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University Microfilms International 300 N. ZEEB ROAD, ANN ARBOR, Ml 48106 18 BEDFORD ROW. LONDON WC1R 4EJ, ENGLAND 8022359

W a n z e r , Jo h n D o u g l a s

MORAL TRAVEL AND NARRATIVE FORM IN "A JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND" AND "THE EXPEDITION OF HUMPHRY CLINKER"

The Ohio State University Ph.D. 1980

University Microfilms International 300 N. Zeeb Road, Ann Arbor, MI 48106 18 Bedford Row, London WC1R 4EJ, England

Copyright 1980

by Wanzer, John Douglas All Rights Reserved MORAL TRAVEL AND NARRATIVE FORM

IN A JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND

AND THE EXPEDITION OF HUMPHRY CLINKER

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate

School of The Ohio State University

By John Douglas Wanzer, B.A., M.A.

The Ohio State University

1 9 8 0

Reading Committee: Approved By

John F. Sena

James L. Battershy

Christian K. Zacher 7 A d v i s e r 7 De tment of English VITA

October 9, 19^8 Born - Rhinebeck, New York

1970 B.A., State University of New York at Albany

1971 M.A., Education, State University of New York at Albany

1973-1977 University Fellow, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1975 M.A., English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

1974-1976, Teaching Associate, Department of 1977-1979 English, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

FIELDS OF STUDY

Major Field: Eighteenth-Century Literature. Professor John F. Sena

Renaissance Literature. Professor David 0. Frant z

Nineteenth-Century Literature. Professor Arnold Shapiro

The Drama. Professor Stanley J. Kahrl TABLE OF CONTENTS

VITA ii

Introduction 1

Chapter

I. Moral Philosophy and the Focus of 12 Factual Narrative

II. Empirical Morality and the Role 3^ of the Artist

III. Moral Travel and Factual Narrative 58

IV. Moral Vision in A Journey to the 78 Western Islands of Scotland

V. Moral Travel and The Expedition 130 of Humphry Clinker

Bibliography 188

iii Introduction

An age of exuberant travel and exploration, the

eighteenth century adopted the travel book as one of its n most popular kinds of writing. The works of travelers

served to enlarge knowledge and gratify curiosity, to p instruct and delight. Charles L. Batten, Jr., outlining

the concerns governing travelers' observations during the

course of the century, describes the travels of the 1?60'

and 1770's as employing "a new principle of selection, variously termed 'men and manners,' 'manners and customs,

'character and manners,' or some synonymous expression.”

Batten traces this focus to a "clearly defined classical precedent," reaching as far back as The Odyssey, and, paradoxically, to literary fashion, seeking new subjects •a to replace the worn topics of earlier works.J Although

these explanations may be valid, they fail, I think, to account for the philosophic impulses motivating the traveler's interest in what the century often called

"moral philosophy," an interest grounded in eighteenth- century beliefs about perception and experience. Samuel

Johnson’s conviction that travel narratives should satisfy the natural curiosity of "One part of mankind

. . , to learn the sentiments, manners, and condition of the rest . . . may reflect literary fashion, hut it is important to recognize the theoretical principles behind Johnson's position. And although Johnson's own travel work, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. c may follow classical precedent,^ its focus also reflects the philosophic beliefs of its own time, a dimension of

"literary fashion" which Batten does not consider.

In this study I intend to examine the philosophic ideas of empirical morality that direct Johnson's perfor­ mance as traveler in the Journey, a work of moral travel seeking knowledge of the reasons for human behavior. I will also explore the way in which a similar conception of travel underlies the journey of the narrators in Tobias

Smollett's The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. As different kinds of works, the Journey and Humphry

Clinker have, of course, very different informing principles. Each work, however, has as its plinth the eighteenth-century belief— based on the period's epistem- ology— that man's duty is to know himself and that travel is an important means to such knowledge. In both works, moral travel functions as an essential element of what R. S. Crane called, in describing the relationship of ideas to literature, the "moral and intellectual bases of their forms . . . ," the "more or less coherent" principles and assumptions that implicitly define the nature of the artist's "world. My aim is thus twofold. First, I intend to investi­

gate a mode of travel deriving from some of the central

intellectual currents of the age. The subject has yet to

receive the attention that it merits. Francis R. Hart

perceptively discusses some aspects of Johnson’s perfor­ mance as "philosophic traveler" and recognizes the moral

focus of the Journey: but the many manifestations of philosophic concern throughout the work, as well as the

perceptual and experiential bases of Johnson's focus upon

"men and manners," fall beyond the scope of his article.

Thomas Jemielity's illuminating article, "Dr. Johnson and

the Uses of Travel," does not discuss the epistemological

grounds for Johnson’s interest in what W. R. Keast, taking

his term from Johnson himself, has called "intellectual

history.

Second, by analyzing the different principles of form

governing the Journey and Humphry Clinker. I seek to show

the different ways in which the assumptions and values of moral travel relate to the structure of each work. The

Journey is itself a work of moral travel, and the search

for accurate knowledge of human nature is central to the

kind of writing in which Johnson has engaged. The

empirical moralist's belief that the human faculties are most gainfully employed in the study of human life

dictates the kinds of things that Johnson as traveler

finds most worthy of note. Indeed, the observation of 4 moral nature is central not only to Johnson's performance as traveler, but generally, to his aesthetic and moral beliefs about the ends of literature and the function of the artist, in whatever genre he writes. Johnson grounds these beliefs not in arbitrary, prescriptive theory, but in experience of both literature— a species of human activity— and human nature: literature, Johnson believes, seeks to please and instruct, and achieves these o ends by serving its reader with novelty and moral truth.

As a work of literature, the Journev is designed to instruct and please its reader by "exhibiting the real state of sublunary nature"^0 ; as factual narrative, the

Journey seeks to exhibit nature as it is manifested within a unique circumstantial setting.

Johnson's aim as traveler is consistent with his goals as critic and biographer. In fact, Johnson appears in the Journey not only as traveler, but as critic of the works of previous travelers to Scotland, and his concerns as critic closely parallel his focus as traveler: both traveler and critic observe human actions, judging individual achievement and extending their knowledge of general human nature. As philosophic observer, Johnson reasons from human behavior— whether evidenced in customs, institutions, or literary works— to the moral causes that inform it. Moral speculation is the basic mode of thought in the Journey, essential to the traveler seeking to understand and judge the behavior he observes.

Indeed, the speculative movement from effects to their

probable and necessary causes is the central principle

informing Johnson's observations of Scotland in the

Journey. The complexity of human nature is not, for

Johnson, easily comprehended? the infinitely various manifestations of nature cannot, in fact, be bounded or predicted by the mind of man.^^ Johnson's moral analyses, which repeatedly weigh and assess alternative interpreta­

tions and evaluations of an action or artifact, suggest

the careful discrimination and ample experience necessary

to informed philosophic judgment. The Journey is not only

"about" Scotland, it is "about" the cognitive processes

involved in seeing Scotland as it is.

The belief that the traveler should seek knowledge

of other men to further his knowledge of self is basic to

Humphry Clinker in an altogether different way. Though employing many of the conventions of the travel work,

Smollett has written a comic novel. More specifically,

Humphry Clinker is a comedy of reconciliation, in which characters who open the work in disunity and isolation move to harmony and accord in the course of the action.

The assumptions and values of moral travel, the dominant mode of travel when Smollett wrote the novel, are funda­ mental to the work's structure, for Smollett's narrators present their accounts of the places they visit as travelers observing the moral world around them. Though

Batten discusses Humphry Clinker as a "fictional travel 12 book," he dismisses, in doing so, the work as a novel.

My chapter on Smollett will examine his use of travel as

one part within the novel as a whole. Basically,

Smollett's narrators open the work as incompetent, self-

absorbed travelers, presenting the reader not with accurate

accounts of mankind, but with subjective reflections of

their own minds. It is, in fact, Smollett's implied reader who, faced with the disparities of conflicting reports, must employ his own experience to piece together

a speculative vision of the moral reality behind the text. This task, implicit in Smollett's mode of expo­

sition, diminishes as the characters, gaining moral

experience in their journey, move to an accord reflected,

in part, by the increased unity of their accounts.

My analyses of Johnson and Smollett will follow three chapters discussing the nature and philosophic bases of empirical morality and its corollary mode of travel. Chapter I will examine the way in which the epistemological theories of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume turn the focus of eighteenth-century philosophic interest away from the Royal Society's Baconian program of natural philosophy to the study of human behavior, from the contemplation of material things and substances to the empirical analysis of human tendencies and capacities. The Lockean conviction that the human mind is so framed

that it can know the "real essences" only of "mixed modes"

has implications for narrative in general, and partic­

ularly for such factual kinds of writing as history,

biography, and travel. In Chapter II, I will look briefly

at some of the many different areas of eighteenth-century

thought fueled by the search for knowledge of human

ideas. Particularly relevant are the aesthetic principles

of Johnson and Reynolds, which define the moral nature of art and the moral experience essential to its practice, for these principles direct Johnson's general concerns as artist and his specific interests as traveler.

A chief philosophic duty facing artist and moral philosopher in the eighteenth century is to increase what

Johnson calls, in speaking of the advantages of travel, his "principles of reasoning." Such principles are grounded in past experience, which provides the "basis of analogy"1-^ that frequently enables an observer to explain moral phenomena, formulate moral opinions, and determine moral probabilities. To show the importance of broad experience to a philosopher hoping to comprehend men,

Chapter III will look, in more detail than Chapters I and II, at eighteenth-century ideas on the role of circumstances in diversifying general human nature.

Although eighteenth-century moral philosophers believe that man is everywhere the same, the belief is tempered "by recognition of the manifold ways in which human nature

is modified, human perception conditioned, and human

institutions shaped by the particular circumstances in which men move and exist. Limited experience of mankind

can, therefore, yield only limited knowledge of nature.

The student of man cannot hope to comprehend his subject by studying behavior "as it stands stripped of every relation, in all the nakedness and solitude of meta- l/i physical abstraction." To extend our experience, and thus "enlarge our knowledge and rectify our opinions" of mankind,"^ we must turn to travel or, in lieu of such firsthand experience, to travel reading,1^ seeking to

learn the causes of unfamiliar institutions, customs, and practices, and striving to know why different men see the ways that they do. The morally perceptive traveler

journeys to increase his exposure to a variety of men in different circumstances; such experience enables him, in turn, to see his own customs and perceptions in per­

spective with those of others. To reap these advantages, the traveler must exert himself mentally, as well as physically. He must engage in active moral speculation, employing the very bases of moral experience he seeks to widen. The reader of travels— indeed, the reader of moral works in general— must also engage in speculation to ascertain the moral probability of secondhand report.

Locke, comparing his reader to a traveler, challenges him to such active participation in An Essay Concerning

Human Understanding, and Johnson regularly practices moral speculation in assessing the accounts of others;

Smollett implicitly demands similar powers from the reader of Humphry Clinker.

The conception of experience and travel that I detect in both works is, to an extent, natural and inevitable, for the focus upon "men and manners" is, as I show in Chapter II, central to much of the period's thought. In examining the ideas of Locke, Hume, Reynolds

Burke, and others, I do not intend to point to direct indebtedness in the works of Smollett and Johnson.

Rather, I seek to describe the ways in which each work reposes upon a background of philosophic assumptions that direct the interests and observations of the philosophic traveler (or, in the case of Humphry Clinker, the obser­ vations expected of the traveler). Each work, in differ­ ent ways, naturally partakes of the intellectual feast of its time. Notes to Introduction

See Charles L. Batten, Jr., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eighteenth-Centurv Travel Litera­ ture (Berkeley! Univ. of California Press. 1978). pp. 1-8; Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976), pp. 7-46. A glance at the approximately 94 columns of travel entries in Vol. II of The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature also suggests the enormous popularity of such works during the period. p Batten, pp. 24-46 and passim.

^Batten, pp. 96, 94-7.

^Idler 97* in The Idler and The Adventurer, ed. W. J. Bate, John M. Bullitt and L. F. Powell, Vol. II of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1963). P* 298.

^Johnson himself seems aware of the precedent: in the course of the Journey he occasionally compares him­ self, not without irony, to Ulysses. £ Philosophy, Literature, and the History of Ideas," in The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays Critical and~Historical (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 19^7). I» 186, 185• "^"Johnson as Philosophic Traveler: The Perfecting of an Idea," ELH, 36 (1969). 679-95*

Q Thomas Jemielity, "Dr. Johnson and the Uses of Travel," Philological Quarterly. 51 (1972), 448-59; William R. Keast, "Johnson and Intellectual History," in New Light on Dr. Johnson, ed. F. W. Hilles (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959). pp. 247-56.

*W. R. Keast, "The Theoretical Foundations of Johnson's Criticism," in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 398-99; James L. Battersby, Rational Praise and Natural Lamentation: Johnson. Lycidas, and Principles of Criticism (Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1980), p. 155* 10 11

Preface to Shakespeare, in Johnson on Shakespeare, ed. Arthur Sherbo, Vol. VII of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1968),. p. 66.

■^Keast, "Theoretical Foundations," p. 398; Battersby, Rational Praise, p. 154. 12 Batten, pp. 21-4. Wolfgang Iser also discusses the role of travel-book conventions in Humphry Clinker: see The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunvan to Beckett- (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 197*0» pp» 60-1, 64-7. For a summary of and argument with Iser's con­ fusing notions of the novel's "form," see the opening pages of chapter five.

•^A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Mary Lascelles, Vol. IX of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1971)p P» 40. 14 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France. in Burke: Selected Works, ed. E. J. Payne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1881), II, 8.

15Idler 97.

■^See Rasselas. Chapter XXIX: "What reason cannot collect . . . and what experience has not yet taught, can be known only from the report of others" (The History of Rasselas. Prince of Abissinia. ed. Geoffrey Tillotson and Brian Jenkins |_London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971]» P« 7^). Future references to Rasselas are to this edition and will be cited by chapter. Chapter I

Moral Philosophy and the Focus

of Factual Narrative

That great chain of causes, which linking one to another even to the throne of God himself, can never be unravelled by any industry of ours.l

Behind the energetic research, discovery, and publication that mark the lively state of natural philos­ ophy during the Restoration and early eighteenth century stands the Baconian program of the Royal Society, a procedural scheme based on assumptions concerning the nature of the material world and the powers of the human mind. The Royal Society aimed not only to promote knowledge of the laws and principles governing the natural world, but also to advance a "way" of investigating that world, a method believed most likely to yield under­ standing of natural phenomena. In this campaign to promulgate philosophic doctrine, theoretical declarations figure prominently in the works of the natural philosophers themselves and in such writings as those of Thomas Sprat and Joseph Glanvill, historians and popularizers of the

"new philosophy." The central philosophic beliefs of the

12 Royal Society are especially apparent in the chief subject of its attacks. Following Bacon, Royal Society writers repeatedly contrast the new scientific logic— inductive and skeptical— to the anathema of natural philosophy— the ''deductive" logic of Aristotle and the Scholastics.

Glanvill for example, vehemently contrasts the way of

"Experiments and Observations" with the a priori methods of Aristotle, who forced "Experience to . . . yield countenance to his precarious Propositions." The Royal philosophers repeatedly condemn Aristotle's alleged failure to consult observation and experience before reaching speculative conclusions. Sprat's History of the

Royal Society criticizes Aristotle, along with the ancient and Scholastic philosophers, for depending upon dispute and argument to the exclusion of accurate observation.

Rejecting such "Verbal" philosophy, which fills men's minds with "imaginary Ideas of conceptions," Sprat praises "Experimental Philosophy," which "opens our eyes 3 to perceive all the realities of things . . .

Through experience, observation, and experiment, the Royal naturalists aimed to construct a foundation of recorded fact. From this groundwork of particulars, they aspired to raise an edifice of progressively inclusive generalizations explaining the world of things:

The True Philosophy must be . . . begun, on a scrupulous, and severe examination 14

of particulars: from them, there may be some general Rules, with great caution drawn: But it must not rest there, nor is that the most difficult part of its course: It must advance those Principles, to the finding out of new effects, through all the varieties of Matter • • • • 4

Although the Royal Society urged skeptical distrust of the human senses and faculties,^ Sprat's statement reflects

the group's optimism that perceptual error and organic

shortcomings could be overcome by adhering to its inductive program. Robert Hooke's suggestions for rectifying such

failings constitute a virtual catalogue of the logical practices most valued by the Society: the natural philos­

opher must obtain his information from many sources,

examine his data closely, and theorize with extreme

caution; he must regulate his senses with reason, while refusing to allow reason to usurp the rightful role of

the senses in the inductive process.^ By thus scrupu­ lously governing his mind, man can, the Society believes, attain certain knowledge of things.

The Society’s confident assertion of man's ability to achieve comprehension of the material world is philosophically weakened by John Locke's analysis of the mind's powers in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. which rejects the Royal Society's brand of positivism.

Locke, too, sees induction as the foundation for human knowledge.^ Indeed, the Essay traces the growth of knowledge from its birth in particular sensory percep­

tions, "simple ideas." Devoid of innate ideas, the mind

forms various "complex ideas," based on the perceptions

of the senses or the reflective "experience of our own O mental operations." Even the most general and abstract

of our complex ideas, concepts such as time, infinity,

and morality, are in fact rooted in simple ideas

(I, 21?). But sensory "ideas" are, for Locke, essen­

tially appearances, effects produced in the mind by

physical causes— "qualities"— residing in things; the

essential nature of such qualities eludes our senses

(I, 166-69, 177-81, ^98). Locke's distinction between

"primary" and "secondary" qualities indicates that our

ideas may in fact bear no resemblance to the qualities

that cause them. Although primary qualities such as

solidity and extension belong "in" an object and remain

an inseparable part through all changes to which it may be subjected, secondary qualities "are nothing in the objects themselves but powers to produce various sen­ sations in us by their primary qualities . . (I, 168-

71). Such basic sensory perceptions as color, sound, and smell are mechanical reactions, mental and neural responses to stimuli; they do not reside, as we perceive them, in the objects of which they are apparent qualities.

Locke's empiricism is thus radically psychological. We cannot have complete knowledge of things in themselves 16

or of their causes, for our knowledge of substances such

as gold lies entirely in the congeries of perceived

qualities by which we identify, define, and distinguish

"gold." This abstract idea of the substance comprises

only its "nominal essence," the cluster of simple ideas

to which we agree to fix the name "gold." The "real

essence" of gold, the imperceptible "constitution" of

internal parts causing our ideas of the substance, dwells

beyond the bounds of human understanding (II, 26-30).

Since men cannot attain direct knowledge of sub­

stance, it follows that, for Locke, natural philosophy

cannot aspire to the cognitive heights envisioned by the

Royal Society. The study of substance may, by extending

and refining our ideas, provide us with useful infor­

mation, the fruit of "experience and history" (II, 350).

