic moral epistemology, according to which feeling appears as principled public virtue. The sentimental hero is problematic because, as Hume puts it in A Treatise of Human Nature, he confines himself to understanding the others’ emotions only as “impressions” of original states: “All human creatures are related to us by resemblance. Their persons, therefore, their interests, their passions, their pains and pleasures must strike upon us in a lively manner, and produce an emotion similar to the original one; since a lively idea is easily converted into an
13 John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, 118-19. 14 Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction, 108. 15 The concept of “sympathy” will be discussed in the third section with reference to Harley’s inappropriate conduct. My analysis will focus particularly on David Hume’s analysis of the term in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-1740), later on developed by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which sympathy is necessarily filtered through the eyes of “the impartial spectator”. 16 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, xxiii. 17 Ibid., xvii. 148 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 impression.”18 The Man of Feeling behaves like Don Quixote when he converts his own “impressions” into “an ideological strategy”19 that engenders fatal errors: feeling becomes excessive, the reasonable interpretation of allegedly similar emotions is replaced by an impressionistic interpretation of self-interest and callousness disguised as a sympathetic response to the sentimental man’s goodness and acts of charity. Caught between feeling and benevolence, the Man of Sensibility is the representative of “moral weeping”,20 a chimera of virtuous feeling against a capitalist background void of the Latitudinarian civic humanist tradition. Although he attempts to grapple with the problem of ethical disillusionment provoked by the world’s selfishness and its penchant for “the immense riches” that “have erected a standard of ambition, destructive of private morals, and of public virtue” (62) the problematic Man of Feeling, notably Harley, remains most of the time just a passive observer of contemporary follies. This is because “his internal concentration is a means of getting as much pleasure as possible from indulging and analyzing his emotion”.21 In opposition to the Good-Natured Man, the Man of Feeling articulates a confusing rhetoric of feeling and/as virtue which, more often than not, recommends him as a fool or, as Sheriff points out, as a “degeneration” 22 of the former. Aware that “the passions of men are temporary madnesses, and sometimes very fatal in their effects” (25), Mackenzie’s major character’s declamation echoes Hume’s belief that the passions – synonymous, in his acceptation, with “feeling”, “affection” and “sentiment” – are triggers for action. Once inflamed, or turned into “madnesses” with the help of the imagination, they “keep pace with the imagination in all its variations”.23 Not only is Harley’s statement significant for the contro-
18 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, II, i, 203. Hume’s definition of “impression” is of utmost importance here: “By the terms of impression I wou’d not be understood to express the manner, in which our lively perceptions are produc’d in the soul, but merely the perceptions themselves; for which there is no particular name either in the English or any other language, that I know of” (I, i, 1). 19 Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 23. Mullan uses the phrase in order to highlight a Humean model of social relations based on sympathy, which leads to a communion of feelings able to create social harmony in a disinterested manner. 20 Crane, “Suggestions Toward A Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’”, 205. 21 Sheriff, The Good-Natured Man, 76. 22 Ibid., 73. 23 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, II, iii, 302. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 149 versial relationship between theory and “mad” actions, it is crucial in treating the Man of Feeling as a sentimental Quixote as long as “the empirical study of invisible things flourishes in sentimentalism, as does the quixotism associated with the practice” 24 nourished by Humean “impressions”. With this in mind, I shall elaborate on Harley’s “ideology of feeling” reflected in Mackenzie’s novel as a “transition from pathos to absurdity”.25 Therefore, despite his unproductive benevolence, Harley is a Quixotic sentimental fool who acts contrary to Hume’s understanding of sympathy. This means that the protagonist fails to harmonize with society and, most significantly, to establish the much craved community of feeling, as David Simple eventually does. Actively involved in the philosophical debates on sentimentalism held by Francis Hutcheson, Adam Ferguson, David Hume and Adam Smith in order to examine the degree to which feeling really is both a marker of exemplary virtue in action and a pleasant emotion able to ensure sociability based on communal interest, Mackenzie popularized the Man of Sensibility as a masculine counterpart of Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa. He thus showed the limitations of imprudent feeling, or of feeling separated from reason, especially when it is experienced in interaction with socio-economic factors. Mackenzie provides us with an account of Harley’s presupposed principled feeling critiqued as effeminate pathetic fallacy occasioned by excessive lament, unconditional suffering for others and “the tribute” and “blessing” of tears (26). The effeminate pathetic fallacy is, according to Bending and Bygrave, a putative solution to the crisis of the representation of masculinity determined by both the collapse of the “modes of epic and the heroic” and by the impact of the above-mentioned discussions of sentiment on gender. Bending and Bygrave claim that “in culture at large, to ‘civilize’ is also to ‘feminize’, and while this was on the one hand to be welcomed, on the other it ran the risk of leaving those males who constituted civilization effeminate and weak”.26 I associate Bending and Bygrave’s observation with both McKeon’s epistemological and socio-ethical answer to the question of the popularity of the man rather than the woman of feeling in the latter
24 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 94. 25 Bending and Bygrave, Introduction to The Man of Feeling, xv. 26 Ibid., xiii. 150 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 half of the eighteenth century.27 Again, as in the case of David Simple, McKeon’s explanation serves my purpose from a twofold perspective. As regards the Man of Feeling’s Quixotic, effeminate mind and practice, “the quality of sensation … represented a detached abstraction from sense experience, the virtuality of emotional experience rather than the actuality of sensible experience”. In terms of “aristocratic ideology”, “what could be seen on the outside and in public – rank, regalia, personal display, even refined complexion – was a dependable sign of internal and ‘private’ value”. In parallel, sensibility replaces the Man of Feeling’s aristocratic honour and merit with a predilection for “the involuntary somatic signs of deep feeling” experienced by a body perceived as “a system of socio-ethical signification in terms of a bodily materialism that would evade the ideology of aristocratic privilege”.28 From this perspective, Mackenzie’s Man of Sensibility is a sentimental Quixote, whose “virtuality of emotional experience”, that is his false projection of the idea of benevolence, sympathy and charity, articulates a moral epistemology that clashes with the prudential, “unaffected” sentiments underlying a commercial, not sentimental, community. Yet again, Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling is a metonymy of mid-eighteenth-century ethics, which confuses unprincipled feeling with virtuous action. In Sheriff’s words, “changes in the basis of morality, not changes in moral values, ultimately brought about the disappearance of the Good-Natured Man”, since, he explains, “the trend … was to divorce goodness from nature and to wed it to social justice, custom, and opinion”.29 The substitution of the paradigmatic Good-Natured Man for the problematic Man of Sensibility occurred under the auspices of David Hume’s sceptical philosophical system. As a close friend of Hume, Henry Mackenzie brought his critical contribution to the “improvement or ornament of the human mind” proposed by the “Science of Man”.30 Not only does this science impose experience as the essential working tool, it formulates an epistemology that excludes
27 See Chapter 4, n.3. 28 McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 673-74. 29 Sheriff, The Good-Natured Man, 91. Sheriff’s remark is a repetition of Hume’s belief that morals “are mere human contrivances for the interest of society”. See A Treatise of Human Nature, III, iii, 411. 30 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, x. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 151 reason 31 and views moral judgement as “essentially private and subjective”.32 Sentiment as a product of morals, contends Hume, is subject to a wide array of interpretations and can only be inferred, for it cannot be empirically verifiable. As a sentimental Quixote, Harley “translates private feeling into universal truth, urging moral uniformity to advance a new fiction of empirical, rational authority”.33 As an effeminate hero predisposed to misinterpret or, like Charlotte Lennox’s Arabella, to “overread”34 others’ sentiments according to his Quixotic model of sympathy and benevolence, the Man of Sensibility experiences feeling as a delicate sensation, not as a spontaneous emotional reaction triggered, as Hume says, by both sympathy and judgement. Mackenzie lambastes Harley’s sanctification of the “heart’s affections, its trust in feeling as the evaluator of virtue, and its sensitiveness to the delicate and irrational intuitions by which man is prompted”35 through what he describes as “the science of manners”.36 Coextensive with “the Science of Man”, “the science of manners” aims at creating an aesthetics of sensibility rooted in a Humean model of sociability. Nevertheless, it is viewed as immoral and perilous by Mackenzie because it only captures emotional self-indulgence – a Quixotic mind-set which cannot decode other affections properly because reason, “or the laws of principle”, 37 have made room for “thinking through feeling”.38 Despite the Man of Feeling’s engage-
31 In A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume asserts that “morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason” (III, i, 325). 32 Brissenden, Virtue in Distress, 24. 33 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 21. 34 Weinsheimer, quoted in ibid., 132. 35 Humphreys, “‘The Friend of Mankind’”, 205. 36 Henry Mackenzie, quoted in Susan Manning, “Sensibility”, 82. 37 Appendix 1, Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger, 20 (Saturday, 18 June 1785), in The Man of Feeling, 103. 38 Bending and Bygrave, Introduction to The Man of Feeling, xii. Also, apart from the etymological meaning of “sensibility”, i.e. both intellectual and physical perception, the word “sentimental”, which spawned a wide range of connotations like “shallow”, “excessive”, “insincere” in the latter half of the eighteenth century, overlapped with “sensibility” to such an extent that no clear distinction could be made between them. A community of feeling was thus possible by analogy with a community of sense (sensus communis). If experience is their common denominator, we can understand why “sensible” also acquired the meaning of physical perception. When the intellect endeavours to pursue true knowledge, human experience is, according to Samuel Johnson, “the great test for truth” (Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson, 202). John 152 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 ment in the active process of sociability upheld by sympathy, his self is and remains emotionally privatized and anchored in the delicacy and refinement of sentiment rather than in the social sphere that constitutes “the great test for truth”, as Samuel Johnson believes. In addition, he is stuck in his feelings of wrong sympathy and benevolence, notably because sympathy, according to Hume, functions as social utility.39 Consequently, sentimental benevolence is actually the product of moral refinement or “delicacy”, which produces emotional self-gratification. The Universal Magazine writes in 1778 that “it must be allowed that Delicacy of Sentiment .… disposes us to rejoice with the happy, and by partaking to increase their pleasure .… It excites a pleasing sensation in our own breast, which if its duration be considered, may be placed among the highest gratifications of sense.” 40 “Delicacy of Sentiment” remains, in Harley’s case, a Quixotic forma mentis and modus vivendi of an effeminate passive observer of social utility. The effects, asserts Mackenzie, can only be dangerous and totally unproductive, since the connection between “enclosed self and outgoing sympathy” 41 – so strong in Henry Fielding – has been jeopardized because of the sentimental hero’s “virtuality of emotional experience” dictated by the lack of Humean reasoning. The “ideology of feeling”, which underlies the “logic of loss”, resists and critiques Quixotically the “antiaristocratic heroism of economic man at work in the marketplace”.42 As a misfit within a world of commercial interests, the Man of Sensibility signals “an alarming crisis in the corruption of the state” (62). This is caused by the currency and pre-eminence of the Mandevillean selfish interests exhibited by the merchant class over the Shaftesburian doctrine of moral sense typical of the nobility. Interpreted according to Adam
Locke was thus highly suspicious of confident opinions formulated in the process of gaining true knowledge whereas the sentimentalists asserted the absolute authority of the observer’s private judgements. 39 Hume claims that “no quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own” (A Treatise of Human Nature, II, i, 225). 40 Quoted in Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 5. 41 Golden, Fielding’s Moral Psychology, viii. 42 McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy”, 314. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 153
Smith’s political economy, as well as to the theory formulated by the Scottish Enlightenment, the Man of Feeling belongs to “a particular phase within a universal model of societal progression, a ‘moment’ in which a society’s economic surplus over subsistence need enabled humanity to cultivate the luxury of emotional expression in relationships”.43 I argue that Mackenzie’s novel challenges the idea that “the luxury of emotional expression in relationships” is fuelled by benevolence, sympathy and friendship, as it happens in David Simple. In terms of moral epistemology and according to Mackenzie’s critique of the sentimental novel, The Man of Feeling synthesizes the shift in “the climate of the age from one cooled by the breezes of intellect to one warmed by the zephyrs of sentiment”.44
The novel’s critique of sentimental morality In The Lounger, No. 20 for 18 June 1785, Mackenzie argues that the sentimental novel has become a degraded genre which foregrounds a fallacious and dangerous ethical system resulted from conflicting sentimental virtues taken as moral duties: “The principal danger of novels, as forming a mistaken and pernicious system of morality, seems to me to arise from that contrast between one virtue or excellence and another, that war of duties which is to be found in many of them, particularly in that species called the sentimental.”45 In the light of Hume’s distinction between natural and artificial virtues Mackenzie takes virtues as “duties”.46 Imported from France as “entanglements of delicacy”, such virtues can no longer appropriately participate in the dynamic of social
43 Manning, “Sensibility”, 83-84. 44 Humphreys, “The Friend of Mankind”, 204. 45 Appendix 1, Mackenzie, The Lounger, No. 20, 101. 46 For a fascinating discussion about this topic, see Schneewind, “The Misfortunes of Virtue”, 42-63. Schneewind claims that the shift from virtue ethics to Christian ethics, as well as the rise of the new science in the seventeenth century led to an understanding of virtue as dependent on rules, laws and principles. Virtue-centred views were thus replaced by act-centred views also supported by natural law theory, which differentiates between “perfect and imperfect rights and duties” whereby lawyers “made room for love in their general theory” (ibid., 49). As regards Hume’s modern theory of this issue, Schneewind points out that his distinction between the artificial and the natural virtues, which is synonymous with the taxonomy perfect- imperfect duties, proves that “a theory making virtue rather than law the central concept of ethics can give a better account of the distinction than that given by the natural lawyers who invented it” (ibid., 50). 154 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 relationships and, implicitly, of the public good. As in the Good- Natured Man’s case, natural virtues are inherent and unconditionally and disinterestedly performed, without presupposing “the virtuous person’s awareness of participating in a social practice”.47 In contrast, artificial virtues are conditioned by “the existence of a general practice of exercising them, and so may not come about in each particular case”. 48 Harley, the sentimental protagonist endowed with natural virtue, contrasts sharply with other civilized nations, especially France, in terms of social behaviour. The Ghost, one of the narrators of Harley’s story, makes clear in the opening chapter that “in some nations (among the French, for instance) the ideas of the inhabitants from climate … are so vivacious … that they must, even in small societies, have a frequent collision; the rust will wear off sooner: but in Britain it often goes with a man to his grave; nay, he dares not even pen a hic jacet to speak out for him after his death” (7). The “rust” which “wears off” in nations like France due to social interaction ironically contaminates Harley in his ongoing attempt to create a community of feeling, no matter how small it may be. By connecting the name of Samuel Richardson with Jean François Marmontel, a French dramatist as fashionable as Richardson due to his juxtaposition of morality with feeling, Mackenzie lays stress on the canonical sentimental fiction as an art dramatically opposed to his “bundle of little episodes, put together without art, and of no importance on the whole, with something of nature, and little else in them”. “One is ashamed to be pleased with the works of one knows not whom”, confesses the editor of Mackenzie’s fragmented chapters, because the readers want the name of authors like Marmontel or Richardson to be “on the title-page” (4-5).49 Unlike unknown authors,
47 Ibid., 52, n.33. 48 Ibid., 52. 49 It is interesting that Mackenzie does not mention Laurence Sterne as a source of inspiration, though it is generally admitted that he adopted the latter’s narrative technique and the rhetoric of sentiment displayed in A Sentimental Journey and Tristram Shandy. Nonetheless, The Man of Feeling lacks Richardson’s psychological insight into the human heart and Sterne’s satirical vigour and belief that feeling is seen as virtue if and only if it is the motivator of action. For Sterne the focus on sentimental benevolence as such is not suggestive of virtuous actions. Conversely, actions are virtuous because they trespass the realm of emotion, being ascribed to the law of God or natural benevolence. Yorick, for instance, misinterprets feeling as benevolence and fails to observe that persons like the monk in A Sentimental Journey are naturally generous. Though in the Introduction to The Man of Feeling, Bending The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 155 such reputed figures of sentimental fiction are skilled in conveying the right sentiments the readers are supposed to share. Though Mackenzie urges his audience “to trust their private literary judgment without the sanction of the literary establishment”,50 he challenges their horizon of expectation when the fictional editor confesses that the fragmented episodes contain “something of nature”. “Something of nature”, explains the author, actually means “some features of the heart” (93) which, even as they develop into Harley’s over-exaggerated sentimental distress, must be read accordingly. They are unlikely to turn Harley’s particular banal experience – “I was a good deal affected with some very trifling passages in it” (5), comments the editor – into a conventional model, or “artificial virtue” with which the readers would sympathize. As Barbara Benedict suggests, “Mackenzie slips in a final criticism of sentimental readers and authors for confusing self-regard with the regard for and of nature”.51 “Self-regard” versus “the regard for and of nature” is also a valid dichotomy which explains the separation between Harley’s sentimental morality and society’s commercial interests. Mr Silton, the baronet of Silton Hall “now forgotten and gone” (7) is a relic of an old unblemished morality which, in modern times, bemoans only individual suffering, private, not fellow-feeling and misanthropy. “Rust”, philosophizes the baronet, “is rather an encrustation, which nature has given for purposes of the greatest wisdom”. Mr Silton’s pessimistic view of the materialistic world is furthered by his differentiation between two types of “bashfulness”, one describing arrogant and unsentimental “coxcombs”, the other denoting “a consciousness, which the most delicate feelings produce, and the most extensive knowledge cannot always remove”. Harley, the baronet’s Quixotic replica of sentimental individualism and, and Bygrave observe the similarity between A Sentimental Journey and The Man of Feeling, they argue that the former was written three years before the latter, so Mackenzie’s imitation of Sterne would have been impossible. They support their argument by quoting from a letter Mackenzie wrote to his friend James Elphinston immediately after The Man of Feeling was published. “Setting out with this principle, that it was an imitation of Sterne”, says Mackenzie, “it was rightly pronounced [by the Monthly Review] a lame one; because, in truth, no such imitation was intended” (ibid., xix). 50 Barbara M. Benedict, Framing Feeling: Sentiment and Style in English Prose Fiction, 1745-1800, New York: AMS Press, 1994, 121. 51 Ibid., 120. 156 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 ironically, of moral “wisdom” is “of the latter species of bashful animals” (8) prone to loss because private feeling never interacts with society and is never an incentive to public action. Barbara Benedict is right in saying that “for Mackenzie, sentiment may demonstrate refined sensibility, but it also can erode civic virtue”.52 In opposition to John Mullan’s claim that “we do not get any ‘war of duties’ in Mackenzie’s novels”,53 my view is that “the war of virtues” breaks out precisely because of these two conflicting attitudes. One interprets the world by means of private delicate feeling as the ultimate expression of sentimental benevolence, the other portrays a world whose basis of morality is not sentimental, but commercial. Actually, Mackenzie reveals the limitations of sentiment and sensibility as exemplum through Harley’s moral epistemology which, faulty as it is, manages to “construct the myth of such knowledge” understood by Mullan as “transparent, knowable virtue”. 54 Closer to my argument, “the myth of such knowledge” becomes synonymous with a Quixotic critique of the status quo, which is as “knowable” and “transparent” as the world’s defiance of exemplary virtue subjected to economic duress. Mackenzie’s harsh criticism of refined feeling as virtue (Harley’s world of Romance) at war with social duties (the pragmatic world of the novel) stems from the fact that the former must be subordinated – contrary to Hume’s abhorrence of reason as an important agent for the establishment of the rules of morality – to “truth and reason”, for they “are more apt to attract the view and excite the admiration of the beholders”.55 Analogous with Samuel Johnson’s strongly held belief that virtue must be neither “angelical, nor above probability”, 56 Mackenzie links sentimental virtue with conscience, without which feeling enters the realm of Quixotism, being rendered merely as emotional enthusiasm. Harley’s atrophied will is the clear sign of loss, for, Mackenzie warns us, it is silenced by “a sickly sort of refinement” that “creates imaginary evils and distresses, and imaginary blessings
52 Ibid., 117. 53 Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 125. Mullan argues that Mackenzie’s novels foreground sentimental heroes “hounded by villains and libertines who simply threaten all social virtues. Moral choice is not an issue; the novel of sentiment has actually purified itself of any vestiges of debate.” 54 Ibid., 126. 55 Appendix 1, Mackenzie, The Lounger, No. 20, 102. 56 Johnson, The Rambler, 4 (31 March 1750), II, 26. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 157 and enjoyments, which embitter the common disappointments, and depreciate the common attainments of life”.57 As a descendant of Richardson’s sentimental mode, Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling was composed in line with the former’s new technique of “writing to the moment”. 58 Walter Scott writes at the end of Waverley that the three volumes of his novel were dedicated to “Our Scottish Addison, Henry Mackenzie, by an Unknown Admirer of His Genius”. 59 Scott also says that The Man of Feeling is “rather the history of effects produced on the human mind by a series of events, than the narrative of those events themselves”.60 By the same token, the sporting curate, the editor’s shooting companion, confesses that Harley’s life story is “no more a history than it is a sermon” (4). These observations unravel the “history” of experienced or observed sensibility which takes the form of a “sermon” meant to educate sentiment and to calibrate the reader’s adequate response to sentimental fiction. Manifesting itself in “a bundle of episodes”, in snapshots of emotional life or in scenes of distress or excessive feeling, sensibility has “no history”61 partly because it is fragmented, partly because “the enthusiasm of feeling”, as Mackenzie notes, cannot be properly verbalized. Such is the force of Harley’s feelings, for instance, that he is at a loss for words: “There were a thousand sentiments; – but they gushed so impetuously on his heart, that he could not utter a syllable” (78). Pathos and logos are in conflict because the immediacy of emotional experience cannot be translated “from the language of the heart to the language of the page”.62 In Leo Braudy’s theoretical terms, the form of the sentimental novel, which comes from “the fictional shaping of a congruence between self and story”, is “the best way to examine more closely those dim and submerged aspects of human character that earlier literary forms tend to obscure”.63 The sentimental novel, therefore,
57 Appendix 1, Mackenzie, The Lounger, No. 20, 102. 58 Samuel Richardson, The History of Clarissa Harlowe in a Series of Letters, in The Novels of Samuel Richardson, London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co. 1824, II, 254. 59 Walter Scott, Waverley (1814), London: Dent, 1969, 478. 60 Walter Scott, Lives of the Novelists (1821-1824), London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1906, 172. 61 Manning, “Sensibility”, 86. 62 Ibid., 88. 63 Leo Braudy, “The Form of the Sentimental Novel”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, VII/1 (Autumn 1973), 6. 158 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 lays emphasis on temporary – and discontinuous – sequences of exalted sentiment in order to dismiss the idea that feeling, divorced from “conscience”, means virtue and also to depreciate refined sentiment, which “inspires a childish pride of our own superior delicacy, and an unfortunate contempt of the plain worth, the ordinary but useful occupations and ideas of those around us”.64 Sentiment alone is not and can never be, in Mackenzie’s view, an authentic agent for a Humean type of sociability made possible due to the collaborative work of sympathy and reasoning.65 I wish to end this section with a short presentation of Mackenzie’s novelistic structure in order to reinforce not only the Richardsonian “writing to the moment” but also the question of “feeling to the moment”, which is held responsible for Harley’s unprincipled feeling and, implicitly, “logic of loss”. Rescued from “a grave, oddish kind of man” whom “the country people called The Ghost”, the manuscript is “torn” by a sporting curate who finds it after the Ghost left the parish because it does not present the events in a logical order. Consequently, the manuscript becomes “excellent wadding” in the curate’s gun, its fragmentation being a fictional strategy for undercutting narrative completeness, which “would undermine the emotional impact of the story”. 66 Shooting together with the fictional editor, who only narrates the introduction to the novel, the curate, “a strenuous logician”, is ready to exchange the fragmented manuscript for the editor’s “great part of an edition of one of the German Illustrissimi” (4). From this perspective, the editor is a sentimental individual “affected with some very trifling passages” (5) in the manuscript whereas the curate is a reasonable person who prefers the German philosophers or logicians “who were sniped at for their rigidity of thinking”.67 The stories, or the scenes, delight the editor who intervenes or omits chapters because they are not artless, but artistically put together “within the relatively
64 Appendix 1, Mackenzie, The Lounger, 20, 102. 65 See Susan Manning, “Sensibility”, in which she summarizes this point very well: “While the ethical standing of Sensibility might be defended by emphasizing its didactic and pedagogical orientation – the education of the passions was its ‘business’ – its actual impact inclined towards emotion that exceeded utility” (89). 66 Braudy, “The Form of the Sentimental Novel”, 6. 67 E.H. Peterson quoted in The Man of Feeling, Explanatory Notes by Stephen Bending and Stephen Bygrave, 113. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 159 uninteresting, seemingly unstructured story of Harley”. 68 Harley’s “history” (4) is an ironically used term, for only public figures, not individuals placed in a privatized social and sentimental context, have “histories”. Some chapters are missing, the editor informs us, because they “were of much the same tenor with the preceding; recitals of little adventures, in which the dispositions of a man, sensible to judge, and still more warm to feel, had room to unfold themselves” (93). In contrast with the sentimental editor, the curate, with his penchant for rigid logic, stands for “intellectual self-consciousness as well as any formal literary sophistications authenticated by tradition”. 69 They are dismantled by the Ghost, the narrator of Harley’s life, who sympathizes with the protagonist’s false image of virtue derived from powerful emotional “effects”. Introduced as Charles, the Ghost admires Harley’s sentimental benevolence and never denounces it as Quixotic. Charles’, like Harley’s, sensibility “is a humour”70 which yields no palpable results. When Harley finally dies because of his physical incapacity to declare his love for Miss Walton, the Ghost confesses that “every beat of my heart awakens a virtue!” that will make the reader “hate the world” (98). Mackenzie thus ironically distinguishes between the sentimental reader’s contemptus mundi and his identification with Harley’s sentimental morality. This disjunction rehearses Mackenzie’s disbelief in the relevance of sentimental morality to social harmony. In addition, the manuscript’s incoherence given by gaps and the arbitrary nature of the narrative71 “are extended into a failure to speak”72 and, implicitly, into an ephemeral triumph of “feeling to the moment”, of feeling as a kind of Quixotic virtue which, according to Mackenzie’s
68 Sheriff, The Good-Natured Man, 84. 69 Braudy, “The Form of the Sentimental Novel”, 6. Similarly, in Framing Feeling, Barbara Benedict points out that “the Holy Ghost or Ghost’s holy script – or spirituality, lies not in the mechanical services that the fat curate performs, but in the narrative the reader is offered”. Benedict also invokes the names of Rousseau, Henry Brooke and Sterne in order to underline that, according to the philosophical and literary principles of sensibility, “conventions, rules, and logic abuse the human spirit” (120). 70 Sheriff, The Good-Natured Man, 87. 71 The novel starts with Chapter XI, as a result of the editor’s arbitrary arrangement of the various episodes the manuscript contains. 72 Bending and Bygrave, Introduction to The Man of Feeling, viii. 160 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 ethical theory, proves to be unfit for a prudential world guided by “use value”.73
The Man of Feeling’s burdensome practice of sympathy In the light of Mackenzie’s critique of sentiment as faltering moral epistemology and Hume’s model of sociability extended by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), in which he puts forward his theory of the “impartial spectator”,74 I shall elaborate on the impracticality of excessive feeling by concentrating on Harley’s sympathetic communication perceived as Quixotic. I would like to start from Patricia Spacks’ noteworthy suggestions that “an ethical dimension inheres in the nature of the narrative” whereas “an ethical paradigm comprises an image of social behaviour”.75 The discrepancy between Harley’s idealized Quixotic feeling and its impracticality can be accounted for by an interdisciplinary approach mingling the history of ideas with the gendered representation of the privatization of virtue. The former examines the socio-ethical theories on “sympathy”, “virtue”, “benevolence” and “charity” advanced by the “moral-sense school”,76 political economy, that is the discourse of civic humanism as well as the burgeoning of capitalism as a visible sign of secular modern progress advocated by Smith’s An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes
73 Manning, “Sensibility”, 97. 74 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments; or, An Essay towards an Analysis of the Principles by which Men Naturally Judge Concerning the Conduct and Character, First of Their Neighbours, and Afterwards of Themselves, London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853, 162. 75 Patricia Meyer Spacks, “The Novel as Ethical Paradigm”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, XXI/2-3, “Why the Novel Matters: A Postmodern Perplex Conference Issue” (Winter-Spring 1998), 182. The starting point of Spacks’ discussion about the ethical dimension of the novel is Michael Holquist’s and Walter Reed’s article, “Six Theses on the Novel-and Some Metaphors”, New Literary History, 11 (1980), 413-23, in which they consider the novel “a diacritical space where other cultural codes, including the literary, intersect and interfere with one another” (415). The converging of “cultural codes”, Spacks argues, “means something human. We may articulate in various ways the shape of novelistic structures, but their substance remains human relationships; that’s what ‘the boundaries between individual and group’ means.” 76 Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, 10. Ellis writes that the “concept of ‘moral sense’ had been suggested by the Cambridge Platonist Henry More, but the term gained its significance in the work of Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671- 1713) and Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746)”. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 161 of the Wealth of Nations (1776).77 According to the latter, masculinity is partly effeminized as a result of the disappearance of “the heroic”78 and partly guided, as McKeon claims, by “the antiaristocratic heroism of economic man at work in the marketplace”.79 Such an interpretation offers a more comprehensive epistemological, socio-ethical and political account of sentimentalism, since it “discovers its power in the novel’s freedom to mix genres and discourses freely”.80 Shortly after its anonymous 81 publication in 1771, The Man of Feeling’s popularity was living proof of the fact that Mackenzie was in line with the mid-eighteenth-century literary and ethical debates on Hume’s “Science of Man”. Furthermore, the fashionable Man of Feeling, who “was an index of ‘Civil Society’”,82 was intended as a counterpart of the Good-Natured Man, whose morality was not dictated by delicate sentiment or refined emotional signs, but, as the name suggests, by natural goodness preached by the Latitudinarian Divines. Unable to establish a community of fellow-feeling because “Civil Society” is animated by a selfish commercial ethos, the Man of Feeling raises the important question of how suitable his morality is as a “sermon for some precept of Christian humility” (9), since sensibility, “is … possessed of a complex aesthetic logic akin to the sublime, that discovers pleasure in distress and misery, albeit that sensibility is a sublime untouched by transcendence”.83 G.J. Barker-Benfield explains that the Man of Feeling was in vogue between the 1760s and the 1770s, when “popular novels written by men were preoccupied with the meanings of sensibility for
77 This issue will be discussed in the penultimate section of this chapter. 78 Bending and Bygrave, Introduction to The Man of Feeling, xiii. 79 McKeon, “Historicizing Patriarchy”, 314. 80 Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, 8. 81 In Introduction to The Man of Feeling, Bending and Bygrave write that the Reverend Charles Stewart Eccles, an Irish clergyman at Bath, was applauded as the author of Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling. Although Eccles transcribed the novel, the publishers refused to recognize him as the real author of the work, for “this was an understandable scam given in the context which this hugely popular novel of 1771 invoked for itself. Not only had it been published anonymously, but its text also purports to reach us through the editor of a dead man’s papers … as the fragmentary transcript of a sentimental life” (ibid., x). 82 Manning, “Sensibility”, 83. 83 Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility, 6. 162 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 manhood”.84 With his self opposed to society, Harley’s meaning of sensibility remains an idealized one, for his faulty “enthusiasm of feeling” as moral epistemology cannot meet with society’s approval. In Smith’s political economy terms, the “emotional capital of sensibility”85 is de-monstered not only as the bourgeois interest in consumption, luxury and exchange of goods but also as the abolition of charitable acts. “Civil Society” is thus the ouster of sympathy and the supporter of property as the sole motivator of the passions. Hence, the “alarming crisis in the corruption of the state” signalled by Harley. The Man of Feeling lends itself to easy summary. Harley, a young gentleman bereft of his parents and “indifferently attended to” because of the permanent disputes between various “guardians” (10) in charge of his education, lives in a rural milieu in which he is the only relic of a noble aristocratic past chronicled by his aunt who always holds it in high regard. Forced by his “guardians” to have recourse to corrupt means of increasing his fortune, Harley tries to ingratiate himself with a relative who “possessed of a very large sum in the stocks”. He fails in his attempt to take hold of her money, for, being unable to use hypocrisy to his own advantage, “he accommodated himself so ill to her humour, that she died, and did not leave him a farthing”. In spite of his disappointment, Harley is advised to sell his vote at an election in order to get a lease of some crown lands “which lay contiguous to his little paternal estate” (11). Hoping that the lease of these lands will help him perform natural acts of benevolence, he receives a letter of introduction from his neighbour, Mr Walton, whose daughter, Miss Walton, becomes the object of his unuttered love. Once parted with his aunt and Mr and Miss Walton, Harley becomes involved in a series of picaresque adventures revolving around his use of wrong sympathy. Thus, on his way to London, where he is to meet an
84 G.J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth- Century Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992, 142. In so far as the meaning of Harley’s sensibility is concerned, Markman Ellis’ theory of “character” presented in The Politics of Sensibility is also revealing in terms of the pedagogical dimension of the sentimental novel and, particularly, of Mackenzie’s “science of manners”. Ellis says that “‘character’ establishes a vicarious empathy between character and reader, even though they are unknown personally to each other. The practice of sentimental benevolence and scenic charity replicates this model, establishing a hitherto unknown relation between strangers” (17). This relation remains “unknown” for Harley, as it does not rely on a reasonable justification. 85 Manning, “Sensibility”, 92. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 163 influential baronet able to help him secure the lease of lands or other means of advancing his fortune, Harley meets successively a beggar with a dog, a party of mad people in Bedlam, a cardsharper, a misanthropist and a prostitute he restores to her distressed father. On finding out that the royal lands have been promised to a “pimp of a gauger”, whose sister “was now sempstress to the baronet” (57), Harley, utterly disheartened, returns home in a coach, accompanied by Ben Silton, an elderly gentleman with whom he discourses on vice and poetry as “an incentive to philanthropy” (61). On his way home, he encounters Edwards, an old acquaintance and former sergeant ordered to the East Indies, who, “assisted by Harley’s beneficence” (75), improves a vacant farm in the neighbourhood. When Miss Walton, the presupposed fiancée of the rich Sir Harry Benson, finally confesses to Harley that she has always held him in great affection, he dies because of his inability to translate fellow-feeling into words. Such picaresque incidents – which evince Harley’s unfitness for the world – cohere in Mackenzie’s hero “sustained crisis-utterance”86 taken as a firm resistance to commercialism and the inapplicability of sentimental benevolence as a moral pattern. Harley’s own philosophy of sentiment departs not only from Hume’s ethical system but also from Adam Smith’s theory of “the impartial spectator” derived from Hume’s analysis of the concept of “sympathy”. Smith’s theory elaborated in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) is an extremely serviceable critical instrument that can accurately assess the protagonist’s absurd socio-ethical behaviour. Hume explains that sentiments are fluid and identical when communicated by one individual to another, because the “minds of men” are “mirrors to one another”87 while Smith calibrates sentiment and virtue by introducing the notion of “the impartial spectator” as much a social norm as a regulator of the passions. Smith thus metaphorically refers to society as a “mirror”88 in which “the individ- ual looks in order to see whether his sentiments are identical with those of others, whether there is a correspondence of sentiments that constitutes approbation”. 89 He propounds that imagination, like
86 Hollahan, Crisis-Consciousness and the Novel, 45. 87 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, II, ii, 259. 88 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 162. 89 Ibid., 61. 164 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Hume’s “impressions” of original emotions, plays a considerable part in the process of sympathetic identification:
As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we can form no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in like a situation …. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.90
Like Hume’s concept of “sympathy”, Smith’s theatrical vision of moral approbation is itself a Quixotic critical perspective91 from which Harley reads the world in a completely wrong way. The characterization of Harley’s sympathy as self-indulgent and telos-free – since it is the product of a wide range of imagined sensations that are unlikely to be appropriately decoded – is an expression of the “fusion of a plot of thought with a plot of action” which betokens “an alarming crisis in the corruption of the state” (62). Smith’s “impartial spectator” thus scrutinizes the propriety of one’s own conduct in relation to the imagined sentiments of another whom Smith calls “the person principally concerned”.92 Harley fails to sympathize because he is always misled by the outward appearance of the human types he meets on his way to London. This is why his “skill in physiognomy” (33) is ironically treated as Quixotic, as his overwhelming feeling becomes the mark of his superficial understanding of “the persons principally concerned”. David Marshall’s analysis of Smith’s ethical theory makes clear that the effort to create a fellow-feeling is epistemologically unattainable and Quixotic, since
… the mirror of sympathy in which the spectator represents to himself the feelings of the other person and places himself in the position and person of the other is itself mirrored in the experience of the person who knows he is being viewed. As the sufferer tries to look at his
90 Ibid., 3-4. 91 See also Motooka’s discussion of the Quixotic nature of Smith’s theory in The Age of Reasons, 205-20. 92 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 5. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 165
spectators with sympathy … he finds himself in the same epistemological void.93
However, Smith insists that the “impartial spectator”, who commits himself to balancing sentiment and virtue through sympathy and to tempering the passions, can make a judgement about the others’ understanding of sympathetic sentiments and motives only if he detaches himself from his own sense impressions: “We can never survey our sentiments and motives, we can never form any judgment concerning them; unless we remove ourselves, as it were, from our own natural station, and endeavour to view them as at a certain distance from us.”94 Yet the fragmented sentimental scenes in which Harley tries to perform his benevolence turn out to be unsuccessful performances because he fails to rationalize others as “a kind of public version of one’s private self”. 95 It is excessive private feeling that warps his judgement, thus denying access to an accurate epistemological inquiry of others. On meeting a beggar and his dog on his journey to London, Harley, guided by his untutored skill in physiognomy, is sure that the beggar’s “appearance of good-humour” is a good opportunity for sympathetic identification and display of delicate feeling. Ironically, it is Harley’s spontaneous and hazardous financial benevolence that buys the beggar’s friendship and allows Harley to sympathize with him in a wrong manner. Harley dispenses six pence to the beggar who “poured four blessings without number”, which stimulates the latter to reveal his trade and recount his life story. The beggar’s dissimulated effort to fulfil sympathetic identification and to display delicate feeling runs counter to Harley’s unprincipled wish for fellow-feeling, since “our delicacies”, said Harley to himself, “are fantastic; they are not in nature!”. The beggar, a fraudulent fortune-teller who reminds us of the fortune-teller monkey and the disenchanted head in Don Quixote, informs Harley that “plain-dealing” or telling the truth is a misfit for a Mandevillean society founded on rational egoism, a society in which
93 David Marshall, “Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments”, Critical Inquiry, X/4 (June 1984), 596 (emphasis in the original). 94 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 161. 95 McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 378. 166 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 honour in its “figurative Sense” is “a Chimera without Truth or Being”.96 Fed by the prospect of securing the income from “some crown- lands” (11), Harley’s imagined happiness only rationalizes sympathy as self-regard, as a version of his own private self. When Harley draws a shilling from his pocket in order to reward the beggar for his tale, “virtue held back his arm: – but a milder form, a young sister of virtue’s, not so severe as virtue, nor so serious as pity, smiled upon him: His fingers lost their compression” (18). Harley’s emotional weakness undermines “virtue” as a major concern for a harmonious society whereas his “pity”– a “serious” moral quality inherent in the mechanics of sympathy – for the dishonest beggar is the somatic response urged by fellow-feeling, a younger and less penny-pinching or mean-spirited sister to “virtue”. Harley is a good-natured fool who “erroneously rationalizes as a crisis of social corruption a condition which proves to be a fatal crisis of his own character, spiritually and physically”. 97 In this sense, Harley encapsulates the very Quixotic forma mentis when he mistakes the “pimp of a gauger” for a gentleman who claims to befriend only men of quality or when he visits the madhouse in Bedlam, where he exclaims that “delusive ideas … are the motives of the greatest part of mankind, and a heated imagination the power by which their actions are incited” (25). The same happens when he encounters “a fresh- looking elderly gentleman” (33) who looks “piteously” on a beggar, regretting that he cannot spare him “a farthing of a change” (34). Harley’s apparent talent for reading people’s character is just pure imagination or delusive sympathy. According to Smith, the mechanics of sympathy is conducive to a “concord with the emotions”98 of those who are watching us, which is fulfilled when both we and others are spectators and spectacle alike. Convinced that the gentleman is a benevolent man, Harley “blesses himself for his skill in physiognomy”, which turns out to be a chimera when he cheats Harley at piquet. Though Harley was warned by his aunt in the country that “all’s not gold that glisters”, Harley was “too apt to forget this caution” (34), thus falling prey to the gentleman’s wickedness. I reinforce Markman Ellis’ claim that “in his superficial reading of
96 Mandeville, “Remarks”, in The Fable of the Bees, 116. 97 Hollahan, Crisis-Consciousness and the Novel, 47. 98 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 23. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 167 social surfaces, Harley exemplifies the naiveté and solipsism of sentimentalism, which mistakes self-regard for sympathy”.99 Harley’s feeling in excess is best illustrated, according to the same anti-Smithean scenario, by his love for Miss Walton. Guided by Shaftesbury’s instinctive natural goodness, Harley’s pent-up emotions – which are highly suggestive of his exacerbated sympathy – make him a “bashful animal” that is “remarkably silent in her presence” (14). Besides, Harley is a passive romantic spectator of Miss Walton whose “humanity was a feeling, not a principle: but minds like Harley are not very apt to make this distinction, and generally give our virtue credit for all that benevolence which is instinctive in our nature” (13). Mackenzie’s crucial point is that Harley can hardly distinguish between “feeling” and “principle”, implying that it is “principle”, or principled feeling, that makes one’s conduct virtuous. Harley is a sentimental “martyr”100 who, as opposed to Miss Walton, lacks the ability to establish, in Hume’s words, a “communication of sentiments” meant to create social harmony. Ironically, Miss Walton covertly exemplifies Mackenzie’s belief that “natural tenderness”, if manifested prudentially, can be considered a virtue. Harley’s visit to Bedlam epitomizes the Man of Feeling’s pity authenticated by tears. Taken as the physiological product of strong emotions, tears carry sympathy to extremes, for they do not stand for an appropriate account of its mechanisms, as detailed by both Hume and Smith. Instead, in Harley’s case, they both testify to his pity for others’ grief, as well as his effeminate pathos. Harley is prudent enough to conceal his surprise at the mad specimens’ “clanking of chains, the wildness of their cries and the imprecations which some of them uttered” (23), but cannot refrain from sympathizing with a young lady whose unhappy tale reduces him to tears. Harley’s exacerbated sympathy manifests itself in the form of a “tribute of some tears” before he comes to know the lady. Though a plaited ring is the young lady’s material reward for Harley’s commiseration, his sympathy, the expression of his “Christian humility” (9), is even faultier because feeling as such “will not save society or the soul”.101
99 Benedict, Framing Feeling, 123. 100 According to the title of Robert L. Platzner’s article, “Mackenzie’s Martyr: The Man of Feeling as Saintly Fool”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, X/1, Tenth Anniversary Issue: I (Autumn 1976), 59-64. 101 Benedict, Framing Feeling, 124. 168 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Harley’s acquaintance with the prostitute Emily Atkins outside a brothel represents an episode in which the misinterpretation of unprincipled feeling as virtue is at its best. Though the narrator Charles does not mention what kind of impulse urged Harley to invite her inside the brothel, his imprudent gesture is explained by the prostitute’s physical, social and moral destitution meant to stir his feeling of absurd pity: “There is virtue in these tears; let them be the fruit of virtue” (38). It is Miss Atkins’ “tarnished beauty”, the “deadly paleness on the other parts of her face” (37) and the state of starvation in which she finds herself that create a false image of virtuous sympathetic identification, doubled, as it were, by Harley’s utter lack of sexual interest in her. The virtue in Emily’s tears tells the story of a captain’s daughter who, once fond of bad-quality plays and novels supplied by circulating libraries, was taught by her father to mock religion and morality. Proud to show her to the world, her father gave her “a degree of good-breeding” which recommended her as “an example of politeness” (43) in the neighbourhood, particularly in Sir George Winbrooke’s house. Her naivety and emotional weakness compensated by her desire for flattery, however, led her to ruin once she was seduced by Sir George’s eldest son. She ended up as a prostitute in the city because of her lack of reasoning and freethinking inculcated by her father. Emily’s feeling is as undisciplined as Harley’s sympathy for her, since both disconnect feeling from principle and feeling from social morality. Mackenzie’s hero’s sentimental benevolence turns out to be infelicitous in such circumstances also because he sympathizes with social outcasts. Harley acts like a sentimental automaton – synonymous with Don Quixote’s idée fixe – eager to pity everybody, regardless of class and rank. He is an effeminate sentimentalist who is far from gaining the moral approbation of society. According to Adam Smith’s gendered perspective on virtue, women are by nature sympathetic and display “the amiable virtue of humanity” 102 while men are characterized by “the virtue of generosity”, which requires “self-denial” and “self-command”. Harley falls into the category of feminine virtues, for, asserts Smith, “humanity consists merely in the exquisite fellow-feeling which the spectator entertains with the sentiments of the persons principally concerned, so as to grieve for
102 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 28. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 169 their sufferings, to resent their injuries, and to rejoice at their good fortune”.103 Instead of masculine authority, that is, “self-denial” and “self-command”, Mackenzie’s protagonist is guided by feminine self- indulgence. Judged from Hume’s or Smith’s perspective, Harley’s imagination becomes “a free-floating principle of sympathy that names … that image-making power that accommodates to each other high and low, outside and inside, public and private in all dimensions of human life”.104 Not for nothing is Harley called a “cully” (39), a man taken in by sharpers or prostitutes, by a waiter in the brothel, to whom he leaves his watch as a substitute for the bill. The encounter with the discharged soldier Edwards on his journey back to his village is the second and last scene in which Harley’s sympathy and benevolence prove to be rewarding. Returned from the East Indies, where he served his country in place of his son, a responsible father who had “to give bread” to his wife and children (69), Edwards distinguishes himself as a Smithean representative of “the virtue of generosity” praised by the effeminate Harley: “You seem to have served your country, Sir, to have served it hardly too; ’tis a character I have the highest esteem for” (65). Though Edwards’ morally laudable account of all his suffering and unhappy incidents to which he was exposed is appropriately internalized by Harley by means of sympathy, it cannot give Harley anything but an imaginative sense of equality with Edwards’ “generosity” supported by tears of gratitude towards his interlocutor: “‘Let me imprint the virtue of thy sufferings on my soul. Come, my honoured veteran! Let me endeavour to soften the last days of a life, worn out in the service of humanity: call me also thy son, and let me cherish thee as a father’” (71). In this imagined father-and-son relationship, Harley’s sympathy urges him to perform the benevolent act of giving Edwards a small farm in the neighbourhood, perhaps another version of Mr Wilson’s peaceful hearth and home untarnished by vice in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. The novel’s conclusion reinforces Harley’s “logic of loss” partly generated by the separation out of feeling from understanding and by pathos from logos. Harley dies of fever the moment he learns that Miss Walton’s love for him is not unrequited: “‘Let not life be so
103 Ibid., 274. 104 McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 379. 170 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 indifferent to you; if my wishes can put any value on it – I will not pretend to misunderstand you – I know your worth – I have known it long – I have esteemed it – What would you have me say? – I have loved it as it deserved’” (96). Harley’s romantic melancholy vibrates in the pastoral poem dedicated to “Lavinia”, the poetical embodiment of Miss Walton. Harley’s death in the presence of Miss Walton is the materialization of a poetic scene lamenting his suffering hypothetically eased only by Lavinia’s affection:
When shall I in its peaceable womb Be laid with my sorrows asleep! Should LAVINIA but chance on my tomb – I could die if I thought she would weep. (87)
Platzner observes that Harley’s “relationship with Miss Walton becomes an inverted re-enactment of his encounter with Emily Atkins; this time, however, Harley is the penitent, and the very quality of self- forgetfulness that underlies so much benevolence finally betrays him into an illusion of personal insignificance”.105 “To love Miss Walton could not be a crime”, exclaims Harley, “if to declare it is one – the expiation will be made” (96). Harley remains a victim of the “alarming” moral and spiritual “crisis in the corruption of the state” to which he hopes to put an end by means of what actually becomes his physical and moral crisis triggered by the inappropriate understanding of the meaning of sympathy. “Buried picturesquely in the shade of a favorite tree, Harley is secured a place in the sentimental calendar of martyrs”106 with a Quixotic frame of mind, whose “lines of duty and happiness” are the imaginings of their private self divorced from social reality.
“His fingers lost their compression”: charity as a Quixotic civic virtue In commenting on Yorick’s sympathy as self-regard in Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, John Mullan argues that “it is made communicative by the compliance of the reader, but the reader is made to understand that feeling is whimsical, quixotic, and simply
105 Platzner, “Mackenzie’s Martyr”, 62. 106 Ibid., 64. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 171 unusual. It is not the currency of the world.”107 In Harley’s situation, this reading of sentiment is inextricably linked with his charity – the gratifying yet undisciplined gesture of giving money to the poor, seen as a reminiscence of the civic humanism tradition. In this section I wish to further Mullen’s argument by outlining the collapse of charitable action – upheld by the discourse of traditional civic humanism – provoked by the burgeoning of the capitalist marketplace theorized by Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). In what follows, I contend that Harley’s acts of charity are the physical product of sympathy in terms of “benevolent redistribution of wealth”,108 which becomes Quixotic in the context of Smith’s “division of labour”, according to which the intent on pursuing one’s own interest leads to maximal economic productivity “by treaty, by barter and by purchase”.109 Harley, the exponent of the aristocratic class now in ruins, is an “impartial spectator” only to the extent to which he is apt to rationalize and lament the corrupt state of England induced by the bourgeoisie’s addiction to riches and luxury. Like his burdensome practice of sympathy in a hypocritical commercial world, Harley’s equally burdensome – hence, Quixotic – performance of charity makes him immune to contemporary mercantile pursuits. In hoping “to dry up the tears of the distressed with money”,110 he challenges the idea that the aristocracy was insen- sitive to sympathy and disinterested benevolence. Maureen Harkin comments that “Harley may provide a flattering portrait of the sensibilities of an older ruling class about to disappear but the novel focuses squarely on the fact that he represents the past, the end of a way of life”.111 Naturally, Harley’s disinterestedness ennobles him as an exemplary member of the dying landowning gentry whenever he assists the distressed but renders his enterprise as Quixotic because he cannot awaken the world’s respect for the aristocratic ideal of civic virtue.
107 Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability, 193. 108 Landry, “Picturing Benevolence”, 88. 109 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), ed. Jim Manis, Pennsylvania State University: PSU-Hazleton, 2005, 19. 110 Mary Collyer, Letters from Felicia to Charlotte, London: R. Baldwin, 1755, I, 5-6. 111 Maureen Harkin, “Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling: Embalming Sensibility”, ELH, LXI/2 (Summer 1994), 329. 172 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
My thoughts on this issue are aided by John Barrell’s analysis of the civic humanist tradition. Barrell traces the discourse of eighteenth- century civic humanism back to the ancient belief that man identifies his own interests with those of his fellow-citizens within the republic. Thus, he relates the Aristotelian idea of leisure to civic benevolence, arguing that the polis perceived leisure as a crucial need “for the development of civic virtue and for active participation in politics: a citizen must be released from the menial occupations of a mechanical or mercantile life”.112 Leisure, in Aristotle’s terms, is the synonym of independent property or the possession of land. This makes possible the sheer differentiation between the independent, liberal man – a “publicus chosen to be so by virtue of his independence and public spirit”113 – and the mechanic, whether an artisan or a merchant, whose trade only implies the pursuit of his own interests urged by his instinctual nature. Because of his routine trade, the mechanic, comments Barrell, cannot understand appropriately “what is good for man in general, for the public interest, for human nature”.114 This Aristotelian conception of a civic humanist polity was memorably associated in the early eighteenth century with Shaftesbury, for whom benevolence and charity were “virtues purely voluntary in a Christian”115 elevated to the status of “heroic virtues”.116 The liberal man, therefore, is the only virtuous individual entitled – socially and politically – both to govern and participate in the fulfilment of the public interest, whereas the mechanic aims to promote only what is good for himself. Coming back to Harley, his hope to increase his fortune by acquiring a lease on crown lands “contiguous to his paternal estate” (11) becomes Quixotic in a “mechanic” world of merchants, notably the figure of the baronet who entitles the “pimp of a gauger” to become the owner of Harley’s father’s property, for he “had long served his majesty in another capacity” (56). “The man of independent means”, says Barrell, “who does not fret or labour to increase them, will be released from private interest and from the occlusions of a narrowed and partial experience of the world, and from an experience
112 Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt, 7. 113 Ibid., 5. 114 Ibid., 7. 115 Shaftesbury, “An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour”, 67. 116 Ibid., 68. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 173 of the world as material”.117 Harley fails to become the legitimate lessor of “some crown-lands”, a situation meant to keep “aristocratic ideology” alive by means of successful manipulation of the fiscal- military state, since this deal is all about “placemen”, the well placed, who can benefit from state patronage. This shows the pre-eminence of the economic over the forlorn civic humanist tradition. Besides, his ability to understand the public interest imposes him as a rational, passive, rather than active, spectator of “an alarming crisis in the corruption of the state” and also as a Quixotic charitable figure – given the crisis of “heroic” civic humanism – who loses the bet he lays on “the refinement of manners”. In characterizing Harley as being “above economy”, Gillian Skinner rehearses this postulate: “To be ‘above economy’, then, would be to inhabit a space where management of financial resources, private or public, was unnecessary or irrelevant. It would also be to be free from all conduct book constraints of prudential behaviour in either sexual or financial situations.”118 Harley’s ignorance of the idea of “management”, or his release “from an experience of the world as material”, as Barrell asserts, marks him out as an undisciplined sentimental Quixote whose tears and “untutored hand of affectation” become a pathetic form of payment in public. Since the Man of Feeling’s modus operandi presupposes the conflation of emotional display and money as means of helping the poor, his benevolence, then, may be regarded as a transaction. Bending and Bygrave argue that “suffering becomes just another commodity”119 that is “morally superior because apparently uncorrupt- ed by pecuniary motives”.120 Suffering as commodity is “apparently uncorrupted” partly because excessive feeling makes Harley’s fingers “lose their compression”, partly because traditional civic humanism is ignorant of the mercantile interests of modern society. Barrell stresses the fact that “because traditional humanism had no means of understanding trade and commerce except as destructive of the commonwealth, and of public spirit, it could not avoid recognising this economic discourse as a threat to its hegemony”. 121 Harley’s
117 Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt, 8. 118 Gillian Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 91. 119 Bending and Bygrave, Introduction to The Man of Feeling, xx-xxi. 120 Ibid., xxi. 121 Barrell, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt, 46. 174 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Quixotism is thus easy to notice, particularly because the collapse of the traditional civic humanist discourse is accounted for by the institutionalization of the bourgeois self-interest which replaced the old practice of public virtue. In her interdisciplinary study of sensibility analysed in conjunction with the medical, philosophical and cultural discourse of the time, Ann Jessie Van Sant writes that sensibility “establishes a relationship between the rhetorical strategy of placing a suffering object before the eyes of an audience and the result of that strategy, moving the passions”.122 In this light, Harley is a sentimental victim of self-love and self-interest, two essential Mandevillean “private vices” that lead to the “public benefits” of the modern commercial world. As a sensible spectator dismayed at such a socio-ethical crisis, Harley exclaims that “the world is ever tyrannical; it warps our sorrows to edge them with keener affliction: let us not be slaves to the names it affixes to motive or to action” (55). “Motive” and “action”, therefore, articulate the mid- and late-eighteenth-century ethos of the middle- class prudent commercial exchange and consumption. The “values” of competition and profit, which underlie the belief that “Interest Will Not Lie”,123 structure the dominant discourse of “a masculine economy of courage”124 at odds with Harley’s “amiable humanity”, which, if judged by Smith’s gendered approach to virtue, turns out to be effeminate. In brief, Harley’s visible humanitarian concern contrasts with society’s visible pragmatism formulated in terms of fictitious sympathy, since its operations are now performed by the “mechanical” world of the marketplace.
122 Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel, 95. 123 Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests, 42. 124 Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 98. Skinner supports this idea by quoting from the anonymous The Economy of Human Life, which describes a brave man as he who “meeteth the evils of life as a man that goeth forth unto battle and returneth with victory in his hand”, whereas a “timorous man” is he who “by tamely bearing insults … invites injuries”. When, for instance, Harley restores Miss Atkins to her desperate father, Harley’s display of powerful feelings renders him as an effeminate man. This makes Skinner claim that “the impulse to respond to Atkins’ drawn sword with comparable masculine vigour gives way to the feminine ‘temperament of humanity’; the code of masculine honour invoked by the sword is rejected in favour of a feminine declaration of sympathy: ‘My heart bleeds for you!’” (ibid., 98). The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 175
Synonymous with his effeminate “humanity”, Harley’s “emotional capital of sensibility”125 keeps his “aristocratic ideology” alive and away from the prevailing bourgeois “progressive ideology” in a strictly Quixotic manner. Though disgusted both with an upward social mobility made possible through commercial prosperity rather than inheritance and with the extinction of the social institution of the aristocracy126 and the rise of “mushroom-gentry who wear their coat of arms in their purses” (81), Harley “moves freely through the ranks of society”,127 struggling to impose the essentialist principles of senti- mental virtue and charity upon them. By giving alms to beggars or prostitutes like Miss Atkins and assisting the family of an imprisoned man “emaciated with sickness” (90) with ₤2,500, Mackenzie’s protagonist rises above the “mechanical” realm within which he unfortunately lives as an aristocratic relic. This is why Harley’s contribution to the welfare of society proves its inefficiency because his pity, humanity and disinterestedness are private, not public, virtues regarded, in the words of Hume, as “delicacies in love and friendship” that “have little influence on society; because they make us regard the greatest trifles”.128 Far from mitigating the dispute between Harley’s affiliation to, and advocacy of, an old social order and the pervasive force of modern commercialism, the novel concentrates on Harley’s traditional civic humanism undercut by the realm of private utility, as theorized by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations. As an avowed promoter of the discourse of political economy and, at the same time, a challenger of the old civic humanist tradition, Smith, similar to Mandeville, yokes self-interest to public good, a fusion which, much like his concept of “sympathy”, leads to an identification of peoples’ materialistic
125 Manning, “Sensibility”, 92. 126 A telling example of the collapse of aristocratic values is also the village schoolhouse Harley and his former servant Edwards find in ruins when they return home. This is yet another opportunity for Harley to pour scorn on the bourgeois taste for profit and wealth, since the school was pulled down by a local squire because “it stood in the way of his prospects” (72). In “Mackenzie’s Martyr: The Man of Feeling as Saintly Fool”, Robert Platzner suggestively correlates this barren landscape – the precursor of the Romantic theme of ruins – with the social and historical change faced by Harley: “… Harley’s lament embraces not merely the scene before him but a mental landscape where he remains in memory what he can hardly claim to be in reality: a child-like soul, dispossessed of his spiritual home” (63). 127 Harkin, “Embalming Sensibility”, 327. 128 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, III, iii, 430. 176 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 interests and advantages due to their “propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another”.129 Explained in accordance with Smith’s extremely prudential transactions, Harley’s charity is not only eccentric but also unproductive because he feels that it is his duty to promote the public good. In opposition to his well-intended benevolent acts, Smith’s individual – like the entire gallery of characters in The Man of Feeling – “intends only his own security”.130 This means that “the pleasure of giving has been entirely discounted in relation to the costs of benevolence as a deterrent to maximal extraction from the labourer”.131 From this perspective, Harley’s passive Quixotism never obstructs the work of a “mechanical” world conducted by an “invisible hand” – the metaphor for a fully secular version of a benevolent God who cares about man’s happiness in the universe – which regulates the economic mechanisms of the marketplace, thus contributing to the welfare of society: “By pursuing his own interest, he [the individual] frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”132 What Harley really promotes intent- ionally is fulfilled by means of “skill, dexterity, and judgement”– three unintentional “effects of the division of labour”, 133 as Smith avers. Harley’s public virtue cannot be but a private “tender passion”, in Hume’s terms, opposed to the modern commercial world’s self- interested and active dimension of sympathy. For recent evidence to this effect I quote McKeon, who argues that “in the system of political economy the market corresponds to the sympathetic mechanism of social psychology by which private feelings become susceptible to a process of imaginative identification”. 134 Hence, the irreconcilable conflict between the unskilled and unreasoning Harley’s charitable actions. By the same token, James D. Lilley’s thought-provoking debate about Marx’s Capital as a sentimental Romance takes Mackenzie’s
129 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 18. 130 Ibid., IV, 363-64. 131 Landry, “Picturing Benevolence”, 90. 132 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 364. 133 Ibid., 10. 134 McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 381. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 177
The Man of Feeling and his later novel, Julia de Roubigné (1777), as a starting point. He insists on “the “ideology of ruin”, according to which sympathy and emotion, viewed “as universal and public principles of political community”, “mourn the ruin of utterly private feeling that such publicity entails”.135 Lilley’s demonstration replicates Adam Smith’s ambivalent attitude towards commerce and profit. The “new political community” contributes to the development of the national welfare as a hierarchically structured society mechanized by the division of labour. But Smith’s critique of man’s inclination to make a profit and accumulate riches is utterly relevant to Harley’s sentimental benevolence. In Book V, Part 3 of The Wealth of Nations, Smith blasts the division of labour because of its pernicious effects upon man’s intellectual and emotional experience:
The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.136
Entrapped in this mechanical modus vivendi, man participates in the destruction of the much revered “heroic ideal”137 the sentimental
135 James D. Lilley, “Mackenzie’s Ruined Feelings: Romance, Race, and the Afterlife of Sentimental Exchange”, New Literary History, XXXVIII/4 (Autumn 2007), 650. Lilley argues that “rather than simply championing liberal principles of freedom, charity, and public equality, the sentimental romance secretly desires the prestige of singular and private differences that have been ruined by, and excluded from, this new political community, and its concept of universal feelings and rights”. Buried in the churchyard, Harley remains just an anonymous individual like Don Quixote. In the Explanatory Notes attached to The Man of Feeling, Bending and Bygrave explain that Harley’s history – indirectly related to the scandalous genre of “secret histories” – contained in the discovered manuscript cannot aspire “to record the more lurid aspects of the lives of public figures; thus, private individuals should not have a “history” (113). 136 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 637. 137 For a detailed account of this issue, see the introductory part of Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests, in which the intellectual historian builds his argument by starting from St Augustine’s critique of man’s love of glory which later on triumphed over “the chivalric, aristocratic ideal” that “made the striving for honour and glory into the touchstone of a man’s virtue and greatness” (10). 178 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Harley can barely hope to fulfil. Apart from the danger of becoming “stupid and ignorant”, man’s routine “corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard, with abhorrence, the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier”.138 Harley talks to the former soldier Edwards “of what he does not understand” (76) because he firmly believes that benevolent feelings work as an ethical and spiritual panacea for Britain’s wild expansionist policy in India. Without being inured to the aftermath of British colonialism in India, which resided not in “friendly commerce”,139 let alone “bartering” commodities, but in the outrageous, rather than civilizing, mission of draining “the treasuries of Nabobs” who oppressed “the industry of their subjects” (76), Harley, an “impartial spectator” in stricto sensu, excoriates the corrupt, unvirtuous and “unheroic”, according to Shaftesbury’s terminology, British conquerors and their mercantile colonial interests:
When shall I see a commander return from India in the pride of honourable poverty? .… Could you tell me of some conqueror giving peace and happiness to the conquered? …. did he endear the British name by examples of generosity, which the most barbarous or most depraved are rarely able to resist?
Commiserating with Harley, the genuinely affectionate and selfless Edwards – the only character in the novel with whom Mackenzie’s hero establishes a “Union of Minds”140 – draws attention to the selfish implications of contemporary “duty”, thus reinforcing Britain’s harsh rhetoric of expansion and colonial profit: “For you know, Sir, that it is not the fashion now, as it was in former times, that I have read of in books, when your great generals died so poor, that they did not leave wherewithal to buy them a coffin” (77). For Lilley, “Harley instead outlines a spectral, other-worldly economy, a system of affective
138 Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 637. 139 Perceived as tyrannical, the British pillaging policy in India runs counter to Smith’s plea for “free trade” and, even more, to the late seventeenth-century doctrine of le doux commerce. In The Passions and the Interests, Hirschman explains that the term doux “carried into its ‘commercial’ career an overload of meaning that denoted politeness, polished manner, and socially useful behaviour in general .… The image of the trader as a doux, peaceful, inoffensive fellow may have drawn some strength from comparing him with the looting armies and murderous pirates at the time” (62- 63). 140 Fielding, David Simple, 26. The Bad Effects of Sentimental Quixotism 179 values that appear only to the extent that they have already been lost, already antiqued and consigned to pastoral prehistory or anticipated in the afterlife”.141 In this light, Harley’s absurd sentimental benevolence in real life might earn him a well-deserved place in heaven as a Christian martyr, since his virtue elevates him beyond the mechanical world of mercantile interests. He remains a losing, contemplative Quixote whose charity is the mood music of his sentimental Romance unable to turn private interest into disinterested civic spirit: “I cannot think but in those regions which I contemplate, if there is any thing of morality left about us, that these feelings will subsist … but there may be some better modifications of them in heaven, which may deserve the name of virtues” (95). If, as Spacks suggests, “an ethical paradigm comprises an image of social behaviour”, Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, then, fruitfully tackles “‘public’ issues of contemporary economic or political debate within the framework of a sentimental exploration of the ‘private’ world of feeling”.142 The purpose of the present chapter has been to examine Mackenzie’s severe critique of sensibility as the Man of Feeling’s moral epistemology, according to which feeling is associated with public virtue. My analysis has concentrated on the Man of Feeling’s treatment as a Quixotic fool whose self-gratification is entertained by feeling alone taken for judgement, not for appropriate emotional response to the others’ affections. Basically read by way of Hume’s discussion of the social utility of “sympathy” furthered by Smith’s theory of “the impartial spectator”, The Man of Feeling brings forth, as I hope to have shown, an “ideology of feeling” which ends up by becoming an “ideology of ruin”, as Lilley explains. Furthermore, my argument was informed by Smith’s gendered image of virtue so as to explore Harley’s effeminate pathetic fallacy, since his benevolence belongs to women’s “humanity”. I have made the case that Harley’s forma mentis and modus operandi in an uncaring world governed by private interest are Quixotic to the extent that, lacking judgement and experience, he sees physiognomy as the only means of displaying others’ sympathy and benevolence, and of sympathizing wrongly with social pariahs by relieving their suffering with coins or by an
141 Lilley, “Mackenzie’s Ruined Feelings”, 653. 142 Skinner, Sensibility and Economics in the Novel, 3. 180 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 exchange of “morally superior” tears that place Harley “above economy”. In the novel, Harley’s “economic capital of sensibility” expresses the fading power of “aristocratic ideology” in an economic world which transforms the hero into a historically marginalized figure with an outdated noble conduct – the prerequisite of his sentimental benevolence. As a failed sentimental Quixote, Mackenzie’s protagonist is reliant on “the virtuality of emotional experience”, an unsurpassable hurdle responsible for what I call Harley’s logic of loss. Irrelevant to the mechanical world of commerce, Harley’s refined feeling and pastoral passivity can only hope to create a stranded or rather utopian space in which the virtue of sympathetic tears may be shared by characters like Edwards and Miss Walton. In conclusion, Mackenzie’s “Quixote of sentiment”143 is a case- study meant to underline the fatal separation of feeling from reason, thus disclosing the bad effects of sentimental Quixotism understood as unprincipled, because delicate, feeling, wrong sympathy, unprudential and unproductive charity. Fragmentarily presented, Harley’s sentimental benevolence is exposed only as “a history of effects on the human mind produced by a series of events”, as Walter Scott notes, which, mingled with the record of others’ emotions as “impressions” of original states, substantiates and propels Harley’s failure into a gain-driven society that will never “pen a hic jacet to speak out for him after his death”.