But men cannot bridge the perceptual gap between object

and idea; the search for the real essences of material

reality is a vain pursuit which cannot yield demonstrable,

scientific knowledge (I, 177-81; II, 213-23, 349-50). Man's real business lies not in the bootless searching

for knowledge of things, but in the study of that which

his mind's capacities fit him to know. Men can attain

certain knowledge of "mixed modes," abstract ideas actively

created by the understanding itself, independent of

passively perceived, external archetypes (I, 381-89;

II, 43-55). Though instances of justice may exist in nature, the concept of "justice" is a product of mental definition, a complex idea compounded of arbitrarily

selected simple ideas. Framed by the mind for convenient reference and communication, "justice," in a fundamental

sense, owes its being to the mind that perceives it.

Since its nominal and real essences are identical (I,

382-85; II, 44-51), we can have certain knowledge of

"justice" (II, 231-5» 251-2) by defining it in relation to the various ideas— agreements about property, etc.— that the term comprises.

Since action, Locke argues, is "the great business of mankind" (I, 387), mixed modes have been employed primarily to denominate types of human actions, dis­ tinguished according to "their various ends, objects, manners, and circumstances" (I, 473); a garnering of such abstractions would constitute a "dictionary of the great­ est part of the words made use of in divinity, ethics, law, and politics, and several other sciences" (I, 389).

Analysis of these terms yields knowledge of men, for mixed modes such as "justice" are, as Locke points out,

"moral beings" (II, 51)» reflecting the "fashions, cus­ toms, and manners" of a nation's people (I, 384). As creations of the mind, abstract ideas can provide valuable insights on a culture and the moral lives of its membersi studying a society's mixed modes enables the observer to discern the actions that men have found worthy of notice 18

and distinction (I, 472; II, 46-8), praise and blame

(I, 476-78). And by analyzing and comparing the mixed

modes of different cultures, the observer discovers clues

to the general characteristics of human nature— manifested

in the distinct ideas formed under different circumstances

among various societies. Indeed, Locke's own Essay

employs an international survey of such mixed modes as

"murder" to dispel the idea of innate moral principles

(I, 72-4).

Bishop Berkeley’s idealist philosophy of human perception extends Locke's belief that we cannot obtain

certain knowledge of the material world. Locke's claim

that men can know nothing beyond their ideas, their

immediate sensory perceptions, forms the cornerstone for o Berkeley's philosophy. Berkeley rejects the very concept

of abstract matter existing independently of the senses, for such a phenomenon cannot be experienced directly or indirectly, and must therefore remain unknown and unverified. As Philonous, Berkeley’s spokesman in the

Three Dialogues, states, "whatever is immediately per­ ceived is an idea . . ."; an abstract material that causes our ideas is not itself an idea, for "the causes of our sensations are not things immediately perceived, and therefore are not sensible."^ It is thus impossible to have any knowledge of unperceived matter, including its 19 existence, for to exist is to be perceived:

as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking things, without any relation to their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is -percfpi; nor is it possible they should have any existence out of the minds . . . which perceive them.H

Berkeley supports this argument for idealism by rejecting

Locke's distinction between primary and secondary

qualities. Since we can perceive no qualities, primary

or secondary, that we do not perceive through our senses,

Locke's distinction is a false one. Primary qualities

cannot be given primacy, for perceived qualities exist

only within the mind. Though we can know through exper­

ience something about the "order of nature," which governs

the connections among our ideas, we can know nothing of

hypothetical material objects, the supposed "causes" of 12 our ideas, that exist beyond our perception.

Man's ultimate ignorance of any demonstrable

connection between cause and effect is most persuasively

argued in the philosophy of David Hume. Custom and

experience, according to Hume, lead men to assume the

stability of the material world and to believe that causes

can be reliably induced from effects, "For all inferences

from experience suppose, as their foundation, that the

future will resemble the past, and that similar powers will be conjoined with similar sensible qualities." 1J 3 20

But though we may know from experience that an effect does follow a cause, we can have no knowledge of any necessary connection between the two contiguous events:

"experience only teaches us, how one event constantly follows another; without instructing us in the secret connexion, which binds them together, and renders them l/i. inseparable." As in Locke and Berkeley, this ignorance of causes vitiates any attempt to know the material origins of our percepts: "the notion of substance is wholly confused and imperfect; . . . we have no other idea of any substance, than as an aggregate of particular qualities inhering in an unknown something.Since we cannot perceive its real essence, our ideas of an object do not provide us with any knowledge of its necessary effects, but we are conditioned by experience to believe we discern the necessity of constantly conjoined events.

Hume dismisses the validity of any such simple conception of order in the universe:

In reality, there is no part of matter, that does ever, by its sensible quali­ ties, discover any power or energy, or give us ground to imagine, that it could produce any thing, or be followed by any other object, which we could denominate its effect .... The scenes of the universe are continually shifting, and one object follows another in an uninterrupted succession; but the power or force, which actuates the whole machine, is entirely concealed from us, and never discovers itself in any of the sensible qualities of body. 21

We know, that, in fact, heat is a con­ stant attendant of flame; "but what is the connexion between them, we have no room so much as to conjecture or imagine.

Hume's conviction of man’s inherent limitations leads him to reject intellectual aspirations that attempt

to leap beyond the sphere of human capacity. Our know­

ledge is limited to matters of "common life and exper­

ience"; those who would soar to comprehend "the origin of worlds, or the economy of the intellectual system or region of spirits . . . may long beat the air in their fruitless contests, and never arrive at any determinate 1 7 conclusion." ' Hume turns, instead, to moral philosophy, the study of human nature. Knowledge of the reasons for human behavior is, for Hume, "the only solid foundation

for the other sciences." Disciplines such as criticism and political science should be essayed only by those with some understanding of the principles of human conduct:

"There is no question of importance, whose decision is not compriz'd in the science of man; and there is none, which can be decided with any certainty, before we become 1R acquainted with that science." Here, too, our know­ ledge must be based upon "experience and observation," for natural and moral evidence are fundamentally ig similar. 7 We cannot hope to discover the real essence of the human mind or the "ultimate principles" that 22 govern its workings, but such concerns are of far less importance to life than knowledge of the particular ways that men behave in "different circumstances and situ- 20 ations. Although the "ultimate principles" of our behavior lie beyond our ken, the "universal principles" of human conduct are within the reach of the moral philosopher working inductively from "cautions obser- 21 vation of human life":

It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations. The same motives always produce the same actions: The same events follow from the same causes. Ambition, avarice, self-love, vanity, friendship, genero­ sity, public spirit: these passions . . . have been, from the beginning of the world, and still are, the source of all the actions and enterprises, which have ever been observed among mankind . . . . Mankind are so much the same, in all times and places, that history informs us of nothing new or strange in this particular .... These records of wars, intrigues, factions, and revo­ lutions, are so many collections of experiments, by which the politician or moral philosopher fixes the principles of his science, in the same manner as the physician or natural philosopher becomes acquainted with the nature of plants, minerals, and other external objects, by the experiments which he forms concerning them.22

Men are alike and different: the fundamental uniformity of human nature is modified by the variety of 23 "circumstances and situations" in which men move and

exist. Moral philosophy seeks knowledge of "Man" by

studying the facts and phenomena of human behavior in 23 various times and various places. J

In the concluding chapter of the Essay. Locke divides the pursuits of the human mind into three fields— natural philosophy, ethics, and logic (II, 460-62).

Locke's general categories of thought fittingly conclude his analysis of the mind's operations and powers; in each branch of intellectual endeavor the mind grapples with distinct concerns which it is variously suited to handle.

The realm of logic may be exemplified by the Essay ?4 itself: Locke's work studies the nature of the "signs"—

"ideas and words" (II, 461-62)— that the mind employs in understanding and communicating. These noumenal and verbal symbols are the means with which the understanding follows its other pursuits; the logician reflects upon those processes of men's minds essential to all know­ ledge. The natural philosopher aspires to reach know­ ledge of things and the principles that govern them; he explores the works of his Maker's clock. The study of substances cannot, however, yield demonstrative knowledge, for our senses cannot perceive "the internal fabric and real essences of bodies" (II, 350)• Though experience may enable us to grasp some frequent conjunctions of 2k

qualities or juxtapositions of phenomena, Locke skepti­

cally insists that complete knowledge of things lies

beyond the scope of human understanding: "natural philos­

ophy is not capable of being made a science" (II, 350).

In contrast to the ultimate uncertainty of natural

philosophy, ethical, or moral philosophy aims for the

proper and practical directing of human "powers and

actions" to achieve ends both "good and useful." The

moral philosopher searches the world of men to unearth

through observation and experience "those rules and

measures of human actions" (II, k6l) leading to such

happiness as man is capable of reaching. Locke's belief

that men must study human conduct to determine human

potential and to judge human action appears repeatedly in

eighteenth-century thought. Pope's declaration that the

proper study of mankind is man aphoristically echoes

Locke's assertion that "morality is the proper science and

business of mankind in general (who are both concerned

and fitted to search out their summum bonum:) . . .

(II, 351). Knowledge of the reasons for human behavior

and awareness of man's duties and capacities lie within

the reach of the active seeker. Locke, Pope, Swift, and

Johnson follow Socrates in steering "philosophy from the

study of nature to speculations upon life." We should

not, Rasselas argues, "endeavour to modify the motions

of the elements, or to fix the destiny of kingdoms. It 25 is our business to consider what beings like us may perform . . . ." He who would comprehend the world around him must, according to eighteenth-century epistem- ology, abandon the useless chase for knowledge beyond his reach and turn to the quest for empirical morality. The philosopher and the artist are the chief embodi­ ments of Locke's empirical moralist. While Locke and

Hume map the province of the human mind, the eighteenth- century writer surveys mankind, distinguishing universal traits of human behavior from particular effects of custom and circumstance, not numbering the tulip's streaks, but portraying the condition of "tulipness." The poet, working in line with this moral aesthetic, creates works that embody qualities of "general nature." Should he choose to work with "factual" narrative, the poet is bound by his undertaking to relate particular "facts"; yet if he hopes to illuminate those facts with artistic and moral meaning, he must discover and interpret the general truths informing circumstantial particulars. In accord with this aim, writers of eighteenth-century history turn from the exclusively factual description of battles, events, and lives to exploratory analysis of human action.2 '7 History seeks moral truths; it serves, as Hume points out,

to discover the constant and universal principles of human nature, by showing 26

men in all varieties of circumstances and situations, and furnishing us with materials from which we may form our observations and become acquainted with the regular springs of human action and behaviour.28

Though men are basically the same in all times and in all places, knowledge of this essential human condition must be empirically gleaned from careful study of various men in different times and different places.

Johnson’s discussion of biography in Rambler 60 requires the biographer to meet obligations similar to those of the historian. In their attempt to gather moral essence from existential facts, the narrative lives of Johnson and Boswell stand between the stylized saints of medieval hagiography and the factual storehouses of 29 seventeenth-century biographical dictionaries. 7 Though biography necessarily deals with the specific facts of an individual life, biographers, Johnson warns, must not

"imagine themselves writing a life when they exhibit a chronological series of actions or preferments." Biog­ raphy should convey knowledge "of a man's real charac­ ter." Such knowledge is useful to all men, for "there is such an uniformity in the state of man, considered apart from adventitious and separable decorations and disguises, that there is scarcely any possibility of good or ill, but is common to human kind."^0 The biographer must portray his subject as a man among men, an aim that demands he set off the portrait by delineating typical actions that define individual character, by distinguish­ ing those specific conditions, advantages, and limitations that affect individual achievement, and by depicting modes of behavior that represent universal nature.

Johnson's own practice in the Lives of the Poets reflects these moral and artistic ideals. The action (of which literary works are one example) of reasonating signifi­ cance to both individual character and human nature forms a basic unit of the Lives. 31

Johnson's Journey reflects the belief that the writer of travels is also concerned with discovering the essential uniformity of human nature. Travel, properly performed, is a means of moral exploration. The moral traveler seeks neither scientific knowledge of things nor mere aesthetic appreciation of landscape. Johnson abrupt­ ly dismisses the traveler who would view only scenery and natural objects: "a blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another: . . . men and women are my subjects of enquiry; let us see how these differ from those we have left behind."^2 The symbolic journey of the eighteenth century is, as Paul Fussell has pointed out, a Lockean journey outward from the self in search for knowledge of men.^ The traits that distin­ guish man in all places may best be learned by observing his behavior as sculpted and modified by unique circumstances. Though nature is everywhere the same, it appears nowhere without a context to which it has adapted.

Indeed, the varying ways in which men have adjusted to different environments reveal important dimensions of human nature. The traveler is singularly situated to discover those human qualities remaining essentially similar under shifting conditions; his voyages, like

Imlac's, afford him the opportunity of "tracing human 'ih. nature through all its variations.

Though travel takes man out of himself, it leads ultimately to knowledge of self. The traveler extends his knowledge of the common nature that he shares with all men. Though the initial motive to travel may he, as it is in Rasselas. a restless itch for that which one lacks, the experience of travel eventually destroys such motivation. Journeys serve to curb the wanderlust of imagination through therapeutic empirical contact with the facts of the human condition: "The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are."^35

The traveler properly journeys in quest of clear vision and accurate knowledge of general human nature. The insights reached through travel enable man to perform what Pope, as well as Johnson, sees as a primary moral duty: "one’s chief business is to be really at home."-^ Smollett's narrators in Humphry Clinker are un­ balanced, self-absorbed travelers who fail, in the first half of the novel, to journey out of themselves. Relying

entirely upon narrow, highly individual vision, Smollett's characters misinterpret the world they seek to describe.

Only when their travels force them to recognize the error of their perceptions do the narrators adjust their opinions. Smollett's implied reader, faced with the critical evidence of zealously incongruous narratives, must exercise skepticism and moral speculation throughout the novel. In Humphry Clinker. the task of the reader mirrors the duty of the traveler. Smollett's reader, like Johnson's traveler, must cautiously construct from his basis of experience a contingent interpretation of the moral world he encounters. Notes to Chapter I

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1759), ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), p. 129* 2 Plus Ultra, or The Progress and Advancement of Knowledge Since the Days of Aristotle, ed. Jackson I. Cope (London, 1668; rpt. Gainesville, Florida: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1958), pp. 87,112.

-^The History of the Roval Society of London. For the Improving of Natural Knowledge, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (London, 1667; rpt. St. Louis: Washington Univ. Press, 1959), PP* 6-19, 26. h, . Sprat, History, pp. 61, 31* See also Sprat, History, p. 20; Glanvill, Plus Ultra, p. 87; Robert Hooke, Micrographia: or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made with Magnifying Glasses with Obser- vations~and Inquiries Thereupon (London,1665; rpt.New York: Dover, 19^1), sigs. blr-blv.

^See Hooke, Micrographia. sigs. alr-alv , a2v , b2v ; Joseph Glanvill, Scepsis Scientifica (166$), pp. 6-7, in The Vanity of Dogmatizing: The Three ''Versions'' (rpt. Hove, Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1970). Robert Boyle's position of skeptically cautious positivism typifies the Royal Society's stance:

though sometimes I have had occasion to discourse like a Skepticke, yet I am far from being one of that sect .... I do not with the true Skepticks propose doubts to perswade Men that all things are doubtfull and will ever remaine so, (at least) to humane understandings, but I propose doubts not only with designe. but with hope. of being at length freed from them by the attainment of un­ doubted truth. . . .

("Experiments and Notes About the Producibleness of Chymical Principles," in The Skeptical Chvmist: or Chymico-Physical Doubts and Paradoxes. Touching the 30 31 Experiments Whereby Vulgar Spagirists Are Wont to En­ deavour to Evince Their Salt. Sulphur and Mercury. To Be the True Principles of Things (Oxford. 1680). sigs. *7v-*8r. I have reversed the type of this preface to the work's Appendix, which is printed in italics, with emphasis in roman type.)

^Hooke, Micrographia. sigs. b2v-b3r . Hooke places considerable faith in the capacity of the Royal Society's program to offset human deficiencies. More accurate records will, Hooke believes, compensate for defective memory, and improved optical technology will check and expand the inadequate senses (sigs. a2v , b2v , a3r ).

^An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser^, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1894; rpt. New York: Dover, 1959); II» 285. Future references to the Essay are to this edition and will be cited in the text. Q Alexander Campbell Fraser, ed., An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. I, 120.

^0f the Principles of Human Knowledge, in The Works of George Berkeley, ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), I, 257.

^0Three Dialogues Between Hvlas and Philonous. in Opposition to Sceptics and Atheists, in Works. I, 414, £ 0 1 : •^Principles of Human Knowledge, in Works. I, 259*

^ Three Dialogues in Works. I, 480, 464, 397-405.

•^An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), in Enquiries: Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch, 3rd ed. (1777; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), p. 37. See also pp. 28-39, 43-7. •*• ^Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 6 6 .

•^"On the Immortality of the Soul," in On the Stan­ dard of Taste and Other Essays, ed. John W. Lenz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 161.

•^Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 75-6. 32 17 'Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 81. 18 A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (1739; rpt. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), p. xx. 19 Treatise,, p. xx; Enquiry Concerning Human Under­ standing. pp. 88-9 1 .

20Treatise., pp. xxi-xxii. 21 An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), in Enquiries, ed. Selby-Bigge and Nidditch, pp. 174-75; Treatise. p. xxiii. 22 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, pp. 83-4.

Jk human artifact, language is, for Hume as well as for Locke, a thread to the labyrinth of human nature. Mixed modes, as Locke pointed out, commonly denote praise or blame. Thus Hume, in examining those general qualities that constitute "Personal Merit," argues that "The very nature of language guides us almost infallibly in forming a judgment of this nature ..." (Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, pp. 173-74). 24 1 ^ Fraser, ed., Essay. II, 462.

^Samuel Johnson, "Life of Milton," Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford, 1905; rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1967)» I. 100.

Rasselas. Chapter XXVIII.

^See Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1932), pp. 87-95; Leo Braudy, Narrative Form in History and Fiction (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 3~13» Becker stresses the frequency voiced eighteenth-century philosophical belief that history is a library of human behavior, in all its variations, for the philosopher seeking to ascertain the constants of human nature. Braudy emphasizes the tentative use of narrative form in history to interpret human action against circum­ stantial background. 28 Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 8 3 . 29 ^Richard D. Altick, Lives and Letters: A History of Literary Biography in England and America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 19^5)1 pp. 6-23. 33 ^ The text cited is The Rambler, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, Volumes III-V of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1969), H I . 322,320. -^"See James L. Battersby, "Patterns of Significant Action in the ’Life of Addison,'" Genre. 2 (1969)* 28-^2. See also Ralph Rader, "Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell’s Johnson." in Essays in Eight­ eenth-Century Biography, ed. Philip B. Daghlian (Blooming­ ton: Indiana Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 6-9. Rader argues that "The subject of Boswell's book is not the life of Johnson but the character of Johnson as revealed in the facts of his life; and his purpose is to make us feel that admiration and reverence which is the natural emotive consequence of full empathetic perception of the character" (p. 6 ). The Life of Johnson aims not to present fact for its own sake but to employ fact for larger literary and moral ends: "Boswell's book is literature because it lifts an aspect of human reality from the contingency of history and displays it as a concrete universal— self­ validating, self-intelligible, inherently moving, per­ manently valuable" (p. 3 5 )*

32Hester Lynch Piozzi, Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson (1786), ed. S. C. Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1932), p. 6 6 . -^The Rhetorical World of Augustan Humanism: Ethics and Imagery from Swift to Burke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965)* pp. 263-6 5 . See also Thomas M. Curley, Samuel Johnson and the Age of Travel (Athens, Georgia: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1976), especially chapter 4, "Morality and the Metaphor of Travel." 3 Ll ^ Rasselas. chapter IX.