143 Scott, Lives of the Novelists, 171.
CHAPTER 6
FEMINIZING QUIXOTISM: THE POLITICS OF GENRE AND GENDER IN CHARLOTTE LENNOX’S THE FEMALE QUIXOTE
The politics of modern Romance In Clara Reeve’s Progress of Romance (1778), Euphrasia, a learned lady engaged in a dialogue with Sophronia and Hortensius on the conflicting genres of Romance and novel, describes Charlotte Lennox and her most acclaimed novel, The Female Quixote, in the following terms:
The Female Quixote was published in the year 1752. – In this ingenious work the passion for the French Romances of the last Century, and the effect of them upon the manners is finely exposed and ridiculed. – The Author of it is since well known as one of the distinguished female writers this age has produced among us – Mrs. Lennox .… Mrs. Lennox’s character is established upon works of a superior kind, which are above our retrospect, though we can only speak here of her Novels.1
Of all “her Novels”, The Female Quixote of 1752, a Cervantic hypertext, is Lennox’s best-known novel. It addresses both the question of women’s writing guided by figures like Samuel Richardson and Dr Johnson and the problem of the female Quixotic practice of reforming eighteenth-century English mores and manners. The conjoining of the two aspects purport the idea that Lennox’s novel substantiates “gender as a determining factor in the development of the narrative” 2 by focusing on the problematic
1 Reeve, The Progress of Romance, II, 7. 2 Jane Spencer, “Women Writers and the Eighteenth-Century Novel”, in The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel, ed. John Richetti, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 213. 182 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Quixotic intermingling of domestic/private knowledge with political/public concerns. Richardson’s unstinting support provided to a witty lady of letters whose major characters are females may be understood as an accretion to his preoccupation for feminine psychology and sensibility epitomized by Pamela. Bringing to light several fragments from two recently discovered letters containing Richardson’s criticism of Lennox’s manuscript, Duncan Isles contributes considerably to the reception of Charlotte Lennox as a key author who reassesses female identity and remaps the boundaries between Romance and the novel. The following excerpt from a letter dated 13 January 1752 is living proof of both Lennox’s acknowledged talent as a female writer and Richardson’s recommendation that Lennox should comply with the rules of the literary market in order to achieve fame and financial comfort:
You are a young Lady have therefore much time before you, and I am sure, will think that a good Fame will be [in?] your Interest [sic]. Make, therefore, your present Work as complete as you can, in two Volumes; and it will give Consequence to your future Writings, and of course to your Name as a Writer; And without a Complement I think you set out upon an admirable Foundation.3
The “admirable Foundation” Lennox set upon thanks to Johnson’s and Richardson’s strong encouragement broadens our understanding of both eighteenth-century women’s writing and the stand female writers took on social and political matters in the patriarchal Republic of Letters. In terms of formal differences between Romance and the novel, Euphrasia pertinently observes that The Female Quixote ridicules seventeenth-century French Romances because of their noxious effects upon manners. Sure enough, Henry Fielding’s patented recipe of reshaping the classical epic by discarding unfashionable pieces of fiction like Clelia, Cleopatra, Astraea, Cassandra and the Grand Cyrus – Arabella’s favourite readings in Lennox’s novel – was there for the taking. Though The Female Quixote upholds Fielding’s
3 Duncan Isles, “Johnson, Richardson, and The Female Quixote”, Appendix to The Female Quixote, in Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, or the Adventures of Arabella (1752), ed. Margaret Dalziel, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 424 (all further references to this edition will be given in the text). Feminizing Quixotism 183 theoretical reform of Romance as comic by ridiculing French Romances, it actually characterizes the world of the novel as a perfect replica of the much despised world of Romance. In the world of the novel, Lennox’s heroine, Arabella, proves that she naturally possesses what she has learnt from French Romances: courage, virtue, generosity and love. Adding to Richardson’s and Dr Johnson’s acknowledged acclaim of Lennox as a professional novelist, Fielding’s review of The Female Quixote published in the Covent-Garden Journal reveals that Romance reading and the absurd actions performed thereof are by far more suitable for female rather than male Quixotes:
First, as we are to grant in both Performances, that the Head of a very sensible Person is entirely subverted by reading Romances, this Concession seems to me more easy to be granted in the Case of a young Lady than of an old Gentleman. Nor can I help observing with what perfect Judgment and Art this Subversion of Brain in Arabella is accounted for by her peculiar Circumstances, and Education. To say Truth, I make no Doubt but that most young Women of the same Vivacity, and of the same innocent good Disposition, in the same Situation, and with the same Studies, would be able to make a large Progress in the same Follies.4
The claim that Romance and female Quixotes imagined by female authors “in peculiar Circumstances” go together posits the problem of gender “as a determining factor in the development of the narrative” far more radically. I wish to point out how Lennox contributed to the crystallization of what J. Paul Hunter calls “the second rise of the novel” occasioned by Fielding’s reworking of Romance in the Preface to Joseph Andrews. I agree with Deborah Ross that criticism has split into two camps, one concentrating on a history of the novel which almost excludes women authors, the other insisting on a feminist approach to “a more integrative history of the novel”.5 I would suggest
4 Henry Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal, No. 24, 24 March 1752, I, 281. 5 Deborah Ross, The Excellence of Falsehood: Romance, Realism, and Women’s Contribution to the Novel, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991, 13. Ross’ account about the complementarity of Romance and novel in eighteenth-century fiction, as opposed to their antagonism in the seventeenth century, is underpinned by a cultural-historical analysis of the changes that occurred in the Renaissance criticism in both Puritan and counter-Reformation camps. Ross argues that such “severe criticism” of Romance as a feminine genre “culminated in historical revolution, a demand for 184 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 that a historical approach to the problem – entirely or partly taken by studies such as Hunter’s Before Novels, McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel and The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge as well as Margaret Doody’s The True Story of the Novel – eases the conflict by reading contextually the fluid boundaries, literary and non-literary, between the constitutive features of the two competing genres. Such features are perceived as a latent metamorphosis of Romance into the novel, with the latter still being considered a residual genre until the end of the eighteenth century. This approach explicates the influence of social, cultural and political institutions responsible for a “more integrative” understanding of what the novel, the hic et nunc secular genre, finally came to mean. Hunter’s theoretical standpoint is extremely useful at this point:
As an upstart species, the novel was at first reluctant to stray far from established aesthetic standards, and critics have ever since been loath to emphasize, or even admit to seeing, features – digressiveness, for example, or didacticism, or sensationalism – that might threaten the novel’s formal claims. But the difficulty also results from an opposite cause – the desire to make clear that the novel was new and different, needing to be defined carefully to show its distinctiveness from other forms of fictional narrative, especially romance.6
Reprocessed by way of Fielding’s comic Romance, the digressiveness, didacticism and sensationalism of Romance were in fact threatening replicas cast, socially and epistemologically, in “the natural of modern novels” 7 of the 1740s, despite the former’s raw material, such as sensational or marvellous adventures, its heroes’ or heroines’
the truth about the past” (ibid., 3) and that “romance was associated with imagination by later writers like Thomas Warton, Richard Hurd, and Clara Reeve, who felt their favourite literature had been nearly killed off in the late 17th century by an epidemic of ‘good sense’” (ibid., 14). I am particularly interested in the conflation of Romance and “good sense”, which underlies Lennox’s plot in The Female Quixote and, moreover, in the Quixotic virtue of Arabella’s treasured French Romances which work as a liminal space between her mimetic conduct and her final entrance into the world of the novel. 6 Hunter, Before Novels, 30. 7 Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis, quoted in Geoffrey Day, From Fiction to the Novel, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987, 2. Feminizing Quixotism 185 untainted moral virtue seen as “a state of being rather than an act”8 and lengthy size.9 Purged from ancient conventions as a result of its mingling with la belle nature, the prescriptive method for writing realistic fiction in the 1740s, Romance was restyled as a modern political – because gendered – genre engaged in the process not only of theorization – as Fielding did – but also of “domestication”10 of the novel. Thus, the modernity of Romance resides in its experimenting with other moral narratives like allegory, fable and satire, which concentrated on topical political issues camouflaged by amorous intrigues, exotic plots, mysterious or fantastic adventures. In The Castle of Otranto, for instance, Horace Walpole mixes two divergent literary genres, that is ancient and modern Romance, with a view to underlining the modern meaning of Romance which, starting with Fielding in 1742, crystallized the definition of the novel as “a young sister of romance”11 rather than its terminological equivalent:
It was an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former, all was imagination and improbability: in the latter nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting; but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life.12
As a guarantee for innovation, therefore, “common life” had already, though indirectly, been the subject-matter of oriental, heroic,
8 Fredric Jameson, “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre”, New Literary History, VII/1, Critical Challenges: The Bellagio Symposium (Autumn 1975), 139. 9 See, for instance, Lord Chesterfield’s consideration of Romance as “generally consisting of twelve volumes, all filled with insipid love nonsense, and most incredible adventures” and of the novel as “a kind of abbreviation of a Romance”, in Letters written by the Late Right Honourable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield, to his Son (1774), quoted in Day, From Fiction to the Novel, 9. 10 Cf. McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 394. I also mean the term as the institutionalization of the novel in the 1740s when, according to Hunter, “the second rise of the novel” occurred. 11 Gregory Griffin (pseud.), The Microcosm, quoted in Day, From Fiction to the Novel, 3. 12 Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1765), ed. W.S. Lewis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, 7. 186 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 didactic, political and allegorical Romances13 before Fielding set out to redefine the genre as comic. The eighteenth-century reformers of Romance were acutely aware that a new dimension of empiricist morality had to jettison the old Romance principle of moral virtue as static and to embrace a dynamic and rationalized view of “ethics, theology, and politics as solutions to the problems encountered by a hero whose character is actually established as a suprahuman beau ideal”.14 As “a self-conscious mixture” of narratives which “program- matically domesticated high affairs of state” and, implicitly, participated “in the emergence of the domestic novel”, modern Romance defines itself against its prototype, that is medieval Romance, as a genre related to epic, not to history. The medieval one- to-one correspondence between Romance and history is replaced, argues McKeon, by the modern juxtaposition of Romance with “epic”, in which love and war appear as “fundamentally antithetical concerns alien to medieval thinking”.15 McKeon’s argument is not only a serviceable instrument for analysing “love” and “war” as Arabella’s inseparable serious socio- political concerns but also for understanding them in the context of mid-seventeenth-century women’s fiction. “Love” was assimilated with Romance as a female genre whereas “war” was indicative of women writers’ strenuous efforts to gain recognition in the male- dominated intellectual world. According to Margaret Doody, “defenders of the ‘Ancients’ could look back to an all-male literary world” while defenders of the ‘Moderns’ had to cope with the unnerving fact of the female presence – as support or contamination of the literary enterprise”.16 In what follows I shall associate McKeon’s
13 For an analysis of the new forms of Romance during the later decades of the eighteenth century, see Jerry Beasley’s Novels of the 1740s, Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1982. Though in the 1740s the English readers were still attracted to the originals of Galland’s oriental fantasy, Arabian Nights, Pétis de la Croix’s Turkish Tales and Persian Tales and Fénelon’s didactic Romance, Télémaque, their “attention coincided with and perhaps reinforced the claim laid by the works of the decade’s major novelists, who were always topical and relevant but who certainly did not altogether exclude romance conventions from their fiction” (ibid., 23). 14 Ibid., 25. 15 McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 394. McKeon explains that the mixed forms adopted by seventeenth-century Romance are embedded in early modern canonical modes that “have always enclosed a tacit heterogeneity’ which, once with the advent of modernity, ‘begins to look contradictory” (ibid., 395). 16 Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 275. Feminizing Quixotism 187 idea with Spencer’s and Doody’s observations in order to discuss the more or less disputable relationship between Romance and women with strict application to both the writing of The Female Quixote and to Lennox’s acknowledged profession of a woman novelist involved in “the second rise of the novel”. The Female Quixote contributes to the “second rise of the novel” in terms of “formal conflation”,17 retaining, at the same time, the obso- lete moral virtues displayed by the French Romances in order to reform the novel’s world. Modelling herself on the heroines portrayed by the influential Madeleine de Scudéry in her voluminous Romances acclaimed in England until the third decade of the eighteenth century, Arabella’s practice of generosity and bravery – taken as resistance to men’s amorous intrigues – as well as exemplary virtue underpins the construction of her outward sensibility, which verifies whether such moral qualities exist and are applied within the world of the novel. Based on the dictates of privacy and empathy as prerequisites of the Quixotic reading grid, Arabella’s reading of Scudéry’s heroic Romances places her as a heroine of a roman à clef who always demands that her secluded, if not secret, history forged by her favourite fiction become public. In this light, I interpret Lennox’s novel as a meaningful juxtaposition of the modern Romance with the novel. It entitles Lennox to observe that the latter has not been entirely cleansed of the serious residues of the former. Hunter remarks that Romance conventions like the unusual, the uncertain and the marvellous are “part of the novel’s territory” because they “allow us to see more clearly where the novel came from”.18 However new and surprising Romance conventions were, the new generation of modern novelists could not possibly be oblivious of them. As a female novelist pertaining to the Moderns’ club run by Dr Johnson, Lennox “was among the few ‘ushers’ of the new world who had Dryden’s resonant sense of the past or his reasoned perspective on how old values could be transformed and reborn”.19 Also inculcated by Richardson’s grandiose ethical and epistemological scheme and by Dr Johnson’s recommendation that exemplary virtue should be accommodated by the probable world of the novel, Lennox’s revival of old Romance values was, in fact, the modern and serious version of
17 McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 388. 18 Hunter, Before Novels, 35. 19 Ibid., 98. 188 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 the novel, particularly, though not exclusively, adumbrated by early eighteenth-century women writers’ mixture of the realistic with other modes. The multitude of styles, settings, forms and concerns has generally been considered to have had a formative effect on the “second rise of the novel” in the 1740s and, implicitly, on the rise of “a typical ‘woman’s novel’”20 in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Jane Spencer rightly observes that the typical sentimental “woman’s novel” is periodized as a product of the 1750s because it started “to delineate a public position for the supposedly private virtues of femininity”.21 It is in this sense that I speak of Arabella’s sensibility as outward, all the more so as her intrinsic moral qualities supported by Romance are not be obliterated by the world of the novel, in which she starts living as a supposedly subdued married woman. Born of the modern version of mixed Romance, the “typical ‘woman’s novel’” becomes modern once with women’s political self-fashioning within the male public sphere in the 1750s. The ongoing experimentation with moral narratives or imported modes leads, in Spencer’s terms, to the late eighteenth-century standardization of the sentimental novel as “a flexible form well able to accommodate, among other things, stringent questioning of the moral limits placed on women’s lives”.22 The form of the nascent sentimental novel is more “flexible” in the case of women authors as the equation of women with Romance. This “axiomatic association in the modern world”, as McKeon puts it, is “a variable and discontinuous phenomenon” stabilized in the later eighteenth century when domesticity is fully institutionalized.23 In 1752, Lennox’s The Female Quixote incorporates the mixed modern French Romance and reads it as a crucial exponent of both the development and feminization of the novel. This type of novel proves to be the most flexible genre in which female characters play a major political role in the establishment of public virtue in the public sphere, as the Quixotic Arabella does.24 Writers like Lennox show what the
20 Spencer, “Women Writers and the Eighteenth-Century Novel”, 215. 21 Ibid., 216. 22 Ibid., 216-17. 23 McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 492. 24 Arabella’s practice of Quixotic virtue is constitutive of the gendered agenda for correcting the mores of eighteenth-century English society, with particular emphasis on the meaning of woman’s courtship and marriage. For an interpretation of The Feminizing Quixotism 189 implications of domestic power are and also what the heroines’ position in society is or may be. Voiced in a Quixotic manner, Arabella’s domestic virtues actually justify her active participation in the public sphere and, at the same time, novelize and re-politicize mid-seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century popular fiction as a serious literary form. As Hammond observes, “by mid-century, the claim to seriousness made by the new species of English fiction was being promoted both in writing about the novel and in the novel itself”.25 In the age of Dr Johnson, Charlotte Lennox wrote a novel about what the novel really is when seen in its formal juxtaposition with Romance. Part of the new generation of novelists who were well- aware of the necessity of experimenting with other modes in order to modernize mid-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century pseudofact- ual patterns of storytelling, she became an unexpected contributor to the “second rise of the novel” due to Richardson’s encouragement, which “was one of the most valuable assets that a young and largely unknown writer could ever hope to have”.26
Romance as female Quixotic pedagogy Margaret Doody’s Introduction to The Female Quixote informs us that Horace Walpole, like his contemporary Mary Delany, took great pleasure in reading Scudéry’s Artamène ou le grand Cyrus and Clélie while a young student at Eton College in the 1730. Similar to Lennox’s Arabella, Walpole’s Quixotic delight in reading French Romances was, according to Doody, “a celebration both of the power of his reading matter and the power of his own imagination”.27 Not only are mixed Romances read by both sexes powerful in terms of imaginative content, they are primarily didactic and heroic to the extent that the heroic becomes synonymous with the characters’ ability to deal with topical rendered as ethical and socio-political matters. Used by Samuel Croxall as a preface for his Select Collection of Novels and Romances (1720), Bishop Pierre Daniel Huet’s essay, “The History of Romances” (1715), offers an insight into the nature and main goal of Romance in quite similar terms:
Female Quixote as a pre-figuration of the novel of manners, see Ronald Paulson’s Satire and the Novel, 275-79. 25 Hammond, “Mid-Century English Quixotism and the Defence of the Novel”, 256. 26 Isles, “Johnson, Richardson, and The Female Quixote”, 427. 27 Doody, Introduction to The Female Quixote, xvi. 190 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
The principal End of Romance, or at least what ought to be so, and is chiefly to be regarded by the Author, is the Instruction of the Reader …. Thus, it appears, That the Entertainment of the Reader, which the Ingenious Romancer seems chiefly to design, is subordinate to his Principal Aim, which is the Instruction of the Mind, and Correction of Manners; and the Beauty of a Romance stands or falls according to its Attention to this Definition and End.
Huet characterizes Romance as fiction, whose beautiful form must be in complete accord with its task of praising exemplary virtue and condemning vice. Moreover, writes Huet, the “Instruction of the Mind”, the “Correction of Manners” and love as “the Principal Subject of Romance” 28 are all indicative of the cultivation of refinement, politeness and gallantry as French qualities, artfully and admirably publicized by women: “’Tis this Art which distinguishes the French from other Romances, and renders the Reading of them so Delicious, that they cause more Profitable Studies to be neglected.”29 Read and cited as exempla by Arabella throughout her adventurous sentimental odyssey, Scudéry’s Romances – almost literally incorporated in The Female Quixote – form the basis of Arabella’s moral pedagogy, which enables her to be a successful Quixotic activist against, and renovator of, the status quo. As an “orthodox”,30 or overt, Quixotic fiction, The Female Quixote portrays the young Arabella secluded in the wilds of the country together with her father, a marquis banished from Court. Quixotic in his effort to conceal “the Pain his undeserved Disgrace gave him” by “the Haughtiness of his Temper”, he decides to “devote the rest of his Life to Solitude and Privacy”. Arabella’s father’s self-indulged privacy is not the primary cause of Arabella’s domestication translated in terms of Romance reading. Retired to a castle in a remote province of the kingdom, the marquis eyes up a young lady who becomes his wife “according to the Plan of Life he had laid down” (5) but who unfortunately dies three years after Arabella was born. Bereft of her mother and educated by an egotistic father who assumes the role of a
28 Pierre Daniel Huet, “The History of Romances. An Inquiry into their Original; Instructions for composing them; An Account of the most Eminent Authors; With Characters and Curious Observations upon the Best Performances of that Kind” (1715), in Novel and Romance, 1700-1800, 46. 29 Ibid., 52-53. 30 Gordon, The Practice of Quixotism, 3. Feminizing Quixotism 191 supervisor, Arabella discovers a “Fondness for Reading” which, thanks to her sound knowledge of French and Italian, is rewarded by her father’s permission to use his library full of Romances, “not in the original French, but very bad Translations”. We learn that such stuff was read by her mother “to soften a Solitude which she found very disagreeable”. It is the cultural heritage of Romances bequeathed by the marchioness to Arabella that marks a turning point in the latter’s life. Charming, delicate, with an “Air so full of Dignity and Grace, as she drew the Admiration of all that saw her” (7), Arabella turns her mother’s books not into a means of alleviating her own solitude but into a political weapon against her father’s whims and impositions, which helps her resist the dullness of eighteenth-century young ladies’ life and “protect her own chastity”.31 Besides, they become Arabella’s books of conduct, according to which heroic virtue, integrity and unblemished love are at odds with the eighteenth-century stereotypical contractual marriage seen – detrimental to women – as the core of family relationships. Arabella’s union with Glanville at the end is the sign of fulfilment opposed to the wish-fulfilment of her father’s self- ordained marriage to the marchioness according to his “Plan of Life”. The Female Quixote is a modern novel because it regards Quixotism and Romance as beneficial and productive. Don Quixote’s “logic of loss” 32 becomes Arabella’s logic of gain which, unlike Fielding’s comic fulfilment that takes providence as chance, underlines Arabella’s individualism fed on Romance heroism. Doody notes that the heroine’s “mode of survival in adolescence is to make a fantasy of her own that will not subordinate her to her father’s story’.33 As a matter of fact, her moral pedagogy – exclusively related to love and heroic virtue – implies a sort of activism, her Quixotism, which turns her into a belligerent protagonist. Thus love and war go together not only to reform men’s manners but also to contest the traditional eighteenth-century relationship between fathers and daughters and, tightly connected with it, marriage as a cultural institution understood as an alliance of both families’ financial or/and property interests. In this sense, Ruth Perry argues that “the emotional power of the father- daughter relationship thus coexisted with the more absolute termination of fathers’ responsibility for daughters when those
31 Doody, Introduction to The Female Quixote, xxxi. 32 Irimia, “From the Sublime to the Comic”, 12. 33 Doody, Introduction to The Female Quixote, xx. 192 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 daughters married, and with the fathers’ growing sense of daughters as property to be deployed in the family interest rather than as lifetime kin”.34 The code of Romance therefore precludes Arabella from being treated as a mere commodity by her father when he forces her into marrying her cousin Glanville. As a female reader of Romances, Arabella does not reiterate her mother’s habit of killing time in a patriarchal solitude – a political allusion to eighteenth-century women’s uneventful lives. Rather, she is a performer of French Romances and, particularly, an exigent educationalist. Liz Bellamy is right in saying that The Female Quixote “emphasizes the importance of the inculcation of sound moral precepts and underlines the need for the emergence of a didactic fiction that is appropriate for a commercial age”.35 The importance of “inculcating” moral precepts is Arabella’s chief preoccupation with the pedagogical nature of Romance, which makes her “comes across much more as a character rather than as a satiric symbol; the reader takes her seriously and asks questions”.36 Isolated from polite society, the gracious and knowledgeable Arabella’s keenness on French Romances is due primarily to their capacity to teach ethical though anachronistic virtues and manners that she will try to teach and even impose on others after becoming familiar with their content. However, such an undertaking cannot ignore, nor obliterate, Quixotic madness as normative. The meta- representational game of the Romance world as actual – the core of Quixotic madness – is nonetheless different in Arabella’s case. In his review of Lennox’s novel, Fielding stresses that, unlike Don Quixote’s false representations of reality deprived of a one-to-one correspondence between signifiers and signifieds,37 Arabella is attuned
34 Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: The Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748-1818, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 79. 35 Bellamy, Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 105. 36 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 273. 37 See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of Human Sciences, New York: Vintage Books, 1994. In Foucault’s terms, Don Quixote is the staple of the Renaissance epistemological rupture between words and things. Bludgeoning his way through similitudes, he becomes “the hero of the Same” who reads the world according to the empty signs of chivalric romances (ibid., 45). “Resemblance and signs”, notes Foucault, “have dissolved their former alliance; similitudes have become deceptive and verge upon the visionary or madness; things still remain stubbornly Feminizing Quixotism 193 to eighteenth-century empiricist epistemology, interpreting what she sees according to the laws of probability:38
… there is nothing except the Absurdities of the Heroine herself, which is carried beyond Common-Life; nor is there any Thing even in her Character, which the Brain a little distempered may not account for. She conceives indeed somewhat preposterously of the Ranks and Conditions of Men; that is to say, mistakes one Man for another; but never advances towards the Absurdity of imagining Windmills and Wine-Bags to be human Creatures, or Flocks of Sheep to be Armies.39
Romances compel Arabella to despise Mr Hervey, a fine young gentleman from London, as a potential suitor because, following the “Example of her Heroines” (10), she cannot tolerate his indecent act of declaring his love for her in a straightforward manner. He appears to be a ravisher who bribes Lucy, Sancho’s counterpart, to send a letter to her lady. Arabella’s anger, the narrator explains, is not unjustified when her imagination “immediately suggested to her, that this insolent Lover had a Design to seize her Person” (19). The subtext of this presupposition, that is, Hervey’s “Design”, points to a tentative marriage as alliance, which Arabella, though of noble blood, expressly rejects. Edward, the gardener who is caught stealing carp from the pond, runs counter to the foregoing example. He is revered as a “Person of Rank” who, despite the “evil Designs in his head” (25), wants to declare his passion for Arabella. Severely punished by his master, Arabella oxymoronically orders him to live as a result of her compassion. Edward leaves the marquis’ service lest other tricks
within their ironic identity: they are no longer anything but that they are; words wander off on their own, without content, without resemblance to fill their emptiness; they are no longer the marks of things; they lie sleeping between the pages of books and covered in dust” (ibid., 46-47). 38 In The Age of Reasons, Wendy Motooka suggests that Arabella has a “faith of seeing” induced by probability forged by the “Laws” of Romance rather than certainty as the epistemological norm used by her rational companions. On mistaking some highwaymen for “Persons of Quality”, Arabella’s force of argument upheld by the laws of Romance is no less valid than the others’ perception that they are robbers. According to Motooka, “there is a method to Arabella’s madness, and that method looks strikingly similar to the empiricist epistemology employed by her “rational” companions” (ibid., 130-31). 39 Fielding, The Covent-Garden Journal, No. 24, 24 March 1752, I, 281-82. 194 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 might be discovered whereas Arabella is fully convinced that his disappearance is “some new Design he had formed to obtain her” (26). Arabella’s inconsistent use of Romance precepts for judging the outward appearance of men, notably persons of quality or ravishers she encounters in her adventures, becomes didactically consistent when she focuses her attention on Glanville, her cousin and future husband, Miss Glanville, who courts men unsuccessfully, though she appears to be an artful coquette, and Sir George Bellmour, a local baronet who exploits French Romances as a ruse to win Arabella’s heart. Unwilling to welcome Glanville as a suitor chosen by her father, Arabella “strengthens her own Resolutions by those Examples of heroic Disobedience” (27), thus being extremely offended by Glanville’s presumptuous gesture of kissing her lips rather than her hand. In the words of Arabella, this is the effect of contemporary moral destitution at war with Arabella’s privatization of classic heroic values. Arabella’s Quixotic fantasy is the critical mouthpiece of the eighteenth-century dictates of courtship and marriage she vehemently opposes. Her arbitrary commands and urge for heroic love are formulated in a style which actually reveals an educationalist Arabella staunchly believing in the ethical truth of Scudéry’s Romances. She informs Glanville that it is her duty to follow the example of “Statira, Parisatis, Clelia, Mandana, and all the illustrious Heroines of Antiquity, whom it is a Glory to resemble” (44) especially after reading Romances:
For Heaven’s sake, Cousin, resumed Arabella, laughing, how have you spent your Time; and to what Studies have you devoted all your Hours, that you could find none to spare for the Perusal of Books from which all useful Knowledge may be drawn; which give us the most shining Examples of Generosity, Courage, Virtue, and Love; which regulate our Actions, form our Manners, and inspire us with a noble Desire of emulating those great, heroic, and virtuous Actions, which made those Persons so glorious in their Age, and so worthy Imitation in ours? (48)
Arabella’s cultural renovation and reformation of men’s manners are the products of her “conversation about books in the text, and its mirroring in a form of critical writing that women writers frequently used to respond to other texts”. However, the imitation of, and Feminizing Quixotism 195
“conversation” with, Cervantes’ Don Quixote is held responsible not only for the “different implications for different genders”40 and for Quixotism “as a transnational genre”41 but also for the characters’ empowerment to bring to the fore what the dominant culture banishes and transforms “into its Outside”. 42 Far from being pathological, madness appears to be a mechanism, a “method” 43 or a “fictional strategy”, according to Scott Paul Gordon, able to “divide deliberate from unplanned, aware from unaware, individuals who act strategically from those who cannot”.44 As a strategist and education- alist, Arabella’s examples are “effective because they are taken not from the realms of the mean and the small but from the public precincts of greatness: only the lives of illustrious men and women can teach a pattern of virtue”.45 In The Female Quixote, “public greatness” alludes to the reading of French Romances by both sexes until the 1730s, as a result of the emergence of circulating libraries. 46 It also fosters the project of female learning advocated by late seventeenth-century women educationalists like Hannah Wooley, Bathsua Makin, Mary Astell, Judith Drake and Damaris Masham, who highly recommend Romances to young ladies because their content teaches them not only to treasure genuine virtue and exemplary human qualities but also to acquire wit, conversational skills and a good command of language. Women who possess such qualities will be able to reform or at least to make social custom more permissive. As Hannah Wooley asserts, “such Romances which treat of Generosity, Gallantry, and Virtue, as Cassandra, Clelia, Grand Cyrus, Cleopatra, Parthenissa, not omitting Sir Philip Syndey’s Arcadia, are Books altogether worthy of their
40 Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres”, 561. 41 Ibid., 554. 42 Michel Foucault, Preface to Histoire de la folie (1961), in David Macey, The Lives of Michel Foucault, New York: Pantheon Books, 1994, 95. 43 John Skinner, An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Raising the Novel, London: Palgrave, 2001, 187. 44 Scott Paul Gordon, “The Space of Romance in Lennox’s Female Quixote”, SEL, 38 (1998), 501. 45 McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 338. 46 I rely here on Jerry Beasley’s observation about Joseph Collyer’s list of heroic Romances recorded in the London Daily Advertiser for 17 November 1741. Collyer’s list, notes Beasley, included the previous decade’s editions of Cléopâtre and Cassandre. See Beasley, Novels of the 1740s, 215, n.2. 196 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Observation”. 47 Wooley theorizes precisely what Arabella will put into practice. She is an autodidact who succeeds – in the light of the proto-feminist principles formulated in late seventeenth-century pedagogical treatises written by women – in epitomizing the ideal of female individualism at odds with the eighteenth-century attitude to women. Quixotic Romance is the cultural instrument Arabella uses in order to “escape the limitations that the customary approach to women’s learning would have placed upon her understanding”.48 In the fierce polemic with Glanville over the bad manners of contemporary society, Arabella mixes the logic of Romance with her sound judgement of the state of current affairs: “I am sure, replied Arabella, the World is not more virtuous now than it was in their Days …. I don’t see why the Manners of this Age are to be preferred to those of former ones, unless they are wiser and better” (45). She laments her father’s matrimonial imposition on her in the same lucid terms and, even more, her genuine chagrin can hardly be expressed in the terms of Romance: “… she thought that her Misfortunes were not exceeded by any she had ever read” (42). Insane, like Don Quixote, only when she seeks or speaks about romantic adventures, Arabella effortlessly adapts “every Incident to her Wishes and Conceptions” (25) in order to instruct, give commands and demand repentance and despair from any suitor who expresses his love outright. Arabella is a comic character as long as her father, her cousin Glanville and Sir Charles, Glanville’s father, are unable to suspect that addictive Romance reading is the cause of her foolish desires and objections. Though aware of her odd behaviour, they cannot separate it from her wit, delicacy and “fine Reasoning upon every Subject” (46) until Arabella enjoins Glanville to learn the language of Romance. Only according to the dictates of the Romances Glanville must read will Arabella favour him over other presumptuous suitors as an exemplary replica of Oroondates. Therefore, her method of teaching Glanville by example is actually the key to successful reformation: “I should be glad to be better acquainted with the Actions
47 Hannah Wooley, The Gentlewoman’s Companion; or a Guide to the Female Sex, London: Newman, 1673, 9. 48 Sharon Smith Palo, “The Good Effects of a Whimsical Study: Romance and Women’s Learning in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, XVII/2 (2005-2006), 208. Feminizing Quixotism 197 of this happy Lover, Madam, said Glanville; that, forming myself upon his Example, I may hope to please a Lady as worthy of my Regard as Statira was of his” (48). By obliging Glanville to speak the language of the French heroic Romance, Arabella starts practising Quixotic pedagogy. She uses her Romance-induced power to rid herself of an educational model based on supervision. Unlike her father and Sir Charles, Glanville starts practising a hermeneutics of Romance. This means that he is be able to decipher Arabella’s “signs”49 not according to his knowledge of Romance – which he fails to acquire – but by his unremitting affection for her, which naturally determines Glanville to indulge Arabella’s whims. Glanville’s experience becomes “inescapably romantic” in the world of Lennox’s novel which “blurs the lines of which he and those like him wish to be confident”.50 Though adamantly opposed to the obsolete precepts of Romance, Glanville’s “inescapable romanticism” pushes him to prevent Lady Bella’s beloved books from being burnt by her father. The episode is only partly a literal imitation of the priest’s and the barber’s inquisitorial bonfire of Don Quixote’s books of chivalry. Yet in either case, Romances are deemed as a canonical genre whose physical destruction cannot possibly lead to any potential, if not forced, cure because both Don Quixote and Arabella know them by heart, use them as a pedagogical tool and, most revealingly, perform them. Romance protects Arabella from customary domestication and projects her romantic alter-ego towards the “pedagogic fulfilment in the realm of the public”.51 As a Lady Quixote, Arabella becomes “a Mistress” of her own actions (44) after the death of her father. Her fictional strategy is now more useful than ever as she is to find out that her father has entrusted his design to Sir Charles, her guardian until she becomes of age. Arabella’s oddity catches Sir Charles’ attention when she mourns her father in the style of Romance. Even so, her affliction cannot equal the suffering of Romance role-models like Sysigambis or Menecrates: “What are the few Tears I shed to such illustrious Instances of Grief and Affection, as these?” (61). The heroine’s recalcitrant resistance – particularly as an orphan – to marriage by force is now doubled by Glanville’s upright personality and defiance of his father’s
49 Doody, Introduction to The Female Quixote, xxv. 50 Ibid., xxvii. 51 McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 340. 198 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
“unjustifiable Methods” (65). In terms of legal inheritance and consanguine kin relations, “a daughter is treated not only as a commodity, but also an extension of her father” and, concurrently, “her connection to her father enhances her power insofar as she is his representative or the representative of his family”.52 As an “exten- sion”, Arabella quixotizes her representativeness as a female individual who can choose one suitor out of many provided. Read like this, Quixotism expresses “the utter possibility”, to rephrase Ruth Perry’s argument, “of the younger generation to marry whomever they will”,53 rather than the realistic impossibility of such a desideratum. In stark contrast to Glanville, Sir Charles seems to be a stalwart supporter of Fénelon,54 who indicts Romances because of their harm- ful effects on women’s imagination. Sir Charles’ emphasizes young women’s transgression of the realm of traditional domesticity in the following terms:
Truly, Niece, said Sir Charles, if we never differ in any thing else, I shall be very easy about this slight Matter; tho’ I think a young Lady of your fine Sense (for my Son praises you to the Skies for your Wit) should not be so fond of such ridiculous Nonsense as these Story- Books are filled with. (61)
Rising above everyday banal subjects and degenerate mores, Lennox’s heroine’s intellectual refinement and moral exemplarity form an epistemological, though anachronistic, fortress which can hardly be pulled down by supervisory pedagogy disguised as amorous design or self-interest. In the words of James J. Lynch, Lennox “advocates a
52 Perry, Novel Relations, 89. 53 Ibid., 231. 54 François Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon, Traité de l’éducation des filles. I am quoting from George Hickes’ 1707 English translation, Of the Importance of the Education of Daughters (I, 370-71), published by Charlotte Lennox in The Lady’s Museum, London: J. Newbery and J. Coote, 1760, a two-volume periodical she edited between 1760 and 1761. It is impossible to say whether Lennox published Fénelon’s translation because she shared his opinion about young women’s perilous practice of reading Romances. For instance, Sharon Smith Palo speculates that when Lennox “decided to include Fénelon’s treatise, it may have had less to do with her own ideas on women’s education than with past readers’ positive reception of the text and the likelihood that it would continue to be well received” (214). See Palo, “The Good Effects of a Whimsical Study”, 212-14. Feminizing Quixotism 199 fictional world in which the qualities of love and fidelity find a more realistic though no less ideal mode of expression”.55 Romance values like those disseminated by Arabella fail to expose “her monstrous egotism or self-sufficiency”,56 since her power and action, she says, “are confined by unavoidable Laws” (182). Though Arabella’s “romance power” entraps her in other characters’ realistic designs, it is due to “unawareness” that she “produces behaviours without intending any of them”.57 Where Glanville relies on tactful pedagogy, which reveals his natural loyalty and affection and helps him come to terms with Arabella’s productive behaviour, Sir George tries to cure Arabella of Romances by inventing Romances. His interest in Arabella, and especially in her fortune, is in fact masked by his familiarity with French Romances, which are the perfect foil for conversing with her in a straightforward manner and also for curing her of delusions of grandeur. His blatant inconstancy and support of materialistic values are the fundamentals of his supervisory pedagogy which, after all, teaches Arabella an unbearable lesson of life. In this respect, his contempt for Dryden indicates that Romance was highly influential in the writing of Augustan literature. As a representative of eighteenth-century cultural hegemony based on progressive ideology, Sir George’s standing contrasts with Lennox’s intent on reviving and transforming old aristocratic ideology. I claim, with David Marshall, that “if Sir George loses control of his plot, one might wonder whether the same is true for Lennox as her anti-romance seems to assume the incredible form that her novel has disparaged”58 and, with Laurie Langbauer, that “the novel is drawn” into Romance and “repeats it”.59 The witty Arabella understands that Sir George has committed a fictional hubris which conveys the disenchanted meaning of reality. This proves that Arabella does not embrace a mimetic or a passive type of pedagogy. Conversely, the virtues of Romance develop her interpretative and
55 James J. Lynch, “Romance and Realism in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote”, ELWIU, XIV/1 (Spring 1987), 53. 56 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 276. 57 Gordon, “The Space of Romance in Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote”, 506. 58 David Marshall, “Writing Masters and ‘Masculine Exercises’ in The Female Quixote”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, V/2 (January 1993), 115. 59 Laurie Langbauer, Women and Romance: The Consolations of Gender in the English Novel, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990, 67. 200 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 teaching skills able to detect the crisis – in the etymological sense of “judging” and “deciding” – in contemporary mores and manners. Analogous to the Duke’s and the Duchess’ tricks played on Don Quixote in Part II of Cervantes’ book, Sir George engineers a plot in accord with Locke’s recommendation that parents as well as children’s tutors should “distinguish between the wants of fancy, and those of nature; which Horace has well taught them to do in this verse: Queis humana sibi doleat natura negates”. 60 In Lockean terms, Arabella’s ideas are shaped not only by “the sense impressions that come from the outside world”61 – narrow as it is because she lives in the solitude of her father’s castle – but also from Romances. I agree, with Palo, that, metaphorically, her simple ideas become complex when she starts separating, comparing and combining what she reads with what she is in real life: “She is well aware that her sexual attractiveness, together with her wealth and social status, renders her a potential romance heroine”62 who defends her identity by interpreting real events according to Romance pedagogy. Her discursive aggressiveness accounts for her self-assertiveness, self-determination and self-legitimation as a woman deeply involved in defending heroic values. As a symbol of idealized femininity, Arabella “is romancing the home – appropriating the language of politics for the purpose of authorizing women’s enlarged self-determination in the personal arena of family, friends and love relationships”.63 Apart from “romancing the home”, Arabella relies on Quixotic pedagogy in order to transform the Nomos with the help of the laws of Romance. Her imperial laws of “Honour, Decency and Decorum” delimit a space “within which we credit her romancing as nonstrategic” due to a “mad space outside of her rational control”64 juxtaposed with her reasonable diatribe against contemporary English society. As a young lady who imitates and teaches heroic virtue in a Quixotic manner, Arabella deconstructs the eighteenth-century stereotypical view about women’s education and
60 John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 2nd edn, Cambridge: At the University Press, London: C.J. Clay and Sons, 1889, 84. 61 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Peter H. Nidditch, 2nd edn, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979, II, ii, 2, 119. 62 Palo, “The Good Effects of a Whimsical Study”, 206. 63 Richard A. Barney, Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth- Century England, Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999, 275. 64 Gordon, “The Space of Romance in Lennox’s Female Quixote”, 508. Feminizing Quixotism 201 their inculcated domesticity. Romance in The Female Quixote recommends Arabella as a politically empowered individual who literally enforces the laws of Romance in order to “resent” (39) men’s unromantic designs rendered as contractual marriage. Also, she figuratively rivals with men “in Parliament”, since, “she speaks like an Orator” (269), as Sir Charles admits. Briefly, Romance has taught Arabella how to reform the male-dominated public sphere.
Romance as history In a letter to Dr Henry, Horace Walpole claims that Romance and history are two synonymous generic categories that are epistemologically separated by the claim to, or the lack of, truth: “I have often said that History in general is a Romance that is believed, and that Romance is a History that is not believed; and that I do not see much other difference between them.” 65 In Clara Reeve’s The Progress of Romance, Euphrasia argues that, as regards ethics, the facts detailed by Romance exceed historical contingency because they are supposed to delight the reader by “giving some agitation to the mind, by their being important, interesting, or surprising; but these events do not frequently recur in History, it is not surprising, but it is sometimes difficult to keep our attention awake”.66 In line with what McKeon terms “questions of truth” and “questions of virtue”, the foregoing observations allow me to examine the dual, that is, moral and epistemological, function of Romance as history with particular reference to Lennox’s heroine. Morally, Romance as history teaches and empowers Arabella how to act within its laws as a powerful exemplum of heroic virtue, honour and decorum. Epistemologically, Arabella’s interpretation of Romance as history is, according to McKeon, the staple of “romance idealism” advocated by the Quixotic heroine so as to resist real givens or threats like contractual marriage, vulgarity, gossip and scandal. I suggest that it is in this sense that Arabella’s “romance idealism” actually becomes her “extreme skepticism” – the critique of the novel’s claim to “naive empiricism”. My task is to show that Arabella’s perception of unbelievable Romance as history is no less valid than the other characters’ understanding of empirical facts as “believable histories”, as Walpole says.
65 Horace Walpole quoted in Day, From Fiction to the Novel, 7. 66 Reeve, The Progress of Romance, II, 87-88. 202 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
By committing herself to reading French Romances, Arabella devotes all her Quixotic “exegetical energies”67 to defending them as histories replete with “important and interesting” adventures. As an “unself-conscious”68 character, Arabella “recapitulates some features of romance idealism which it is equally committed to opposing”.69 I make use of McKeon’s terminology in order to improve on Motooka’s claim that “Lennox’s novel undermines the very assumption that quixotism and sentimentalism are weaknesses particular to women’s reading practices’ and, ultimately, that Lennox ‘mocks empiricism as quixotism by ridiculing not only romantic extravagance, but also (masculine?) rational empiricism and the reading practices associated with it”. 70 Based on Scudéry’s reworking of traditional Romance, Arabella’s practice of interpretation opposes false “Roman Historians”, for they distort the truth about the exemplary heroines she continually imitates. At the same time, Scudéry’s modern rewriting of Romance according to the principle of vraisemblance entitles Arabella to regard it as true history, since the French heroic Romance “associates its fictionality with a quasi-Aristotelian probability”. The French Romances become Arabella’s documentary objectivity that displays an obvious contempt for antiquated Romance conventions by “heartily proclaiming its own divergence, in select scenes, from well- known instances of what it calls ‘romance improbability’”. Anachronistic as it is in Lennox’s novel, the French Romance ignored the difference between verisimilitude and the claim to historicity because, as McKeon shows, seventeenth-century writers interpreted Aristotle’s Poetics “through the spectacles of empirical epistemology”.71 The complexity of Lennox’s novel stems from the
67 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, 280. 68 Ruth Mack, “Quixotic Ethnography: Charlotte Lennox and the Dilemma of Cultural Observation”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, XXXVIII/2-3 (Spring 2005), Brown University, 194. 69 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, 21. In the final part of this chapter I contend that “extreme skepticism” does not annihilate Arabella’s “romance idealism” by positing her cure and marriage to Glanville as a novelistic solution. Rather, “romance idealism” strengthens and finally confirms Arabella’s natural virtues, which the world of Romance helps her internalize within the realm of the private. 70 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 126. 71 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, 54. My argument is here informed by McKeon’s analysis of the seventeenth-century reinterpretation of Aristotle’s notions of verisimilitude and the claim to historicity as two conflicting Feminizing Quixotism 203 complex epistemological problem of how to distinguish the claim to truth expressed by “naive empiricism” from Arabella’s “extreme skepticism” which partly blasts the “overenthusiastic”72 naive empiri- cal account of reality by “recapitulating” some features characteristic of “romance idealism”. If Arabella cannot be “a subject of heroic romance”,73 as is Don Quixote in Part II of Cervantes’ book, she is “a Dulcinea” invested with the power to control “masculine heroics”.74 The absolute, mono- lithic truth revealed by the French Romances acquires “a positive valence”75 as long as Arabella points out what ought to happen rather than what happens with contemporary society. This is crucial to understanding how Arabella’s “romance idealism” becomes “extreme skepticism” because her learning and rules of decorum taught by Romance allow her to critique contemporary degeneracy. In “making the real”,76 Arabella’s creativity projects the significant meaning of Romance values onto fashionable manners translated as raillery and frivolity. According to Patricia Meyer Spacks, “this ‘female Quixote’ cannot be dismissed as merely narcissistic, or merely silly; indeed, her rigorous principles enable her to offer penetrating criticism of social follies”.77 Engaged in seventeenth-century love and war Romance adventures, Arabella is, metaphorically and metonymically, an anachronistic representative of the “new robe nobility”78 whose aim was to promote a civic conception of honour and worth heralded, in strategies for telling the truth in seventeenth-century prose narrative and, particularly, as “competitive” expressions of the early historicist revolution caused by the transformation of one prose narrative, Romance, into another, the novel. McKeon writes that “the claim to historicity and its more extreme negation of ‘romance’ are preferable, at first, for obvious reasons: they are a far more direct and immediate reflection of empirical and sceptical epistemology” (ibid., 53). 72 Ibid., 21. 73 Todd, The Sign of Angellica, 155. See also Bellamy, Commerce, Morality and the Eighteenth-Century Novel. Bellamy provides a different perspective from my own by interpreting Todd’s observation as “a satire on the improbability of the form and conventions of the romance” (ibid., 101). 74 Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres”, 562. 75 Richetti, The English Novel in History, 1700-1780, 208. 76 Gordon, The Practice of Quixotism, 53. 77 Patricia Meyer Spacks, “The Subtle Sophistry of Desire: Dr. Johnson and ‘The Female Quixote’”, Modern Philology, LXXXV/4, From Restoration to Revision: Essays in Honor of Gwin J. Kolb and Edward W. Rosenheim (May 1988), 541. 78 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 182-83. 204 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Quixotic terms, as a preference for the discourse of “letters” (humanism) over “arms” (chivalry). The new robe nobility’s double purpose is to underline “the autonomous figure of the courtier himself” as well as “the self-creative power of the principle of service now internalized within his own person”,79 and, particularly, within Don Quixote. Thus, I suggest that, read in terms of gender politics, McKeon’s juxtaposition of love with war underlies the Quixotic legitimation of Arabella’s noble honour and civic service unfolded in public with a view to transforming the status quo. Designed in the manner of Princess Julia’s “Robe”, Arabella’s dress bears the original mark of history within the realm of transient fashion and custom. Arabella’s absolutism derived from what she considers to be Romance factuality opposes Sir Charles’ universal perspective on history and, consequently, gives birth to two divergent epistemological systems: “What, Sir, said Arabella, will you contradict a Fact attested by the greatest Historians that ever were? You may as well pretend to say, there never were such Persons as Oroondates or Juba, as dispute the existence of the famous Thalestris” (205). The rooted-in-fact modern Romance associates traditional Romance with history in order to “extrude vraisemblance around itself as a self-protective carapace”.80 Interpreted in this light, Arabella’s much beloved Romances evince “formal self- consciousness”,81 which means that they disclose their own means of establishing the truth Arabella formulates in terms of “extreme skepticism”. From this point of view, both her belief in the immutable truth of the French Romances and her knowledge of history acquired from them construct not only Arabella’s alternative ethical system but also an alternative epistemological model defined as rational madness. It is valid because, as McKeon explains, “in a world where truth is submerged by the interchangeability of competing conventions, belief is the respect we pay to a persuasive consistency of style”.82 In this context, Arabella’s essentialist interpretations of the world are the direct consequence of her application of the “Laws of Love and Honour” laid down by Romance. Besides elevating the genre of Romance to the status of a legal system through which Arabella
79 Ibid., 184. 80 Ibid., 58. 81 Ibid., 60. 82 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, 279. Feminizing Quixotism 205
“reforms her subjects by way of direct prescription, prohibition, and punishment” and “persuasively” contributes to the “consistency of its style”,83 Romance laws articulate her efforts to construct a modern, though modest, version of womanhood and of their status within the realm of the domestic. As a practitioner of Romance laws, Arabella is an agitator, a tyrannical Amazon whose views contravene the Christian, ethical and legal precepts of modern society her servant Lucy refers to. While Lucy is well-aware that “it’s better to save Life than to Kill, as the Bible-Book says” (176), Arabella incessantly relies on “the morally dubious form of romance”84 in order to “legally” punish the potential suitors like Glanville and Sir George, who dare declare their love for her. Yet, in spite of being a matter of opprobrium, they uphold Romance’s “formal self-consciousness”, which becomes fully operational when it is conjoined with Arabella’s solid knowledge of history. The heroine’s old-fashioned but rational discourse is, according to Leland E. Warren, highly symbolic of Arabella’s contempt for “trivial talk because she sees it as the normal mode of expression for those willing to accept oblivion”.85 It is alternative and, therefore, acceptable because “empirical validation may be of no easier access than the idealist bases of romance truth”.86 “Extreme skepticism” is devoid of any alternative model, but, McKeon insists, it is “the negative midpoint” between Christian and “romance idealism”, which each of them may become by turns. Arabella’s “romance idealism” becomes “extreme skepticism” through satire, which is another way of saying that Arabella’s “impersonation of the romance of true history” is a “playful affirmation” of “naive historicity” whose “critique of romance fiction is too skeptical”.87 Saying that “the intense psychological scrutiny of Arabella made possible by the small circle and the single locale is replaced by a
83 Barney, Plots of Enlightenment, 276. Barney suggests that Arabella acts as a law- enforcement authority as long as “romance authorizes her largely to dictate the course of her relationships” and “serves as a precedent in the strongest legal sense of the term, constraining her from seriously deviating from its precepts” (ibid., 282). 84 Bellamy, Commerce, Morality, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel, 102. 85 Leland E. Warren, “Of the Conversation of Women: The Female Quixote and the Dream of Perfection”, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 2 (1982), 374. 86 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600-1740, 58. 87 Ibid., 119. 206 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 rather clumsy attempt at the rapid satirical survey of society”, 88 Ronald Paulson seems to ignore three major aspects. First, Arabella is not really an object of psychological scrutiny throughout the novel, let alone at Bath – where her grace and magnificent appearance, anachronistic as it is, turns her into an object of admiration – because of her mimetic performance of outdated fiction. The only psychological problem scrutinized by all the other characters is related to Arabella’s non-pathological, bookish madness labelled by Gordon as “the Quixote trope”.89 From this point of view, I side with John Skinner, who affirms that her “emotional and intellectual depth is signified by the intensity of her unswerving commitment to the romance ideal” 90 and with Gordon’s Foucauldian interpretation of madness as “a category a dominant culture constructs to confine those values it disowns”.91 Second, according to Don Quixote’s ideology, it is natural for Arabella, a Cervantic avatar, to critique the secularism of contemporary times, thus trying to intervene in, and reform, society. Third, as a female Quixote, her behaviour articulates the politics of gender by allowing women to become self-assertive, to affirm their own identity and, ultimately, to gain recognition in the public sphere. In a post-heroic age, all she can do is to retrieve and give Romance ideals a concrete form repressed by contemporary social custom, particularly when it comes to women. Envied by all the other ladies at Bath, who “seem’d to contend with each other who should ridicule her most” (322), Arabella is “rescued from their ‘ill-natur’d Raillery” (323) by the “celebrated Countess of ---”, “a very singular character” introduced in Chapter 5 of Book VIII. Acting as Arabella’s rational and conventional alter- ego, the Countess’ candour, sweetness, modesty and benevolence – qualities meant to account for her singularity among her own sex at Bath – allow her to regard Arabella as a witty young lady with whom she can have a polite conversation about contemporary customs and manners and, most importantly, about the meaning of women’s history.
88 Paulson, Satire and the Novel, 277. 89 See Scott Paul Gordon’s study, The Practice of Quixotism: Postmodern Theory and Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing, 1-10. 90 Richetti, The English Novel in History, 1700-1780, 208. 91 Gordon, “The Space of Romance in Lennox’s Female Quixote”, 499. Feminizing Quixotism 207
As a reformed reader of Romances, the Countess may profitably play the role of “an ideal instructor” of Arabella in terms of moral pedagogy. In a friendly way, she informs Arabella not only that domestication are characteristic of eighteenth-century women but also that words like “adventure” and “virtue” are historically invested with a different meaning, since she complains that “what was Virtue in those Days, is Vice in ours”. Arabella’s “romantick Heroism deeply rooted in her heart”, which is somewhat coextensive with the Countess’ regret for the historical changeability of customs and manners, portends “the ideological shift in later eighteenth-century fiction identified as the feminization of the novel”.92 This explains why Arabella does not rebel against the Countess’ rational discourse on contemporary customs and manners. The Countess’ brief pedagogical exercise based on “contracted Friendship” evinces how “educational indirection” – radically different from males’ pedagogical impositions – “might also function as an act of genuine respect and improvement”: 93 “When the Countess took Leave, the Professions of Arabella, tho’ deliver’d in the Language of Romance, were very sincere and affecting, and were return’d with an equal Degree of Tenderness by the Countess, who had conceiv’d a more than ordinary Affection for her” (329). While Romance as history “causes Arabella to see through the most flagrant duplicities and meaningless functions of her culture”,94 the Countess’ comprehensive analysis of the social background of her time aims to cure and thus relocate Arabella within historical contingency, without discrediting the heroine’s moral precepts which have become “a simple abstraction” 95 in the eighteenth century. Arabella’s modern historical Romances are different from authentic history but, at the same time, they act as a useful form of “extreme skepticism” whereby both Arabella and the Countess can disparage secularism. All in all, the Countess “unsentimentally”96 asserts that women’s history is just an uninteresting story of domesticity or, in Lucy’s
92 Skinner, An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction: Raising the Novel, 194. 93 Barney, Plots of Enlightenment, 284. 94 George E. Haggerty, Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later 18th Century, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1998, 134. 95 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 19. 96 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 138. Motooka uses the word to underscore the Countess’ accurate and unbiased description of eighteenth-century society. I employ 208 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 words, a “History of Nothing” (305). It is just a socio-political fabrication inescapably enmeshed in hegemonic masculine exercises of power. Constructed outside historical contingency, Arabella’s “History” will soon become part of the normal course of patriarchal history, not because of the Countess’ friendly yet tentative pedagogical reformation, but because of a “good Divine” (368) who uses a recipe rooted in what he claims to be the genuinely modern and valid genre drawn on “naive empiricism”, namely the novel.
The implications of Arabella’s cure: gendered epistemological argument and conflicting generic categories Arabella’s Quixotic adventures come to an end in London, where she strongly disapproves of both the ladies’ “insipid Discourse” unlikely to live up to her heroic expectations and “the Number of Gazers who prest round her with so little Respect, that she was greatly embarrass’d” (361). In Cervantes’ novel, the priest and the barber humiliatingly bring Don Quixote back home in a cage after his failed second sally, while, at the end, the Spaniard is cured of his madness and dies in his native village of La Mancha. For Arabella, the abrupt shift of the plot from Bath to London – the last bastion of her romantic adventures and, unlike Don Quixote’s La Mancha, the epitome of urban experience which lays the ground for her cure – is extremely suggestive of Lennox’s modern imitation of Cervantes understood, along with Fielding, as happy ending. Once the clergyman cures her of “romance idealism”, Arabella enters the world of the novel not as a woman simply subordinated to traditional domesticity, but as a virtuous companion who lives in harmony with her cousin Glanville. In terms of gender and generic categories, Arabella’s reorientation towards the world of experience becomes successful when Romance has already tested her inherent wit, generosity, honour and disinterested affections. My concern, therefore, is to underline that Arabella’s cure, which is counter to Don Quixote’s self-realization of the dangers of reading and his tragic death, consists in an exchange of equally intelligent and valid viewpoints with the Doctor who appears as Quixotic as Arabella, since her epistemological arguments are no less valid than his and the other characters’ understanding of empirical facts as “believable histories”, according to Horace Walpole. In the the term in connection with the Countess’ concurrent regret for the replacement of Romance virtues with a modern secular ethic rooted in historical changeability. Feminizing Quixotism 209 words of Motooka, Lennox “mocks empiricism as quixotism” because the Divine’s arguments are no less general and essentialist than Arabella’s when he subliminally theorizes the novel as a “naive empiricist” genre. The Doctor’s methods are, after all, “far less convincing than those of the brilliant Countess”.97 Fond of Arabella’s “Piety and Firmness of Mind” (366), though shocked to learn that she emulated her beloved heroine “to preserve her Honour as that renown’d Roman Lady did for hers”, the worthy Divine is at a loss to explain the heroine’s unstable, Quixotic psyche: “… the Doctor left her in strange Embarrassment, not knowing how to account for a Mind at once so enlighten’d, and so ridiculous” (367). Once Arabella recovers the health of her body, the Doctor initiates a dialogue with his patient, which suddenly takes the form of a confutation of her dangerous action and absurd reading of Romances. In the penultimate chapter of Book IX, the Doctor aims to impart “some very mortifying Reflections on the imperfection of all human Happiness, and the uncertain Consequences of all those Advantages which we think ourselves not only at Liberty to desire, but oblig’d to cultivate” (369). The Doctor’s discourse needs clarification at this point because it duplicates the “Words of the Greatest Genius in the present Age” (377) embodied by Dr Johnson, one of Charlotte Lennox’s well-wishers. In the Appendix to The Female Quixote, Duncan Isles points out that Dr Johnson “contributed the Dedication” to Charles Sackville, Earl of Middlesex (1711-1769), and that “we assume that Mrs. Lennox had discussed at least the conclusion with him” rather than having been “heavily influenced by his ideas and phraseology in the penultimate chapter”. 98 Along these lines, Patricia Meyer Spacks pertinently suggests that “if not literally, at least metaphorically, Dr. Johnson articulates the view of the world that persuades Arabella to abandon her dream of creating meaning, interest, and power beyond the domestic sphere”,99 though the heroine does not become a simple domestic female who abandons the realm of virtuous Romance.
97 Skinner, An Introduction to Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 191. 98 Isles, Appendix to The Female Quixote, 422. Isles doubts Dr Johnson’s writing of the penultimate chapter by invoking Lennox’s use of inferior linguistic, stylistic and structural elements. 99 Spacks, “The Subtle Sophistry of Desire”, 534. 210 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Before the “Pious and Learned Doctor” (366) effects her cure, Arabella’s wise remarks on the nature of vice and virtue exemplify the Johnsonian, and Fieldingesque,100 “articulation” of the status of fiction and, by extension, “of the view of the world”:
A virtuous Mind need not be shewn the Deformity of Vice, to make it be hated and avoided; the more pure and uncorrupted our Ideas are, the less shall we be influenc’d by Example. A natural propensity to Virtue or Vice often determines the Choice: ’Tis sufficient therefore to shew a good Mind what it ought to pursue, though a bad one must be told what to avoid. In a Word, one ought to be always incited, the other always restrain’d. (277)
Arabella wittily impersonates the “Greatest Genius of the present Age” who maintains that literature ought not to represent vice, but “chastity of sentiment” and “purity of manners”. 101 It is this very Johnsonian dictum, I think, that eases the tension between Romance and the novel, with particular reference to Arabella’s commitment to commonsense. Arabella’s chaste sentiment and genuine manners continue to be her ethical credentials in the novel’s world of prescribed domesticity. As for the tension between generic categories, Lennox “subverts the very deflation of circulating-library formulas by mockery of the critical father figure of its day”.102
100 In “‘High and Noble Adventures’: Reading the Novel in ‘The Female Quixote’”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, XXXI/1, Thirtieth Anniversary Issue: I (Autumn 1997), 45-62, Mary Patricia Martin examines the relationship between genre and gender by focusing on the women writers’ participation in the definition of the new yet uncalled genre of the novel heralded by both Richardson and Fielding. Martin writes that it is Fielding’s, not Richardson’s, re-canonization of women’s Romance “within the authorized ‘new species’” that prevails in The Female Quixote: “And yet, in a text like The Female Quixote, despite its explicit championing of his great rival, Fielding is every-where: in the shared nod to Don Quixote (the title page to Joseph Andrews reads “in imitation of the manner of Cervantes”), in its self-conscious play with its own fictional status (an acknowledgment that is anathema to Richardson), evident, as in Fielding, in chapter titles that call attention to the volume’s material status and the progress of its story, and in the ironic narrator who presides over the novel and its readers alike” (ibid., 51). 101 Johnson, The Rambler, 37 (24 July 1750), II, 240. See also the Explanatory Notes section in The Female Quixote, 408. 102 Anna Uddén, “Narratives and Counter-Narratives – Quixotic Hermeneutics in Eighteenth-Century England: Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote”, Partial Answers, VI/2 (2008), 445-46. Uddén’s narratological approach looks at the Doctor’s didacticism in an ironic mode which alludes to the association of Romance with good Feminizing Quixotism 211
While the worthy Divine is trying to construct appropriate gendered arguments in order to persuade Arabella that she has been envied, not hated by those who “give Way to natural Passions”, the empirical heroine readily informs the Doctor that she is fully aware of the inferiority of her gender, since she never expects Praises “from the Severity of the Sacerdotal Character” (369) and that she “would yet rather hear Instructions than Compliments”. Lennox’s heroine expects the Divine to exert “the Authority of your Function, and I promise you on my Part, Sincerity and Submission” (370) if and only if his speech provides substantial and substantive arguments similar to the “Laws” of Romance according to which she asks Lucy to write her history as accurately and minutely as possible. Laurie Langbauer affirms that “it is she who insists upon and dwells upon the laws of disputation in her discussion with the Doctor”.103 Moreover, the Doctor must convince Arabella by means of particular evidence – as she admirably does until she is cured – that Romances are not histories, but “absurd and criminal” fictions (374). Though the Johnsonian Doctor attempts to transform her into “a naive sentimental reader”104 who must realize that “though even Virtue be added to external Advantages, there will yet be something wanting to Happiness” (370), Arabella resists the clergyman’s “Scholastick Ruggedness”, or hegemonic rationality, by bringing forth an epistemological argument doubled by its socio- political valence (“aristocratic ideology”). This is concurrently seen as Quixotic (“romance idealism”) and rational (“naive empiricism”): “If Worth and Knowledge can give nothing else, they at least confer Judgment to foresee Danger, and Power to oppose it.” It is this crucial point that prompts the Johnsonian Doctor, who thinks himself “in Danger of Defeat” (371), to initiate Arabella’s
sense. She says that the penultimate chapter “parodically emphasizes the boredom of such an existence, i.e. women’s eighteenth-century mundane domesticity, and its unnarratability” (ibid., 445). By the same token, in her article, “Rereading the Patriarchal Text: The Female Quixote, Northanger Abbey, and the trace of the Absent Mother”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, VIII/2 (January 1996), 271-92, Debra Malina contends that “if the clergyman’s rationalistic talking cure seems artificially tacked on to a novel written in an entirely different style, the artificiality may arise from Richardson’s and Johnson’s gentle coercion of Lennox to change the course that she had originally planned to pursue” (289). 103 Laurie Langbauer, “Romance Revised: Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote”, Novel: A Forum on Fiction, XVIII/1 (Autumn 1984), 36. 104 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 138. 212 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
“talking cure” according to the standard norms set by “naive empiricism”. The Doctor’s instruction, like the Countess’, is fruitful only from a formal point of view, for it leaves the “questions of truth”, in McKeon’s terms, unresolved because they never specify what criteria one should use in order to assess Erlebnis (“lived experience”) appropriately. Arabella’s poetic truth (vertiente poética) and the Doctor’s historical truth (vertiente histόrica) coincide by virtue of their essentialist way of interpreting experience:
You allow that Experience may be gain’d by Books: And certainly there is no Part of Knowledge in which we are oblig’d to trust them more than in Descriptive Geography. The most restless Activity in the longest Life, can survey but a small Part of the habitable Globe: And the rest can only be known from the Report of others. Universal Negatives are seldom safe, and are least to be allow’d when the Disputes are about Objects of Sense; where one Position cannot be inferr’d from another.