-^The Letters of Samuel Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), I, 355* no. 326. Future references to Johnson’s letters will be to this edition; letters will be cited by number.

-^Letter to Hugh Bethel, 9 August 1726, The Correspon­ dence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956) II, 386; Fussell, p. 266. C hapter I I

Empirical Morality and the Role of the Artist

But how much soever the Reason may "be strengthened by Logic. or the Conceptions of the Mind enlarged by the Study of Nature, it is necessary the Man be not suffered to dwell upon them so long as to neglect the Study of himself, the Knowledge of his own Station in the Ranks of Being, and his various Relations to the innumerable Multitudes which surround him .... Ethics or Morality. therefore, is one of the Studies which ought to begin with the first Glimpse of Reason, and only end with Life itself.1

Human perception and knowledge, as conceived by

Lockean philosophy, reflect man's fallen state. We move in exile amidst absolute substantial realities that we can never know. Though our ideas are not illusory, they are

"inadequate." Our inherent inability to perceive with certainty the causes of effects relegates us to a realm of mental constructs. Ignorant of the substances that cause our perceptions, we form complex ideas of those substances that are, according to Locke, necessarily incomplete and relative. Different men possess different ideas of the same substance, ideas that approach the

"reality" of the substance's "archetype" to different degrees. To the extent that our perception of effects

3^ 35 varies, our vision of the external world is private and

relative. Reasoning from partially observed effects to

their probable causes, the task of the natural philoso­

pher, poses a hazardous endeavor that cannot yield demon­

strative knowledge. Since our vision of effects is in­

complete, any attempt to induce the causes of partial appearances will be radically inadequate. While the degree of inductive inadequacy will vary with the experience and perceptual powers of the observer, no man can fathom material reality. Perceptual difficulties resulting from the innate limitations of the senses are complicated by organic deficiencies. Sight, the most important of the senses, may be blurred and distorted. Colors that tint the eye, as in the disease of jaundice, stain the colors of the eye's "Pictures." The spectator may thus see objects uniquely the work of his own vision. An excess or

"defect of plumpness in the Eye" may cause either myopia or hyperopia, both blurring vision under certain con- 2 ditions. Since knowledge of "things" is based upon the reports of the senses, distorted and inaccurate ideas threaten the natural philosopher's attempt to comprehend the material world.

Although the natural philosophers are acutely aware of the failings and frolics of the senses, they remain optimistic that these difficulties can be surmounted by rigorous, collective observation. Though individual testimony may be incomplete and slanted, the observer can compensate for such faults by weighing his findings against those of other witnesses. The belief that man can atone for his perceptual and intellectual short­ comings by basing his conclusions upon repeated obser­ vations from multiple points of view is an important article of Royal Society doctrine. By assessing the testimony of multiple observers, natural philosophy hopes to achieve the completeness and accuracy of observation and hypothesis that lie beyond the grasp of the single observer. The need to employ multiple perceptions in observing natural phenomena is a main reason, according to Sprat, for the foundation of the Royal Society; to avoid the possibility of narrowly biased, partial, or conditioned vision, the Society consciously enlists many members from diverse professions, various religions, and different countries. Sprat describes the group as a

"union of eyes" that achieves "a full comprehension of the object in all its appearances." Working in assembly, the Society believes that it can evade the idiosyncracies of vision and judgment which might befall an individual observer.J

Although natural philosophy must use the evidence of multiple perspectives, its knowledge cannot, as

Glanvill points out, rely upon casual, carelessly 37 accepted reports of the senses. Rather, "... Instances must be aggregated, compared. and critically inspected.

. . . Not all testimony is of equal value, for some men’s observations and ideas are more scrupulous and com­ plete than others'. The natural philosopher does not merely collect observations: he must also assay them against the empirical criteria of individual experience and the gathered experiences of others. To encourage analysis and evaluation, the Royal Society, whenever possible, conducts observations and experiments first­ hand before its assembled members, "making the whole process pass under its own eyes." Observation and experi­ ment must be followed by debate among witnesses, by

"critical. and reiterated scrutiny" of object or pheno­ menon. Debate allows each observer to compare "so many other mens conceptions with his own, and with the thing it self." The individual can skeptically adjust and sharpen his own opinion in the light of multiple obser­ vations. Only after discussion has precisely established the "matter of Fact" they have observed do Society members venture to conclusions about causes.-’

Despite the becoming modesty that marks the Royal

Society's position on the hypothetical explanation of nature, the natural philosophers voice enormous optimism in discussing the scope of their endeavors. According to

Sprat, the Society aims ultimately to explain all nature with a framework of general theories accounting for observed phenomena: "to represent to mankind, the whole

Pahrick, the parts, the causes, the effects of Nature."

Newton, known for his caution in hypothesizing, assigns a yet loftier role to natural philosophy, which strives

"to deduce Causes from Effects, till we come to the very- first Cause, which certainly is not mechanical; and . . . £ to unfold the Mechanism of the World. ..." Though officially skeptical of the power of the human faculties, natural philosophers believe that man can largely surmount his weaknesses. The secrets of the universe are within our reach.

Locke also believes that men can improve their ideas of substance by comparing the notions of multiple observers, but he remains considerably more skeptical than the natural philosophers as to the degree of perfection that men can hope to achieve. Lacking immediate per­ ception of causes, our approach to the material world is necessarily hypothetical. We form complex ideas of substance based on as many substantial qualities as we are able to perceive. The adequacy of the complex ideas thus inductively fashioned varies with the observer's experience of the perceived object, "For he has the perfectest idea of any of the particular sorts of sub­ stances, who has gathered, and put together, most of those simple ideas which do exist in it. . . . Since different men have differing degrees of experience with different

objects, and have observed those objects with varying

degrees of accuracy, our knowledge of the external world

is profoundly relative— different men see different worlds. The relative adequacy of our complex ideas of

substance can be rated by the number of simple ideas and powers they include, and men can upgrade their ideas by

increasing their experience of substance. But Locke repeatedly emphasizes his belief that man is ultimately

doomed to inadequate ideas. In discussing the complex

idea of "gold," for example, Locke conjectures that the

first man to see gold probably included little more than

its yellow color and heavy weight in his complex idea of

the substance. Other observers added such qualities as

"ductility" and "fusibility" that constitute the more

complete complex idea of gold in the minds of most men.

But this idea is, in turn, only relatively adequate. It

does not exhaustively define "gold," which, according to

Locke,

has infinite other properties not contained in that complex idea. Some who have examined this species more accurately could, I believe, enumerate ten times as many properties in gold, all of them as insepa­ rable from its internal constitution, as its colour or weight: and it is probable, if any one knew all the properties that are by divers men known of this metal, there would be an hundred times as many ideas go to the complex idea of gold as any one man yet has 4-0 in his; and yet perhaps that not he the thousandth part of what is to he discovered in it.8

Locke's proportion is telling, especially when viewed against the Royal Society's optimism that men can eventu­ ally comprehend "the whole Fahrick . . . of Nature."

Though multiple observations can improve our knowledge of things, the collective penetration of men can grasp only the smallest fragment of the material creation.

Locke's analysis of our ideas of substances leads him away from confidence in the utility of natural philosophy. Skeptical of our power to comprehend the material world, he emphasizes empirical morality as our proper intellectual concern. We can know with certainty the ideas that men form and the actions in which men engage. Knowledge of our own species, its capacities, limitations, and tendencies, falls within our reach. The duty of man is to know man in all his historical, indivi­ dual, and cultural vicissitudes. Though such knowledge of the universal qualities of general nature lies within our power, its pursuit, as eighteenth-century writers are aware, is an enormous undertaking. The search for empirical morality must he a collective human endeavor.

The artist and the philosopher— and their hybrid off­ spring, the historian, biographer, and traveler— are all engaged in a mutual quest. The moralist must turn the 41

techniques of active empirical observation employed by

natural philosophy to more useful ends of self-knowledge.

Moral philosophy in the eighteenth century embraces

a range of concerns as wide as human life. Hume employs

observation and experience to ascertain and analyze the

qualities that constitute "Personal Merit," seeking to

discover, through induction, "the foundation of ethics,

. . . those universal principles, from which all censure q or approbation is ultimately derived." Edmund Burke’s

Philosophical Enquiry observes human behavior to learn

the psychological origins of aesthetic response; the

constitutive qualities of objects capable of arousing

emotions of beauty or sublimity must be discovered through

experience— they cannot be predicted a priori.^0 In

Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke studies

history and society, extending the study of man to politi­

cal science, knowledge of the various ways in which men

have formed governments in adaptive response to particular

circumstances.1'1' Adam Smith traces the economic division of labor, which he sees as the cornerstone of capitalism,

to moral principle, "a certain propensity in human nature"

— the "trucking disposition" that impels men to "exchange 12 one thing for another."

Regardless of its specialization, the methods of moral philosophy remain essentially the same. Repeatedly

in evidence are the procedures of empirical inquiry: close observation, tempered by skeptical distrust of

individual experience and conclusions. The moral philoso- per reasons from the observed particulars of human behavior to the general principles that subsume specific acts; he observes effects, and he attempts to determine the con­ ditions that cause them. In attempting thus to comprehend the human situation, philosophy must bear in mind Hume’s warning that "The more instances we examine, and the more care we employ, the more assurance shall we acquire, that the enumeration, which we form from the whole, is complete and entire."1^ Burke’s comments upon the study of government epitomize the century's cautious approach to all areas of human endeavor: short experience of political phenomena cannot yield certain results, for "the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate. ..."

A government or social institution is often the product of "some obscure and almost latent causes, things which appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend." The moral philosopher must remain conscious of the limitations of his powers and the com­ plexity of his subject: "The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity. . . . The individual must see his own contribution to knowledge as a single brick to a work in progress, for comprehensive knowledge of man is the work ^3 of many minds. Systematic theories explaining the whole of human nature are, Thomas Reid argues, "too vast for any one man, how great soever his genius and abilities 1 5 may be." ^ Even "The science of government," according to Burke, requires "more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be. . . .”1^

The epistemological beliefs that underlie eighteenth- century empirical morality figure prominently in theo­ retical discussion of the duties of the artist, whose work must be based on moral vision, "A KNOWLEDGE of the disposition and character of the human mind" that "can be acquired only by experience."1^ Sir Joshua Reynolds voices a critical commonplace of his century in warning his pupils that in striving to create a work that mirrors general "Nature," they must avoid exact pictorial realism, a technique founded upon a "confined view of what is natural," a "truth . . . not sufficiently extensive"; scribal copying of particular detail forces the artist to rely upon his unique vision of a single instance. The student must strive to rise above "all singular forms, local customs, particularities and details of every kind." To capture the qualities of a species, the artist must seek an "enlarged and comprehensive idea" of nature, the proper object of his limitation. Reynolds equates

"Genius" in art with discovery of rules and principles for producing excellence, rules that the artist derives

from the infinite stock of nature "by a kind of scien- 1 R tifick sense." He follows Johnson, Burke, and Hume in

the belief that artistic principles must be discovered

through observation:

none of the rules of composition are fixed by reasonings a priori. or can be esteemed abstract conclusions of the understanding .... Their foundation is the same with that of all the practical sciences, experience; nor are they any thing but general observations, concerning what has been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages.19

Reynolds, like Johnson, refuses to limit the means by

which works can please, since experience tells us that

the means are various, the variety deriving in part from

the inexhaustible possibilities of nature:

Every object which pleases must give us pleasure upon some certain principles, but as the objects of pleasure are almost infinite, so their principles vary without end, and every man finds them out, not by felicity or successful hazard, but by care and sagacity.20

Effective art demands empirical knowledge of general nature, reached through close examination of broadly 21 cultivated experience.

Skill in perceiving the "ideal beauty" that is the

essence of nature operates, according to Reynolds, "in proportion to our attention in observing . . ., to our skill in selecting, and to our care in digesting, metho­ dizing, and comparing our observations." Beginning with

individual experience, the artist’s "enquiry" cannot rest only upon his own ideas, for "we can never be sure that our own sensations are true and right, till they are con­ firmed by more extensive observation." The artist must seek the perceptual consensus found only in "a general union of minds." Reynolds warns his pupils to beware all "narrow theories" that would exclude "the application of science" from the practice of art, for only through 22 extensive observation can art achieve its proper scope.

With Johnson, Reynolds believes that as we experience more we gain more principles of reasoning and establish a wider basis of analogy:

He . . . who is acquainted with the works which have pleased different ages and different countries, and has formed his opinion on them, has more materials, and more means of knowing what is analogous to the mind of man, than he who is conversant only with the works of his own age or country.23

Though much can be done by the individual who examines oh. his own motives and feelings, only art founded upon wide empirical exploration of nature promises to embrace the universal verities essential to artistic pleasure:

"It is the false system of reasoning, grounded on a partial view of things, against which I would most k6

earnestly guard you." y

The critic of art must meet as many empirical and moral obligations as the artist himself. Judging works

against the standard of nature demands knowledge of life,

as Burke suggests in his essay "On Taste": "Whatever certainty is to be acquired in morality and the science of life; just the same degree of certainty have we in what relates to them in works of imitation." A work of art is, in this view, a microcosm of the moral world.

The critic studies the work he hopes to explain and judge, seeking to measure the artist's vision against the general nature the work represents. Effective criticism will reflect an active engagement with the moral world, and the critic's qualifications must match those of the 07 artist. ' Indeed, the artistic and critical tempers are inseparable, for the budding artist must, according to

Reynolds, immerse himself not only in the world of nature, but also in the world of art. He must study his prede- t cessors to learn the principles of construction that they discovered. As moralists seek the general nature that informs the external world, the artist-critic examines the representations of general nature that inform works. The critic must exercise careful observation, for art, like the nature it imitates, eludes casual observation and easy explanation: ^7 Art in its perfection is not ostenta­ tious; it lies hid, and works its effect, itself unseen. It is the proper study and labour of an artist to uncover and find out the latent cause of conspicuous beauties, and from thence form principles for his own conduct: such an examination is a continual exertion of the mind; as great, perhaps, as that of the artist whose works he is thus studying.28

Hume, too, believes that the critic must develop and cultivate taste by acquiring experience of art. Subtle artistic effects can only be perceived and understood by

"delicacy of imagination," a power of apprehension that must be improved by training: "the same address and dexterity which practice gives to the execution of any work, is also acquired by the same means in the judging of it." 2 '9 As the critic extends his experience of art, he expands his knowledge of men and gains standards of comparison essential for sound judgment: "One accustomed to see, and examine, and weigh the several performances, admired in different ages and nations, can alone rate the merits of a work exhibited to his view, and assign its proper rank among the productions of genius."-'30

While Reynolds would have the apprentice artist study great works of the past to learn the rules employed by the masters, he does not encourage slavish imitation of ancient practice. Through imitation, the artist finds his own niche in artistic tradition. Properly performed, imitation of former artists serves the student as a form of experience, enabling him to see nature as others have seen it before him, and thus fertilizing "Genius," the power that enables poet or painter to discover new rules.

In the works of the past, the novice experiences various representations of the nature that he in his turn must comprehend. As the masters have established themselves as observers of the first order, they provide the working artist with the experience needed to forge his own vision:

We behold all about us with the eyes of those penetrating observers whose works we contemplate; and our minds, accustomed to think the thoughts of the noblest and brightest intellects, are prepared for the discovery and selection of all that is great and noble in nature.31

3y a species of empathy that lies, for Reynolds, at the heart of man's experience of art, the studious artist shares the insights of the best past judges of nature.

Prom his own observations and from his critical experience of the past observations of others, the student raises an artistic vision that is, if he has diligence and true

Genius, "a well-digested and perfect idea." Artists who have failed, for whatever reason, to continue "looking out of themselves" have, Reynolds avers, generally withered 32 in their performances.

Johnson's critical theory also centers on the empirical procedure and moral occupation of the critic. The focus of Johnson's criticism falls, as W. R. Keast has argued, upon the author, the primary "cause" of literary pleasure. Starting with determinations of the nature and bases of the pleasure readers receive from a work, Johnson reasons to the author's powers, evidenced in the production of such literary "effects." For Johnson, working within this scheme of emphasis, the assessment of genius becomes a central part of the critical task.

Criticism thus conceived is an essentially moral under­ taking, a part of the general "enquiry" as to "how far man may extend his designs, or how high he may rate his native force. ..." Johnsonian criticism aims to measure both the ability of the author and the capacity of his species. The two are inseparable: the powers of man must be empirically "discovered in a long succession of endeavours"; the powers of the individual must, in turn, be reckoned against "the general and collective ability of man."^ But Johnson’s judgments of "native force" do not view an author's work in total abstraction. Rather, as Keast points out, Johnson considers works in their 3*5 "circumstantial setting,distinguishing those characteristics that spring from individual ability—

"original powers"— from those that derive from temporal or circumstantial accident— "adventitious help." History and biography help to determine the means by which an author performed his work and are thus important critical 50 instruments in assessing genius:-^

Every man's performances, to be rightly estimated, must be compared with the state of the age in which he lived, and with his own particular opportunities; and though to the reader a book be not worse or better for the circumstances of the author, yet as there is always a silent reference of human works to human abilities, . . . curiosity is always busy to discover the instruments, as well as to survey the workmanship. . . .37

In judging individual achievement, the critic must possess moral knowledge of man in general; this general knowledge is, in turn, advanced by study of the author at hand, whose contribution to man's ongoing endeavors serves to confirm, adjust, or extend our assessment of human potential. The critic, like the historian and biographer whose viewpoints he incorporates, sifts the unsorted particulars of life to articulate general moral truths, forming contingent conclusions upon an ever-widening basis of observation.

In Johnson’s Journey, travel is a mode of moral inquiry. Johnson travels to gain principles of reasoning— which extend comprehension— and to regulate imagination by reality— which rectifies opinion. Travel, the primary mode of exploration in the Journey, comprises various aspects of moral inquiry prominent in eighteenth-century thought. In the course of the work, Johnson is, by turns, historian, biographer, social scientist, economist, and literary critic. These seemingly diverse roles are in fact one with his part as artist and traveler, a moral philosopher seeking general nature in its unique Highland habitat. Whatever the object of his capacious inquiry, be it the poetry of Ossian or the social functions of the

Tacksman, Johnson seeks knowledge of human nature as it manifests itself in artifact and behavior. Though a foreigner to the Highland culture he observes, Johnson brings to his travels the fruits of a lifetime of moral analysis, a wealth of analogy proportional to the breadth and acuity of his reading and to the extent and sensitivity of his previous experience of mankind.