“Descriptive Geography”, “Objects of Sense” and the inference of “one position from another” are invoked to cement the relationship between signifieds and signifiers, as dictated by the precepts of “formal realism”, to use Ian Watt’s concept. Despite the Doctor’s endeavour to cure Arabella through empiricist epistemology, he remains a naive empiricist who discredits Romances without having read them at all: “To the Names of many of these illustrious Sufferers I am an absolute Stranger, replied the Doctor” (373). The clergyman’s verbal curing equates Arabella’s Quixotic defence of glorious virtue and pure love until the former trenchantly reaffirms his hostility – by far more vehement than Fielding’s – towards the “senseless” French Romances which “at once vitiate the Mind and pervert the Understanding; and which, if they are at any time read with Safety, owe their Innocence only to their Absurdity” (374). “Mocking empiricism as Quixotism”, Arabella’s “general and essentialist” discourse finally makes room for a reformation in line with Dr Johnson’s “Genius” and Richardson’s noblest feelings and “most solid Instructions” conveyed “in the pleasing Dress of a Novel” (377). The fabric of this “Dress” is the reprocessed fabric of Romance or the fabric of the novel disguised as Romance. The tension between generic categories is finally assuaged not by the Divine’s imperatives, Feminizing Quixotism 213 but by Arabella’s duly submission to truth. “My Heart yields to the Force of Truth” (381), confesses Arabella, but, at the same time, she staunchly believes that Romances, absurd as the pious Doctor labels them, are not “without one Argument” (376) on their side. They are false and falsehood, specifically “the Falsehood of History” is a “Species of Corruption” which proves its excellence due to “its Resemblance to Truth”, argues the curate (378). Yet it is Arabella who anticipates her sudden and effortless reformation which, under patriarchal duress, does not occur merely because she takes the Johnsonian Doctor’s words for granted. Once she declares that “there is a Love of Truth in the human Mind, if not naturally implanted, so easily obtained from Reason and Experience” (376), her Quixotism becomes an alternative to empiricism. Lady Bella is easily converted to common sense, since her Quixotic experience and desire for truth – whereby she satirizes the status quo – are finally “dressed” as empiricism in the world of the novel, in which, she is united with Glanville in “every Virtue and Laudable Affectation of the Mind” (383). Actually, she replicates empirically what Romance has taught her. According to Palo, ‘the novel implies that a young woman’s early education can potentially protect her from those elements of public life that might otherwise inhabit her intellectual development”.105 Thus, Arabella realizes that the Doctor’s differentiation between humans and heroes and heroines is not “in Favour of the present World” and, ultimately, that the vicious nature of Romances, false as they are, “give us an Idea of a better Race of Beings than now inhabit the World” (380). What starts as a disputation between a female Quixote and a male Doctor, as well as between Romance and the novel, finally becomes a reconciliation highlighted by Romance as a “foil for the novel’s strengths”.106 As a rustic living in seclusion, Arabella learns that ex- perience is the sole social and epistemological ingredient capable to justify people’s un-Quixotic actions. This is because, as the Doctor says, “the Likeness of a Picture can only be determined by a Knowledge of the Original. You have yet had little Opportunity of
105 Palo, “The Good Effects of a Whimsical Study”, 224. 106 Langbauer, “Romance Revised”, 29. Langbauer regards Lennox’s book as problematic insofar as the relationship Romance/novel is concerned. She argues that “Lennox’s equation of romance and fiction attests to a tacit recognition that the problems of romance are the problems of fiction, the novel’s as well”. 214 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 knowing the Ways of Mankind, which cannot be learned but from Experience” (379). “Truth is not always injured by fiction” (377), avers the clergyman, which means that Romances ought not to be exploded for their morality but for their capacity to transmogrify objectivity and, implicitly, transport the reader into an imaginary, not empirical, world. Though the Doctor’s curative discourse convinces Arabella of the true meaning of the concept of “experience”, Arabella nevertheless remains a heroine worthy of respect. Once she has tested Glanville’s faithfulness according to the rules and language of Romance, she finally receives what she has unselfconsciously militated for: she ends up as a married woman who starts living in a traditional Romance plot. With M.P. Martin, I argue that “Arabella can read her Romances in just the way that the novel’s champions had reserved for the new genre, and a central claim for the novel’s novelty is thus undermined”.107 The learned Divine’s point of view – “Truth is not always injured by Fiction” – based on contemporary literary norms urges Arabella to replace one form of fiction with another, that is, with Richardson’s Clarissa’s “noblest Sentiments and most exalted Piety conveyed in the pleasing Dress of a Novel”. According to “the Author of The Rambler”, this “has taught Passions to move at the Command of Virtue” (377). The Doctor’s lesson is, from this point of view, a lesson in genre: “… though Arabella must give up her romances, it is not real life that she must learn to love, but novels.”108 Once again, Arabella’s final substantiation of “romance idealism” – her recapitulation and de facto implementation of a traditional Romance plot articulated by her marriage to Glanville – alternates with, if not belies, the clergyman’s “naive empiricism” taken as a means (the praise of the new genre) to an end (Arabella’s reformation). In conclusion, Arabella’s lesson in genre and gender conventions casts Quixotism in a modern light primarily due to the happy-ending “History” of her adventures which, though demystified by the naive empiricist Divine, preserve their romantic aura reshaped as aristocratic idealism. This is another way of saying that Arabella’s Quixotic moral truth perpetuated by Romance as a “tale of love and war” finally prevails in a judicious form confirmed by her union with Glanville in “every Virtue and laudable Affection of the Mind”. Thus, Ronald
107 Martin, “‘High and Noble Adventures’”, 58. 108 Ibid., 45. Feminizing Quixotism 215
Paulson’s interpretation of The Female Quixote as a sentimental novel is wrong, as sentimentalism becomes a way of life only at the close of the novel.109 Lady Bella’s common status as a married woman marks the passage from the private to the public, since “common”, argues McKeon, is a term whose “semantic richness mediates between the sociopolitical sense of the private realm and the epistemological payoff of generality that traditionally had seemed available only through the sociopolitical sense of the realm of the public”. 110 In Arabella’s case, this means that the privatization of Romance’s heroic love and moral truth becomes “an epistemological payoff” if we bear in mind that “eighteenth-century readers, as well as fiction writers – including Johnson – found Romance difficult to avoid, though they believed they ought to try”.111 By mocking empiricism as Quixotism, Lennox not only highlights the clergyman’s impossibility of reforming her heroine in pedagogically professional terms but also his preference for generality which, despite Arabella’s submission to the “Force of Truth”, is vulnerable to her demand for, and use of, Romance particularity. By incorporating Romance into the novel, Lennox “conflates reason and quixotism, making their gendered associations suspect”, since “the Doctor’s rationality and Arabella’s quixotism describe identical”, yet temporally different, “patterns of thought”.112 By easing the tension between the two generic categories, Lennox, who took the advice of Dr Johnson, a good connoisseur of the genre of Romance,113 became engaged in the Romance-novel debate as a woman writer who “undermines the lesson in genre that would write women’s narratives out of the novel”.114 The aim of this chapter has been to account for the felicitous juxtaposition of a modus operandi (Romance) with a modus vivendi
109 In “Narratives and Counter-Narratives”, Anne Uddén makes a similar point: “Paulson’s reading of The Female Quixote as sentimentalist is a reading of what is conspicuously absent” (448). 110 McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 340. 111 Ross, The Excellence of Falsehood, 109. 112 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 141. 113 In The Life of Samuel Johnson, 2 vols, Boston: Carter, Hendee and Co., 1832, Boswell says that “when a boy”, Johnson “was immoderately fond of reading romances of chivalry, and he retained his fondness for them through life” (18). 114 Martin, “‘High and Noble Adventures’”, 59. 216 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
(the novel) which, inspired by Lennox’s heroine’s reading of Romance as history, finds its ultimate expression in the real world of Johnsonian virtuous sentiments. Concurrently, emphasis has been laid upon the double-edged meaning of the concept of “Quixotism”. As a “transnational genre”,115 it converses with, and responds to, Cervan- tes’ text, or hypotext, through the voice of an empiricist female counterpart who ends well because Romance has taught her, and perfected, her innate virtue, generosity and love in the conventionally appropriate “naive empirical” world of the novel theorized by the curate. Thus, Lennox makes use of Quixotism as a “transnational genre” in order to explicate – in the Richardsonian and, particularly, Fieldingesque tradition – the Romance-novel relationship “not as it has typically been read, as the stark opposition of Romance and novel, but as a revelation of the continued reliance of the latter upon the political resources of the former”.116 Lennox’s novel is a “tale of love and war” highly suitable for a heroine like Arabella who is endowed with the capacity to defend heroic virtue and honour against their secular meaning moulded by the modern commercial age. Set against the background of classic modernity, The Female Quixote creates the second meaning of Quixotism as politics of gender interpreted as women’s and women writers’ power to intervene and transform the public sphere. By encouraging and contributing to the materialization of the successful prospects of “the second rise of the novel”, Lennox demonstrates, as I hope to have shown, that the politics of genre and gender does force the gates of the literary canon reserved to male authors. As Mary Patricia Martin observes: “Lennox successfully imagines a place for women’s writing in the history of the novel not – and this distinction is important – by ‘restoring’ the female literary tradition of Romance to that history, but by challenging the very gendering of literary genres and their histories.”117 Arabella’s forte is Romance as female pedagogy recast in the world of the novel as a documentary source recording Glanville’s test for true affection and, notably, her untainted virtue rewarded by her affectionate “Union” with his cousin. Northrop Frye’s definition of
115 Cf. Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations, and Transatlantic Genres”, 554. 116 Helen Thompson, “Charlotte Lennox and the Agency of Romance”, Eighteenth- Century: Theory and Interpretation, XLIII/2 (Summer 2002), 105. 117 Martin, “‘High and Noble Adventures’”, 59. Feminizing Quixotism 217
Romance as a mode may be invoked to support the previous statement because Romance is not only the expression of utopian fantasy – Arabella’s fictional power as well as moral and legal absolutism – but also a “search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfilment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality”.118 Functioning as mere facsimiles of heroic love and virtue, Arabella’s Romances eventually give her a sense of progression, her marriage, in a conservative male-oriented society. Notwithstanding the final return to aristocratic idealism, the heroine’s progressive – and promising – steps towards virtuous sentimentalism free of female conventional domesticity testify to her logic of gain in an “orthodox” imitation of Cervantes, according to Gordon, in which Arabella is cured in different yet equally essentialist terms by the Johnsonian doctor and gets married to Glanville. Even so, the dramatization of her theoretically reasonable attempt to reform secular morals and manners so as to reconstruct the theatre of disinterested politeness is doubled, in the world of the novel, by her “personal and political integrity” and also by “the sense of the value of her own experience”. 119 In Arabella’s case, the politics of genre and gender has thus proven its meaningfulness.
118 Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, 193. 119 Haggerty, Unnatural Affections, 136.
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). A Tale of Faith and Love 221 with his mother’s maid, he decides to put an end to his melancholy by committing himself to reading a heap of “godly discourses, upon predestination; election, and reprobation; justification by faith; grace and free-will, and the like controverted points of divinity … especially as these writings abounded with bitter invectives against the regular clergy, and the established church” (19). Pleased with such curious volumes found in his attic, the main character becomes a frantic enthusiast who comes to relish the doctrine preached by Methodists. Together with Jeremiah Tugwell, a cobbler who acts as his Sancho- like companion, Wildgoose sallies forth in search of spiritual adventures as a preacher of the New Birth propagated by Wesley and Whitefield. While haranguing a crowd in Warwick about the “unlawfulness and bad tendency” of horse races seen as “Paganish diversions” (428), Wildegoose is brought back to his sanity by a decanter thrown at his head by a young fellow on horseback. In terms of cure, this coup de grâce is complemented by Miss Townsend’s steady affection for him, which eventually leads to their union in holy matrimony. Subtitled “A Comic Romance”, Graves’ novel is written in the manner of Fielding’s patented genre in which the low mode is consubstantial with Addison’s and Steele’s recommendation for amiable laughter. Methodism takes the form of Quixotism when it comes to exaggerated religious affections, manner of preaching, and the much expected conversion of the labouring poor. It is advocated by itinerant preachers like the young, good-looking Geoffrey Wildgoose, the saint-errant protagonist of Graves’ novel, who aims at reviving Methodism as true Christianity. Graves pours scorn on the practice of Methodism, not on its principles, for we learn from Christopher Collop, Graves’ authorial persona, that “he did not approve of the Methodists rambling about the country, as many of them do; yet he was suspected to favour them in his heart; and continued to do so, to the day of his death” (6).6 Closely related to
6 In “Hints for a Preface for any author, and for any book”, Richard Jago sees Methodism as an utterly impolite and socially disturbing practice (Poems Moral and Descriptive, London: J. Dodsley, 1784, xxviii): “He is aware likewise that there is another sect of philosophers, whom his ingenious friend Mr. G., author of The Spiritual Quixote, distinguishes by the name of censorious Christians … – But as the writer of this admirable work as shewn himself so able, and successful a casuist in a similar instance of a petulant, and over officious zeal, he hopes these gentlemen will, 222 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Wildgoose’s religious frenzy, the equivalent of sinrazόn, is his loyalty to Miss Townsend, not only a mistress “of thoughts”, as the motto reads, but also a Dulcinea in flesh and bones whom he eventually marries as a result of his natural affection, the equivalent of razón, experienced and intensified while playing the role of a spiritual knight-errant. Graves’ novel is a tale of faith and love, an adaptation of Lennox’s Arabella’s tale of “war and love”7 seen as two interdependent ele- ments characteristic of a modern female Quixote acting in a modern Romance. Faith and love become the modern complements of Graves’ comic Romance written à la Fielding: Methodist itinerant preaching, whose popularity among poor and spiritually unenlightened industrial workers was more than evident at the time, is conjoined with Wildgoose’s attachment to a physical Dulcinea acting as a genuine object of desire, as well as a successful remedy for his religious madness. Set against a background of Fieldingesque “cosmological plenitude”,8 Wildgoose’s religious furor is amiably critiqued through comedy, whereas his faithful love for Miss Townsend finds its ultimate expression within the realm of comedy’s generic complement, Romance. In what follows I shall briefly consider Graves’ ambivalent attitude towards Methodism. In a sermon entitled “On Superstition”, he opposes religion to superstition by considering reason and conformism as the former’s prerequisites:
But religion as a sentiment, and as opposed to superstition, consists in a habitual reverence of the Divine Being, and a devotion of the heart and affections to his service, founded on a rational conviction of his power, wisdom and goodness; which will naturally shew itself in a conformity of our lives and actions to his moral perfections, his justice, mercy, purity, and truth.9
in the imitation of Mr. Wildgoose, for the future refrain from a practice so injurious to the neighbours’ repose, and so contrary to all the laws of civility and good manners.” 7 See Chapter 6, n.15. 8 See Chapter 2, n.56. 9 Richard Graves, “On Superstition”, in Sermons, Bath: R. Cruttwell, 1799, 34. A Tale of Faith and Love 223
Connected with Shaftesbury’s natural affections,10 the “rational con- viction of his power” – in line with Locke’s approach to theological truth11 – shows what true, or rather conformist, religion is. At the other end of the scale there is superstition, synonymous with speculation, peculiar or private opinion and, primarily, irrational faith. In “A Letter from a Father to His Son at the University”, for instance, Graves teaches his son Charles to “form a system of religion of yourself” that must not be sectarian, as it happens with “Papists and Presbyterians; Baptists and Independents; Methodists and Moravians … who are generally taught to maintain their peculiar opinions with zeal and obstinacy”.12 Graves concludes by urging Charles to be deaf to private opinions as they run counter to “our ecclesiastical establishment” and “have a tendency to undermine the foundation of all government”.13
10 In “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm”, Shaftesbury avers that only balanced affections, or affections regulated by reason, can prevent one from becoming an enthusiastic, therefore vicious, person who is prone to misunderstanding the Divine Presence. He summarizes Locke’s viewpoint as follows: “For to judge the spirits whether they are of God, we must antecedently judge our own spirit, whether it be of reason and sound sense; whether it be fit to judge at all, by being sedate, cool, and impartial, free of every biassing passion, every giddy vapour, or melancholy fume” (ibid., 39). Shaftesbury’s critique of enthusiasm will be analysed in strict reference to Wildgoose’s Methodist practice. 11 According to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, one can grasp the idea of God by means of a process of mental reflection upon ideas derived from the senses. By means of reasoning, says Locke, we are able to form “the Ideas of Existence and Duration; of Knowledge and Power; of Pleasure and Happiness; and of several other Qualities and Powers, which it is better to have than to be without” (ibid., II, xxiii, 33, 314). Once possessed by the individual and associated with our own idea of infinity, they “make our complex Idea of God” (ibid., II, xxiii, 33, 314). By equalling the proof of God’s existence with “mathematical certainty”, Locke argues that God “has so plentifully provided us with the means to discover and know him; so far as is necessary to the end of our being, and the great concernment of our happiness. But, though this be the most obvious truth that reason discovers, and though its evidence be (if I mistake not) equal to mathematical certainty: yet it requires thought and attention; and the mind must apply itself to a regular deduction of it from some part of our intuitive knowledge, or else we shall be as uncertain and ignorant of this as of other propositions, which are in themselves capable of clear demonstration” (ibid., IV, x, 1, 619) (emphasis added). By means of demonstrative knowledge, God’s existence is therefore accounted for by man’s awareness of his own existence, since, says Locke, we “cannot want a clear proof of him, as long as we carry ourselves about us” (ibid., IV, x, 1, 619). 12 Richard Graves, “A Letter from a Father to His Son at the University”, in Sermons, 215 (emphases in the original). 13 Ibid., 217. 224 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Born within the established Church of England, Methodism functioned as a means of spiritual enlightenment of the increasing working class from villages and towns where the Church of England could hardly reform “a moribund parochial organization which bore little relation to population growth”.14 Despite being a niche doctrine that ran counter to “our ecclesiastical establishment”, Methodism was the most significant Nonconformist movement of the eighteenth century whereas “the Evangelical spirit which it fostered was well at work among Anglicans and Dissenters by the end of our period”.15 Sambrook’s historical account testifies to the ambivalent spirit of the Anglican Richard Graves who dissented not from the Methodist precepts, but from its rapid spread “in every corner of the kingdom” (20). According to Sambrook’s argument, one may read Methodist practice not as anachronistic as Don Quixote’s books of chivalry but as a contemporary politically disturbing religious matter. Through Geoffrey Wildgoose this revivalist movement exalts enthusiastic faith in God as true Christianity at the time “when the more perfect regulations of civil society had rendered it, not only unnecessary, but unlawful” (39). Founded by Charles Wesley, the group of Oxford Methodists aimed at transforming religion into something more personal 16 by preaching the doctrine of supernatural grace, as a result of their evening meetings dedicated not only to the reading of classical books but also to religious tracts. In 1729, John Wesley, Charles’ older brother, came back to Oxford as a fellow at Lincoln College and started to unfold both a religious and literacy campaign meant to reform the sick, the afflicted and prisoners alike. Both Charles and John Wesley rejected the Calvinist doctrine of justification by faith alone, for the Methodist Church, like other Dissenting or Anglican denominations, was active in establishing charity schools, promoting religious education and reforming the manners and mores of the day. Clarence Tracy argues that
14 Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century, 31. 15 Ibid., 32. 16 I am indebted to Clarence Tracy’s account of Graves’ contact with Methodism, as presented in his comprehensive monograph, A Portrait of Richard Graves, Cambridge: James Clarke, 1987, 40-47. A Tale of Faith and Love 225
… the Wesleys expressed in both words and deeds their belief that, though salvation cannot be bought by good works, good works are the sign a man gives when his feet are on the road to salvation. Dubbed the “Holy Club” by a Merton undergraduate and presently to be widely and pejoratively known as “Methodists”, the little group encountered a good deal of scorn and even hostility.17
Opposed to the Wesleys’ theology, which was somewhat closer to the Latitudinarians’ creed, George Whitefield, the Calvinist leader of the “Holy Club”, considered faith alone as the only means of man’s salvation. It is Whitefield rather than Wesley who becomes a ridiculous character in Graves’ novel, since his puritanical views are construed as the absurd version of true Christianity, or the “New Birth”. Whitefield asks Wildgoose and his companion, Jeremiah Tugwell, whether God “has made use of the foolishness of my preaching … to bring you to a sense of your fallen condition? Come, my brethren, sit down; and let me know, when you were converted, and what symptoms of the New Birth you have experienced in your souls” (230). In Graves’ novel, Quixotism is the awful corollary of Methodism taken as Whitefield’s Calvinism: “Mr. Whitfield … laid all the stress upon Faith alone; so that, if a man was, or fancied, or even said, that he was, possessed of true Faith, he was immediately pronounced a convert, and, whether he reformed his life or not, became a Saint upon easy terms” (235; emphasis in the original). The “New Birth” is Quixotic as long as it acquires the status of superstition and “undermines the foundation of all government”. Though he preaches Whitefield’s precepts, the Quixotic saint-errant Geoffrey Wildgoose always performs Wesley’s good works, especially when he tries to give money to the poor or when he endeavours to borrow it from penny-pinching priests and innkeepers in order to display his genuine benevolence. In this sense, I would like suggest that Graves’ reconciliation of two antipodean doctrines within Wildgoose reinforces the author’s tolerant, rather than scornful, attitude towards Methodism. As a critical mouthpiece of Graves, Wildgoose truly believes that while faith alone may manifest itself through love, love is nevertheless always bound up with good works. Clarence Tracy quotes a few lines from a 1747 poem entitled “The Invisible”, arguing that the name of Whitefield “came more and more
17 Ibid., 41. 226 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 to seem to Graves to be the major reason for his antipathy to Methodism”.18 His antipathy was undoubtedly stirred by Whitefield’s zealous preaching that put the crowds into a feeding frenzy. The following passage from The Spiritual Quixote is a telling example:
But, about two in the morning, Mr. Wildgoose was waked by a confused noise, as if a number of men were putting to the sword. He went up into the Society-room, where the people had worked themselves up to such a pitch of religious phrenzy, that some were fallen prostrate upon the floor, screaming, and roaring, and beating their breasts, in agonies of remorse for their former wicked lives; others were singing hymns, leaping and exulting in extasies of joy, that their sins were forgiven them. (294)
This image of religious madness condenses Graves’ critique of frenzied Methodist prayers as Quixotism. Yet Graves’ contact with Methodism while a student at Oxford19 exerted “a lasting influence on his mind”.20 What he admired was the movement’s advocacy of un- feigned piety and devotion, not the “unlawful” sincere enthusiasm possessed by its itinerant preachers: “It is doing them too much credit, and at the same time an act of injustice, to call them a sect; as I know of few novel opinions which they maintain, except that of the lawfulness of preaching without a legal call; and of assembling in conventicles or in the open fields in direct opposition to the laws of the land” (30). “Unlawful” as they were in terms of religious practice, Graves “favoured them in his heart”, for he perceived them “as
18 Ibid., 47. 19 In Book II, Chapter 1, Graves commends, in an autobiographical tone, the educative and philanthropic qualities of Methodism, which emerged when he was an undergraduate student of Pembroke College, Oxford: “Mr. John Wesley, fellow of Lincoln-college, his brother Charles, a student of Christ-church, Mr. Clayton of Brazen-nose, and two or three more young gentlemen, (with a very laudable intention) agreed to spend two or three evenings in a week together, in reading history or other entertaining and instructive books …. The Sunday evening they appropriated to religious matters: which soon convinced them of the great neglect of practical religion in that place, as well as in other parts of the kingdom. In consequence of these convictions, they formed themselves into a little society; and raised a small fund for charitable uses: to relieve the necessitous, buy medicine for the sick, and to disperse books among the ignorant. They agreed also to go occasionally, and visit the prisoners in the castle; who, at that time, were much neglected” (31). 20 Tracy, A Portrait of Richard Graves, 47. A Tale of Faith and Love 227 examples that many of the regular clergy might follow with advantage to the established church” (19). This aspect is underlined by Mrs Wildgoose, Geoffrey’s mother, who laments the contemporary clergy’s dwindling interest in attending to their religious duty: “If the clergy would do but their duty, as her poor father did, and as the canons of the church required, there would be no necessity for these extraordinary proceedings” (20). Similarly, Graves’ sympathy for the Methodists is mirrored by Wildgoose’s propagation of their doctrine so as to criticize “the great decay of Christian piety (which with regard to his present audience was probably a complaint but too justly founded)”. The protagonist’s mission is also to preclude its degeneracy – caused “by the present doctrine and discipline of the church” – from holding sway on the clergy for whom preaching “might serve just to keep up some little appearance of religion amongst us” (25). Methodism was Quixotic only because it insisted on a kind of conversion relying on irrational experience upheld by “the mysterious operation of supernatural grace within the soul”.21 As a priest, Graves was mainly preoccupied with the clergy’s constant preservation of “vigilance and sobriety, or a decent severity in our manners and our example”.22 This is seen as a contemporary counter-example by Wildgoose, Graves’ harsh critical mouthpiece, since a parson “could never reform one sinner; nor make ‘men wise unto salvation’” (25). In imitating “our primitive Reformers” (41), the Quixotic Wildgoose falls back on the “particular doctrines of Assurance and inward Feelings” that “have to make men presumptuous, and to delude them to their own destruction” (129; emphasis in the original). “Assurance and inward Feelings” underlie the early Methodist Church law due to the heavy influence of William Law’s religious emotional experience. Law claimed that faith could be demonstrated by faith itself. The proof is “within the believer’s own heart in the witness of his spirit to the inward desire for holiness”.23 For Law man’s inward
21 Ibid., 44. 22 Richard Graves, “On the Clerical Character”, in Sermons, 4 (emphases in the original). 23 Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century, 51. Sambrook constructs his argument by quoting from William Law’s The Way to Divine Knowledge (1752): “This is Christian Redemption; on the one side, it is the Heavenly Divine Life offering itself again to the inward Man, that has lost it. On the other side, it is the Hope, the Faith, and Desire of this inward Man, hungering, and thirsting, stretching after, and calling upon this 228 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 power was, therefore, the only way in which Christian perfection, later on preached by the early Methodists, could be attained. Contrary to this Quixotic ideal, Graves supported the time-honoured canon of the Church of England, according to which a priest’s belief in the truths of the Gospel “made him consider as an indispensable duty those acts of benevolence which his humanity prompted him to perform”. This is exactly what Wildgoose does, in spite of his imitation of Whitefield’s theology. Dr Greville, a clergyman “in whom the sacerdotal character appeared in its genuine dignity” (432), finally raises Wildgoose’s awareness of the dangers of itinerant preaching, which contributes to the fast spread of Methodist sects “into most parts of the nation” (30). Thus, the parochial structure of the Church of England is likely to be destroyed. In a comical tone, which undercuts the force of satire, Graves looks at Methodism as a Christian confession meant to overcome “the powers of darkness” (40) that pervaded the developing industrial towns and villages deprived of a well-defined church organization and religious reform that the Church of England was supposed to complete. Sambrook has observed that “the new industrial villages and the suburban slums of the manufacturing towns were left in spiritual darkness until they were penetrated by Methodism”.24 Highly influential in shaping Graves’ personality while a student at Oxford, Methodism was amiably perceived and filtered through comedy, for he knew that “the intentions of the Methodists were generally good even when their actions were unwise”.25 Graves borrowed Shaftes- bury’s good-natured ridicule in order to expose the perilous practice of itinerant preachers rather than “the general principles of the people in question, which he thinks exceptionable” (3). Notwithstanding the juxtaposition of Methodism with Quixotism, this Non-conformist religion allowed worshippers to liberate their conscience from standardized modes of worship, as John Wesley writes in his Journal on 18 May 1788:
Divine and Heavenly Life’ (ibid., 51; emphases in the original). According to Law, the lost “Heavenly Divine Life” can be rediscovered and re-appropriated with the help of man’s will, imagination and desires: “All outward Power that we exercise in the Things about us, is but a Shadow in Comparison of that inward Power, that resides in our Will, Imagination and Desires” (ibid., 52; emphases in the original). 24 Ibid., 32. 25 Tracy, A Portrait of Richard Graves, 136. A Tale of Faith and Love 229
The Methodists alone do not insist on your holding this or that opinion, but they think and let think. Neither do they impose any particular mode of worship, but you may continue to worship in your former manner, be it what it may. Now I do not know any other religious Society, either ancient or modern, wherein such liberty of conscience is now allowed or has been allowed since the age of the Apostles! Here is our glorying; and a glorying peculiar to us! What Society shares it with us?26
Such “liberty of conscience” throws off the shackles of social and cultural custom governed by “the powers of darkness”. Methodism as Quixotism ensures the same Fieldingesque “cosmological plenitude” as long as the comic was for Graves “a God-sent means of preserving peace of mind in a dark and frustrating world”.27
A comic Romance in the style of Henry Fielding In the late eighteenth century, John Moore reflects back upon the mid- century, stating that “the genius of Cervantes was transfused into the novels of Fielding, who painted the characters and ridiculed the follies of life with equal strength, humour, and propriety”. 28 The liberal- ization of laughter achieved by Fielding, his accurate representation of human nature and kind-hearted treatment of virtuous characters whose “propriety” becomes the laughing stock of society at large, are all expressive of the novelist’s strong belief in a comic sense of wish- fulfilment translated as “cosmological plenitude”. Following in Fielding’s footsteps, Richard Graves indicts Methodist itinerant preaching, though his persona, Christopher Collop, affirms that “he was suspected to favour them in his heart” (6). I want to argue that in Graves’ novel, as in Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, “humour” and “propriety” are clearly marked as the comic fulfilment of Romance wish-fulfilment. This is evident when we read about Wildgoose’s successful preaching to miners and sensuous women as well as his unabated affection for a real Dulcinea, Miss Townsend, a potential convert to Methodism who ends up by becoming his beloved wife. Though a minor text unable to rival the novels of Fielding, The Spiritual Quixote remains faithful to
26 Quoted in E.R. Taylor, Methodism and Politics, 1791-1851, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935, 51. 27 Tracy, A Portrait of Richard Graves, 145. 28 Moore, “A View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance”, 441. 230 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Fielding’s comic Romance predicated on mirth, amiability and sociability, as Geoffrey Wildegoose shows, despite the vibrant style of his sermons delivered in different parts of Britain. Although Ernst A. Baker is right in saying that Graves cannot vie with Fielding and Smollett, I think he oversimplifies the whole point of Quixotism when claiming that “Wildgoose is a caricature of such a fanatic as Graves supposed Whitefield to be, just as Don Quixote was a caricature of spurious knight-errantry”.29 Graves, like Fielding, prevents Method- ism from becoming ridiculous by endowing Wildgoose with the gift of eloquence, sincere devotion, charity and benevolence. These qualities recommend Wildgoose as yet another moral example to be admired and followed by avid readers who laugh with such virtuous protagonists. John Moore echoes Fielding when he explains that readers “find folly ridiculed in a pleasant manner … and a variety of instructive lessons so interwoven with an interesting story, that they cannot satisfy their curiosity until they have received impressions of a useful or virtuous nature, and thus acquire something infinitely more valuable than what they were in pursuit of”.30 By the same token, in his Apology to the novel, Graves is fully convinced that the merit of Don Quixote or Gil Blas, Clarissa or Sir Charles Grandison “will furnish more hints for correcting the follies and regulating the morals of young persons, and impress them more forcibly on their minds, than volumes of severe precepts seriously delivered and dogmatically enforced” (3). Similar to Fielding, Graves proposes correction in order to distinguish true from false gravity “by carrying the rule constantly with us, and freely applying it not only to the things about us, but to ourselves; for if unhappily we lose the measure in ourselves, we shall soon lose it in everything besides”.31 True gravity is, in Wildegoose’s case, his divine enthusiasm coupled with excellent oratory when preaching “in the Rostrum” (144). Ridiculing “true gravity” acts, in this case, as a Whiggish rehabilitating laughter, for otherwise, remarks
29 Ernst A. Baker, Review of The Literary Career of Richard Graves, the Author of the Spiritual Quixote by Charles Jarvis Hill, in Modern Language Review, XXXI/4 (October 1936), 573. 30 Moore, “A View of the Commencement and Progress of Romance”, 442. 31 Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm”, 11. A Tale of Faith and Love 231
Vicesimus Knox, it seems to become “a weapon in the hands of the wicked, destructive of taste, feeling, morality and religion”.32 Through Wildegoose’s Quixotism and the “transgression of the strict rules of epopœa” (5) Graves “hitched his wagon to Fielding’s star”.33 The influence of Fielding’s new generic construction is dis- cernible in The Spiritual Quixote in mock heroics, interpolated stories, low- and middle-class characters, spiritual picaresque, authorial omniscience, unexpected twists, absurd incidents, denunciation of vice and eulogy of exemplary moral conduct. In 1773, when the novel was published, the Monthly Review described Graves’ comic romp as “something singular” that deserved “to be distinguished from the common trash of modern novels”.34 Havelock Ellis thought of it as “a comic masterpiece in its own way among the best of English novels”.35 However exaggerated Ellis may have been in commending a minor novelist, he certainly knew that Graves’ novel was part of Fielding’s new generic legacy. In the second decade of the twentieth century, Charles Whibley formulated an almost identical response – also close to Fitzmaurice-Kelly’s – to the reception of the The Spiritual Quixote, being all for making it as canonical a piece of writing as Fielding’s Tom Jones: “The Spiritual Quixote was republished about a century ago, and it is to be hoped that this comely reprint will help to rescue from the dust-heap of forgotten books a lively comedy of manners, a good-humoured romance of the road, which is worthy to stand by the side of Tom Jones itself.”36
32 Knox, Essays Moral and Literary, II, 165. 33 Tracy, A Portrait of Richard Graves, 132. 34 Ibid., 131. 35 Havelock Ellis, “Richard Graves and The Spiritual Quixote”, Nineteenth Century, LXXVII (1915), 848. 36 Charles Whibley, Introduction to The Spiritual Quixote, London: Peter Davies, 1926, I, xx. It is worth mentioning that Graves’ novel has so far been mentioned only in passing in literary histories and dictionaries of English writers or merely integrated in the literary tradition bequeathed by Cervantes in articles and studies dealing with the eighteenth-century Quixotic phenomenon. Recent articles and studies on The Spiritual Quixote, by contrast, have concentrated at length on the unexplored significance of Methodist preaching and its impact upon the polite public discourse in Britain or upon spiritualized erotic melancholy as the cure of Wildegoose’s enthusiasm. These critical investigations provide a refreshing reading of Graves’ novel, in that they go beyond the imitation of Cervantes in order to explore the controversies aroused by eighteenth-century Methodism through the lens of Geoffrey Wildegoose’s itinerant preaching. See, for instance, Paul Goring, “Anglicanism, Enthusiasm and Quixotism: Preaching and Politeness in Mid-Eighteenth-Century 232 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
In the Introduction, Graves informs the reader he will meet with “several trifling incidents from real life” which “are so far disguised by an alteration of the circumstances of place and time, as to prevent a particular application – unless where a particular application was intended” (9). Counting on Fielding’s decision to portray universal, not individual, types so as to avoid any particular resemblance to real- life persons, Graves makes use of Fielding’s play with “the pseudo- Aristotelian ‘unity of time’ … in a way that presages his later play with the naive claim to historicity and its pretense to an unselective completeness of narrative detail”.37 Tracy points out that the novel “is a manifesto declaring that it is wrong to reject the good things that God has created for man to enjoy”.38 Sex appeal, theatre, hunting, laughing, ale and tobacco are, in this sense, natural habits exhibited in The Spiritual Quixote as a symbol of Graves’ tolerant religious views at odds with “metaphysical puzzles”39 like the doctrine of election, reprobation and justification by faith alone. Enthusiastically preached by Wildgoose in an effort to revive true Christianity across Britain, these Calvinist “puzzles” cracked, as Graves suggests, by means of speculation, augment the protagonist’s Quixotic zeal denounced as affectation. “Essay on Quixotism”, the fourth chapter of Book II, likens Wildgoose to the knight-errant Don Quixote not only in terms of absurd imagination and unlawful profession but also from the point of view of “mimetic disposition” to achieve the “greatness” and “venerable heroism” of a historical figure (40). We remember Samuel Johnson speaking about virtue as “the only solid basis of greatness” that should be neither “angelical, nor above probability”.40 Fielding’s ethical ideal of “true greatness”, which replicates Johnson’s aphorism, is reduced to the status of “goodness” possessed by an honnête homme 41 steered by spontaneous benevolence and charity towards
Literature”, Literature and Theology, XV/4 (2001), 326-41; Oliver Lovesey, “Divine Enthusiasm and Love Melancholy: Tristram Shandy and Eighteenth-Century Narratives of Saint errantry”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, XVI/3 (April 2004), 373- 99; and Paul Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 37 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 383. 38 Tracy, A Portrait of Richard Graves, 139. 39 Ibid., 81. 40 Johnson, The Rambler, 4 (31 March 1750), II, 26. 41 See Chapter 2, n.33. A Tale of Faith and Love 233 redressing the callous world that qualifies his behaviour as ridiculous affectation. For Graves too ridiculous affectation equals Fieldingesque goodness whereby Wildgoose’s religious frenzy is identified as true religious gravity, which acts as the comic source of polite and amiable amusement:
And there are a few people, I believe, so severely rational, as not to have some slight tincture of this harmless frailty, or, as the wise men of the world would call it, this ridiculous affectation. Indeed, life itself would be insipid; nor could human-nature support itself upon merely rational pleasures: did not fancy enlarge our sphere of enjoyment; not only by giving an additional glass to the most substantial objects; but also by stamping an imaginary value upon the most trifling: which by that means, whilst the novelty lasts, frequently become the source of the most exquisite delight. (40)
Graves’ approach to Methodism as Quixotism is tolerant and good- humoured to the extent that “Quixotism involves a deviation from dominant ideology, and its cure represents a return to orthodox values, but, through the proposition of deviance, established norms are exposed as flawed and as ameliorable through a selective application of the Quixote’s alternative world-view”.42 The same is true of the impact of Methodist preaching upon the development of polite eloquence, since eccentricity and enthusiasm are “utterances wherein we can witness not only the conflicting ideologies surrounding the human body, but also the complex rhetorical strategies of cultural contest and formation”. 43 Graves deploys Wildegoose’s unlawful field-preaching as a “mimetic disposition” towards saint-errantry induced by Whitefield’s and Wesley’s journals – the counterparts of Don Quixote’s chivalric Romances. Quoted at length in the novel, they are partly a de facto sermo humilis through which Wildgoose seeks to enlighten the lowest orders, partly an instantiation of “prophaneness”, that is, speculation, because they fail to follow Scripture, which is the only epistemological means of understanding transcendent truth:
42 Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility, 90. 43 Ibid., 63 (emphasis added). More will be said in the next section on the art of Wildgoose’s enthusiastic oratory, which accentuates the relevance of the Methodist discourse to the improvement of Anglican preaching techniques. 234 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
As for the frequent allusions to Scripture, the author is sorry that the truth of his principal character, not only justifies, but makes such allusions necessary; and the charge of prophaneness will fall upon the Journals from whence those expressions are taken, and not upon the author of this history. (4)
Graves dismisses Whitefield’s and Wesley’s journals as Non- conformist by invoking William Warburton’s Doctrine of Grace (1750), a severe critique of Methodism that the amiable Graves transforms into a humorous book in order to prevent “his principal Character” from becoming an even more ridiculous figure. The novelist’s sympathy for Methodism becomes more noticeable due to the fact that he deliberately mistakes Warburton’s book for a humorous work. Posing as the editor of the novel discovered in an upholsterer’s letter-case, Graves says that “the Author might have heightened the ridicule of his principal character, by making more use of some modern Journals: which has since been done, on a different occasion, with exquisite humour, by one of the first writers of the age for genius and learning” (4). In the Introduction to The Spiritual Quixote, Tracy explains that Warburton’s Doctrine of Grace may have served as a source of inspiration for Graves, who “used many of the same quotations from Wesley’s journal that Warburton used. Moreover Warburton twice referred to Cervantes in this connection, likening the Methodist preachers to Don Quixote and Sancho Pancho.”44 The lack of “Christian meekness” (70) parallels the unorthodox conduct of all Methodist women who temper their erotic enthusiasm – analogous to the main character’s divine enthusiasm – by apparently asking the young and beautiful saint-errant Wildgoose to ease their soul of some of its burden. Such is the uncouth behaviour of Mrs Booby, Graves’ replica of Henry Fielding’s Lady Booby, 45 who directs her burning sexual desire onto Joseph Andrews. Her frivolity is masked by the false pretence of seeking spiritual consolation with a view to alleviating her “present uneasiness” occasioned by “a bad run at cards” at Bath (157) rather than her unfortunate marriage to an authoritarian gentleman, Mr Booby. The comedy of the whole
44 Tracy, Introduction to The Spiritual Quixote, xviii. 45 Booby is the name of both Joseph Andrew’s sister, Pamela, and his brother-in-law Fielding uses to ridicule Richardson’s Mr B. A Tale of Faith and Love 235 situation stems from the discrepancy between her intention “to captivate our Hero” in an elegantly furnished dining-room in which she receives him in a “genteel dishabille” (148) and Wildgoose’s earnest compassion for her anguish. After listening to the story of her past life, Wildgoose turns out to be wise enough to guess the real cause of her distress, telling her that she actually prefers “the gaieties and pleasures of Bath” (156) to her marriage to Booby. In spite of “the peculiarities of his religious system”, Wildgoose is an appealing figure throughout the novel. Though he returns some amorous glances to some Methodist female characters, he resists their sexual overtures by constantly thinking of his physical Dulcinea, Julia Townsend. Analogous to Joseph’s union with Fanny in Joseph Andrews, Wildgoose and Julia Townsend symbolize Graves’ optimistic view of reality which, as McKeon puts it, appears as “poetic justice”.46 I would like to conclude by referring to the two mottos to the first volume of the novel. “Amusement reigns Man’s great Demand”, reads the first motto taken from Edward Young’s Night Thoughts, vouchsafes Graves’ soft spot for Addison’s and Steele’s naturalization of Whig laughter. Amusement – of the kind relished by Mrs Booby – constitutes Graves’ sympathetic response that is to be inculcated in readers’ mind by means of the pedagogical force of Romance, as the second motto from Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloise shows: “Romances are almost the only Vehicles of Instruction that can be administered to a voluptuous People” (11). Inspired by Henry Fielding, The Spiritual Quixote substantiates his idea of comedy and Romance under the guise of providential justice which “transfers the major challenge of utopian projection from the substantive to the formal realm”.47 Consider the concluding lines of the novel: “THAT, where we do not obstinately oppose its benevolent intentions, nor presumptuously persist in a wrong course of life, Providence frequently makes use of our passions, our errors, and even our youthful follies, to promote our welfare, and conduct us in happiness” (473). I agree with Tracy, that the adjective “voluptuous” used to characterize the readers of The Spiritual Quixote is not related, pejoratively, to hedonistic pleasure, but to “a pleasure-loving public”
46 See Chapter 2, n.53. 47 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 408. 236 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 entertained by a copy of the original Fieldingesque comic-epic poem in prose.
Methodist saint-errantry, religious enthusiasm and eloquent preaching The Spiritual Quixote depicts Methodist saint-errantry upheld by manic preaching as Wildegoose’s purposeful Quixotic policy. In Tracy’s terms, this novel, like all the others penned by Graves, is a “novel of ideas containing social and moral content tailored to suit the capacities of the novel-reading public of his time”.48 The following discussion will cover a great deal of the protagonist’s idée fixe – a complement, along with love, to Fielding’s Anglicization of Don Quixote – materialized as religious enthusiasm. Side by side with eloquent preaching, it sets the meaningful role of Methodism as Quixotism against a backdrop of unfulfilled priestly duties acknowledged by Graves himself. Equally important in this regard is “the restrictedly subjective and largely aesthetic sense”49 of enthusiasm throughout the eighteenth century. This sense is also fostered by Graves’ belief that, under Fielding’s magnetism, good- natured laughter constitutes the very essence of the comic. I shall concurrently look at Wildgoose’s art of enthusiastic preaching as an important contribution – notwithstanding its unlawfulness – to the development of eighteenth-century polite and persuasion-oriented rhetorical strategies based on bodily performance and controlled emotionalism. From the outset Wildgoose appears as a naturally agreeable person endowed with “a very musical tone of voice” (73) and an “elegance of expression” (27) on common subjects that entitle him to be an excellent orator much admired by his fellow villagers. Importantly enough, in Graves’ novel private reading no longer constitutes the direct cause of madness. Wildgoose cannot forgive the vicar’s “high treason” (17) and, as a consequence, he “gladly embraced any system”
48 Tracy, A Portrait of Richard Graves, 134-35. Tracy points out that James Dodsley, the editor of Richard Graves’ works, replaced “voluptuous” with “polite” in the first edition of the novel, to the astonishment and disappointment of Graves, “who wrote to him explaining that he had used the word ‘voluptuous’ deliberately and that the change made nonsense of his point” (ibid., 135). 49 Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries, Leiden, New York and Cologne: E.J. Brill, 1995, 279. A Tale of Faith and Love 237
(19) able to challenge Powell’s doctrine. The Spiritual Quixote’s revenge and defiance of the religious establishment show him to be a rebel who manages to compete with Powell in terms of solid knowledge of “godly discourses” and preaching talent. In addition, Wildgoose’s mimetic – because Whitefieldian – saint-errantry practised on behalf of the true spiritual reformation of the lowest orders represents a countermeasure against Powell’s coercive and violent attitude towards his parishioners. Once the ground for Wildgoose’s missionary zeal is thus successfully prepared, he launches the first spiritual campaign in his own village, accompanied by Jeremiah Tugwell, the spitting image of Sancho Panza, who is “an honest sociable cobbler” (21) characterized by “justice, temperance and fortitude” (24). Nonetheless, comically speaking, they cannot prevent him from becoming quixotized because of his great interest in “fabulous books, which dealt in the marvellous and the romantic”, not to mention his predilection for speculation, thus disregarding “the common maxims of prudence” (23). He makes the first show of enthusiastic preaching under the great elm of Tugwell’s gate, where he harangues his audience about the depravity of human nature. “With eyes fixed and foaming mouth”, the hero preaches “the quaint Hebraisms of the Old Testament” by making use of “the peculiar expressions of the primitive apostles … to every trifling occurrence of modern life” (26-27). When the first test of his preaching skills animated by works like “The Marrow of Divinity, Crumbs of Comfort, and Honey-combs for the Elect, The Spiritual Eye-salves, Cordials for the Saints, and Shoves for heavy-ars’d Christians” (19) is passed successfully, Wildgoose commits himself to taking the “Road to lasting Fame” paved by a strong self-confidence in his own oratory talent. This is bound up with his ambition to emulate the spiritual adventures of “our modern Apostles”, namely Wesley and Whitefield, and “imitate them in their sufferings; and wished for nothing so much as to be persecuted for the sake of his own religion”. Less persecuted than Tugwell, who is drubbed, ready to be tossed in a blanket or pelted with dirt and horse-dung because of his companion’s ecstatic eloquence which spoils the country people’s diversion, Wildgoose resolves to revive primitive piety and the doctrine of the Reformation “by turning missionary, and publishing his religious notions in every part of the kingdom” (29). 238 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
By preaching faith alone, instead of “the filthy rags of our own works” (25), “with eyes fixed and foaming mouth”, Wildgoose claims to have direct divine inspiration through violent passions responsible for physical convulsions taken as signs of external behaviour. Isabel Rivers points out that “true experience is distinguished from false enthusiasm (religious madness) because it can be validated not only by the individual’s appeal to his own feeling, but by the observer’s appeal to the test of Scripture and reason”.50 According to Samuel Johnson’s definition, “enthusiasm” means “hot credulous imagination, heat of imagination, a vain confidence of divine favour or communication, a vain belief of private revelation”.51 Though perfec- tion can be achieved as long as there is an interdependence of Scripture and reason, the marker of true experience, Wildgoose confutes this “secular ethics”52 he views both as “the custom of the country” and “a tedious piece of lip-labour, without the least edification” (25). The “vain confidence of divine favour”, as well as the “vain belief of private revelation” inculcated by the “modern Apostles” of Methodism are exponents of the much criticized false prophesy dictated by enthusiasm. At the same time, they represent indispensable rhetorical ornaments that help the mimetic Wildgoose to make his preaching technique more persuasive. Michael Heyd has shown that “after 1660, the emphasis seems to have been on the legitimacy of enthusiasts’ claims to have direct divine inspiration, rather than on the content of their preaching”.53 I wish to connect Heyd’s observation with the idea of “enthusiasm” posited by Shaftesbury in A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm. As a disciple of the Cambridge Platonists, Shaftesbury adopts a tolerant position on enthusiasm theorized as a “militant religion”, a “soul- rescuing spirit” and “saint-errantry”,54 an ecstatic mood that needs to be soothed by artful magistracy:
50 Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, 243. 51 Comprehensive Johnson’s Dictionary, pages unnumbered. 52 Rivers writes: “Faith working by love is a process in which grace and reason, faith and works, Scripture and experience, religion and ethics are indissolubly linked in order to produce the holy and happy life, the life of perfection here on earth” (Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, 252). 53 Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”, 166. 54 Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm”, 16. A Tale of Faith and Love 239
The magistrate, if he be any artist, should have a gentler hand; and instead of caustics, incisions, and amputations, should be using the softest balms; and with a kind sympathy entering into the concern of the people; and taking, as it were, their passion upon him should, when he has soothed and satisfied it, endeavour, by cheerful ways, to divert and heal it.55
“Sympathy” and “cheerful ways” are synonyms, in terms of cure, for good-humour. It is ensured by “one of those principal lights, or natural mediums, by which things are to be viewed, in order to a thorough recognition”. This means “ridicule itself, or that manner of proof by which we discern whatever is liable to just raillery in any subject”.56 Always accompanied by melancholy, religious enthusiasm can never be a state deemed suitable for grasping the divine spirit, for its symptoms make us “unapt to think of it in good-humour”. When seized with enthusiasm, we approach religion, continues Shaftesbury, “in adversity chiefly, or in ill health, under affliction, or disturbance of mind, or discomposure of temper”.57 Like any other Quixote, Wildgoose is able “to examine the temper of his mind” only when he does not put his idée fixe in execution, which, in the words of Shaftesbury, is characterized as “panic”: “Thus is, my lord, there are many panics in mankind besides merely that of fear. And thus is religion also panic; when enthusiasm of any kind gets up, as oft, on melancholy occasions, it will.”58 Before Wildgoose becomes a Spiritual Quixote, his “panics” are brought about both by the quarrel with the vicar and the fear that the latter may have found out about his love affair with his mother’s maid. These “panics” generate “a sort of Enthusiasm of the second hand” 59 that warps Wildgoose’s mind the moment when he stumbles upon “a multifarious body of divinity”. This is a turning point in the temper of the main character bedazzled by a frenzy-causing “farraginous medley of opinions” (20) about the sect of Methodists to which he now veers. The “medley of opinions” is consubstantial, from this point of view, with “a liberty of judgement” 60 voluntarily taken by Wildgoose in
55 Ibid., 14. 56 Shaftesbury, “An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour”, 44. 57 Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm”, 24. 58 Ibid., 13. 59 Ibid., 31. 60 Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”, 215. 240 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 order to adopt any system “that seemed to thwart his [Mr. Powell’s] doctrine” (19). Such a liberty is inferred from Shaftesbury’s medical critique of enthusiasm:
There is a melancholy which accompanies all enthusiasm. Be it love or religion (for there are enthusiasms in both) nothing can put a stop to the growing mischief of either, till the melancholy be removed and the mind at liberty to hear what can be said against the ridiculousness of an extreme in either way.61
Connected with “the temper of our own mind and passions”, instead of “the content of the preaching”, as Heyd suggests, divine enthusiasm is, in Shaftesbury’s view, a spiritually acceptable and “serene” 62 modus operandi relying exclusively on good-natured sentiment: “… he [the enthusiast] had nothing of the bigot. He heard everything with mildness and delight, and bore with me when I treated all his thoughts as visionary, and when, sceptic-like, I unravelled all his systems.”63 In accord with the Whiggish good-natured laughter, Shaftesbury “gave a subjectivist twist to the Platonic interpretation of enthusiasm [false feeling of the divine presence], seeing it primarily as a human passion” and concurrently, pointing out “its psychological and epistemological perspective”.64 Graves makes a similar point when he underlines the superiority of “Patriarchs and Prophets, Apostles and Evangelists, and even St. Paul himself” who “had divine commissions to take the profession [of saint-errantry] upon them” to “our modern itinerant reformers” who “are acting in defiance of human laws, without any apparent necessity, or any divine commission”. By the same token, the primitive way of preaching based on reason and Scripture has been replaced, comments Graves, by the force of modern field preachers’ imagination that propels them into “planting the Gospel in a Christian country: they are combating the shadow of Popery, where the Protestant religion is established; and declaiming against good works, in an age which they usually represent as abounding in every evil work” (40). Yet this unlawful enthusiastic preaching is successfully tried by good humour,
61 Shaftesbury, “A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm”, 12. 62 Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”, 224. 63 Shaftesbury, “The Moralists”, I, iii, 25. 64 Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”, 222. A Tale of Faith and Love 241
“the best security against enthusiasm” and “the best foundation of piety and true religion”. 65 Heyd argues that “Shaftesbury clearly extended the medical account of enthusiasm to include at least the bodily symptoms of all prophets, whether heathen or Christian, ancient or contemporary”,66 since he was highly sceptical of the way in which the “ill physicians” managed to heal the humours responsible for either physical or mental commotions. Therefore, it is the Magistrate who is in charge of alleviating the distempers of the enthusiast’s mind “by cheerful ways”. It is through good-natured laughter or raillery, claims Shaftesbury, that “we may treat other enthusiasms as we please”.67 In Wildgoose’s case, excellent oratory and the performance of the body “in the Rostrum” are “connotations”68 of the term “enthusiasm” which, apart from revealing the sublime in human passions, become active participants in shaping the aesthetic sense of the protagonist’s divine enthusiasm. Knowing very well that excellent oratory, as opposed to ordinary talking, is also dependent on an enthusiastic body twisted by the passions as “visible signs of virtue or true faith”, 69 Wildgoose’s zealous eloquence is first hailed as a success under the great elm at Tugwell’s gate:
… Mr. Wildgoose was sufficiently sensible of the difference between mere talking, and preaching in a fanatical manner …. but where the passions were to be moved and the affections engaged, a more vehement action (approaching to gesticulation), a greater earnestness, and more impassioned tone of voice, were to be made use of: which an orator upon a level with the crowd and in the open street could by no means exert to the best advantage. (26)
Happy to see that his little audience responds favourably to his harangues about diabolical or “profane amusements” like ringing bells and dancing at may-poles, Wildgoose begins “to aspire after a more
65 Ibid., 17. 66 Ibid., 217. 67 Ibid., 16. 68 Heyd writes that “enthusiasm” also had a linguistic connotation in the seventeenth century: “The growing suspicion of ornamental style, high-flown language and the tropes and figures of Renaissance rhetoric, together with the stress on ‘plain style’ and on clear and distinct statements, has attracted the attention of many literary scholars in the past two generations (ibid., 5). 69 Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility, 249. 242 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 extensive fame” (29) immediately after his eloquent preaching is put to test in his own village. Determined to imitate Whitefield, the hero turns into a missionary who thinks of Bristol as his next destination because it stands for “an Original of Methodism” (30) embodied by Whitefield who, “at this time, made that his principal residence” (32). Not only does Wildgoose imitate the doctrine of the primitive reformers, he imitates their hairstyle in order to resemble them in his external appearance as well. He therefore willingly jettisons his periwig in favour of his natural hair that “was now thick enough to keep him warm, yet as it did not extend below his ears” (41). The hero philosophizes that modern periwigs signify bad taste and corrupt moral and religious conduct as they cannot convey the sense of Methodist “holiness of heart and life”70 achieved through purity and simplicity of manners. Though Wildgoose rejects the fashionable custom of wearing a periwig, he continues to be an agreeable man, especially when women are the main target of spiritual conversion. His rough hair too becomes an important element of the rhetoric of body language, of what Goring calls “rhetorical strategies of cultural contest and formation”. Eager to disseminate the doctrine of divine grace and reprobation outside his native village, Geoffrey Wildgoose, a name whose initials are identical to those of George Whitefield, deserts his mother who is utterly grieved and disappointed with her son’s absurd resolution to preach Methodism in every corner of the kingdom. The hero’s first effort towards reforming a party of revellers in the Cotswold hills ends unsuccessfully “amidst the loud scoffs and exulting shouts of the unthinking multitude” that actually excite his zeal as a Spiritual Quixote never disheartened by “so slight a persecution”. By taking Scripture alone as deity, he enjoys the prospect of better success in Gloucester, the cradle of Methodism, where “Mr. Whitefield was born, and first preached the word” (55). Whereas Whitefield appears in the novel as a hypocritical figure, Wesley, an honest and spiritually supportive presence, warns Wildgoose to avoid Wednesbury, the place of the Methodist preachers’ violent persecution, where not even the hero’s oratory can soothe the rage of poor colliers described as “a many-headed monster, a drunken multitude, who knew not what they did” (326). Whitefield
70 Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, 227. A Tale of Faith and Love 243 experiences a feeling of jealousy of Wildgoose’s success as a field preacher. Jealousy is symbolized by the former’s refusal “to admit any more sharers in the labour” (230) even after the leader of the Methodist movement finds out the real name of the hero ready to follow his spiritual master so as to reform the prevailing darkness of the miserable poor by means of his remarkable rhetoric: “Wildgoose excelled Whitfield in an expressive countenance, and a more gentleman-like air; not to mention the weight which an opinion of Wildgoose’s superior fortune would probably give to his eloquence” (236). This is yet another confirmation of the fact that the Spiritual Quixote’s missionary task is a relevant one in terms of reformation of plebeians, as it is realized by a sincere and vehement orator driven, nonetheless, by “the mechanical and infectious operation of an enthusiastic energy” (269). In his analysis of the questioning status of the Methodist preacher as either pariah or exemplar, Paul Goring has argued that Graves, like Goldsmith, presents “constructive and (selectively) tolerant views of Methodism – they promote, in fact, a qualified incorporation of Methodist preaching techniques into the ‘official’ discourse of eloquence”. This is because The Spiritual Quixote seeks to “secure an authorial position at the heart of polite society, from which then to transform society by redefining the terms of its politeness”.71 Goring’s claim is analogous to Quixotism as an alternative ideology that endeavours, against all odds, to reshape contemporary morals and manners, even as this is done by the Quixotes’ delusive power. The methodically mad Wildgoose’s mystic possession does have palpable results at Gloucester, where most countrymen “bestowed no small encomiums upon the youthful Orator” whose field preaching becomes “a sort of fashion” among people “of all ranks and degrees” (73). In A Defence of Methodism: Delivered Extemporary in a Public Debate, Thomas Olivers too lays emphasis on the Methodists’ undeniable merit of having made the vulgar see the light:
But what good have they done? Spiritual and Temporal good. For first they have been instruments in turning the most ignorant, vulgar, and ridiculous sinners from darkness to light.72
71 Goring, “Anglicanism, Enthusiasm and Quixotism”, 328. 72 Thomas Olivers, A Defence of Methodism: Delivered Extemporary in a Public Debate, London: J. Atlay, 1785, 24. 244 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Thus Wildgoose is living proof of the superiority of enthusiastic Methodist preaching over Anglican services frequented by “drowsy congregations”, 73 since it is “not only argumentative, but likewise plain, practical, and persuasive”.74 Furthermore, Mr Graham – a polite and benevolent philosopher self-styled “a Knight-errant in the cause” (127) whom Wildgoose and Tugwell meet on their way to Bath – admits that persuasive Methodist preaching did contribute to the improvement of the discursive techniques used by establishment religion, but he cannot help accusing itinerant preachers of pure speculation:
I really believe, when the Methodists first set out (as Providence often brings about salutary ends by irregular means) they did some good, and contributed to rouse the negligent clergy, and to revive practical Christianity amongst us. But, I am afraid, they have since done no small prejudice to Religion, by reviving the cobweb disputes of the last century; and by calling off the minds of men from practice, to mere speculation. (128)
Graham’s dual perspective on Methodism may also be interpreted as a cultural border between impolite and polite conduct. Where Anglican preaching techniques seem to be flawed because of their inability to move the passions, Wildgoose’s enthusiastic bodily performance manages to “have a proportionable effect upon his audience” (73). Wildgoose can only be conscious of the pernicious effects of enthusiasm upon his audience as an observer, since he saw “what absurdities people frequently run into who have once forsaken the guidance of Reason” (243). The protagonist’s spiritual mission reliant on the passions as signs of true faith acts as an exemplary model of bodily performance which, blended with eloquence, can perfect the Anglican polite body. According to Goring, “Graves asserts the authority of the institution he represents, but he does so only after its flaws have been put on public display and after marginally-sited ideas for its improvement have been posited”.75 We remember Mrs Wildgoose deploring the want of spiritual duty amongst contemporary clergy that is to be reactivated by Wildgoose’s
73 Goring, “Anglicanism, Enthusiasm and Quixotism”, 331. 74 Olivers, A Defence of Methodism, 33. 75 Goring, “Anglicanism, Enthusiasm and Quixotism”, 339. A Tale of Faith and Love 245 mechanical yet appealing “extempore effusions” (279). Once again, we hear Wildgoose averring that his models, Whitefield and Wesley, “rouse men from their dangerous lethargy, and engage their attention to the pure and genuine doctrines of Primitive Christianity” (176). Far from scoffing at enthusiasm as a mere Quixotic idiosyncrasy, Graves expresses his conviction of the meaningfulness of enthusiastic eloquence through the voice of Mr Greville, an epitome of piety and good nature, who cures Wildgoose’s madness at the end. A member of polite society in whom “the sacerdotal character appeared in its genuine dignity”, which is the result of “a sincere piety, sanctity of manners, and goodness of heart”, Greville bases his argument on the same duality suggested by Graham. He recognizes the merits of passionate Methodist eloquence supported by bodily conduct, but excoriates the Methodist doctrine of election and reprobation which, allegedly, facilitates access to direct divine inspiration. For Greville, faith working by love is interpreted in the modern sense of “acts of beneficence which his humanity prompted him to perform” (432). As a performer of good works, therefore, he accommodates Wildgoose after the latter is wounded by a decanter a young man on horseback hurls at his head while the protagonist harangues at Warwick about “the evil consequences of these ungodly assemblies”, as well as of “drunkenness and intemperance” (428). The violent blow on his head constitutes, along with the love for Miss Townsend, the path to sanity thanks to the careful Doctor Greville, who is glad that “the mist was dispelled from his mind, and that he seemed to see things in their proper light” (448). Like any Quixote that is to be brought back to established social norms, Wildgoose cannot be so easily convinced that Methodism has had a wrong influence upon his mind and conduct. Wildgoose’s idea that everyone “has a divine call” to revive the practice of true Christianity is rebutted by the Doctor, for, he says, everything should be done “decently and in order” (449), without violating the regulations of society. Unlike Don Quixote’s madness that is always at odds with the law, “eighteenth-century versions cannot stomach this, and set much more store by the dehumouring of their Quixotic figures – their restoration to sanity, marriage, and social control”. 76 In this sense, eighteenth-century Quixotes are modern to the extent that they are
76 Hammond, “Mid-Century English Quixotism and the Defence of the Novel”, 267. 246 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 reintegrated into the community to which they belong, though not without having contributed with their alternative view of the world to the cultural renovation of lawful conventions and principles. In Graves’ novel it is preaching “without a legal call”, not the sect of the Methodists that is condemned. As for the latter, Dr Greville omits to mention that the Methodists’ serious lives and “the vehemence and earnestness of their harangues … may have a temporary effect upon their audience whilst the impression on their fancy lasts; and have, I believe, really awakened many indolent and careless Christians to a sober and devout life” (451). Greville metonymically takes Wildgoose as a good, even exemplary, orator who is able to intervene in the process of bettering the polite discourse promoted by the Anglican Church. As Goring contends, “The Spiritual Quixote seeks to identify a mode of expression which is at once eloquent and polite”.77 The Spiritual Quixote’s bodily performance and elocutionary talent coalesce into a challenging complex rhetorical strategy which, on the anti-Methodist side, “can function as a stimulus for an introspective self-critique”.78 Corroborated with Graves’ sympathetic laughter, en- thusiasm becomes a determining factor in the process of religious secularization, since it has caused the decline of the Church of England after philosophers like Shaftesbury began to treat the term with tolerance. If we consider “the retreat of the supernatural dimension from human and natural affairs, then it is the reaction to enthusiasm from the clerical establishment which may be taken as an indication of this process”. 79 By means of Shaftesbury enthusiasm acquires the status of a private sentiment experienced not only under the form of saint-errantry but also as direct access to divine inspiration eased by an exalted tone meant to move both the orator’s and the audience’s passions. In doing so, Geoffrey Wildgoose’s enthusiastic yet persuasive preaching proves its superiority to modern-day sterile, though rational, sermons.