Understanding the Scotland of 1773 requires, for

Johnson, not only awareness of its immediate conditions, but also knowledge of the land and its past. To under­ stand Scottish customs and institutions, one must realize their reasons for being. Highland culture is a complex, organic structure that has evolved in response to the demands of existence in a rugged, isolated, impoverished land. Since present institutions and conditions are the growth of historical and circumstantial causes, a genuine knowledge of Scottish culture is impossible without knowledge of its origins. The philosophic observer of cultural phenomena must recognize the extent to which the present situation represents an effective, practical adaptation to specific conditions and limitations. And any attempt to solve Scotland's problems and to improve its future lot must not consider present conditions in isolation, for a genuine cure of social ills must involve more than merely local treatment of present symptoms.

Social change that hopes to achieve any real benefit must address the problems to which the present culture is at least a partial solution. Philosophic travel cannot be guided by abstract beliefs about what could or should be: it must seek to comprehend the reasons for what is.

The travelers in Humphry Clinker consistently fail, during the first half of the novel, to see things as they are. Smollett's writers aim to describe the world around them, and the novel abounds in factual details of eight­ eenth-century Bath, London, and Scotland. But the fictive universe of Smollett's novel is not the product of objective, cautious, morally insightful vision. Each of

Smollett's narrators perceives a reality uniquely colored by his own sight. Bramble sees a world tinted by his irascible hypochondria, while Lydia beholds a shimmering vision of adolescent romance. The diverse points of view suggest the epistemological texture of the novel’s world. No single perspective presents an objective vision of moral reality upon which Smollett's reader can rely. Instead, the five divergent points of view con­ stitute a body of subjective evidence upon which Smollett's implied reader must exercise his own powers of comparison, discrimination, judgment, and synthesis.

Perceiving "Smollett," who stands ironically behind the writers' accounts, the reader must construct a perspec­ tive that embraces the testimony of multiple viewpoints.

Working from his own experience--and literary experience of the conventions and types from which Smollett draws is relevant here--and from the overlapping reports by the various narrators, the reader can construct a far more adequate assessment of character and event than any single narrator provides. Performing in this manner,

Smollett's reader works as empirical moralist and effective traveler within the world of Humphry Clinker.

Though Smollett's narrators begin the work as ineffective, self-absorbed travelers, in the course of their journey they learn to see more objectively the moral world their letters describe. Recognition of their perceptual shortcomings is thrust upon them through experience— through changes of location and alterations in circumstance. Jery's easy cynicism and Bramble's defensive misanthropy crumble beneath their experience of Scottish generosity and hospitality. The sudden discoveries of the comic plot force characters to confront and acknowledge perspectives of which they have been previously ignorant and enable individuals to see them­ selves and others in a new and more complete light. 5 ^ Their expedition enables Smollett's narrators to fill more adequately their duty as travelers.

The Journey and Humphry Clinker are very different kinds of works, to which moral travel is quite differ­ ently important. But fundamental to both works is the process of eduction, as understood in terms of the third definition of The Oxford English Dictionary; "The action of drawing- forth, eliciting, or developing from a state of latent, rudimentary, or potential existence.

. . ." Both works reflect the belief that eductive vision is essential to accurate moral perception. Ade­ quate, comprehensive vision of moral phenomena is, in both the Journey and Humphry Clinker, a perceptual and imaginative construction which the observer must forge from its "potential existence" in limited, partial evi­ dence. Using his principles of reasoning, founded in his experience of mankind, the observer seeks to unravel perplexity, to confirm, adjust, and extend his stock of moral opinion. In both works, this duty of the moral inquirer, be he artist, philosopher, or critic, is mani­ fest as a skeptical, empirical quest, an epistemological journey through the world of men. Notes to Chapter II

Samuel Johnson, "Preface" to The Preceptor, in Samuel Johnson's Prefaces and Dedications, ed. Allen T. Hazen (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1937). P* 186. 2 Sir Isaac Newton, Q-pticks: or. A Treatise of the Reflections. Refractions. Inflections and Colours of Light (1704) (London, 1730; rpt. New York: Dover, 1952), pp. 14-16.

3Sprat, History, pp. 73, 85, 91, 99, 102, 104-05. For similar descriptions of the Royal Society, see Glanvill, Plus Ultra, pp. 52, 114.

^Glanvill, Plus Ultra, p. 52.

3Sprat, History, pp. 84, 91-2, 98-100. £ Sprat, History. p. 20; Newton, Opticks, p. 369*

^Locke, Essay. I, 396-97* fj "Locke, Essay. I, 510-11. o Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, pp. 173-7^* 30Burke, Philosophical Enquiry, pp. 129, 53-^, 95-6, 112-13* Burke carefully distinguishes "the efficient cause of sublimity and beauty," the subject of his analy­ sis, from the unknown (and unknowable) "ultimate cause" of such emotions (p. 129); his subject is moral philoso­ phy, not natural philosophy.

^ Reflections on the Revolution in France, pp. 8-9, 70-3, 217-19. 1 2 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell, A. S. Skinner, and W. B. Todd fOxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), I, 25-7* 13Enauirv Concerning Human Understanding, p. 24. 14 Reflections on the Revolution m Francg. pp. 71-2. 55 56 ^ An Inquiry into the Human Mind (1763). ed. Timothy Duggan (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 16-17.

^^Reflections on The Revolution in France, p. 72. 17 . Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art. ed. Robert R. Wark (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1959)» p. 132 (Discourse VII, 1776).

TO Discourses, pp. 125 (Discourse VII, 1776), 44 (Discourse III, 1770), 98 (Discourse VI, 177^).

■^David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste" (1757). in On the Standard of Taste and Other Essays, ed. John W. Lenz (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), p. 7* 20 Discourses. p. 46 (Discourse III, 1770). See William R. Keast, "The Theoretical Foundations of Johnson's Criticism," in Critics and Criticism; Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), pp. 395, 398, 400. 21 Discourses. pp. 44-5 (Discourse III, 1770), 117- 13 (Discourse VII, 1776).

^ Discourses. pp. 44 (Discourse III, 1770), 132 (Discourse VII, 1776), 231-32 (Discourse XIII, 1786).

^ Discourses, p. 133 (Discourse VII, 1776). o h Discourses. p. 132 (Discourse VII, 1776). See also Rasselas. chapter XVI: "Every man . . . may, by examining his own mind, guess what passes in the minds of others. ..." Also see Reid, Inquiry, p. 5. The anato­ mist of the mind, Reid argues, must base his study on analysis of his own thoughts: "It is his own mind only that he can examine with any degree of accuracy and distinctness. This is the only subject he can look into. He may, from outward signs, collect the operations of other minds; but these signs are for the most part ambiguous, and must be interpreted by what he perceives within himself."

^ Discourses. p. 232 (Discourse XIII, 1786).

Philosophical Enquiry, p. 23.

2^As critic and biographer, Johnson frequently per­ forms such moral judgments in the Lives of the Poets, testing and assessing motives, beliefs, and apocryphal anecdotes against his own experience of human behavior. 57 ?P Discourses, p. 101 (Discourse VI, 1774). Reynolds' statement that "Art . . . lies hid, and works its effect, itself unseen" echoes Pope's An Essay on Criticism, lines 7^-9. Art from that Fund [["Nature"3 each .just Sup-ply provides, Works without Show, and without Pomo presides: In some fair Body thus th'informing Soul With Spirits feeds, and Vigour fills the whole, Each Motion guides, and ev'ry Nerve sustains; It self unseen, but in th'Effects. remains.

(The text cited is Pastoral Poetry and An Essay on Criticism, ed. E. Audra and Aubrey Williams. The Twicken­ ham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope [.London: Methuen; New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 196lH, PP* 247-48).

^9"0f the Standard of Taste," pp. 10, 13. 30„of ^-he standard of Taste," p. 14.

^ Discourses, pp. 97-101, 99 (Discourse VI, 1774).

-^Discourses. pp. 110, 111 (Discourse VI, 1774).

-^Keast, "Theoretical Foundations," pp. 399, 404-06. 34 J Preface to Shakespeare, pp. 81, 60. 3 ^ ^Keast, Theoretical Foundations," p. 406.

-^Keast, "Theoretical Foundations," p. 406.

J37 'Preface to Shakespeare, p. 81, Chapter III

Moral Travel and Factual Narrative

Humanity is immense, and reality has a myriad forms. . . .1

The quest for more extensive knowledge of the world

connects eighteenth-century natural philosophers with

another of the period’s major cultural figures— the

traveler. In its search for natural knowledge, the Royal

Society drew freely upon the collections, reports, and published accounts of travelers; indeed, many travelers were themselves natural philosophers seeking to expand knowledge of the material world. Sprat's History of the

Royal Society repeatedly refers to the reports of voyagers and merchants as one of the group's primary sources of knowledge, guaranteed in its charter's grant "to hold

Correspondence and Intelligence with any Strangers . . . without any Interruption or Molestation. ..." With characteristic nationalism, Sprat praises English merch­ ants, whose "Inquisitive Genius" is a principal means of attaining "that Knowledg. which is to be made up of the

Reports, and Intelligence of all Countreys." To gather this knowledge, the Society employed not only citizen- merchants and "their Factors abroad," but also visiting

58 59 foreigners, military officers serving overseas, and

England's foreign ambassadors. Sprat describes the

group's wide correspondence, including numerous inquiries

to foreign countries. The Society, says Sprat, expects 2 accounts daily "from all coasts."

Indeed, travel reports and reviews of travel books

form an important category of material in the Society's

Transactions.J The data of travel— reports of distant

countries and their unique inhabitants— fueled philosophic

speculation. Voyagers furnished naturalists with supple­

mentary observation; employing reports from foreign lands,

the Royal philosophers could base their own observations,

experiments, and hypotheses upon a more extensive foun- L dation of experience. Thus Robert Hooke cites "the

descriptions of Aetna in Sicily, of Hecla in Iceland. of

Tenerif in the Canaries, of the several Vulcans in New-

Spain, describ'd by Cage. and more especially . . . the

eruption of late years in one of the Canary Islands" as evidence of the probability that the moon's craters were produced by volcanic activity.^ Through his reading of

Gage and other travelers, Hooke gains what Johnson will call "more principles of reasoning" and "a wider basis of analogy,"^ knowledge that enables him to explain the probable causes of the moon's surface. In the journeys of others, the armchair traveler adds to his stock of experience, the basis for imaginative yet principled 6o

speculation.

The soundness of such speculation, of course,

depends, in part, upon the accuracy and trustworthiness

of reports. The reader who aspires to philosophy must

face the serious problems raised by his dependence on the

findings of other observers. How can he insure the

accuracy of secondhand reports? How can he even be

certain the traveler will attend to the noteworthy? To

increase the likelihood of accurate, useful reports, the

Royal Society sought to train the perceptual skills of

the Englishman abroad through various published directions

and "inquiries" for travelers."'7 Within six months of the

Society's first charter, Robert Hooke wrote inquiries for

Greenland and Iceland, in a clear attempt to guide the 8 Nordic traveler's powers of observation. The Transactions published numerous additional inquiries— questions to be researched by visitors to specific countries— as well as

such instructions as the Society's "Directions for Sea-

Men, bound for far Voyages," designed to qualify sailors

to make observations likely to increase England’s

"Philosophical stock.Directions stressed the impor­

tance of precise observation10 and, like the inquiries,

they were clearly designed to inspire the delegate

naturalist with an awareness of the multiple objects and phenomena requiring investigation. The "Directions for

Sea-Men," which span a variety of geographical. 61 geological, meteorological, and astronomical concerns, enjoin the traveler to note his observations in an "exact

Diary." The Society's instructions repeatedly urge the traveler "To observe," "To remark carefully," "To make

Plotts and Draughts," "To sound and marke," "To keep a

Register," "To observe and record," and even "To carry

. . . good Scales. " 1 '1‘ In one attempt to further its ideals, the Society distributed both directions and instruments to prominent military generals serving abroad.12 The Royal Society’s ideals govern, in large measure, the content of many Restoration and early eighteenth- century travel works. Travelers responded to the Society’s goals by striving to make records and reports that were 13 objective, skeptical, and precise. J Many travelers, unlike the natural philosophers, aimed at objective fact untainted by speculation, leaving hypothetical theories, in the words of Martin Martin, "to the learned in that faculty."1^ His role as observer dictated the traveler's chief concern— the accurate presentation of facts derived from scrupulous observation. From this raw material, naturalists hoped to "read" the workings of the material world.

Lockean philosophy rejects the Royal Society's optimistic belief that man can "read” the works of nature. 62

Since we cannot know from experience the real essences

of things, nature's text defies our comprehension:

"natural philosophy is not capable of being made a

science. In exploring the moral realm that he pre­

scribes as our proper sphere of knowledge, Locke, like

the naturalists, employs the reports of travelers, but

the important focus of the traveler's concern is no longer

the material world of things, but the behavior of men.

When, for example, in Book I of the Essay. Locke repudi­

ates the notion of innate ideas, he supports his argument with material taken from travel literature. Surveying mankind from China to Peru, Locke cites cases of atheism

and of "Enormities practiced without Remorse" to discredit the existence of an innate belief in God and innate moral principles (I, 72-3» 96-8).

In addition to using the reports of travelers to sustain moral speculation, Locke refurbishes the venerable metaphor of man as traveler to portray the very nature of the mind's development. In "The Epistle to the

Reader" prefacing the Essay. Locke envisions intellectual growth as a journey, a hunting expedition in pursuit of truth, a pleasurable "progress towards Knowledge" (I,

7-8). The journey for knowledge is incumbent upon all men, and it behooves us to travel well. Though thorough knowledge of material reality may lie beyond our reach, he who dawdles by the wayside despairing that he cannot 63 know all things behaves "as wisely as he who would not use

his legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly" (I, 30). Those, on the other hand, who indulge vain curiosity extend themselves beyond their capacities and "wander into . . . depths where they can find no sure footing ..." (I, 31). Moral knowledge is essential to life lived in accord with our talents. Men who guide their actions with knowledge of their capaci­ ties and limitations direct their travels wisely:

It is of great use to the sailor to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the depths of the ocean. It is well he knows that it is long enough to reach the bottom, at such places as are necessary to direct his voyage, and caution him against running upon shoals that may ruin him. Our business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our conduct. (I, 3 D

Man is, for Locke, a moral traveler, who properly journeys in quest for knowledge of self.

Locke's experience in writing the Essay mirrors the voyage of the mind from tabula rasa through accumulated knowledge. The more he explored his subject, the more it expanded before him. Research became a journey in pursuit of the understanding, a journey in which he was "led

. . . on" by "new discoveries" until he found himself

"out of the ordinary road . . ." (I, 10-11). The thought­ ful reader, who follows Locke's ideas but travels on his 6k

own two feet, engages in a similar task:

This, Reader, is the entertainment of those who let loose their own thoughts, and follow them in writing; which thou oughtest not to envy them, since they afford thee with an opportunity of the like diversion, if thou wilt make use of thy own thoughts in reading. It is to them, if they are thy own, that I refer myself: hut if they are taken upon trust from others, it is no great matter what they are; they are not following truth, hut some meaner consi­ deration; and it is not worth while to he concerned what he says or thinks, who says or thinks only as he is directed hy another. If thou judgest for thyself I know thou wilt judge candidly, and then I shall not he harmed or offended, what­ ever he thy censure. (I, 8)

The search for knowledge, though a primary duty of the philosopher, also involves his philosophic reader. The

Essay * s ideal readers, "the most judicious, who are always the nicest readers" (I, 11), possess thoughtful, skepti­ cal, and independent minds. Only these readers can, hy testing Locke's conclusions against their own moral experience, respond adequately to the Essay's ideas, and only to these readers is Locke willing to submit his work for critical judgment.

In his insistence upon accurate measurement and prompt discriminating notation, Johnson, touring the

Hebrides with measured stick, journeys in accord with the standards of accuracy established hy the Royal Society, 65 standards expressed in his statement that "ancient travellers guessed; modern travellers measure."1^ The

Society's ideals, however, with their focus upon the material world, provide us with few of Johnson's philo­ sophic assumptions as traveler. Men are not, as Johnson frequently remarks, "placed here to watch the growth of plants, or the motions of the stars." Man's chief vocation is to know mankind:

the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or the frequent business of the human mind. . . . we are perpetually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary- and at leisure.

Travelers hoping to entertain their readers should, Johnson warns, "remember that the great object of remark is human life."18 Johnson's injunction to report on men and manners accords with his critical beliefs as to the nature and bases of the pleasure that readers derive from travels.

Though Johnson's criticism refuses to limit the means by which works can please, observation of human nature does allow him to infer the general conditions of pleasure—

"the recognition of truth" ("just representations of general nature") and "the surprise of novelty or 66 19 variety." These conditions of pleasure place two very general material demands upon the travel writer, who works in the mode of factual narrative. The "episodes" in which the writer represents nature cannot be invented: they should be accounts of particular facts that, trans­ formed by the writer's art, glow with the universal truths that illuminate them. The effective travel work embraces both recognition and novelty; the reader’s recognition of the morally familiar animating the actions of strange men provides the pleasure characteristic of travels. As reader, Johnson delights little in either the itinerary of banal facts or the marvelous tale of "romantic ab- 20 surdities or incredible fictions." Travels should gratify the reader's curiosity by informing him of some­ thing new, but such information should correspond to informed general notions of the probable. These narrative qualities form the basis of Johnson’s praise for Father

Lobo's A Voyage to Abyssinia, a work "curious and enter­ taining, . . . judicious and instructive." To his credit,

Johnson says, Lobo "appears . . . to have copied nature from the life, and to have consulted his senses not his imagination." Lobo's pages present his reader with no natural or, more important, moral improbabilities:

The reader will here find no regions cursed with irremediable barrenness, or blessed with spontaneous fecundity, no perpetual gloom or unceasing sunshine; 67 nor are the nations here described either devoid of all sense of humanity, or consummate in all private and social virtues; here are no Hottentots without religion, polity, or articulate langu­ age; no Chinese perfectly polite, and completely skilled in all sciences: he will discover, what will always be discovered by a diligent and impartial enquirer, that wherever human nature is to be found, there is a mixture of vice and virtue, a contest of passion and reason, and that the Creator doth not appear partial in his distributions, but has balanced in most countries their particular inconveniences by particular favours.21

Johnson's belief that works of travel should illu­

strate anew the familiar moral principles that constitute

general nature, manifested in particular human actions,

is apparent in his investigations throughout the Journey.