77 Goring, The Rhetoric of Sensibility, 89. 78 Ibid., 73. 79 Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”, 275. A Tale of Faith and Love 247
Enthusiasm and love go together; or, the Spiritual Quixote’s natural affection for a real Dulcinea As a complement to Wildegoose’s Quixotism construed as Methodist preaching, love rounds out Graves’ comic Romance patterned on Fielding’s Joseph Andrews. In The Spiritual Quixote, love takes the form of “some slight symptoms of an affection, not entirely of the seraphic or platonic kind” (77), as is the case of Joseph’s love for Fanny. As a good-looking Quixote, Wildgoose is desired by women of all ranks driven by the force of inflamed passions allegedly soothed by their claim to seek his spiritual consolation. It is precisely his peculiarity, namely his enthusiastic preaching, mingled with erotic desire that transform the protagonist into a sensual Spiritual Quixote or, simply, into a secular Don Quixote for whom Dulcinea ceases to be only a mistress of his thoughts. We should not forget that one of the causes of Wilgoose’s absence from church and melancholy is the presupposed infringement of “the rules of chastity with his mother’s maid”. This clarification, which shows Wildgoose as a sensual man before taking his Quixotic duty up for a while, foreshadows the Methodist women’s temptations he is supposed to resist throughout the novel, pointing out, at the same time, that eroticism becomes yet another ingredient underlying his picaresque adventures. Clarence Tracy makes an illuminating point in this respect, arguing that “Graves ranked love high among the virtues and that for him love was neither platonic nor entirely spiritual but contained a large carnal ingredient”. 80 I relate his claim to Oliver Lovesey’s suggestion that “Wildegoose’s perambulations expose him to the temptation of potentially violent spiritualized erotic melancholy wherein lies the cure of his enthusiasm”. 81 If Methodism as Non- conformist religion is both community- and emotion-oriented, Wildgoose’s erotic melancholy implies both cognition and emotion, particularly when, as a Quixote, he meets Miss Julia Townsend. Not only do cognition and emotion remain unadulterated while he is a Spiritual Quixote, they help his natural affection for Julia materialize into a union that takes place after “the marvellous vicissitudes which abound in modern romance” (472) have been overcome. Wildgoose meets Julia in Gloucester, where his oratorical skills are praised by the lowest orders and rapturously received by Methodist
80 Tracy, A Portrait of Richard Graves, 139. 81 Lovesey, “Divine Enthusiasm and Love Melancholy”, 384. 248 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 women. Accompanied by Mrs Sarsenet, whose exaggerated Methodist principles forbid men like Wildgoose to “countenance the ladies … in any vain ornaments or wanton attire”, Miss Townsend becomes the object of the hero’s spiritual consolation, with the latter being charmed, at the same time, by both her beauty, “sprightliness in her air, and a piercing brilliancy in her eyes” (78). Well read in Dryden’s plays, as well as a wide array of novels and Romances, the sixteen- year-old Julia derives pleasure from conversing with Wildgoose about assorted intellectual subjects. Yet she cannot help disapproving of his ignorance of his disappointed mother, who falls ill because she can no longer endure his long absence occasioned by the preaching of deviant religious beliefs. Her earnestness stirs the inquisitiveness of Wildgoose, who wishes to find out “why she looked so very dismal upon the occasion?” (78). Covering a considerable part of Book III, Julia’s digressive account of her unfortunate life functions, in Hunter’s terms, as “a whole treated ‘as part of another whole-in-the-making’”.82 As she clarifies from the outset, her suffering, caused by her taste for Romance reading, stirs her sister’s jealousy reciprocated by their step mother, whose “forbidding looks and reproaches” (83) determine Julia to put an old romantic scheme into practice. Craving to taste the grandeur and politeness of London, she is exposed to all kinds of sexual temptations, as her view of reality is actually the one borrowed from Romances. Restored to her father after she managed to avoid becoming a prostitute and marrying a bigamist, Julia stirs Wildgoose’s compassion which is not understood, the narrator says, as “a mere human passion for this young lady” (98). Displeased with the hero’s “nice distinctions in divinity”, since they are of an enthusiastic sort, Miss Townsend is, however, attracted to Wildgoose’s pleasant nature that his social rank makes more agreeable, since “fortune alone, where the person is disagreeable, has seldom any considerable influence over the affections of a young girl” (99). Despite being the heir to a good fortune, Wildgoose unconditionally falls in love with Julia, whose “fetishized virginity is … representing the sociable religion that can check Wildgoose’s zeal”.83 This does not mean that Wildgoose’s sensuality is not put to the test whenever he is eager to give spiritual consolation to sinful
82 Hunter, Before Novels, 48. 83 Lovesey, “Divine Enthusiasm and Love Melancholy”, 385. A Tale of Faith and Love 249 women like Mrs Booby, a brothel patroness whom he advises that prostitutes can be granted salvation provided they go to church, or Mrs Molly, a young servant in Sir William Shenstone’s house, who makes no bones about exchanging amorous glances with the Spiritual Quixote. These are instances that show the hero’s vulnerable passions, but Julia’s “fetishized virginity” becomes indicative of his natural affection advocated by the rules of sentimental Romance. As a zealous preacher in love, Wildgoose is aware that his “vagabond profession” cannot “forbear the tribute of a sigh to … Miss Townsend” (224), whose absence is made up for by the cambric handkerchief she drops from the chariot on her way to Birmingham. The handkerchief becomes the iconic object that strengthens Wildgoose’s passion for Julia, thus standing for the test his chastity passes successfully. In The Spiritual Quixote, the presence of Miss Townsend towards the end of the novel is even more influential than that of Dr Greville, the actual curate of Wildgoose. Once confirmed by her presence and care for the wounded hero, her share of affection helps him put the practice of Methodism aside and return to conformity. This is not done, however, until Wildgoose has heard the story of Mr Rivers, his former colleague at Oxford. This seemingly irrelevant narrative of Mr River’s sinuous path to happiness pursued and finally consumed together with Charlotte Woodville – a young, beautiful and good- natured lady exposed, like Julia Townsend or Fielding’s Fanny, to a series of sexual misdeeds – mirrors the happy ending of Wildgoose’s and Julia’s picaresque adventures. With Wildgoose growing out of Methodist enthusiasm and Julia stuck to the world of Romance both as a reader and wife, natural affection restores the balance between religious principles and social norms based, nevertheless, on the Spiritual Quixote’s mad but excellent oratory and priestly duties and also on his wife’s benevolence shown to those in distress. According to Lovesey, “Wildgoose locates the antidote for divine enthusiasm within a potentially dangerous object of temptation that becomes an emblem of natural affection and sociable religion”.84 Treated as complements in a novel written in the manner of Fielding, divine enthusiasm and natural affection for a real Dulcinea act as a mingling of the wish-fulfilment of Romance with the comic fulfilment proclaimed by the novel.
84 Ibid., 387. 250 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
The argument of this chapter has been that Richard Graves treats Methodism as Quixotism shaped by divine enthusiasm understood as religious knight-errantry, or, in Shaftesbury’s terms, as “saint- errantry”. Graves’ view of such a Nonconformist confession – endorsed by Christopher Collop in the Advertisement for the novel – is tolerant to the extent that the doctrine’s aim to revive true Christianity can be achieved through sincerity and devotion conveyed by zealous preaching rather than traditional, though rhetorically dull and boring, Anglican teachings. Graves’ amiable view of Methodism is formally supported by an overt imitation of Fielding’s generic transformation of Romance, which adds to the novelist’s penchant for Addison’s and Steele’s Whiggish aestheticization of laughter corroborated with Shaftesbury’s new understanding of “enthusiasm” as “liberty of judgement” or individual sentiment. Though attacks on Methodist enthusiasm “are legion in the anti- Methodist literature of the eighteenth century”,85 Graves’ novel blends divine enthusiasm with natural affection for a mistress who is part not only of Wildgoose’s thoughts but also of his life. In Clara Reeve’s Progress of Romance, The Spiritual Quixote is included in Euphrasia’s “list of Novels and Stories Original and uncommon”.86 Its originality is advocated by the political implications of Methodism as a Nonconformist religious confession while its uncommonness consists in the association of Methodism with Quixotism. This is because the former – born within the Church of England – was denigrated, in spite of its rapid success, as it was believed to encourage “insubordination, if only in the spiritual pretensions of its converts”.87 But we cannot fail to observe that Graves’ tolerant atti- tude towards the Methodists is also strengthened by the relationship between faith and “progressive notions of ‘virtue’” 88 reflected in Wildgoose’s acknowledged oratorical talent proved when trying to reform the lowest orders, in the steady fulfilment of his priestly duties even after Dr Greville restores him to full health and, in the long run, in his happy marriage to Julia Townsend.
85 David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2005, 34. 86 Reeve, The Progress of Romance, II, 53. 87 Sambrook, The Eighteenth Century, 53. 88 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 398. A Tale of Faith and Love 251
I wish to conclude with Clarence Tracy’s idea that the rector of Claverton “deserves to be remembered for himself, as an interesting and complex personality who was at once very much a man of his time and one who suffered the miseries and perplexities and experienced the joys common to all mankind”. Along with recent scholars like Paul Goring and Oliver Lovesey, who have shown an interest in Graves’ novel, Fitzmaurice-Kelly, Charles Whibley and Havelock Ellis share Tracy’s opinion that The Spiritual Quixote should keep “a modern reader’s attention, and an anthology of his shorter pieces in verse and prose should attract many readers”.89 The canonization of such a minor novelist is necessary when it comes to both Quixotic imitations and Quixotism as an eighteenth-century socio-cultural and political phenomenon. However unacceptable Methodism may have been, Graves’ willingness to admit that it is “an act of injustice to call them [the Methodists] a sect” broadens the eighteenth-century tolerant view of religion that G.M. Trevelyan synthesized in his English Social History: “Indeed, the age of Wesley, Cowper, and Dr. Johnson was perhaps as ‘religious’ as the seventeenth century itself, though it had ceased to fight with the sword about rival doctrines of Christianity, and was, therefore, somewhat tolerant of still wider differences of opinion.”90
89 Tracy, A Portrait of Richard Graves, 152. 90 G.M. Trevelyan, English Social History, London, New York, Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1942, I, 353.
CODA: CHARLES LUCAS’ THE INFERNAL QUIXOTE, RADICALISM AND THE COMIC SENSE OF MORAL REFORM
The Quixot who is a sort of Enthusiast in Honour … never meddles with any but military Men, and tho’ he may do some Injury to a good Name, among the unthinking, yet he cannot entirely blast it, his notions being too romantick and chimerical.1
The main types of eighteenth-century English Quixotes portrayed in this book may be seen, as I hope to have shown, as both ethical and socio-economic tools used to redress and, most significantly, to reform the status quo. Without losing their gentlemanly or gentlewomanly decorum, the Quixotic protagonists use these tools in a politicized manner, since their agenda always clashes with an empirical reality that views their conduct as outlandish, eccentric, absurd or anachronistic. More specifically, their tools are politically laden because, at loggerheads with rational authority, Quixotism appraises it as a mere hobby-horse or, in the words of Motooka, “as a political fiction only as rational as the authority of Don Quixote’s lance”.2 This is what I call embattled reason. I would like, however, to draw a conclusion by taking into account a fully political and reasonable Quixote who “meddles with any but military Men”, as the motto suggests, in order to initiate an Irish rebellion modelled on the Jacobin ideals and principles that sent shivers over Britain in the 1790s and early 1800s. This is a hero whose anarchist beliefs turn him into an “infernal” Quixote at the start of the
1 Philonauticus Antiquixotus, The Rule of Two to One: Or, the Difference betwixt Courage and Quixotism. Being Remarks on a Pamphlet, entitled, An Inquiry into the Conduct of Captain M-n, &c., London: W. Webb, 1745, 4. 2 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 2. 254 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 nineteenth century, when the Romantic idealization of Don Quixote foreshadowed in 17403 was more than obvious. Published in 1801, The Infernal Quixote: A Tale of the Day is Charles Lucas’ second novel “avowedly written against the modern principles of atheism and licentiousness, disguised as philosophy and liberty”. 4 Without having any direct connection with the Spanish model, Lucas’ Quixote is associated, ironically and oxymoronically, with Marauder, the central hero and replica of Milton’s Satan, whose doctrine is “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven” (125). Admittedly, Marauder’s personality obviates the display of good nature as well as disinterested or sentimental benevolence specific to most eighteenth-century English Quixotes. Yet the infernal, egoistic, ruthless and deceiving Marauder is Quixotic when it comes to his unwavering rebellious and revolutionary spirit marked by a perfect match between diabolic calculation, arms and discursive adroitness. As M.O. Grenby makes clear in the Introduction to the novel, “the title’s designation of Marauder as a ‘Quixote’ becomes ironic … Marauder certainly was not [a Quixote], for his adoption of Jacobinism was deliberate, cynical, and misanthropic. The novel might, with less irony, have been called ‘The Infernal Machiavel’.”5 Although I readily agree with Grenby’s alternative label attached to Marauder, I insist that the anti-hero – as he is the very opposite of Don Quixote in terms of exemplary moral worth – bears traces of self- imposed Quixotic rebelliousness.6 This is evident when he adopts the identity of Captain M’Ginnis, who raises a small army in the Irish county of Tipperary in an effort to implement Jacobinism, the “new philosophy” underlying the French Revolution. This is the gist of Lucas’ novel, in which Marauder, “the Prince of Hell” (344), or the
3 See Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to Don Quixote: A Critical History of the Romantic Tradition in “Quixote” Criticism, London, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1977, 11-12. 4 Appendix A: From Charles Lucas, Gwelygordd; or, the Child of Sin. A Tale of Welsh Origin (1820), in Charles Lucas, The Infernal Quixote: A Tale of the Day, ed. M.O. Grenby, Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview, 2004, 413 (all further references to this edition will be given in the text). 5 M.O. Grenby, Introduction to The Infernal Quixote, 17. 6 In this sense, my argument differs from Miriam Rossiter Small’s claim that Marauder “is never convincingly a Quixote” and, consequently, “the relation of the book to the quixotic series is distant and feeble”. See Miriam Rossiter Small, Charlotte Ramsay Lennox: An Eighteenth-Century Lady of Letters, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1935, 109. Coda: Charles Lucas’ The Infernal Quixote 255 putative “Cromwell of England” (350), attempts to transplant the ideals of the French Revolution onto Irish soil as a leader of the United Irishmen. Mainly supported by William Godwin’s anarchist principles formulated in Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) and Thomas Paine’s Rights of Men (1791) and The Age of Reason (1793-1794), Marauder’s “new philosophy” would apparently win over the old, conservative tradition of the ancien régime. Yet the victory is deterred by Wilson Wilson, the Christian Quixote who forestalls the spread of “Diabolism” across Britain (175), or Jacobinism, in the anti-Jacobin terminology used by Lucas. Viewed like this, the novel – and the malefic Quixote it foregrounds – is propagandistic to the extent that it exposes the moral, social and political crisis provoked by the voice of democracy and egalitarianism preached by Revolutionary France in the 1790s. Paine, for instance, attacked Edmund Burke’s enthusiastic, if not utopian, conservatism and arid rhetoric whereby the latter deplored the waning of the age of chivalry – an outstanding cultural institution seen by Burke as playing a major role in reshaping the moral and political foundation of modern Europe. Paine says that
When we see a man dramatically lamenting in a publication intended to be believed, that, “The age of chivalry is gone!” that “The glory of Europe is extinguished forever!” ... and all this because the Quixotic age of chivalric nonsense is gone, what opinion can we form of his judgement, or what regard can we pay for his facts? In the rhapsody of his imagination, he has discovered a world of wind-mills, and his sorrows are, that there are no Quixotes to attack them.7
7 The Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Moncure Daniel Conway, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967, II, 287. For a comprehensive discussion of the Quixotic dimension of Burke’s political thought and the revival of chivalric Romance in the eighteenth-century through Jean Chapelain, Pierre Daniel Huet and Jean Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye in France and Thomas Warton, Richard Hurd and James Beattie in Britain, see Frans De Bruyn, “Edmund Burke the Political Quixote: Romance, Chivalry, and the Political Imagination”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, XVI/4 (July 2004), 695-733. Bruyn’s insight into Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) and Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is one more proof of Don Quixote’s transformation into a Romantic hero at the close of the eighteenth-century. He insists that “his [Burke’s] conception of the quixotic role to which he has seemingly sentenced himself reflects the growing sophistication of late eighteenth-century critical readings of Cervantes. While continuing to perceive a burlesque element in Cervantes’ characterisation of the Don, these readings also acknowledge a nobility in the knight’s 256 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Nevertheless, applied to The Infernal Quixote, Paine’s categorization of the age of chivalry as nonsensical is cast by Lucas into a comic mould which echoes the sense of wish-fulfilment exploited by Henry Fielding in relation to truly virtuous characters applauded by good-nature spectators or readers. Lucas’ novel uses vice and virtue as two given moral categories into which good versus bad characters fall, without ever changing their conduct. Thus, much in a Fieldingesque fashion, Marauder and Wilson are two counterpoised political Quixotes, one committed to turning chivalry into the illusory emblem of radicalism, the other set to defend British conservatism, thus restoring political justice as “poetic justice” 8 confirmed by the reader’s sympathetic response to his defence of the political status quo. Since the comic key in which I read The Infernal Quixote resonates with the low mode, Wilson, a carpenter’s son educated according to the principles of Christianity, as opposed to the aristocratic Marauder, is a sentimental Quixote posing as “a friend of humankind” (66). He vanquishes Marauder’s “Diabolism”, simultan- eously reassuring his readers that Jacobinism can be defeated “if they were resolute, loyal and pious”.9 Wilson’s union with Fanny after his regiment returns to England and their happy life in his native village of Hazleton complete the sense of comedy and, implicitly, of the logic of gain. Despite the novel’s happy-ending advocated by conservatism, one cannot disregard the question of Jacobinism dramatized according to various accounts abounding in the state-papers of the time. “However ridiculous, infamous, and contemptible, the sentiments of the Jacobins of that day were”, confesses Lucas, “there is not a man that has been able to advance one word against the veracity of any part of it; and the political facts, as to the Irish Rebellion, &c. were taken from state- papers”.10 The remark is all the more interesting if we consider the novel as a mixture of political anecdotes of the day – the second half of the title, “A Tale of the Day”, is thus suggestive – with fictional strategies through which the authors of anti-Jacobin novels blasted the iniquities of the French Revolution and the “new philosophy” that was idealism and recognise that the reader’s satirical laughter at Quixote reflects ironically on his or her own worldliness and compromising self-interest” (ibid., 707). 8 See Chapter 2, n.54. 9 Grenby, Introduction to The Infernal Quixote, 31. 10 Appendix A, 413. Coda: Charles Lucas’ The Infernal Quixote 257 ready to be exported to Britain, to say nothing of the potential threat to property and social hierarchy. It was generally considered that the pedagogical message conveyed by the late eighteenth-century novel was doubtful because it was enjoyed mainly by “impressionable readers who were young, female, or lower class … who could hardly discriminate between fiction and real life, between good and bad books”.11 Yet many conservatives elevated it to the status of a political genre fraught with propaganda 12 against Jacobin Radicalism, most notably preached by William Godwin’s Caleb Williams published in 1794.13 With the war of ideas waging in fiction too, Lucas’ Infernal Quixote ridicules radical tracts like Paine’s Rights of Man and Age of Reason, Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which turn Marauder into a revolutionary Quixote subdued by a Christian conservative one. “Religion and loyalty” were thus the safe weapons used against readers who “were likely to be seduced by the ‘new philosophy’”.14 The novel opens with a prologue in which Milton’s Satan15 heralds “the reign of ANTICHRIST … – Thanks to the daring, restless sons of France, inspired by me and mine!” (39). Alluding to the infernal
11 Grenby, Introduction to The Infernal Quixote, 12. 12 In his illuminating book, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, Grenby discusses the propagandistic role played by a large number of novels massively distributed on the market in order to disseminate conservatism as the sole political ideology in Britain: “The fact that Jacobinism was almost extinct by the mid 1790s, therefore, gave strength to the anti-Jacobin novel rather than depriving it of its purpose, for as the threat of revolution receded anti-Jacobin fiction was able to build on the ideological unanimity of the population to expand its market and, by reaching more people, most of whom had become increasingly predisposed to accept it, to enhance its potency as an agent of conservatism” (10). 13 Grenby explains that Lucas was interested in drawing attention to the dangers which arose from reading radical political tracts that gained public acclaim in the 1790s, for they represented “one half of what is often referred to as the ‘war of ideas’” (ibid., 12). 14 Ibid., 13. 15 In Grenby’s terms, Milton’s Satan was inspired by Godwin’s own interpretation of Paradise Lost in the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice: “Satan, he [Godwin] suggested, saw no reason for the unequal, unjust and unalterable hierarchy which existed in heaven, so he rebelled …. It was not the idea of hierarchy itself which Marauder disdained, but rather the lack of advancement which, in his precise circumstances, he was able to achieve” (ibid., 16). 258 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Marauder, the prologue encapsulates the radical doctrine of Jacobinism that he is to unfold shortly after his uncle, the Duke of Silsbury, denies him the right to become the heir of the family honours and titles: “Our Hell-born virtues nor art nor force can graft upon their tree of civil and religious Liberty” (39; emphasis in the original). In striking contrast with such a threatening prelude is the cheerful beginning of the novel, which, in a Sternean vein, describes the birth and comic baptism of the good Quixote as Wilson Wilson, rather than William Wilson: “Merrily rang the bells in the village of Hazleton” (41). The same bells ring merrily in the end too, when Marauder commits suicide and the Irish Rebellion, a micro-replica of the French Revolution, is nipped in the bud by the conservative government’s army led by Wilson. Sterne’s style is also identifiable in the person of Dr Line, a man- midwife fond of astronomy “subservient to his astrological fancies” (45). However hobby-horsical, Dr Line’s predictions prove to be true. Born on the same day, Wilson’s and Marauder’s destinies meet, according to Dr Line’s calculations, in the last part of the novel, in which both are leaders of rival armies. Comically enough, the narrator anticipates the antagonism between the two by invoking the discovery of a new comet whose “inauspicious influence” was responsible for “the retrograde motion of things”. Far from becoming “a second Castor and Pollux” (53), the two Quixotes actually become political enemies the moment Marauder loses a duel with Wilson. This scene occurring in their youth is, observes Grenby, “emblematic of the turn of the tide in the war between insurgents and the state”.16 Where the benevolent yet poor Wilson was raised in the spirit of virtue, religion and happiness, the witty duke-to-be Marauder learnt the lesson of Stoicism, ambition and trickery, to which he added “reflection, penetration, and judgment” (57). The engagement of the Satanic Marauder, a metonymic figure of Jacobin Radicalism, in the politically radical reformation of Ireland is instrumental for unravelling the fears of the “new philosophy” called by Lucas “A species of Wisdom, which man discovers by the aid of his own individual powers, corporeal and mental, without owning the aid of any superior Being, directly or indirectly” (174). Lucas points to William Godwin’s anarchist idea of government posited in Enquiry
16 Ibid., 29. Coda: Charles Lucas’ The Infernal Quixote 259
Concerning Political Justice. For Godwin, reason, individual sovereignty and private judgement – the signs of man’s perfectibility – are apt to determine what is just for both oneself and the welfare of society, whereas government must be dissolved. It is, claims Godwin, a “brute engine”,17 the epitome of evil, tyranny, corruption and manip- ulation, rather than a Lockean political body elected by the people’s consent. B. Sprague Allen suggests that The Infernal Quixote is a novel “of buffoonery and scandal” which represents “a distorted conception of human nature, an absurd theory of perfectibility, and a visionary scheme of social reconstruction”.18 The offensive against the Godwin- ian political doctrine may be coupled with Augustin Barruel’s denunciation of the French Revolution as a “scourge to all Europe”, “a frantic rage against the altar and the throne”19 or with Robert Bisset’s attack against Jacobinism: “Whoever is the enemy of Christianity, and natural religion, of monarchy, of order, subordination, property and justice, I call a Jacobin.” 20 From a conservative point of view, Marauder’s “social reconstruction” is “visionary” and, inevitably, Quixotic in the most radical, if not Romantic, terms. From a radical point of view, Marauder is the reformer for whom “ALL PRINCIPLE IS FOLLY” (198), which compels Lucas not only to repel this “war of ideas” but also to ridicule it. He classifies different types of Jacobinism according to their particular political or moral hobby-horse, with Marauder standing above all the sects of modern “Infernal spirits”, or “would-be Philosophers” grouped under the umbrella concept of “Diabolism” (174). The Infernal Quixote is a “Nothinger” in Lucas’ terminology, namely “a mixture of vices” deployed by “tale-bearers, liars, and common perjurers, thieves, and petty rogues” that “may range among the PERIPATETICS, ILLUMINATI, and NATURALS” (197). It is “heroic diabolism” (257) that spurs the Godwinian Marauder to seek out every opportunity to become a member of both secret organizations in London, such as the Illuminati and the London
17 William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness, London: G.G.J and J. Robinson, 1793, II, 579. 18 B. Sprague Allen, “The Reaction against William Godwin”, Modern Philology, XVI/5 (September 1918), 242. 19 Appendix F: From Augustin Barruel’s Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797-98), in Lucas, The Infernal Quixote, 430. 20 Robert Bisset quoted in Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel, 8. 260 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Corresponding Society, as well as of the republican Society of the United Irishmen, whose organizing system he adopts in order to raise a mutiny in the county of Munster. The radical claim for equal rights, equal laws and equal representation aims at protecting the poor “from the insults and oppressions of the rich, and the rich from the insults and invasions of the poor”.21 At the other end of the scale, the con- servative conviction that social hierarchy or hereditary order cannot and must not be abolished may be rooted in the Evangelical movement, whose reformist agenda focused on the spiritual awakening of the upper class in order to shield the nation from the perils of Jacobinism. Yet Wilson, the son of a carpenter and, in the end, the Christian Quixotic winner, does not belong to the social elite. This means that Lucas’ conservatism “was not always as absolute as Burke’s had become in the 1790s”. 22 But Burke, we remember, deplores the absence of an age of chivalry he commits himself to revitalizing through his conservative utopianism. In The Infernal Quixote, chivalry accounts for the victory of British conservatism impersonated by Wilson at the same time that it epitomizes the force of Jacobin reform of social, political and religious institutions. The latter remains a political fiction “only as rational as the authority of Don Quixote’s lance”, as Motooka inspiringly puts it. As an anti-Jacobin novelist, Lucas lacks the long-standing and enthusiastic force of those who advocate conservative hegemony in fully political terms, targeting his propaganda at Jacobinism’s want of principles or, as he declares, of its categorization of principle as “folly”. Apart from Paine’s, Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s radical ideas that serve as a guide to Marauder’s infernal Quixotism, the renunciation of noble privileges determined by Marauder’s difficulty in inheriting his uncle’s dukedom and title by legal means is yet another source of his untrammelled revolutionary foolhardiness. For Marauder, the “lack of advancement” in terms of social rank turns into his most contemptuous conservative foe to be defeated by the satanic forces of democracy:
21 Appendix E: London Corresponding Society Handbill (1795), in Lucas, The Infernal Quixote, 426. 22 Grenby, Introduction to The Infernal Quixote, 15. Coda: Charles Lucas’ The Infernal Quixote 261
“Cursed Aristocracy!”, said he, “thou art but the semblance of greatness: I’ll no longer pursue the gaudy shadow! Could I have found thy ascent ready prepared for glory, I would have mounted to the top. I will not servilely follow behind, but I’ll hew me out another path. “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”, said the arch-fiend; and since heaven was to him a hell, I’ll make the hell of democracy my heaven. (125)
Analysing Burke’s theory of the French Revolution, Michael Freeman affirms that
… disorderly appetites – such as pride, ambition, revenge, and ungoverned zeal – were the causes of the world’s miseries. Religions, moral codes, ideologies, were the pretexts. The pretexts were always a specious appearance of a real good.23
Marauder’s new desideratum propels him into action as an anarchic, rational, self-sufficient and self-interested diabolic hero ready to fight in the name of the Godwinian principle of absolute individualism:
If a man be of an aspiring, ambitious temper, it is because, at present, he finds himself out of his place, and wishes to be in it. I have this temper – I feel these great talents and great virtues within, and I will mark out a road that shall put me in my proper place. (126)
Ironically, Marauder’s “great talents and great virtues” are “the evils of a fatuous and … criminal egoism”, 24 the cause of his inherent malevolent nature and the pretext of his revolutionary – though Quixotic – spirit. A cunning seducer, the handsome Marauder wins the heart of the young and innocent Emily Bellaire, with whom he elopes to London, where his “connections … were great and splendid”. Reputed for his leading skills, shrewdness, excellent oratory and determined behaviour, the Infernal Quixote earns the admiration of many “Ministerialists and Anti-ministerialists, Aristocrats, Freethinkers, and Sectaries of all denominations”, though his wariness always prompts
23 Michael Freeman, “Edmund Burke and the Theory of Revolution”, Political Theory, VI/3 (August 1978), 288. 24 Allen, “The Reaction against William Godwin”, 239. 262 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 him not to become a slave to any party “before he had the power of full means to be a principal” (94). In London Marauder meets knee- jerk democrats like Mr Arnon, fervent supporters of British conservatism like Rattle and an old Irish friend from Italy, Fahany, who informs Marauder about the plan “to separate Ireland from this country” (141). The novel deals with this issue from now on, after putting aside the debates – whether radical or satirical – about “the Revolution controversy”25 held by the London Corresponding Soc- iety 26 and attended by Marauder and his companions with radical beliefs. In order to put his revolutionary plans in execution, Marauder leaves Emily and, recommended by Mr Arnon, joins the London Society of Freemasons and other conspiratorial organizations bent on plotting the overthrow of church and state. As an upholder of the ideals of the French Revolution, Marauder abides by the reasoned philosophy of Nothingism. Similarly, Grenby says that “new philosophy was created as an amalgam of insidious ideas, separate strands of which could be apportioned by anti-Jacobins to individual characters selected to act as vehicles to drive a putative Jacobin principle before the guns of the novelists”.27 Marauder is, therefore, the vehicle employed by Lucas to bring “reason, virtue, and equality” onto British soil under the name of “modern PHILOSOPHY (though certainly PHILOSOPHISM, or more properly Diabolism)”, which “dazzles the eyes of the present generation of men” (171). In Marauder’s case, “modern philosophy” – which Lucas pejoratively
25 Grenby, Introduction to The Infernal Quixote, 14. 26 Founded by the Scottish boot-maker Thomas Hardy in 1792, The London Corresponding Society was the main radical organization whose purpose was to reform the British Constitution and “those corruptions and abuses which, though some have attempted to justify, no one has had the hardihood to deny” (Appendix E, 426). Grenby argues that “most LCS members were politically moderate, and they aimed for political reform rather than religious upheaval” while the presentation of the society, however consistent with historical facts, “reveals a great deal more about how anti- Jacobins like Lucas imagines these groups to be” (Introduction to The Infernal Quixote, 17). By the same token, in his article, “The Meaning of Revolution in Britain, 1770-1800”, published in The French Revolution and British Culture, eds Ceri Crossley and Ian Small, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, 1-30, George Woodcock makes the case that the London Corresponding Society “represents the most important intrusion of the French Revolution into English intellectual life” (18). 27 Grenby, The Anti-Jacobin Novel, 78. Coda: Charles Lucas’ The Infernal Quixote 263 calls “philosophism” – is the equivalent of progressivism and human perfectibility, for, as Woodcock has observed:
The French Revolution, taking place in a country that had no radical traditions like Britain, and therefore no myth of revolution as a cyclic process, assumed an entirely different direction and opened the era that would be dominated by another myth, that of progress, whether revolutionary or evolutionary, which rejected the past as a model and set its goals in the future, during which humanity and human society would draw ever nearer to perfection.28
“Indefatigable in putting his political schemes into a favourable way” (170), Marauder, accompanied by Fahany, travels to Ireland, where he is to strategize an Irish rebellion against England. Professing himself a Catholic after the funeral of his father, Marauder, now disguised as Captain M’Ginnis, joins the secret society of the United Irishmen, undauntedly pursuing his political and military career until he succeeds in forming a well-mounted and apparelled corps ready to avenge Ireland’s cause. Clive Emsley maintains that “Irish historiography is rather different; in this the French Revolution is seen as giving hope and, belatedly and insufficiently, military assistance to a nation struggling for its freedom and independence”. 29 Marauder reinforces this idea when he informs a French commissioner in charge of negotiating an exchange of prisoners of war that “there is not a man in Ireland, uninfluenced by Ministerial pay, that does not look up to the GREAT NATION as the people with whom they wish to unite and fraternize” (228). However, Marauder’s ideal of union and fraternization with Revolutionary France remains Quixotic. This is because, notwithstanding Lucas’ faithful description of the 1798 Irish Rebellion interpreted as a tale of Irish national identity, his intention was to emphasize that the political institutions of Britain were so solid and seamless that the need for such a rebellion would look preposterous. At the same time, Lucas’ intention was not only to warn his readers about the threatening force of Jacobinism but also to comfort them, “for if the whole Jacobin matrix could be classified and explained,
28 Woodcock, “The Meaning of Revolution in Britain”, 4. 29 Clive Emsley, “The Impact of the French Revolution on British Politics and Society”, in The French Revolution and British Culture, eds Ceri Crossley and Ian Small, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, 31. 264 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 then it could be controlled and countered”.30 Wilson’s victory over Marauder’s “Diabolism” attests to the fact that conspiratorial societies eager to disseminate Jacobinism in Britain are as infernally Quixotic as Marauder’s tactics. In terms of “militant loyalism”,31 Wilson, the Christian Quixote, acts as a deus ex machina, being a commander of the Protestant Brethren in Ireland who defeats Marauder in a duel. This symbolizes the debacle of the latter’s rebellion. Marauder dies “a felon” (409), leaping into a precipice after he recollects all his mischievous deeds, “every fiend of guilt, depravity, and madness” (408) caused by an ailment. Wilson comes back to London and marries Fanny Bellaire, Emily’s sister, whom Marauder abducted in order to take her to America. The Infernal Quixote projects, like Fielding’s Don Quixote in England or Joseph Andrews, the sense of the comic not only in terms of ridicule of the conspiracy “against God, the King, and Society”32 – hence, the characterization of the novel as a comic romp – but also in terms of happy-ending and celebration of virtue, which always goes with the low mode. In addition, Lucas’ excoriation of Jacobinism becomes consubstantial with the power of religion to defeat both infernal Quixotes like Marauder and to instruct readers – through the Christian Wilson – how to follow the pious path to the afterlife:
What art thou, reader? – No matter. – Be thou ever so great in thine own eyes, thou must yield to the power of that Almighty fiat, which can say – ‘This night thy soul shall be required of thee!’ (410)
It has been suggested that The Infernal Quixote is “fraught with ideological tensions” revealed by the mingling of two opposite novelistic traditions, that is, “the raised patrician eye of Fieldingesque satire and the intense, puritanical earnestness of Richardsonian sentiment”.33 Since “Richardsonian sentiment” is not what concerns me here, I claim that Wilson, in contrast with Marauder, articulates Fielding’s belief that true virtue lies in good manners. By defending
30 Grenby, Introduction to The Infernal Quixote, 19. 31 Ibid., 30. 32 Appendix F, 433. 33 Anti-Jacobin Novels, ed. W.M. Verhoeven, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005, X, xii. Coda: Charles Lucas’ The Infernal Quixote 265 the conservative status quo and finally marrying Fanny Bellaire, Wilson reinforces the sense of comic fulfilment construed as “poetic justice”. In Sarah Wood’s words, Lucas’ preference for calling his protagonist the Infernal Quixote “signals the extent to which the knight had become a recognizable political counter in the war of ideas raging across the British Isles at the turn of the nineteenth century”.34 In line with Wood’s argument, I conclude that “the knight”, like all the eighteenth-century English Quixotes under scrutiny, is a “political counter” as long as he upholds an alternative ideology, a social and cultural lance with which the Quixotes usually fight in order to renovate and reform the public sphere. Also, what entitles Quixotic protagonists to be political counters is, as I hope to have shown by employing McKeon’s methodological framework, the manifestation of their “romance idealism” in the realm of “naive empiricism”, which finally culminates in a logic of gain. Parson Adams, Joseph Andrews, David Simple, Arabella and Geoffrey Wildgoose are part of this category. Concurrently, virtuous characters like David Simple in Volume the Last and Harley in Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling become the victims of a “logic of loss”,35 which appears as “extreme skepticism” imposed by the strict rules of the market advocated by Mandevillian economics. It subdues them as a consequence of their excessive sensibility and benevolent sympathy downtrodden by self- interest. Such readings underline what Scott Paul Gordon has called “the Quixote trope”.36 As “the most important vehicle”, in Brean Hammond’s terms, for Cervantes’ reception in England in the comic mode, Henry Fielding not only coined and theorized comic Romance, or what we now call a novel, but also set the tone for, and canonized, the interpretation of eighteenth-century Quixotes as heroes whose senses are perfectly at work. Their “epistemological problems … become political problems, or political problems that turn out to have their basis in epistemological divisions”.37 As a result, their operational strategy is as valid as the universal authority of Lockean reason by which latter- day disenchanted society abides. This line of thought – also supported by McKeon’s “questions of truth” – constitutes a significant argument
34 Wood, Quixotic Fictions of the USA, 25. 35 Irimia, “From the Sublime to the Comic”, 12. 36 See Gordon, The Practice of Quixotism, 1-10. 37 Motooka, The Age of Reasons, 4. 266 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 for viewing Quixotism as a powerful mitigator between the two apparently distinctive generic categories, Romance and the novel, which are, as Margaret Doody has suggested, part of “a timeless continuum”.38 Jeremy Hawthorn also insists on the hybridized form of the eighteenth-century English novel, pointing out that
Even if the novel can be said to emerge as a new literary genre in the eighteenth century, it still owes much to traditions and works, literary and non-literary, from earlier times. No serious student of the novel would deny, for example, that its development in the eighteenth century was profoundly influenced by works such as François Rabelais’s Pantagruel and Gargantua (1532 and 1534) and Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605-15) – whether or not one agrees to describe these works as novels themselves.39
The novel as a hic et nunc hybridized genre was classified by Fielding as a comic Romance in which characters are laughed with, according to Addison’s and Steele’s version of Whiggish amiable laughter. At the level of generic categories and aesthetics of Cervantes’ reception in England, it has been the “more proper Dress”,40 to quote Peter Motteux, worn by six major types of eight- eenth-century Quixotic reformers. They enabled me to read, (1) Fielding’s coalescence of comic Romance with Quixotism as a productive tautology; (2) Sarah Fielding’s moral Romance as a genre sandwiched between Richardsonian feeling and Fieldingesque disinterested benevolence; (3) Lennox’s treatment of Romance as a modern gendered and epistemologically conflicting genre interpreted by Arabella as history; (4) Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling as a typically sentimental piece of fragmented literature in which the passive, charitable and sentimental Harley identifies but cannot solve “a crisis in the corruption of the state”;41 (5) Graves’ Spiritual Quixote, which, in a Fieldingesque vein, satirizes Wildegoose’s Methodism and praises his divine enthusiasm and excellent oratory; (7) Lucas’ Infernal Quixote as a comic romp that suppresses Marauder’s romantic revolutionary ideals inspired by the French Revolution on behalf of British conservatism defended by the Christian Quixote
38 Doody, The True Story of the Novel, 164. 39 Jeremy Hawthorn, Studying the Novel, London: Arnold, 2001, 17. 40 Motteux, “The Translator’s Preface to Cervantes”, 1. 41 Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, 62. Coda: Charles Lucas’ The Infernal Quixote 267
Wilson Wilson. All these novels attest to the fact that Don Quixote began to be perceived as a sublime figure at the beginning of the 1740s, when it spawned through Fielding a considerable number of imitations that transformed Quixotism into a “transnational genre”,42 as Bannet has cogently suggested. In tandem with generic issues, this study has been substantiated by a history-of-ideas approach, a paramount critical instrument for placing the most important varieties of eighteenth-century Quixotism in the cultural context that produced them. Given the heterogeneity of eighteenth-century English Quixotic texts and motifs that confute Motteux’s statement according to which Cervantes’ Don Quixote was “a Pattern without a Copy”,43 I have examined Quixotism in relation to the Latitudinarian notion of innate goodness and good-natured laughter, to which Isaac Barrow refers as “risus ex serenitate con- scientiae”,44 Shaftesbury’s notions of moral sense, ridicule, friendship and benevolence – also filtered through John Barrell’s theory of civic humanism – and religious enthusiasm doubled by Michael Heyd’s exploration of the concept from the perspective of intellectual history. David Hume’s concept of sympathy, Adam Smith’s theorization of “the impartial spectator” and Mandeville’s explication of self-interest has also helped me view Quixotism as embedded in a sentimental tradition in which crisis leads to a war of ideas waged in the name of moral and socio-political reform. In this light, the Quixotic individual endeavours to fulfil his idée fixe in a telos-free world in which he plays the role of “man-as-he-could-be-if-he-realised-his-essential- nature”.45 This is synonymous with McKeon’s observation that “‘nat- uralness’ and ‘morality’ in narrative” are “closely related to what I have been calling questions of truth and virtue”.46 In her enthralling study on the canonization of Don Quixote in the eighteenth century, Rachel Schmidt draws attention to the fact that “the dialectic of Alonso Quijano/Don Quixote manifests the dialectic of reason and irrationality in all its forms; unrationality and delusion must be destroyed”.47 Some Quixotes like Arabella and Wildgoose
42 Bannet, “Quixotes, Imitations and Transatlantic Genres”, 554. 43 Motteux, “The Translator’s Preface to Cervantes”, 1. 44 Barrow, quoted in Tave, The Amiable Humorist, 7. 45 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 52. 46 McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 415. 47 Schmidt, Critical Images, 87-88. 268 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801 return to reason, the imperative conservative norm of the Enlightenment. Other Quixotes like Parson Adams, David Simple and Harley are inherently self-deluded and ironically punished for their want of experience, whereas Marauder is irrational because of his Godwinian and Wollstonecraftian radical beliefs. But all of these Quixotes must be seen as culturemes of eighteenth-century British identity, as militant protagonists governed by the star of Comedy which, in Francis Heyman’s “Untitled Frontispiece” inserted in the first edition of Tobias Smollett’s translation of Don Quixote published in 1755, is ready to de-monster Romance, allegorically represented by a gothic castle. Nevertheless, curled up around her legs, the dragon looks as if he has beseeched her to get into the castle, whereas Comedy’s left hand touches the edifice gently. Comedy is lured to enter, Romance is ready to collapse, with Truth remaining far behind Comedy and trying to banish the hideous chimeras of Romance. This gives us the meaning of Quixotism in classic modernity: comedy engulfs Romance, laughter becomes amiable, Don Quixote is ennobled and truth melts into a myriad of sentimental idiosyncrasies that are as legitimate as rational authority when it comes to the Quixotes’ duty to carry out moral, social or political reform.
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INDEX
acculturation, 33, 38 Barchas, Janine, 112 Addison, Joseph, 6, 7, 18, 31, Barker, Gerard, 127 72-79, 92, 157, 221, 235, Barker-Benfield, G.J., 161, 250, 266 162 Allen, B. Sprague, 259 Barney, Richard A., 200, 205, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third 207 Earl of Shaftesbury, 6, 15, Barrell, John, 105, 172, 173, 16, 27-29, 31, 72, 74, 77- 267 79, 80, 86, 92, 97, 98, 105, Barrow, Isaac, 75, 100, 267 106, 108, 116, 117, 119, Battestin, Martin, 89, 96, 102, 120, 143, 160, 167, 172, 111 178, 223, 230, 238-41, 246, Beasley, Jerry C., 65, 186, 195 250, 267 Beattie, John, 9, 60, 255 Antiquixotus, Philonauticus, Beck, Hamilton, 83 253 Bellamy, Liz, 121, 140, 141, anti-Jacobin, 14, 17, 29, 255- 192, 203, 205 57, 259, 260, 264; anti- Bending, Stephen, 146, 149, Jacobins, 262 151, 154, 158, 159, 161, arbitrary power, 36, 51 173, 177 Ardila, J.A.G., 2 Benedict, Barbara M., 155, Aron, Raymond, 71 156, 159, 167 Ascham, Anthony, 36, 146 benevolence, 15, 16, 21, 27, Astell, Mary, 195 31, 52, 59, 67, 74, 75, 79- Auty, Susan G., 18, 77 81, 88, 89, 91, 96, 97, 101, Avellaneda, Fernández de, 70, 103, 106, 107, 109, 110, 88 113, 115-17, 120-22, 126, 127, 129-31, 134, 136, 140, Baker, Ernst A., 230 142, 146, 147-54, 156, 159, Bakhtin, Mikhail, 25, 58 160, 162, 163, 165, 167-73, Bannet, Eve Tavor, 10, 30, 37, 176, 177, 179, 180, 206, 38, 40, 41, 47, 92, 99, 195, 225, 228, 230, 232, 249, 203, 216, 267 254, 266, 267 288 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Black, Scott, 65 58-60, 63, 65, 67, 70, 71, Bonilla y San Martín, Adolfo, 73, 74, 78, 80, 81-107 72 passim, 112, 116, 139, 140, Borgmeier, Raimund, 46, 89, 142, 145, 146, 148, 168, 94, 107 177, 191, 192, 196, 197, Boswell, James, 151, 215 200, 203, 204, 206, 208, Bowle, John, 1 210, 224, 230, 232-34, 245, Braudy, Leo, 157-59 247, 253-55, 260, 267, 268; Brissenden, R.F., 13, 49, 94, a political reading of, 7; La 151 Galatea, 24; Novelas Brooke, Henry, 109, 159 ejemplares, 59; Ocho Bruyn, Frans De, 255 comedias y ocho Buck, Gerhard, 86 entremeses nunca Burke, Edmund, 255, 260, 261 representados, 24 Burney, Frances, 109, 110 chivalry, 7, 48, 145, 204, 255, Bygrave, Stephen, 146, 149, 256, 260; books of, 2, 15, 151, 155, 158, 159, 161, 21, 22, 30, 50, 51, 197, 224 173, 177 civic humanism, 86, 89, 104, 105, 108, 160, 171-73, 175, La Calprenède, 61 267 Carteret, Lord, 1 Clarke, Samuel, 102 Cascardi, Anthony J., 11, 63, Cleary, Thomas R., 33-35, 37, 87, 92 41 Castro, Américo, 21 Close, Anthony, 71, 254 Cervantes, Miguel de, 1, 2, 4, Colahan, Clark, 2-4 6, 8, 9, 15, 16, 19, 24-26, Collier, Jane, 135, 138 28, 30, 32, 34, 39, 44, 50, Collyer, Joseph, 195 52, 53, 55-58, 60, 62, 63, Collyer, Mary, 109, 112, 171 65, 68, 69, 71, 72, 74, 77, comedia nueva, 25, 26 79, 80, 86-88, 93, 94, 107, comedy, 5-7, 14, 15, 21, 26, 208, 217, 219, 229, 234, 29, 30, 31, 33, 52, 53, 57, 265; Works: Don Quixote, 58, 60, 62, 64, 71, 73-76, 1-9, 14, 16, 18, 21-51 79, 80, 222, 228, 231, 234, passim, 54, 55, 58, 59, 60, 235, 256, 268 62, 63, 70, 72, 74, 77, 83, commercialism, 14, 133, 134, 84, 86, 89, 94, 118, 123, 140, 143, 163, 175 147, 165, 195, 200, 203, Communio mercium, 36, 37, 208, 236, 266, 267, 268; as 41, 67, 79, 106, 119, 124, hero, 2, 11, 13, 16, 28-55, 138, 146 Index 289 conservatism, 255-57, 260, Quixotism, 202, 209, 212, 262, 266 215; rational, 202, 212 Crane, R.S., 97, 110, 127, 148 enthusiasm, 7, 17, 18, 78, 79, crisis, 8, 16, 18, 30, 31, 41, 43, 86, 95, 156, 157, 219, 223, 44, 46, 47, 51, 54, 67, 90, 226, 230, 231-33, 234, 236- 136, 138, 143, 145, 149, 41, 243-47, 248-50, 266, 152, 164, 166, 170, 173, 267 174, 200, 255, 266, 267; epistemology, 11, 15, 150, crisis-consciousness, 8, 30, 193, 202, 212; of feeling, 44, 67, 104, 145, 163, 166; 17; moral, 125, 145, 147, crisis-trope, 8; crisis- 150, 153, 156, 160, 162, utterance, 163 179 Cross, Wilbur, 32 “extreme skepticism”, 11, 12, Croxall, Samuel, 189 65, 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, Cueva, Juan de la, 21 207, 265
Damrosch, Leopold, 65 Fénelon, François Salignac de Delany, Mary, 189 la Mothe, 198 Dodsley, James, 236 Ferguson, Adam, 149 domesticity, 110, 188, 198, Fielding, Henry, 5-7, 9, 10, 12, 201, 208, 210, 211, 217 14-18, 21, 23, 24, 26-35, Doody, Margaret, 10, 184, 37, 38, 41-43, 46, 47, 49, 186, 187, 189, 191, 197, 50-53, 54-83, 85-94, 96, 98, 266 99, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, Drake, Judith, 195 109-14, 116, 117, 126, 128, Dryden, John, 31, 73, 187, 138, 142, 152, 182, 183-86, 199, 248 191-93, 208, 210, 212, 221, Dudden, Homes, 87 222, 229-36, 247, 249, 250, Duncan, Ian, 65 256, 264-67; Works: Dunn, Peter N., 53, 83 Coffee-House Politician, Durfey, Thomas, 40 47, 49; The Covent-Garden Journal, 55, 56, 183, 193; Eagleton, Terry, 110 Don Quixote in England, Ellis, Havelock, 231, 251 14, 16, 21, 28-33, 37, 38, Ellis, Markman, 152, 160-62, 54, 55, 264; An Essay on 166 the Knowledge of the Elphinston, James, 155 Characters of Men, 98, 99; Emsley, Clive, 263 Jonathan Wild, 42; Joseph empiricism, 76, 121, 213; as Andrews, 5, 6, 12, 14, 16, 290 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
22, 23, 27, 28, 53, 55-57, Genette, Gérard, 45 60-62, 65, 68, 72, 75, 77, Gilman, Stephen, 21, 22 81, 86-94, 96, 110, 129, Godwin, William, 17, 255, 169, 183, 210, 229, 234, 257-61 235, 247, 264, 265; Golden, Morris, 98, 101, 152 Miscellanies, 63, 126; Goldsmith, William, 109, 243 Pasquin, 34, 42, 43; Tom good nature, 7, 27, 29, 31, 47, Jones, 23, 24, 57, 81, 89, 56, 66, 73, 81, 85, 87, 88, 231; “An Adventurer in 90, 92, 93, 96, 97, 103, 106, Politicks”, 42 113, 142, 245, 254; as Fielding, Sarah, 14-16, 102, Quixotism, 47, 52, 56 104, 109-15, 119, 125, 128- Gordon, Scott Paul, 36, 132, 31, 135, 136, 138, 142, 143, 137, 139, 140, 145, 190, 146, 266; Works: David 195, 199, 200, 203, 206, Simple, 14, 16, 102, 109, 217, 219, 265 111-15, 118-20, 124, 127, Goring, Paul, 231-33, 241-44, 128-33, 135-39, 141, 142, 246, 251 149, 150, 153, 178, 265, Graves, Richard, 14, 15, 17, 268; Volume the Last, 14, 219-236, 240, 243-47, 250, 16, 17, 109, 121, 125, 131, 251, 266; The Spiritual 132, 134, 135-37, 139-43, Quixote, 14, 17, 219, 220, 265 221, 226, 229-31, 232, 234- Fitzmaurice-Kelly, James, 1, 3, 37, 243, 246, 247, 249, 250, 219, 231, 251 251 Foucault, Michel, 192, 195 Grean, Stanley, 79 Frank, Judith, 77, 79 Green, Otis H., 26, 27 Freeman, Michael, 261 Greene, Donald, 94 The French Revolution, 17, Grenby, M.O., 254, 256-60, 254-58, 259, 261-63, 266 262, 264 Frye, Northrop, 26, 58, 60, 66, Griffin, Gregory, 185 217 Fuchs, Barbara, 101 Haggerty, George E., 207, 217 Hammond, Brean S., 28, 44, Gautier, Gary, 102, 104, 113, 61-63, 189, 245, 265 138 Harkin, Maureen, 171, 175 gender, 17, 149, 181, 183, 195, Hawthorn, Jeremy, 266 204, 206, 211, 214, 216; Hayes, Julie Candler, 72 instability, 16; and generic Hayman, Francis, 18, 20 categories, 208-17 passim Hempton, David, 250 Index 291
Heyd, Michael, 236, 238-41, “the impartial spectator”, 15, 246, 267 17, 120, 147, 160, 163-65, hidalgo, 2, 3, 5, 7, 50, 58, 59, 171, 178, 179, 267 69, 72, 88, 146 Irimia, Mihaela, 12, 58, 67, 83, Hill, C.J., 220, 230 124, 146, 191, 265 Hirschman, Albert, 141, 174, Irwin, Michael, 7, 30 177, 178 Isles, Duncan, 182, 189, 209 Hoadly, Benjamin, 105 Ivana, Dragoş, 12, 146 Hobbes, Thomas, 73, 76, 96 Hollahan, Eugene, 8, 30, 44, Jacobinism, 18, 67, 254-60, 145, 163, 166 263, 264 Holquist, Michael, 13, 58, 160 Jago, Richard, 221 Huet, Pierre Daniel, 189, 190, Jameson, Fredric, 185 255 Jarvis, Charles, 62 Hume, David, 15, 17, 33, 47, Jauss, Hans Robert, 5, 6, 74 48, 50, 53, 100, 119, 120, Jehenson, Myriam Yvonne, 53, 124, 143, 147-53, 156, 160, 83 161, 163, 164, 167, 169, jingoism, 38 175, 176, 179, 267 Johnson, Maurice, 23 Humphreys, A.R., 28, 84, 101, Johnson, Samuel, 17, 63-66, 151, 153 68, 72, 75, 87, 104, 105, Hunter, J. Paul, 10, 56, 62, 63, 107, 110, 111, 118, 121, 69, 84, 85, 87, 110, 183-85, 151, 152, 156, 181-83, 187, 187, 248 189, 203, 209-13, 215, 217, Hurd, Richard, 184, 255 232, 238, 251; The Hutcheson, Francis, 120, 149, Rambler, 4 (31 March 160 1750), 63-66, 68, 87, 121, 156, 210, 214, 232 ideology, 8, 65, 206, 233, 257; aristocratic, 11, 12, 38, 48, Kahn, Madeleine, 113, 114 147, 150, 173, 175, 180, Kelsall, Malcolm, 111, 112, 199, 211; capitalist, 48; of 114, 115, 135 chivalric romance, 60; Keymer, Thomas, 42, 122 conservative, 11, 12; of Kim, James, 132, 138, 143 feeling, 149, 152, 179; Klein, Laurence E., 28 progressive, 11, 12, 38, 39, Knowles, Edwin, 2, 30, 40 48, 134, 146, 147, 175, Knox, Vicesimus, 107, 113, 199; Quixotic, 15, 67; of 114, 231 ruin, 177, 179; Whig, 80 Kottak, Conrad, 107 292 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Landry, Donna, 131, 142, 146, Infernal Quixote, 14, 15, 171, 176 18, 29, 253, 254, 256, 257, Langbauer, Laurie, 199, 211, 259-62, 264, 265 213 Lukács, Georg, 11, 63, 66, 68, Latitudinarian, 70, 75, 79, 82, 82, 92 86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 95, 97, Lynch, James J., 198, 199 99-101, 104, 105, 107, 110, 147, 148, 267; Divines, 15, MacIntyre, Alasdair, 102, 104- 16, 27, 75, 92, 97, 98, 107, 106, 130, 267 161, 225 Mack, Ruth, 202 laughter, 5-7, 9, 16, 18, 31, 56, Mackenzie, Henry, 14-17, 109, 71-80, 122, 236, 241, 256, 110, 118, 120, 123, 143, 267, 268; aesthetics of, 6, 8, 145, 146, 148-63, 167-71, 229; amiable, 7, 80, 92, 175, 176-80, 265, 266; 221, 266; sympathetic, 31, Works: Julia de Roubigné, 56, 73, 75, 91, 246; a Whig 109, 177; The Man of aesthetics of, 8, 230, 235, Feeling, 14, 16, 17, 109, 240, 250 110, 118, 123, 127, 142, Law, William, 227 145-51, 153-55, 157, 158- Lennox, Charlotte, 12, 14, 15, 62, 167, 173, 175-77, 179, 62, 110, 151, 181-84, 187- 265, 266 89, 192, 195-99, 200, 202, McKeon, Michael, 10-13, 31, 206, 208, 209, 211, 213-16, 36, 38, 39, 42, 48, 58, 70, 222, 254, 266 ; The Female 92, 93, 99, 101, 105, 106, Quixote, 12, 14, 17, 44, 62, 110, 124, 128, 130, 132, 102, 181-83, 184, 187-92, 134, 146, 147, 149, 150, 195-97, 199, 201, 203, 205, 152, 161, 165, 169, 176, 206, 209-211, 215, 216; 184-88, 195, 197, 201, 202- The Lady’s Museum, 198 205, 207, 212, 215, 232, Lilley, James D., 176-79 235, 250, 265, 267 Locke, John, 3, 4, 15, 77, 96, Macphail, Eric, 69, 70 152, 200, 220, 223 Makin, Bathsua, 195 Lockwood, Thomas, 42, 47 Malina, Debra, 211 The London Corresponding Mancing, Howard, 53 Society, 260, 262 Mandel, Oscar, 30 Lovesey, Oliver, 232, 247-49, Mandeville, Bernard, 15, 96, 251 101, 116, 123, 133, 134, Lucas, Charles, 14, 15, 18, 29, 137-40, 142, 166, 175, 267 253-60, 262-66; The Index 293
Manley, Mary de la Rivière, Murphy, Arthur, 64, 76, 80, 61 111 Manning, Susan, 122, 131, 135, 145, 151, 153, 157, “naive empiricism”, 11, 12, 58, 158, 160-62, 175 70, 88, 113, 114, 132, 201, Mareska, Thomas, 66, 94, 106 203, 208, 212, 214, 265 Marshall, David, 164, 165, 199 Martin, Mary Patricia, 210, Olivers, Thomas, 243, 244 214, 216, 217 oratory, 18, 53, 230, 233, 237, Masham, Damaris, 195 241, 242, 249, 261, 266 Mayo, Arantza, 2 Owen, William, 53, 56, 61, 62, Methodism, 17, 67, 219, 220, 69, 70 221, 222, 224-26, 228, 229, 231, 234, 238, 242-45, 247, Paine, Thomas, 255-257, 260 249, 250, 251, 266; as Palo, Sharon Smith, 196, 198, Quixotism, 17, 219, 221, 200, 213 226-29, 233, 236, 250 Pardo, Pedro Javier, 107 Molina, Tirso de, 26 Paulson, Ronald, 1, 2, 5-7, 26, Moore, John, 68, 229, 230 29, 31, 42, 54, 56, 59, 68, moral reform, 91, 93, 253; 69, 73, 75-80, 82, 90, 93, moral sense, 27, 67, 94, 97, 96, 189, 192, 199, 206, 215 99, 100, 105, 106, 108, 109, Pavel, Toma, 11 112, 120, 122, 129, 130, Perry, Ruth, 191, 192, 198 143, 152, 160, 267; theatre Peterson, E.H., 158 of, 28, 29, 53; moral Phillips, John, 3 sentiment, 16, 109; as Pike, Kenneth, 107 Quixotism, 115-124 El Pinciano, Antonio Lόpez, Motooka, Wendy, 8, 9, 12, 13, 21 35, 36, 51, 53, 116-19, 124, Platzner, Robert L., 167, 170, 125, 129, 130, 149, 151, 175 164, 193, 202, 208, 209, poetic justice, 70, 85, 101, 128, 211, 215, 253, 260, 265 235, 256, 265 Motteux, Peter, 4, 5, 7, 13, 14, politeness, 15, 28, 85, 168, 22, 31, 32, 34, 35, 38, 55, 178, 190, 217, 231, 243, 72, 83, 86, 92, 266, 267 248 Mullen, John, 109, 147, 156, Pope, Alexander, 59, 73, 84; 170, 171 The Dunciad, 4 294 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
Quixotism, 8, 10, 12, 13, 15, 59, 61-64, 66, 68-71, 79, 17-19, 30, 35, 60, 80, 84- 80, 84, 86, 88, 102, 107, 87, 92, 112, 117, 119, 124, 112, 113, 125, 156, 208-17, 129, 130, 143, 145, 147, 222, 229, 231, 235, 247, 149, 156, 174, 176, 181, 248, 250, 266, 268; 191, 198, 202, 214, 216, chivalric, 24, 26, 60, 63, 91, 219, 225, 230-33, 243, 247, 94, 101, 233; comic, 9, 14, 251, 253, 260, 266-68; as 16, 17, 70, 83, 104, 107, an alternative to empiric- 183, 184, 221, 222, 229, ism, 213; as a critique of 230, 247, 265, 266; comic Methodism, 219; as Romance and Quixotism, madness, 94; as moral 55-80, 266; comic reform, 91; and Romance, Romance and history, 64; 191; sentimental, 14, 16, as female pedagogy, 189- 114, 116, 118, 125, 143, 201; French, 17, 60, 61, 62, 145, 180; as transnational 67, 182, 183, 187-89, 192, genre, 10, 195, 267 (see 194, 195, 197, 199, 202- also the Quixote trope, 36, 204, 212; as gendered 206, 265) genre, 185; as history, 201- 208; moral, 16, 109, 112- radicalism, 7, 14, 15, 17, 18, 14, 130, 142, 266; and the 253, 256-58 novel, 61, 62, 181, 182, Reed, Cory A., 25 183, 185, 210, 213, 216, Reed, Walter, 13, 61, 160 249, 266; the politics of, Reeve, Clara, 115, 181, 184, 17, 181-189; sentimental, 201, 250 176, 177, 179, 249; Roman- Richardson, Samuel, 10, 13, ces, 8, 16, 17, 24, 26, 56, 16, 17, 65, 68, 75, 90, 91, 57, 59, 60-63, 67, 84, 86, 93, 109-14, 129, 142, 149, 90, 91, 94, 181-83, 184, 154, 157, 181-83, 187, 189, 186, 187, 189-200, 202- 210, 211, 213, 214, 234 204, 207, 209, 211-15, 217, Richetti, John, 85, 88, 91, 109, 233, 235, 248; romance 117, 181, 203 idealism, 11, 65, 113, 114, Rigolot, François, 31, 90 118, 125, 130, 136, 138, Riley, Edward, 7, 15, 71 143, 201, 202, 203, 205, Rivers, Isabel, 97, 105, 238, 208, 212, 214, 265 242 Ross, Deborah, 183, 215 Romance, 2, 9, 11, 12, 14, 16- 19 passim, 35, 39, 56-59, Sacks, Sheldon, 75 Index 295
Sambrook, James, 219, 224, Shapiro, Barbara, 101 227, 228, 250 Shelton, Thomas, 1-4, 7, 55 Sams, Henry W., 138 Sheriff, John K., 85, 103, 107, saint-errantry, 84-86, 89, 94, 145, 148, 150, 159 96, 98, 106, 233, 236-38, Singleton, Mack, 3 240, 246, 250 Skinner, Gillian, 118, 131, San Juan, Huarte de, 21, 22 133, 134, 136, 173, 174, satire, 2, 4-6, 14, 15, 17, 21, 179 26, 29, 30, 31, 33, 38, 52, Skinner, John, 195, 206, 207, 54, 56, 59, 67, 68, 72, 73, 209 74, 76, 78, 79, 82, 90, 93, Smith, Adam, 15, 17, 120, 96, 104, 107, 130, 185, 189, 147, 149, 153, 160, 162-69, 192, 199, 203, 205, 206, 171, 174-79, 267 219, 220, 228, 264 Smollett, Tobias, 14, 15, 18, Schmidt, Rachel, 72, 267 65, 77, 230, 268 Schneewind, J.B., 100, 124, sociability, 28, 81, 96, 113, 153 114, 120, 122, 124, 149, Scott, Sarah, 110 151, 152, 158, 160, 230 Scott, Walter, 157, 180 Spacks, Patricia Meyer, 125, Scudéry, Madame de, 17, 61, 130, 132, 160, 179, 203, 187, 189, 190, 194, 202 209, 210 self-interest, 42, 52, 67, 91, 96, Spellman, W.M., 97, 107 98, 101, 115, 119, 131, 134, Spencer, Jane, 114, 181, 187, 137, 143, 148, 174-76, 198, 188 256, 265, 267 Starr, G.A., 117, 132 sensibility, 16, 17, 28, 94, 102- Steele, Richard, 7, 18, 31, 72- 104, 109, 113, 114, 118, 74, 80, 221, 235, 250, 266 122, 125, 126-29, 131, 134, Sterne, Laurence, 12, 14, 15, 136-38, 142, 143, 145, 147- 77, 109, 154, 155, 159, 170, 53, 156, 157-62, 161, 162, 258 171, 173-75, 179, 180, 182, Stevenson, John Allen, 24 187, 188, 232, 233, 241, Stevick, Philip, 70, 71, 82, 113 246, 265 Swift, Jonathan, 6, 32, 56, 73, sensus communis, 29, 68, 146, 75, 78 151 sympathy, 15, 17, 27, 30, 33, sentimentalism, 12, 13, 35, 43, 53, 73, 79, 96, 98, 103, 118, 120, 122, 128, 129, 109, 112-14, 118, 120-22, 131, 135, 139, 143, 149, 124, 125, 128-30, 132, 140, 161, 167, 202, 215, 217 143, 146, 147-49, 150-53, 296 Quixotism in English Novels, 1742-1801
158, 160, 162-71, 174-77, exemplary, 9, 17, 44, 74, 179, 180, 227, 234, 239, 107, 149, 156, 187, 190; 265, 267 material, 146; moral, 43,
Tave, Stuart, 5, 6, 30, 71, 75, 185, 186, 187; natural, 153, 267 154; public, 104, 114, 119, Taylor, E.R., 229 134, 146, 147, 148, 174, Temple, William, 55 176, 179, 188; questions of, Terry, Richard, 112, 128, 129, 11, 31, 92, 201; Quixotic, 135, 139, 142 80, 92, 159, 184, 188; Tillotson John, 95 sentimental, 17, 153, 156; Todd, Janet, 114, 118, 143, as unprincipled sentiment, 147, 203 16, 145, 168; as vice, 73; Tracy, Clarence, 220, 224-26, 228, 229, 231, 232, 234-36, Walpole, Horace, 31, 33, 34, 247, 251 37, 41, 184, 185, 189, 201, Trevelyan, G.M., 251 209 Warburton, William, 234 Uddén, Anna, 211, 215 Wardropper, Bruce W., 21 The Universal Magazine, 152 Warner, William, 75, 91, 95 Warren, Leland E., 205 Van Sant, Ann Jessie, 126, Warton, Thomas, 184, 255 128, 129, 174 Watt, Ian, 10, 59, 64, 212 Vega, Lope de, 25, 26 Weber, Max, 38, 92 virtue, 27, 28, 31, 38, 39, 43, Wesley, John, 95, 220, 221, 46, 63, 64, 66-68, 74, 79, 224-26, 228, 233, 234, 237, 84, 87-91, 93, 96, 100, 101, 242, 245, 251 103, 106, 110, 121-23, 127, Welsh, Alexander, 13, 87 130-32, 134, 140, 142, 143, Whibley, Charles, 231, 251 147, 148, 151, 153, 154, Whichcote, Benjamin, 98 156, 158-60, 163, 165-69, Whitefield, George, 220, 225, 174, 175, 177, 179, 180, 226, 228, 230, 233, 234, 183, 188, 189, 191, 192, 237, 242, 245 194, 195, 199, 200, 201, Wollstonecraft, Mary, 257, 202, 207, 208, 210, 211-17, 260 232, 241, 247, 250, 256, Wooley, Hannah, 195, 196 258, 261, 262, 264, 267; Wood, Sarah, 8, 18, 19, 30, artificial, 153, 154, 155; 265 civic, 156, 170, 171, 172; Woodcock, George, 262, 263 Index 297
Wright, Andrew, 89, 93, 94 Ziolkowski, Eric J., 32, 86
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