Travel and the reports of travelers enable the philosophic

observer of men to extend his knowledge of the human condition and adjust his opinions of nature— "to regulate

imagination by reality." In seeking knowledge of men, the traveler must study their behavior, which is, according

to Thomas Reid, a primary means to knowledge of the mind:

The actions of men are effects: Their sentiments, their passions, and their affections, are the causes of those effects; and we may, in many cases form a judgment of the cause from the effect. . . . Not only the actions, but even the opinions of men may sometimes give light into the frame of the human mind. The opinions of men may be considered as the effects of their intellectual powers, as their actions are the effects of their 68

active principles. Even the prejudices and errors, when they are general, must have some cause no less general; the discovery of which will throw some light upon the frame of the human understanding.22

Johnson construes "actions" to include a wide variety of

human performances— from customs, practices, and institu­

tions to buildings, artifacts, and literary works— all

capable of yielding knowledge of an agent’s "active principles" and primarily, his "intellectual powers."

As moralist, Johnson observes behavior in its various modes and, using his own experience of men, reasons from

outward, visible acts to their probable causes.

The principles and powers of the performer are not the only efficient agencies governing human acts, for men do not act in "metaphysical abstraction" J but in a net­ work of contextual circumstances. The philosphic observer must study men in the circumstantial setting that helps to shape their lives, directing, assisting, and limiting their actions and achievements. Edmund Burke sarcasti­ cally condemns those "metaphysical and alchemistical legislators" who judge political institutions without regard to the existential particulars essential to informed moral judgments:

. . . I cannot stand forward, and give praise or blame to any thing which relates to human actions, and human concerns, on a simple view of the object 69 as it stands stripped of every relation. . . . Circumstances (which with some gentlemen pass for nothing) give in reality to every political principle its distinguishing colour and discriminating effect.24

Abstract theories of human rights and ideal government, which lump all men together, fail to recognize the diffe­ rences in situation that may justify a unique practice,

custom, or institution. Moral wisdom is exemplified, for

Burke, in the social institutions devised by "The legisla­

tors who framed the ancient republics." The ancients, unlike the revolutionary politicians Burke attacks, worked

from close observation of human life:

They had to do with men, and they were obliged to study human nature. They had to do with citizens, and they were obliged to study the effects of those habits which are communicated by the circumstances of civil life. They were sensible that the operation of this second nature on the first produced a new combination; and thence arose many diversities amongst men, according to their birth, their education, their professions, the periods of their lives, their residence in towns or in the country, their several ways of acquiring and of fixing property, and according to the quality of the property itself, all which rendered them as it were so many different species of animals.25

The philosopher hoping to comprehend the immense variety of human nature must acquire experience of men in various circumstances, increasing the principles of reasoning 70 with which he can comprehend human behavior. Travel is a

primary means of obtaining such broad moral experience.

The moral traveler seeks to discover the causes of

the human phenomena he observes. He must, as Josiah

Tucker's Instructions for Travellers (1757) emphasizes,

remain ever aware that the features of the country through which he journeys and the characteristics, practices, and

attainments of its residents are the "Effects and Conse­

quences" of a wide range of possible causes. The

traveler's inquiry aims to determine the extent to which

the said Effects may be ascribed to the natural Soil and Situation of the Country.— To the peculiar Genius and singular Inventions of the Inhabitants.— To the Public Spirit and Tenor of their Constitution,— or to the Religious Principles established or tolerated among them.26

This circumstantial method of investigation, refined to

include the various geographical, historical, and bio­ graphical factors that influence human actions, is essen­ tial to Johnson's judgments in the Journey and, indeed, to his moral assessments throughout his works. Accurate

judgment must recognize "that all human excellence is comparative; that no man performs much but in proportion to what others accomplish, or to the time and opportunities which have been allowed him. . . . "2? The works of men must be referred to the abilities of men, and native 71 powers distinguished from adventitious help and circum­

stantial hindrance.

Johnson appears at several points in the Journey

as a reader of such earlier Highland travelers as Boethius,

Martin, and Pennant. His performance as a reader of such

factual reports displays the same probing search for and

application of moral principles that informs his perfor­

mance as artist, critic, and traveler. Indeed, Johnson's

analysis of "facts" and anecdotes throughout the Journey

suggests the challenges to be met by every reader of

factual narrative and every recipient— reader biographer

or traveler— of secondhand report. Since no one can see

everything for himself, such accounts are a potentially

important source of knowledge. But secondhand information must be scrupulously tested against one's own experience.

Often neither the reader nor the traveler can confirm or refute such material firsthand; but even without direct observation, one can, by virtue of analogical reasoning,

detect fraud, inaccuracy, and improbability. "It is," as

James Beattie argues, "by reasoning from our experience of human actions and their causes . . . that we detect 20 misrepresentations concerning moral conduct. ..." Johnson does this frequently in the Journey and in the

Lives of the Poets, in which he repeatedly sees more clearly from Fleet Street than other reporters see from 72 the "spot” itself.^

Though any traveler must often rely upon the reports of others, traveling does provide Johnson with oppor­ tunities to assess firsthand the observations of preceding

Highland travelers. His journey enables Johnson to bring previously unavailable resources to his reading. Factual precision is not, however, the sole criterion for critical judgment. As moralist, the reader must look beyond facts: he must judge the man behind the facts, measuring achieve­ ment in light of circumstances limiting performance. By this standard would Johnson have his reader measure the Journey. To similar ends, the traveler must look beyond the factual accuracy of anecdote and traditional accounts.

Such reports, be they true or false, manifest human be­ havior and can, therefore, yield knowledge of human nature to the perceptive observer.

Smollett's characters persistently violate the philosophic values of moral, empirical travel. The narrators in Humphry Clinker repeatedly fail, in the first half of the novel, to journey out of themselves and thus fail, in varying degrees, to provide accurate reports of men and manners. Each of the narrators is characterized partially through the vividly peculiar vision conveyed in his first-person letters; each writer is to some extent unreliable, his description of the external world and other characters a'refraction of his own mind. Faced with this mode of exposition, the implied reader of

Humphry Clinker must assume the characteristics of the

skeptical, morally perceptive reader defined by Locke and

exemplified by Johnson. Smollett implicitly defines a

fictive reader characterized chiefly through his ability

to perceive "Smollett" standing behind the narrators and

to collaborate with this implied author in apprehending

and organizing the narrators' perceptual shortcomings.

Smollett's reader must reason from the textual evidence

of the letters to formulate conceptions of the characters

that adequately explain their varying accounts. Observing

and integrating the narrators' disparate reports of event and character, the reader uses his basis of analogous

experience to intuit the characters behind the letters.

Like every reader of travels, Smollett's reader must approach "factual" narrative with skeptical and inde­ pendent mind. Indeed, the reader must himself act as effective traveler within the world of Humphry Clinker,

sorting out as best he can a tentative, hypothetical, and necessarily subjective view of "things as they are." Notes to Chapter III

■^Henry James, "The Art of Fiction," in Partial Portraits (London and New York: Macmillan, 1888), pp. 387- 88.

2Sprat, History, pp. 72, 76, 86; 142; 88; 129-30, 128, 131-32; 86, 156; 190.

-^See, for example, The Royal Society of London, Philosophical Transactions (rpt. New York: Johnson Rpt. Corp. and Kraus Rpt. Corp., 1963), I (1665-66), 127-28, 201-02, 248-51, 327-28, 377, 390-91; II (1667), 464-67, 484-88, 493-500, 565-67; H I (1668), 699-709, 717-22, 817-24, 863; IV (1669), 972-73, 1028-34, 1083-85; V (1670), 1151-53, 1179-84, 1189-96; VI (1671), 2263-64, 3088; VII (1672), 4003, 5021-23, 5043-47, 5170-72; VIII (1673), 6017-19; IX (1674), 238-4 0 ; X (1675), 456-61; XI (1676), 571-72, 711-15, 751-58, 758-61, 767-68; XII (1677), 442-43. ^Travelers, of course, also supplied naturalists with specimens to observe firsthand. Hooke's preface to Micrographia praises the Royal Society for neglecting "no opportunity to bring all the rare things of Remote Countries within the compass of their knowledge and practice" (sig. glr ), and in the course of the work he often examines the collections and donations of travelers. Hooke describes the fur of a polar bear and "the hair of a Greenland Deer, which being brought alive to London. I had the opportunity of viewing . . ."; he examines "East-India Sand" donated by a Society fellow and experi­ mentally irritates his hand with East-Indian cowage, the gift of a sea captain (pp. 160, 80, 145-46).

^Micrographia. p. 244. "Gage" is Thomas Gage (1603?-1656). The reference is to his description of the volcanoes of Guatemala and Nicaragua in The English- American his Travail by Sea and Land, or. A New Survey of the West-Indias (London. 1648). See Thomas Gage's Travels in the New World, ed. J. Eric S. Thompson (Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1958), pp. 181, 293-94, 306. Elsewhere in Micrographia, Hooke cites John Evelyn's observations of the "hunting spider" in Italy (pp. 200-02) and compares a magnified water insect to the opossum described in Willem Piso's Historia Naturalis Brasilae (p. 187). 74 75 ^A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. p. 40.

^R. W . Frant z, The English Traveller and the Move­ ment of Ideas. 1660-1732. The University Studies of the Univ. of Nebraska, vol. 32-33 (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 193*0 » PP« 15-19. O In Philosophical Experiments and Observations, ed. W. Derham, Cass Library of Science Classics, no. 8 (1726; rpt. London: Frank Cass and Co., 1967), PP* 18-19 (Jan. 14, 1662/63), 19-22 (Jan. 21, 1662/63).

^See Philosophical Transactions. I, 141, 42, 3^4-52, 360-62; II, 414-22, 467-72, 554-55; H I , 634-39.

10Frantz, pp. 15-24.

^ Philosophical Transactions. I, 141-42. See also the "Directions for Observations and Experiments to be made by Masters of Ships, Pilots, and other fit Persons in their Sea-Voyages," I, 433-48; Robert Boyle, "General Heads for a Natural History of a Countrey, Great or Small," I, 186-89. 12Sprat, p. 132.

^Frantz, pp. 30-68; Batten, p. 41.

"^Frantz, pp. 38-39; Martin Martin, "The Preface" to A Description of the Western Islands of Scotland (1703), in A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World, ed. John Pinkerton, III (London, 1809), 574.

^'’Royal Society writers often portray natural philo­ sophers as effective, enlightened travelers guided by the map of empirical procedure; such journeys are frequently contrasted to those of Aristotle and the "Peripateticks," who are seen as engaged in misguided, ineffectual wander­ ing. See Boyle, The Sceptical Chvmist. p. 433; Glanvill, Plus Ultra, pp. 8, 52, 126; Sprat, History, pp. 90-99, 334. The ideal "journey" of the experimental philosopher, who curiously follows external nature, contrasts not only with the "journey” of the "Peripateticks," but also with the ideal journey of medieval Christianity— the pil­ grimage. See Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pil­ grimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth- Century England (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 56-7, who describes the ideal 76 pilgrimage as "an interior journey of the quiet soul." The naturalist is also frequently imagined as a diligent reader closely examining the Book of Nature. See Abraham Cowley's ode, "To the Royal Society," in Sprat, History, sig. B3r (st. VII, 11. 12-21); Hooke, Micro­ graphia. pp. 15^-t 155; Glanvill, Plus Ultra, sig. B5V Lp. 28]", p. 126. 16 Locke, Essay. II, 350. Future references will be cited in the text. 17 (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson. LL.D.. with A Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 193^-50), III, 356.

^ Lives of the Poets. I, 100, 99-100; Idler 97» p. 300. See also, for example, the Preface to Shakespeare, pp. 60-61.

■*"%east, "Theoretical Foundations," p. 398; Preface to Shakespeare, p. 61. 20 "Preface" to A Voyage to Abyssinia, by Father Jerome Lobo, trans. by Samuel Johnson (1735). in Voyages. ed. Pinkerton, XV (London, 1814-), 1.

21"Preface" to Lobo, pp. 1-2. Op Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (1785)» in Essays on the Powers of the Human Mind (Edinburgh. , II, 86.-7. 23Burke, French Revolution, p. 8.

2i,Burke, French Revolution, pp. 2191 8.

2^Burke, French Revolution. pp. 217, 218.

Instructions for Travellers (1757)» in Josiah Tucker: A Selection from His Economic and Political Writings. ed. Robert Livingston Schuyler (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1931), pp. 230-31. 2^Rambler 127.

pQ An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth. in Opposition to Sophistry and Skepticism (1770; London, 1807), p7 163. 77 ^When, to take a brief but typical example, Johnson dismisses the unproven story that Milton, after the Restoration, courageously asserted his integrity by refusing the position of Latin Secretary, he bases his opinion on analogical grounds, employing moral knowledge gained from past experience: "this tale has too little evidence to deserve a disquisition; large offers and study rejections are among the most common topicks of false­ hood" (Lives. I, 132). Chapter IV

Moral Vision in A Journey

to the Western Islands of Scotland

It is not easy to live without enquiring by what Means every­ thing was brought into the State in which we now behold it. . . .1

About noon on September 1, 1?73» while crossing a wild and barren section of the Highlands, Samuel Johnson

first thought of writing A Journey to the Western Islands 2 of Scotland. Johnson's account of the work's genesis

immediately follows his theoretical discussion of the use

of travel, a discussion that illuminates his philosophical

concerns throughout the Journey. Countering the charge

that the Highlands' "uniformity of barrenness" can provide

the traveler with little knowledge or delight, Johnson

affirms the epistemological value of travel:

It is true that of far the greater part of things, we must content ourselves with such knowledge as description may exhibit, or analogy supply; but it is true likewise, that these ideas are always incomplete, and that at least, till we have compared them with reali­ ties, we do not know them to be just. As we see more, we become possessed of more certainties, and consequently gain more principles of reasoning, and found a wider basis of analogy. (40) 78 79 Johnsonian travel, exemplified in the Journey's analysis of Scotland, is a mode of inquiry, a means of gratifying curiosity and extending knowledge. Journeys help men to broaden their experience, yielding rewards in direct proportion to the experience and moral knowledge the traveler brings to his search:

books of travels will be good in propor­ tion to what a man has previously in his mind; his knowing what to observe; his power of contrasting one mode if life.with another. As the Spanish proverb says, "He, who would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry the wealth of the Indies with him." So it is in travelling; a man must carry knowledge with him, if he would bring home knowledge.3

Observing life as it is lived in different lands under different circumstances enables the voyager to compare his customs with those of others and to test his opinions of the human lot against the concrete facts of existence:

"The use of travelling is to regulate imagination by reality and instead of thinking how things may be, to 4- see them as they are."

Johnson's statements on the theoretical value of travel, his consistent focus on "the manners of the people" (540, and his characteristic methods of analysis in the Journey all reflect his concern with philosophic speculation, what William R. Keast has called "intellec­ tual history." This mode of philosophic inquiry, which explores the history of man's intellectual progress,

"bases itself on the products of art or industry and reasons to the powers which produced them."^ As traveler,

Johnson is, above all, a critical, penetrating judge, seeking to reason from observed effects to the causes that inform them. He repeatedly examines the artifacts, customs, and institutions, past and present, that men have devised and attempts to establish the causes and motives, the principles and powers behind these "works." The knowledge he gleans in his search enables him to perceive more clearly and certainly the range of human capacity and, hence, the status of specific achievement.

Johnson's description of Inch Keith in the Firth of Forth, his "first experiment of unfrequented coasts"

(3), introduces this method of exploration in its sim­ plest form. Observing the ruins of the island's small fort, Johnson speculates on the building's original use; as a product of human design, the fort manifests the intent for which it was built. The intent of course, cannot be directly observed, but it does inform the fort's structure; the practical, particular choices that the builders made reflect the end to which they designed their work. Such choices are observable effects. When clearly defined by the observer, they can enable him to restore the intent that makes them necessary. From the situation of the island and the specific location of the 81 fort, Johnson, employing a few general concepts, infers the structure's original purpose:

It seems never to have been intended as a place of strength, nor was built to endure a siege, but merely to afford cover to a few soldiers, who perhaps had the charge of a battery, or were stationed to give signals of approaching danger. There is there­ fore no provision of water within the walls, though the spring is so near, that it might have been easily enclosed. (3-4)

Johnson's analysis works by accounting for the charac­ teristics of the fort; in explaining presence, he draws upon absence, imagining the different way in which things would probably have been done had the fort been intended as a stronghold. The choice not to include the spring within the walls enables him to speculate on the probable cause informing the decision— the fort was designed for shelter, not for strength. Envisioning the former use of the island affords Johnson insight on the defensive V life of the earlier Scots, but its present, deserted condition is also informative when seen in the light of comparative possibility. By contrasting the appearance of the island, so near to Edinburgh, with "the different appearance that it would have made, if it had been placed at the same distance from London, with the same facility of approach ..." (4), Johnson obtains a clear measure of the relatively unprosperous state of Scotland. The 82 juxtaposition of past and present, Edinburgh and London, introduces one of the themes that threads through the whole work— the benefits and drawbacks of Scotland's association with England. The deserted state of the island does not, however, tell all that is to be told; at Inch Keith and throughout the Journey, one must weigh both advantages and disadvantages in assessing the effects of change upon human life. Though the island is abandoned and barren, Johnson suggests that its present condition derives in part from the fact that Scotland's union with England no longer makes any fort necessary.

In the course of the Journey. Johnson frequently employs similar methods to investigate natural phenomena.

Analyzing the likelihood of the claim that Loch Ness never freezes, Johnson considers the possible causes of such a prodigy should it be true (31)- He conjectures that scarcity of wildlife was a necessary condition for the growth of forests (140), and he deliberates on the forces that might lie behind two isolated boulders on

Col (125-26). Johnson's primary interest is not, however, in natural philosophy, and he abruptly dismisses the pursuit of fruitless knowledge: "There are so many more important things, of which human knowledge can give no account, that it may be forgiven us, if we speculate no longer on two stones in Col" (126) 83 The traveler's real business lies "with life and manners" (132), and to this knowledge the study of artifacts, the products of human industry and the records of intellectual history, can provide suggestive clues:

To know any thing,. . . we must know its effects; to see men we must see their works, that we may learn what reason has dictated, or passion has incited, and find what are the most powerful motives of action. To judge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past; for all judgment is comparative. . . .7

The study of buildings is an especially important means of comprehending a nation's unrecorded past, for "Edifices, either standing or ruined, are the chief records of an illiterate nation" (73). His analysis of Hebridean castles provides Johnson with concrete evidence that the tales of "romantick chivalry had for their basis the real manners of the feudal times, when every lord of a seignory lived in his hold lawless and unaccountable" (155). Con­ temporary Scotch houses attest to the passing of the age of "romance" and "to the progress of arts and civility, as they shew that rapine and surprise are no longer dreaded" (15*0. As artifacts, buildings can provide a sympathetic observer with vital clues to the minds and lives of the men who designed, built, and used them.

The comparative study of buildings also helps to define the nature and vigor of construction that characterize a 8k

past age and distinguish it from other periods, knowledge O essential to accurate historic judgment. Such observation

stands behind Johnson's caustic defense of the early

Scotch priests against the charges leveled by Calvinist

reformers:

It has been, for many years, popular to talk of the lazy devotion of the Romish clergy; over the sleepy laziness of men that erected churches, we may indulge our superiority with a new triumph, by comparing it with the fervid activity of those who suffer them to fall. (65)

The process of "reading" the record of ruins tests

to the utmost the observer's powers of inferential

reasoning, for he aims to "restore" the whole from the evidence of its existing parts. Mental reconstruction is

not always possible, for Johnson does not always possess

the necessary basis of experience or knowledge, but even

in such cases he can see the qualifications necessary to

informed speculation. His discussion of the ruined monastery at Aberbrothick suggests the powers essential

to philosophic vision:

Men skilled in architecture might do what we did not attempt: They might probably form an exact ground-plot of this venerable edifice. They may from some parts yet standing conjecture its general form, and perhaps by comparing it with other buildings of the same kind and the same age, attain an idea very near to truth. (11) 85 Working from a blueprint of precisely gathered facts,

Johnson's hypothetical observer uses imagination, di­ rected by reason and supported by a foundation of analogy, to erect a speculative version of the original structure.

By placing the "new" against a background of the known, the traveler assembles an idea that enables him to appre­ hend the purpose or rationale of the work, thus adding to his knowledge of the culture he explores.

Though buildings are the most conspicuous artifacts soliciting the traveler's notice, any product of human contrivance can provide moral insight to the sensitive observer. Especially revealing to Johnson are those means that men devise to meet daily necessities. Such devices receive a great deal of his attention, for the conveniences that men remain content to employ are an informative measure of their civilization's "general prosperity":

life consists not of a series of illus­ trious actions, or elegant enjoyments; the greater part of our time passes in compliance with necessities, in the per­ formance of daily duties, in the removal of small inconveniences, in the procure­ ment of petty pleasures; and we are well or ill at ease, as the main stream of life glides on smoothly, or is ruffled by small obstacles and frequent inter­ ruption. The true state of every nation is the state of common life. (22) The inconvenient windows of the Scots, which must he

propped open, lead to the stuffy air in Scottish houses,

and are one minor indication of the generally uncultivated

condition of Scottish civilization, for the builders have

failed to see that windows can be efficiently held open

by sash weights (22). The backward state of Scottish life

is the product of such poor contrivances, and, with vicious circularity, such clumsy devices result from the very backwardness they help to produce. More expedient

solutions may be hindered by the harsh state of Highland

life, in which conditions do not favor the development of

comforts: inconvenience may breed inconveniences. The

continued use of precarious crags to land boats (which may have originated as a device to prevent easy invasion) may thus be "the consequence of a form of life inured to hardships, and therefore not studious of nice accommo­ dations" (58-9).

National customs, manners, beliefs, and attitudes are as revealing as artifacts, for in exploring their causes the traveler can learn much about human history and behavior. Celebrations, ceremonies, and traditional stories deserve particular attention, since, like build­ ings, they are the sole "registers" among an illiterate people, the best available indication "of the life and character of the ancient Highlanders" (50, 65, 127).

But any of the minutiae of national practice and character may repay close analysis with dividends in understanding.

The increasingly "indiscriminate collation of degrees"

by Scotch universities (17), the civil character of the

Highlanders (29-30)» and the rapid communication of news

through the islands (53) all have causes visible to the

sensitive student of human nature. Human nature, of

course, often defies easy explanation, for we cannot always

"fix the principles" behind human conduct (61); though

"uniformity of practice" most likely has a reason, that reason cannot always be recovered (15*0. But much can be

learned. Johnson is especially interested in examining

the circumstantial determinants of action and achieve­

ment. Indeed, as Keast has argued, circumstantial know­

ledge is absolutely essential to Johnson's reasoning, and

he regularly employs the "circumstantial method" in his works.^ Men act within a context of historic, environ­ mental, and biographic circumstance; recognition of the

extent to which particular conditions help or hinder,

foster or deprive attainment must precede any just assess­ ment of the merit due to specific accomplishments and any reasonable speculation as to human capacity. As their windows and their landing of boats reveal, the Highland

and Hebridean Scots not inventively "dexterous." But

this national trait derives from the harsh circumstances

of life in the Highlands, which limit the opportunity for

happy dexterity and make a virtue of stubborn endurance: 88

"their narrowness of life confines them to a few opera­ tions, and they are accustomed to endure little wants more than to remove them" (30). So, too, may the lack of "philosophical curiosity" and "commercial industry" in the Hebrides be traced to the hostility of island life, for "the importunity of immediate want supplied but for the day, and craving on the morrow, has left little room for excursive knowledge or the pleasing fancies of distant profit" (81).

Johnson’s most extended analysis of national character appears in "The Highlands," where he explores the general "effects of habitation among mountains" (47).

Speculating on "the reason of those peculiarities by which such rugged regions as these before us are generally dis­ tinguished" (43)i he repeatedly reasons from the general characteristics of mountaineers to the general causes necessary to produce such effects:

Mountaineers are warlike, because by their feuds and competitions they consider themselves as surrounded with enemies, and are always prepared to repel incursions, or to make them. Like the Greeks in their unpolished state, described by Thucydides, the Highlanders, till lately, went always armed, and carried their weapons to visits, and to church. (45)

Johnson's generalizations, as the parallel from Thucydides suggests, are not based only upon his limited experience of the Highlands, but upon a broad base of analogous

historic and moral knowledge. He often attributes the

characteristics of mountain cultures to general causes

recognized through knowledge of the ways that human

disposition reacts to specific circumstances. Thus

Johnson reasons that the isolation of mountainous regions

leads to their lack of cultivation: "As mountains are

long before they are conquered, they are likewise long

before they are civilized. Men are softened by inter­

course mutually profitable, and instructed by comparing

their own notions with those of others" (43-4). The

contentiousness of mountain clans likewise results from a

combination of human nature and environment:

Such seems to be the disposition of man, that whatever makes a distinction produces rivalry. . . . A tract intersected by many ridges of mountains, naturally divides its inhabitants into petty nations, which are made by a thousand causes enemies to each other. (44-5)

To recognize the causes of moral effects, the traveler must bring to his journey an adequate base of experience, for analogy helps the observer to explain the new through the known and familiar. Moral speculation demands a stock of knowledge from which imagination, guided by

judgment, can draw analogous instances that enable the traveler to apprehend the probable reasons for what he 90

sees. This epistemological foundation lies beneath

Johnson's warning that his limited experience of rural life may have led to his surprise at aspects of existence less novel to "men of wider survey and more varied con­ versation" (164).^

Imagination, informed by moral knowledge, plays an especially prominent role in some of Johnson's Highland speculations. Though he often uses specific events and actions to support and illustrate his conclusions, Johnson also argues by educing the way things must have happened given the circumstances under which they occurred and the consequences that have resulted. Observing, for example, that mountanous lands are often peopled by a country's

"oldest race of inhabitants," Johnson traces this pheno­ menon to the difficulty of conquering such lands. He supports his position with two paragraphs imagining the kind of war likely to be waged in the rugged Highland terrain:

If the assailants either force the strait, or storm the summit, they gain only so much ground; their enemies are fled to take possession of the next rock, and the pursuers stand at gaze, knowing neither where the ways of escape wind among the steeps, nor where the bog has firmness to sustain them. . . . (^3)

His imagination versed in historic knowledge, Johnson graphically reasons from the evidence of the Highlands to 91 the probable effect— a guerilla war suited to defending a rugged land and confounding its invaders.

In "The Highlands," Johnson works with large gener­ alizations, examing those characteristics historically common to mountain cultures, traits produced by human nature adapting and responding to the conditions peculiar to mountain life. The general aim accords perfectly with the pace of this portion of his journey. Crossing the

Highlands in about six days, Johnson has little oppor­ tunity for extended observation of minute particulars, and the Highlands is a "summary" section of the work. His trip through the islands of Skye and Raasay, by contrast, lasts an entire month, and the summary, philosophic section, "Ostig in Sky," appearing near the end of this stage, reflects the more leisurely pace of travel.

Johnson's conjectures in this section work from the con­ crete specifics of island life to possible causes and effects. Beginning with the characteristics of the island itself— its situation, climate, and soil (78-9), all affecting life on Skye basically— Johnson moves through agriculture, mining, and husbandry (79-82) to the traits of the inhabitants and the quality of their lives (83-5)> to their modes of existence, their social and civil practices, their religious and spiritual beliefs, even their literature. He repeatedly links the things he observes to the conditions of island life. He traces the 92 absence of very tall men and extremely beautiful women among the ranks of cottagers to their impoverished lives

(83-4), and he ascribes the islanders’ lack of conveniences to a life insufficiently "diversified with trades" (84) and the failure to miss what they have never enjoyed

(102).

As his analysis of Skye progresses, Johnson probes ever deeper into its life. Much of the section examines the island’s social and civil institutions and customs, exploring the likely reasons behind traditional ways and the effects of innovations. The extended scope of

"Ostig in Sky" allows Johnson to develop in detail the nature and effects of the change asserted in the con­ cluding paragraph of "The Highlands":

Such are the effects of habitation among mountains, and such were the qualities of the Highlanders, while their rocks secluded them from the rest of mankind, and kept them an unaltered and discriminated race. They are now losing their distinction, and hastening to mingle with the general community. (35)

In traveling the Hebrides, Johnson encounters a civili­ zation caught in the midst of profound social changes brought about by the laws designed to break up the clans in the wake of Culloden and the '45. Behind his mixed feelings toward such changes lie Johnson's belief that institutions have evolved through adaptation to specific 93 conditions that make them necessary and his knowledge that civilization and commerce are mixed blessings that bring pain as well as pleasure. The changes regulated by law and the "improvements" springing from the intro­ duction of commerce come about not through evolution but imposition, and thus produce an uncommon degree of dis­ comfort and dislocation. Indeed, as Johnson argues in

"The False Alarm," changes that ignore the needs filled by an existing system, however inconvenient and unpros- perous it may be, may, despite the good intentions of reformers, cripple a functioning society:

Governments formed by chance, and gradually improved by such expedients, as the successive discovery of their defects happened to suggest, are never to be tried by a regular theory. They are fabricks of dissimilar materials, raised by different architects, upon different plans. We must be content with them as they are; should we attempt to mend their disproportions, we might easily demolish, and diffi­ cultly rebuild them.

Since no system of human affairs can satisfy the ideals of "theoretical nicety," the proper "subject of political disquisition is not absolute, but comparative good."'*''1'

This belief in the delicate, pragmatic evolution of social and civil institutions informs Johnson's discussion of Skye's ancient "system of insular subordination"

(89). His defense of the position of Tacksman against the charges of critics "not defective in judgment or general experience" rests upon close analysis of the particular needs of Skye that the Tacksman meets. A major lease­ holder to the Laird, the Tacksman farms a portion of his holding as his own while subleasing the rest to a number of smaller tenants, thus filling a middle station between the island's highest and lowest inhabitants. The "primi­ tive stability" of this position has already begun to erode by the time of Johnson's journey. While the office of Tacksman was formerly an hereditary station, often held by a "collateral relation" of the Laird, this tra­ dition of feudal subordination totters, by Johnson's time, on the brink of becoming a commercial opportunity, of

"giving way to a higher bidder" (86). With the coming of an economy based on wealth (derived from money) rather than power (derived from land) and with the curtailing of the Laird’s traditional power, these landlords have begun to desire wealth. Commerce has led the Laird to sell what had previously been purchased with fealty, as well as with rent (86, 9*0* The cash nexus severs the obligations between classes, for the Tacksman who buys his position believes that he pays with his rent all that he owes

(86). Here, as throughout the work, there is a careful balance in Johnson's assessment. He wistfully recognizes that increase in property and civility often comes at the expense of community and virtue. 95 Having traced the causes of change, change that he finds much less attractive than the regular subordination and stability of the original system, Johnson defends the

Tacksman against those who propose eliminating the post altogether. The Tacksman's critics, basing their attack on economics, argue that eliminating the profit consumed by the middleman will ease the tenant's burden of payment while allowing the Laird to lease his land for more money.

Johnson opens his defense by meeting the critics on their own ground, for they argue "the propriety of suppressing all wholesale trade" (87). Cutting the middleman elimi­ nates the advantages of economic security and flexibility that he brings to a trade society. Finally, however,

Johnson rejects the critics by rejecting the association of Tacksman and middleman; the analogy attempts to link what will not finally coalesce, for the Tacksman, though inferior to his primitive archetype, remains more than a commercial nexus between groups. He embodies a congeries of social values not found in the middleman. Johnson replaces the imperfect alignment of Tacksman and middle­ man with the feudal analogue of the body politic to suggest one important function of the Tacksmans

As the mind must govern the hands, so in every society the man of intelli­ gence must direct the man of labour. If the tacksmen be taken away, the Hebrides must in their present state be given up to grossness and ignorance; 96

the tenant, for want of instruction, will he unskilful, and for want of admo­ nition will he negligent. The laird in these wide estates, which often consist of islands remote from one another, cannot extend his personal influence to all his tenants; and the steward having no dignity annexed to his char­ acter, can have little authority among men taught to pay reverence only to hirth, and who regard the tacksman as their hereditary superior; nor can the steward have equal zeal for the prospe­ rity of an estate profitable only to the laird, with the tacksman, who has the laird's income involved with his own. (88)

Difficulties deriving from the conditions peculiar to the

islands comhine with problems arising from the basic nature

of man to make the Tacksman a necessary office. The

Tacksman's function is not merely economic: he, along with

the clergy, plays a vital role in civilizing the islands.

He spreads knowledge and civility to his tenants and provides conversation and fellowship for the Laird, thus decreasing the incidence of absentee landlords (88-9).

Johnson's observations on Col confirm the importance of this last office of the Tacksman:

He who lives in Col, and finds himself condemned to solitary meals, and incom­ municable reflection, will find the usefulness of that middle order of tacksmen, which some who applaud their own wisdom are wishing to destroy. Without intelligence man is not social, he is only gregarious; and little intelligence will there be, where all are constrained to daily labour, and every mind must wait upon the hand. (136) Just analysis of social institutions cannot be conducted

in a vacuum of abstract social planning. Traveler and

social critic must base their assessments upon clear

recognition of the particular conditions behind practical

adaptations. Johnson has little sympathy for those

reformers who "are strangers to the language and the

manners, to the advantages and wants of the people, whose

life they would model, and whose evils they would remedy" (88).

Over the course of his journey, Johnson himself

displays a flexible judgment that responds to the changing

conditions he encounters. His attitude toward wealth and

commerce, for example, varies from place to place, and

such adjustments of opinion are attributable to his

sensitivity to changing conditions and to different levels or stages of "civilization." Near the opening of the work, Johnson praises the beauty and cleanliness of New

Aberdeen, a result of its recent commercial prosperity, and a sharp contrast to the dilapidated condition of the old city, "situated in times when commerce was yet un­ studied. . ." (14). At Coriatachan he notes the benefits its inhabitants have gained from the introduction of money and commercial motivations to industry; their poverty has decreased, and "the possibility of gain will by degrees make them industrious" (58)* But money is not an abstract good independent of circumstances. Its ultimate value must be determined from its effects. Johnson's attitude

toward money in "Ostig in Sky" is considerably more

ambivalent, for here the ravaging social effects of money

and motivation through the hope of monetary gain are glaringly evident. Those Lairds who sell the formerly hereditary position of Tacksman to the highest bidder undermine the loyalties and obligations on which the stability of a feudal society is based: "The commodious­ ness of money is indeed great; but there are some ad­ vantages which money cannot buy, and which therefore no wise man will by the love of money be tempted to forego"

(86). Knowing the special qualities of the military and agricultural society that has evolved on Skye, Johnson also questions the wisdom of the laws designed to assimi­ late the Highlands and Hebrides to the rest of the Union, to make them a commercial part like all other parts.

To uproot the spirit of courageous independence removes

"what no small advantage will compensate" (91)• Johnson questions the worth of policy designed to extirpate a culture which, though rebellious, is suited to the con­ ditions from which it has grown and is potentially more valuable to the Union than that which would replace it:

It may . . . deserve to be inquired, whether a great nation ought to be totally commercial? whether amidst the uncertainty of human affairs, too much attention to one mode of happiness may not endanger others? 99 whether the pride of riches must not sometimes have recourse to the protection of courage? and whether, if it he necessary to preserve in some part of the empire the military spirit, it can subsist more commo- diously in any place, than in remote and unprofitable provinces, where it can commonly do little harm, and whence it may be called forth at any sudden exigence? (91-2)

Wealth can yield benefits, but measuring its precise worth requires the flexible application of principles to determine how, under the conditions at hand, a contingent human happiness can best be served. The effects of commerce upon the people of the islands have been dis- asterous, for the Lairds, deprived of their traditional power, have been forced to seek wealth by raising rents and ejecting tenants; the letting of land to strangers for more profit has further contributed to weakening the stability afforded by the feudal social structure (9*0 •

Johnson returns to the subject in discussing the recent practice of paying rents in money, rather than in kind.

The ability to change property to portable wealth has made both landlord and tenant less responsible to one another.

The result, absentee landlords and emigrating tenants, has further weakened the island's society: "The feudal system is formed for a nation employed in agriculture, and has never long kept its hold where gold and silver have become common" (113). While money can bring prosperity, 100

it can also ruin a secure, functioning community (131-32); the attempt to graft an abstract "good" to an existing culture may kill the stock. The goods of life are set on the right and the left:

Those conditions, which flatter hope and attract desire, are so constituted, that, as we approach one, we recede from another. . . . No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of the springs no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.12

He who makes the wisest choice of life tills the ground on which he stands. The traveler surveys mankind not to construct an ideal mode of existence that pleases him most, but to learn to improve, and enjoy his own lot (138).

Johnson's careful adjustment of judgment, responding to altering conditions, is also evident in his different attitudes toward the planting of trees in different parts of Scotland. The dearth of trees in Scotland is obviously a running joke between Johnson and Boswell throughout their trip, but Johnson makes a number of serious statements on the cultivation of the country's resources, statements that resonate in their application to the lives of the island­ ers. Near the beginning of the work, he remarks the stark treelessness of the land surrounding St. Andrews, specu­ lating on the probable reasons and noting the ease with which reforestation can be accomplished: 101

Of this improvidence no other account can be given than that it probably began in times of tumult, and continued because it had begun. . . . That before the Union the Scots had little trade and little money, is no valid apology; for planta­ tion is the least expensive of all methods of improvement. To drop a seed into the ground can cost nothing, and the trouble is not great of protecting the young plant, till it is out of danger; though it must be allowed to have some difficulty in places like these, where they have neither wood for palisades, nor thorns for hedges. (10-11)

The failure to cultivate the islands, however, grows from far weightier causes than mere habit, and Johnson changes his judgment to accord with changing conditions. While continuing to recognize the basic ease of the task, he also recognizes a complex set of factors impeding refores­ tation in a land as plagued by poverty as the Hebrides.

The "frightful interval between the seed and timber" makes the planting of trees an act of faith in the future, a future toward which men necessarily engrossed with the problems of present survival are little given to looking:

Plantation is naturally the employment of a mind unburdened with care, and vacant to futurity, saturated with present good, and at leisure to derive gratification from the prospect of posterity. He that pines with hunger, is in little care how others shall be fed. The poor man is seldom studious to make his grandson rich. It may be soon dis­ covered, why in a place, which hardly supplies the cravings of necessity, there has been little attention to the delights of fancy, and why distant 102

convenience is unregarded, where the thoughts are turned with incessant solicitude upon every possibility of immediate advantage. (139-40)

The absence of efforts to reforest the land is more under­ standable in some parts of Scotland than in others. The latter judgment does not cancel the earlier: what is possible at St. Andrews may not be at Skye. Johnson's sensitivity to the plight of the islanders leads to a difference in judgment commensurate with changing con­ ditions .

Johnson is finally hopeful not only about the planting of trees, but about the overall possibility of improving life in Scotland. Having observed Braidwood's success in teaching the deaf, Johnson'compares the edu­ cation of such scholars to the task of civilizing the islands: "after having seen the deaf taught arithmetick, who would be afraid to cultivate the Hebrides?" (164).

The Braidwood episode, which appears almost incidental to the book, makes a strikingly appropriate finish. The students’ "wonderful" (163) ability to adjust to a handi­ cap previously thought to confine its victims to extremely limited achievement and nearly complete isolation suggests the resiliency of human nature, man's capacity, when properly nourished, to find a degree of happiness beneath the most trying of circumstances. Johnson assesses the students' accomplishments by accounting for the specific 103 conditions limiting their performance, his method of gauging achievement throughout the work. Johnson's concerns in the episode mirror his concerns as traveler throughout the Journey. In extending his moral know­ ledge, in widening his grasp of intellectual history and human capability, the traveler must probe the specific forces shaping the lives and works of the men whose condition he seeks to know.

Johnson's references to buildings, celebrations, and folklore as the "records" and "registers" of an illiterate people (50, 65» 73) suggest parallels between Johnson, the travel writer, "reading" the "records" of the people he would know, and Johnson, the literary critic: his investigations as traveler are strikingly similar in both aim and procedure to those he habitually displays as critic. As Keast points out, Johnson thinks of literary works as performances, "as human acts to be judged in relation to the agency of their production and appreciation."^ Beginning with the effect of a work— with the nature and bases of the effect it excites in its readers through its representation of general nature—

Johnson reasons to the characteristics of the work and the powers of the author responsible for the causes of pleasure. The powers of the author, the efficient cause of literary pleasure, are the ultimate focus of critical inquiry, which seeks to assess the genius that works display. Such judgment is, for Johnson, necessarily comparative: "no man performs much hut in proportion to what others accomplish, or to the time and opportunities which have heen allowed to him. ..." Working from his "observation and experience" of literature, the critic estimates works

"by their proportion to the general and collective ability of man, as it is discovered in a long succession of 14 endeavours." The circumstantial contingency of per­ formance binds the critic to the study of biographic and historic conditions that might have assisted or restricted native genius. The study of individual works and authors furthers the empirical discovery of human capacity, enabling the critic to refine his standard of measure­ ment. This moral knowledge of human abilities is the ultimate aim of critical endeavor, for "the enquiry, how far man may extend his designs, or how high he may rate his native force, is of far greater dignity than in what 15 rank we shall place any particular performance. . . ."

Reasoning from the products of human device— whether poem, building, or social office— and from the conditions that help to shape them, critic and travel writer pursue the same philosophic task. They seek the human causes informing the acts of men and defining the realm of human possibility.

Johnson occasionally appears in the Journey as a critic examining the works of previous travelers to Scotland. His comments on his predecessors suggest the qualifications he sees as necessary to an effective writer of travels and allow us to glimpse Johnson applying critical principles to fathom the causes of human be­ havior— the same goal for which he works as travel writer.

In criticizing Martin's A Description of the Western

Islands of Scotland (1703), Johnson points to the exper­ ience and knowledge which the traveler needs "to qualify him for judging what would deserve or gain the attention of mankind" (65). Characteristically, Johnson partially excuses Martin, "a man not illiterate." Martin's limited experience is a product of the limited opportunities available to a resident of Skye. In part, Martin, having no comparative standards, did not know what to remark.

Johnson is less lenient toward Martin's gullibility.

Living on Skye, he might easily have obtained firsthand knowledge of the places he describes, "yet with all his opportunities, he has often suffered himself to be deceived" (64). The last fault also mars Hector Boece’s

Scotorum Historiae (1526). Boethius' grossly exaggerated measurements of Loch Ness indicate that he did not take the trouble to learn what he could have known (30-I).

But while condemning Boethius' "fabulousness and cred­ ulity," Johnson carefully distinguishes between the two failings. No excuse can be made for Boethius' fictions, but his gullibility deserves critical mercy, for it is a 106 function of the rudimentary state of scholarship in the age when he wrote:

his credulity may be excused in an age, when all men were credulous. Learning was then rising on the world; but ages so long accustomed to darkness, were too much dazzled with its light to see any­ thing distinctly. The first race of scholars, in the fifteenth century, and some time after, were, for the most part, learning to speak, rather than to think, and were therefore more studious of ele­ gance than of truth. The contemporaries of Boethius thought it sufficient to know what the ancients had delivered. The examination of tenets and of facts was reserved for another generation. (15)

However excusable the shortcomings of Martin and

Boethius, Johnson clearly finds accurate representation, supported by probing, skeptical investigation, an essen­ tial ingredient in the traveler's descriptions and analy­ ses of moral life. These qualities are just as necessary to the critical reader who would avoid being gulled by duplicitous, careless, or unsuspecting travelers.

Readers, of course, are limited in their means of assess­ ing reports. A close reader can analyze texts for signs of reliability, a practice which Johnson employs in his assessment of Lobo, who "appears by his modest and unaffected narration to have described things as he saw them, to have copied nature from the life. ..." Such scrutiny, however, provides little protection against a rhetorically able travel liar. Readers must rely chiefly upon experience— their knowledge of moral probability:

"he who tells nothing exceeding the bounds of proba­ bility, has a right to demand that they should believe him who cannot contradict him."1^ But though the reader must normally rely upon his own resources to estimate truth, traveling provides him an opportunity to try a wide range of reading through firsthand observation and direct experience. His journey allows Johnson to dis­ cover the frequent error of Martin's descriptions (64), and large portions of the book examine the social policies advocated by such "Whig" writers as Martin and Pennant. 17'

Observing the wild remains of feudal Scotland even enables Johnson to test the verisimilitude of medieval romances: the sudden transition from barren moor to elegant castle proves that "The fictions of the Gothick romances were not so remote from credibility as they are now thought" (77)• More often, however, a traveler cannot observe everything with his own eyes; he, like the travel reader, must depend on secondhand report for much of his infor­ mation about history, tradition, and manners. Working from a basis of moral analogy, the traveler (like most readers of factual narrative) must use imagination to establish the probability of reported "facts." The need to evaluate such sources is especially acute in northern

Scotland, where ignorance and negligence prompt the 108 inhabitants to assert confidently what they do not know.

The resulting testimony, abounding in contradictions, threatens to foil casual investigation: "He that travels in the Highlands may easily saturate his soul with intelli­ gence, if he will acquiesce in the first account" (51)•

Faced with this "laxity of Highland conversation,"

Johnson continually scrutinizes information with the same caution he displays in dismissing the claim that the caves at Ulinish are the former dwellings of Skye's first inhabitants. Reasoning from the characteristics of the caves to their probable effects upon the lives of in­ habitants, Johnson rejects the account of their purpose.

The situation and dimensions of the caves would make them damp and restrictive; so rude an existence does not square with the art manifested in the caves' construction, which

Johnson finds equal to the powers displayed in the huts of his own time. Basing conjecture on his knowledge of island life, Johnson speculates on the probable purpose of the caves: "I imagine them to have been places only of occasional use, in which the Islander, upon a sudden alarm, hid his utensils, or his cloathes, and perhaps sometimes his wife and children" (72-3)• Johnson often performs similar analyses in the Journev. Observing pasture on Col ruined by sand blown from the shore during storms, he questions the claim that the inundation continues; since the extent of progress has probably 109 never been determined, no one has been able to disprove the confident proposition of those who say the sand advances (125). Johnson's perception of a consensus based on cowed acceptance of bold assertion suggests the moral insights to be gleaned through close analysis of dubious information.

Report— whether oral tradition, proverbial wisdom, written record, or conversational statement— is a product of human agency; even error can clarify our vision of the human landscape when analyzed for its causes and effects.

In describing a document appropriating the lead roofs from the cathedrals at Elgin and Aberdeen to support the

Scottish army, for example, Johnson's knowledge of political abuses leads him to suspect fraud as the real motive for seizure:

A Scotch army was in those times very cheaply kept; yet the lead of two churches must have born so small a proportion to any military expence, that it is hard not to believe the reason alleged to be merely popular, and the money intended for some private purse. (23—if)

As he examines and rectifies opinion, probing, in the process, human behavior, Johnson turns this basic mode of analysis to a rich variety of related purposes. He frequently examines the likelihood of traditional assumptions and explanations. Observing island life enables him to expose the fallacy of the primitivistic 110

assumption "that life is longer in places where there are

few opportunities of luxury. ..." The truth estab­

lished, Johnson shrewdly discovers the motives for willing

credulity: "To he told that any man has attained a

hundred years, gives hope and comfort to him who stands

trembling on the brink of his own climacterick" (84).

Johnson likewise fails to find evidence for traditional descriptions of "the force and terrour of the Highland

sword" (113). While there is no denying the awful

effects of an onslaught of Highlanders, Johnson, vividly

imagining the position of English troops under attack,

traces their reaction to its real causes:

As an army cannot consist of philosophers, a panick is easily excited by any unwonted mode of annoyance. New dangers are naturally magnified; and men accustomed only to exchange bullets at a distance, and rather to hear their enemies than to see them, are discouraged and amazed when they find themselves encountered hand to hand, and catch the gleam of steel flashing in their faces. (114)

Analysis can, of course, confirm tradition as well as discount it. The continuing effects of the treaty between

Maclean and Maclonich verify the essential truth of the tale relating Maclonich's preservation of the heir of

Maclean (134).

In testing his reading through observation, Johnson rarely rests with the mere discovery of error; he usually I l l proceeds to examine its causes. Having failed to find the islanders inquisitive, as he had read that they were,

Johnson displays striking sympathy with the subjects of philosophic research while speculating on the reasons for such rash judgments

A stranger of curiosity comes into a place where a stranger is seldom seen; he impor­ tunes the people with questions, of which they cannot guess the motive, and gazes with surprise on things which they, having had them always before their eyes, do not suspect of any thing wonderful. He appears to them like some being of another world, and then thinks it peculiar that they take their turn to inquire whence he comes, and whither he is going. (103)

Observation also leads Johnson to correct reports that those privy to second sight see only visions of future evil. In fact, seers foresee good with a frequency commensurate to the occurrence of good in human life.

The reporters' error is rooted in their failure to recog­ nize the nature of human experience. Since most men

IQ suffer more than they enjoy and since the experience of pain is more intense than that of pleasure (108), visions of evil naturally predominate.

Skeptical analysis of moral probability is an especially useful means of assessing the merit of specu­ lative theory. The standard of experience gives the philosophic traveler a litmus with which to evaluate both theory and theoretician. His experience of human 112 motives leads Johnson to reject the belief among students of epic that oral recitation of genealogies is an effec­ tive means of preserving an accurate lineage. Bards are dependents, with the same motives to flatter their masters and disguise their own forgetfulness as any men (112).

He also dismisses the theory that the population of the islands has been decreasing for two centuries, for the inference is based on the false assumption that any country's population can be estimated by the number of churches, their decay indicating a decrease in inhabi­ tants. While this means of estimate may prove roughly true in lands where religion "enforces consecrated buildings," it cannot be appropriately applied in the islands, where "a change of manners" has left the country willing to live without churches (66).

Johnson’s continual examination and adjustment of assumptions suggests the caution he finds necessary in any reasoning from moral evidence. He who reasons by analogy sails in tricky waters, for human behavior is notoriously inconstant and illogical: "Inconsistencies

. . . cannot both be right, but, imputed to man, they may both be true." It is often impossible to determine the causes of ancient customs, "for the practice often con­ tinues when the cause has ceased; and concerning super­ stitious ceremonies it is vain to conjecture; for what reason did not dictate reason cannot explain." 17 9 It is 113 even fallacious to assume that human action must have a commensurate cause; man cannot be explained by the laws of Newtonian dynamics:

It seems to be almost the universal error of historians to suppose it politically, as it is physically true, that every effect has a proportionate cause. In the inanimate action of matter upon matter, the motion pro­ duced can be but equal to the force of the moving power; but the operations of life, whether private or publick, admit no such laws. The caprices of voluntary agents laugh at calculation. It is not always that there is a strong reason for a great event. Obstinacy and flexibility, malignity and kindness, give place alternately to each other, and the reason of these vicissitudes, however important may be the consequences, often escapes the mind in which the change is m a d e . 20

Uncritical conjecture may also apply a wrong standard of comparison; failing to recognize important circumstantial distinctions may lead to the error of trying "to estimate the manners of all countries and ages by our own" (97)*

Our very ideas of what we have observed become, if not promptly noted, "broken" and "confused," "compressed and conglobated," leading to narratives like those of

Wheler and Spon, travelers who, like the fictive narrators of Humphry Clinker, see the same scenes but describe them with "irreconcilable contrariety" (1^7). Standards of measurement can help the traveler accurately to define and represent his ideas. Johnson urges the necessity of traveling with instruments for measuring distance and height (146), hut several of his analyses suggest the need cautiously to adjust accepted standards of measure­ ment which can lead to erroneous impressions. Passing through the Highlands, for example, Johnson comments on the potentially misleading, though "philosophically" correct, method of measuring the heights of mountains hy their altitude above sea level. Such measurements are

"fallacious" in the case of hills rising only slightly above surfaces that have gradually attained great height, for the measurement ultimately leads to the "wrong" effect

The effect on the spectator is related not to the height from sea level, but to height as taken from the place where the rise begins (38-9). Measurement that is not adapted to altered conditions is, like any other rigidly applied principle, often an inadequate means to truth.

Money is also a standard of measurement that must be adjusted if we are to attain an accurate notion of value, for the worth of money is historically and culturally relative. Johnson's discussion of Boethius' salary illustrates his cautions recognition of the problem. The annual stipend, equivalent to two pounds, four shillings, and six pence sterling, seems inadequate and insultingly small, "yet it was probably equal, not only to the needs, but to the rank of Boethius," for Johnson estimates that

English money was worth more than five times that of 115 Scottish money. Having calculated the rate of exchange,

Johnson uses the roughly contemporary English pension of

Roger Ascham, granted by Henry VIII, "among whose faults avarice was never reckoned," as a standard to indicate the actual generosity of Boethius' stipend (15). As an adjustable quantity, money must be evaluated by what it can purchases "A sheep has always the same power of supplying human wants, but a crown will bring at one time more, at another less" (142). Unless we recognize "that nominal and real value may differ" (157)» we cannot draw reliable inferences from monetary figures.

Our human tendency to invest desire and prejudice in what we see and believe further increases the possi­ bility of erroneous inference. Johnson’s perception of our need to compensate for emotional participation in what we see is clearly evident in his rejection of the

Rev. Donald Macqueen's hypothesis that the ruins they observe at Ulinish are those of a Danish fort: "In Sky, as in every other place, there is an ambition of exalting whatever has survived memory, to some important use, and referring it to very remote ages" (72). He detects the same national pride, spiced with a dash of self-aggrandi­ zement, behind the enthusiasm of Scottish support for

Ossian (118-19). Given the potential for vagary in human action and distortion in human perception and judgment, close analysis of assumption, probability, and motive 116

provides a necessary check on the numerous errors to

which moral speculation may be subject.

Johnson's awareness of the multiple causes of

error appears not only in his continual scrutiny of second­

hand report and conjectural reasoning, but also in his

analysis of his own speculations, which are often neces­

sarily founded on questionable assumptions and limited

information. On Raasay, for example, Johnson tries to

compute the population from the hundred men the Laird

commanded in the rebellion of 17^5. Basing his estimate

upon the assumption that "The sixth part of a people is

supposed capable of bearing arms. . ." (63-^0. Johnson

places the population at six hundred. The figure needs

adjustment, however, for it is improbable that every

able man would answer the Laird’s call or that the Laird would leave his land without defenders or workers. The

assumption, then, needs adjustment: "let it be supposed,

that half as many might be permitted to stay at home."

Neither assumption is fully satisfactory, for the new

estimate of nine hundred allots an average of nine

residents to a square mile of land, a density of popu­

lation the Hebrides seldom show (6^). The same process

of reconsideration and modification is evident in Johnson's

discussion of the likely fate of Scotch emigrants.

Johnson opens his consideration by delineating the process

of emigration and conjecturing as to one possible "effect." Swayed by the favorable accounts of a few first adventurers, colonists moved in large groups containing "whole neighborhoods"; by bringing with them the security of friends and cultural identity, the settlers changed only their place of residence, a change entirely to their advantage. This, however, is the

"real effect" only if colonists remain together and preserve their hereditary ways and only if the favorable accounts have been true. Some accounts relate tales of naive colonists "dispersed. . . upon a Sylvan wilderness" and faced with a deadening life of unrewarding drudgery

(95). The truth lies between and is not at all certain;

Johnson refuses to rest with either version, for both are based on dubious reports motivated by self-interest:

Those who are gone will endeavour by every art to draw others after them; for as their numbers are greater, they will provide better for them­ selves. . . . But with equal temp­ tations of interest, and perhaps with no greater niceness of veracity, the owners of the islands spread stories of American hardships to keep their people content at home. (95-6)

This pattern of movement from initially incomplete or inadequate understanding toward a position of greater insight and comprehension appears throughout the Journey as a formal part, a structural unit in Johnson's narra­ tive. Our vision of artifacts and behavior is repeatedly 118

expanded by light of the reasons and causes informing

them. Report and explanation are repeatedly rejected or

adjusted to account for altered conditions, erroneous

assumption, inadequate reasoning, and reductive motive.

The tendency is evident in the critical qualifications with which he avoids easy condemnation of Martin and

Boethius and in his dismissal of the ill-informed stance of shallow social critics. At the center of Johnson’s analysis we frequently find the hasty attitude examined and placed in proper perspective, the blurred vision corrected through precisely defined distinctions. This tenor is displayed even in Johnson's brief aside warning his English audience not to be overly hasty in condemning the ruin of Scottish cathedrals. English cathedrals are also decaying in neglect, but, the comparison drawn,

Johnson immediately makes the crucial distinction. Those rhetorical readers who hurl precipitate blame err in ignoring Scotland's political circumstances at the time of destruction: "we are in danger of doing that deliberately, which the Scots did not do but in the unsettled state of an imperfect constitution" (24). The same diligent focusing of judgment appears in Johnson's excuses for the

Highlanders' persistent failure to stick to the truth in explaining their culture. Despite their contradictory stories, the Highlanders do not "deliberately speak studied falsehood, or have a settled purpose to deceive." 119 Negating the oversimplified possibility that the Scots are

deliberate liars, Johnson's analysis moves to a more

complex assessment of their behavior. The notion of

strict adherence to truth in matters of antiquity is

foreign to Highland life. Lacking the comparative stan­ dards to be gained from study, Highlanders may fail to recognize their ignorance. Seldom questioned by others,

they "seem never to have thought upon interrogating

themselves; so that if they do not know what they tell to

be true, they likewise do not distinctly perceive it to

be false" (11?).

Johnson's prose style and paragraph development

often suggest the same adjustment and qualification of

simplistic impression. Sentences and paragraphs often

balance two contrasting points of view, the first dis­ missed in favor of the second. In describing, for example,

the effects of living in a land without shops, Johnson first suggests an erroneous, exaggerated supposition:

"To live in perpetual want of little things, is a state not indeed of torture, but of constant vexation" (130).

This basic rhetorical technique is variously expanded to

suit the importance of the subject. In assessing the effects of emigration, Johnson grants each of the con­ trasting perspectives the weight of a main clause. The

second position, more accurate and more complex, is then developed in the brief remainder of the paragraph: 120

It may be thought that they are happier by the change; but they are not happy as a nation, for they are a nation no longer. As they contribute not to the prosperity of any community, they must want that security, that dignity, that happiness, whatever it be, which a prosperous community throws back upon individuals. (131-32)

Sentence may be contrasted with sentence, as in Johnson’s justification for discussing Scottish windows; those who ridicule the subject as trivial make a wrong assumption about human life: "These diminutive observations seem to take something from the dignity of writing. . . . But it must be remembered, that life consists not of a series of illustrious actions, or elegant enjoyments. . (22).

This technique often serves as a structural device for larger units of discussion. Paragraphs may be weighed against one another, topic sentences acting as the focuses of contrast, as in Johnson's dismissal of the claim that emigration has always helped to relieve the islands' excess population: "There are some. . . who think that this emigration has raised terrour disproportionate to its real evil; and that it is only a new mode of doing what was always done. . . . This is plausible, but I am afraid it is not true" (132). Johnson often sketches with considerable detail the position he rejects. The passage in which he discusses the epistemological value of travel appears in just such a context: 121

It will very readily occur, that this uniformity of barrenness can afford very little amusement to the traveler; that it is easy to sit at home and conceive rocks and heath, and waterfalls; and that these journeys are useless labours, which neither impregnate the imagination, nor enlarge the understanding. (40)

Johnson repudiates this easy dismissal, which fails to consider the foundation of knowledge and the basis of imagination. While it is true that we must normally rely upon imagination to flesh out description and to suggest analogies, such reasoning is reliable only insofar as it

is anchored in observed reality. Johnson's adjusted vision of mountain travel appears in the next paragraph:

Regions mountainous and wild, thinly inhabited, and little cultivated, make a great part of the earth, and he that has never seen them, must live unacquainted with much of the face of nature, and with one of the great scenes of human existence. (40)

In presenting and analyzing alternate points of view, both actual and imagined, Johnson’s narrative explores the reasons why men see things as they do.

Johnson does not, however, examine only erroneous (though realistic) points of view. He also depicts perspectives which, though at variance with his own point of view or even the standards of his culture, are validated by the different gestalts of those who hold them. Even the

Highlanders' failure to see the importance of truth in 122 describing their antiquities is not, for example, to be

viewed as error (though it promulgates error), but as a

legitimate product of their way of life. Johnson's

descriptions sometimes abumbrate two or more perspectives, each of them valid. Surveying the land around Anoch, for example, he suggests its varying effect upon different observers: "this country, however, it may delight the gazer or amuse the naturalist, is of no great advantage to its owners" (36). Reality, in part at least, is a function of the mental set we bring to observation.

While the owners have our sympathy, this sympathy does not

invalidate the "real" perspectives of gazer and naturalist.

Sympathetic appreciation of various potential ways of seeing gives Johnson’s description a moral dimension that suggests the various effects of setting upon different men. Johnson's style, with its balanced nouns, can also imply different ways of viewing the same object, which takes on a "reality" from the terms of the observer. A mountain rising from the plain may affect "the eye or imagination" of the traveler and may create "a spectacle or an obstruction" (39). These brief outlines of differ­ ing perspectives can be more fully developed, as in

Johnson's suggestion of the diverse reactions of travelers journeying in the same setting under different circum­ stances : 123 In travelling. . .almost without light thro' naked solitude, when there is a guide whose conduct may be trusted, a mind not naturally too much disposed to fear, may preserve some degree of cheerfulness; but what must be the solicitude of him who should be wandering, among the craggs and hol­ lows, benighted, ignorant, and alone? (7?)

It is not surprising that Johnson should sometimes find such disparate outlooks a source of amusement. The gap between philosopher and islander can be wide, as is evi dent in his discussion of the natives of Staffa, whose natural common sense Johnson clearly finds less idio­ syncratic than the traveler in the grips of natural philosophy:

When the Islanders were reproached with their ignorance, or insensibility of the wonders of Staffa, they had not much to reply. They had indeed considered it little, because they had always seen it; and none but philosophers, nor they always, are struck with wonder, other­ wise than by novelty. How would it sur­ prise an unenlightened ploughman, to hear a company of sober men, inquiring by what power the hand tosses a stone, or why the stone, when it is tossed, falls to the ground! (41-2)

Johnson also perceives the slant to his own perspective.

The limits to his experience determine his outlook, though he can see beyond it to other possibilities. This bifocal vision is apparent in his description of the storm that forces their landing on Col: "We were doomed 124 -

to experience, like others, the danger of trusting to the

wind, which blew against us, in a short time, with such

violence, that we, being no seasoned sailors, were

willing to call it a tempest" (119-20).

In seeking more complete knowledge of men, Johnson

often reasons from the evidence of product or environment

to the probable effect upon human life and behavior. This

is essentially the same method of reasoning he employs to

apprehend the probable perceptions of different observers. The same eductive reasoning is often necessary to complete

immediate sensory impressions. Johnson strives for a

breadth of vision that recognizes how things alter under

altering conditions. At the fall of Fiers, for example,

he remarks on their disappointment at the failure of the

falls to meet their expectations of sublimity:

The river having now no water but what the springs supply, showed us only a swift current, clear and shallow, fretting over the asperities of the rocky bottom, and we were left to exercise our thoughts, by endeavouring to conceive the effect of a thousand streams poured from the mountains into one channel, struggling for expansion in a narrow passage, exasperated by rocks rising in their way, and at last discharging all their violence of waters by a sudden fall through the horrid chasm. (3*0

The two views of the falls do not negate one another, for each is an aspect of reality. Johnson's imagination 125 endeavors to bring us to truth. The "truth" is implicitly contained in the falls as they are now, from which Johnson conceives of the scene that must be every spring. Thus, the imagined scene offers no violation of natural proba­ bility and is, indeed, necessary to comprehensive vision of the falls. Characteristically, Johnson finds a happi­ ness in this "lost" scene of dreadfulness, for if they had come in the spring when the falls were dreadful, they would have had difficulty approaching the falls. With knowledge of the different effects of different circum­ stances, Johnson can see beyond the disappointment to the particular felicities of his present position.

Johnson's observations in the Journev exhibit the perspicacity with which the observer must supplement sensory perception. The traveler must possess keen mental vision if he is to serve his readers with accurate report and moral insight. Such vision is founded not only on experience of the world, but also on experience of himself. While Johnson travels to observe other men, he also observes the arena of his own mind. Knowledge of one's own inner life contributes much to the fund of knowledge he must employ to understand other men. The observer who hopes to see things as they are must culti­ vate clear vision of the causes and effects of his own ideas. Through self-analysis he gains expanded know­ ledge of the workings, powers, and limitations of the 126 human mind. Travel provides Johnson the opportunity to broaden his encounters with the world, extending and deepening his experience of his own responses to moral phenomena. At St. Andrews, for example, finding himself more moved by the present decline of the university than by the ruins attesting to the decay of a former arche- piscopal see, Johnson seeks the reasons for his reaction.

While calamity long past "seems to preclude the mind from contact or sympathy," present trouble "fills the mind with mournful images and ineffectual wishes" (9). Johnson is not, however, a stone in the presence of ruins. Though time can mercifully distance us from past ills, past glories can readily stir us anew. He is deeply moved by the monuments of Iona and praises the salutary effects of selflessly embracing another age:

Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indiffe­ rent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the plain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona? (14-8)

Again, Johnson supports and highlights his vision of truth by imagining an inadequate, impoverishing response to 127

historic remains. In helping to "bridge the gap between

past and present, self and others, the emotions and

imagination give us vital access to the lives of other

men. Such contact is essential to the discovery of moral

truths.

The Journey bears witness to Johnson's own pene­

trating contact with the distant and the past. His tour

through the Highlands enables him to expand the boundaries

of his experience beyond the confines of a largely urban residence. In his turn he brings to his travels a life­

time of discriminating experience. Johnson travels in

quest of moral knowledge, and the work's power comes from

his recognition of the morally familiar in the midst of

the distant and the past. The Journey is a study of the

Hebrides and the life of its people, but it is also the record of a mind struggling to achieve a hard-won know­ ledge of complex moral realities. The unique power of the Journev derives from its formal unity, the sum of the parts in which Johnson repeatedly expands and adjusts our vision. Examining the causes of a wide range of moral phenomena, revealing the numerous ways that men glance askew of truth, displaying the need to envision rather than merely to see, Johnson's narrative patterns hold up for us the difficulties and challenges besetting the traveler on a journey through life. N o te s to C hapter IV

■'■Johnson, Preface” to The Preceptor, p. 182.

p Letters No. 326; A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, ed. Lascelles. Subsequent references to the J ournev are to this edition and will be cited in the text.

-^Boswell, Life of Johnson. Ill, 301-02. See also the "Life of Gray": "it is by studying at home that we must obtain the ability of travelling with intelligence and improvement" (Lives. Ill, 428-29).

Letters. No. 326.

^"Johnson and Intellectual History," in New Light on Dr. Johnson, ed., F. W. Hilles (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. 1 9 5 9 ) , p. 250. ^See also the "Life of Milton," Lives, I, 99-100: "the knowledge of external nature, and the sciences which that knowledge requires or includes, are not the great or frequent business of the human mind. . . . we are per­ petually moralists, but we are geometricians only by chance. Our intercourse with intellectual nature is necessary; our speculations upon matter are voluntary and at leisure."

^The History of Rasselas. Prince of Abissinia. ed., Geoffrey Tillotson and Brian Jenkins (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1971), p. 80 (Chapter XXX). O It is especially important to study the means by which such works have been performed. See Rasselas. p. 81 (Chapter XXX) and the Preface to Shakespeare: "The palaces of Peru and Mexico were certainly mean and in­ commodious habitations, if compared to the houses of European monarchs; yet who could forbear to view them with astonishment, who remembered that they were built without the use of iron?" (Johnson on Shakespeare, ed., Arthur Sherbo, Volume VII of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1968), p. 81). ^"Theoretical Foundations," p. 406. 128 129 Johnson's belief that young men profit more from study than travel suggests a further application of the principle (Life. Ill, 352).

"^"The False Alarm" (17?0),- in Political Writings.- ed. Donald J. Greene, Volume X of The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven and Londons Yale Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 328, 327. ■^Rasselas. chapter XXIX.

■^"Theoretical Foundations," pp. 395, 396, 397* 14 Rambler 127; Preface to Shakespeare, pp. 81 59, 60.

■*• ^Preface to Shakespeare, p. 81.

■^Pref. to Lobo, p. 10.

"^Mary Lascelles, ed., A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, pp. xviii-xxiii; Curley, pp. 208-09.

■^See Rasselas. chapter XI and Adventurer Ills "such is the state of this world, that we find in it absolute misery but happiness only comparative; we may incur as much pain as we can possibly endure, though we can never obtain as much happiness as we might possibly enjoy." ■^^Rasselas. chapters VIII, XLVIII. 20 "Thoughts on the Late Transactions Respecting Falkland's Islands" (1771), in Political Writings, pp. 365-66. Chapter V

Moral Travel and

The Expedition of Humphry Clinker

thou art highly mistaken if thou dost imagine that we intended, when we began this great Work, to leave thy Sagacity nothing to do, or that without sometimes exercising this Talent, thou wilt be able to travel through our Pages with any Pleasure or Profit to thyself.1

In his chapter on Humphry Clinker in The Implied

Reader, Wolfgang Iser describes the structure of

Smollett's work as containing "three forms of novel which are interwoven almost without a visible join."

Smollett's novel, according to Iser, is a hybrid form, developed through its author's skillful combination of the forms of the epistolary novel, the travel book, and the picaresque novel. By freeing each component "form" from some of the traditional qualities that readers expect,

Iser argues, Smollett forces his reader to make fresh, unbiased contact with the "empirical reality" presented 2 in the work. Iser's analysis of the "form" of Humphry

Clinker is fraught with problems. In considering the

"structure" of the novel as an aggregate of "forms," he regards form not only as the guiding principle and 130 131 finished product of an author's choices and arrangement, but also as the plastic "material" with which an author works.^ As one critic has remarked: "only confusion is served by talking about a 'kind,' a 'form' as though it were a 'medium,' a 'material' to be shaped .... If a medium is also a form, we have a right to know how this II comes about." Iser, furthermore, equates "form" and

"genre." Faced with the fact that Humphry Clinker fits no established generic class but contains elements of three different genres, he concludes that the form of

Smollett's work is a composite of forms. In seeking to explain the unity behind what he sees as a diversity of forms, Iser overlooks a far simpler and more comprehensive description of the novel's form. Humphry Clinker may be generally described as a comedy of reconciliation, in which the characters who narrate the work move from mis­ understanding and isolation toward harmony and accord in the course of the action.^ This chapter will analyze the way in which the values and assumptions of moral travel constitute an implicit norm against which Smollett expects his reader to measure the travelers and their moral growth.

As Iser has recognized, Smollett has loosely endowed his last novel with many of the generic properties of the travel work.^ Indeed, in the prefatory letter of the novel's fictitious bookseller, Henry Davis, Smollett ironically groups Humphry Clinker and Sterne's A Senti­ mental Journey with a number of genuine contemporary travels (including his own Travels through France and

Q Italy Cl7663). The ironic connection accords with one chief purpose of the two opening epistles— to establish as "factual" narrative the fictional letters that make up the rest of the work. The novel’s numerous references to actual people and places serve to enforce this flimsy but deliberate illusion. Like many eighteenth-century travel writers working in the domain of facual narrative,

Smollett's narrators appear repeatedly as observers of the world— moral, natural, and social— especially the moral world of men and manners. Their descriptions of Bath,

London, and Scotland focus upon human life in its various settings. Even when they turn to trivial, personal experiences outside the proper realm of the travel work, the narrators continue their concern with moral dis­ covery; throughout their journey they watch other char- Q acters in order to make moral judgments. Having engaged to describe his "family of originals" (I, 11), Jery spies on Bramble's meeting with the ensign’s widow in Hot

Well (I, 29-32) to get to the bottom of his uncle's character (only to discover that Tabby has also been watching the pair). Bramble and Jery attend Jack Holder's "tea-drinking" as a moral "experiment," testing their opinions of human nature with observation and 133 experience (I, 72-5). In their attempts to understand human behavior, the narrators frequently seek to fathom

the motives of other characters. Lydia struggles to

explain Bramble's strange physical disturbances in the presence of Lady Griskin (I, 13*01 and Bramble studies

Tabby to discern the hidden reasons for her uncharac­ teristically benevolent behavior: "She . . . does nothing but smile, like Malvolio in the play— I'll be hanged if

she is not acting a part which is not natural to her disposition, for some purpose which I have not yet dis­ covered" (I, 151). In discussing Tabby as though he were watching a character on stage, Bramble employs a metaphor that appears frequently in the novel. Cringing from her limited contact with mankind, Lydia describes her exper­ ience as though she were a spectator at a moral inter­ lude: "when Vice quits the stage for a moment, her place is immediately occupied by Folly, which is often too serious to excite any thing but compassion ..." (II,

168). Jery repeatedly describes events as though they were episodes in a play or part of an evening's dramatic fare: "The particulars of the denouement you shall know in due season" (I, 199); "The farce is finished, and another piece of a graver cast brought upon the stage"

(I, 207); "The comedy is near a close; and the curtain is ready to drop: but, the latter scenes of this act I shall recapitulate in order" (II, 221). In part, the

dramatic metaphors suggest the narrators' conscious obser­ vation of "scenes" exhibiting human nature. Bramble and

Jery often act as spectators in the novel, observing such moral "scenes" as the riotous "tea-drinking" (I, 72-5) and Captain Brown's sentimental homecoming (II, 10^-07).

The episodic quality of the novel makes Smollett’s reader, like Bramble and Jery, an observer of "scenes," for the narrators' letters often present description or narrative as extended moral set pieces. The accounts of Bath and

London, the description of Baynard's estate and the story of his marriage (II, 136-52), as well as such digressions as the history of Paunceford (I, 95-9) and the assembly of Grubs (I, 17^-88) all form discrete scenic blocks that emphasize the roles of both narrator and implied reader as observers of the world of men. This "scenic" organi­ zation of reality is carried to its furthest extent in the novel not by the narrators, but by Sir Thomas Bullford, a grotesque comic artist and dramatic connoisseur who, at the expense of his guests, stages jests and pieces of living theater to exhibit moral character for his own amusement: "'what a fine descent from the cross, or ascent to the gallows!— what expression above!— what an aspect! .... such a farce! such a denouement! such a catastrophe! '" (II, 157-58)* The novel's epistolary format also implies a reader who is in the position of a moral spectator, observing communication "intended" for the five correspondents and privy to knowledge of all the letters, knowledge which no single correspondent would possess. The differing testi­ mony of the first-person narratives directs the reader's attention beyond the events reported to the narrators themselves. Each narrator manifests and fulfills his role as observer in his individual performance as writer; readers see each narrator not only as presented in the letters of the other writers, but also as presented and revealed in his own first-person narrative. As travelers and moral observers, Smollett's narrators are seriously flawed, for each is, in his own way, unreliable. Their vision biased by fixed and narrow points of view,

Smollett's writers, like bent mirrors, present the reader with distorted, inadequate reflections of the external world. Character and episode come to us filtered through multiple points of view that are often in active con­ flict. Behind this apparent epistemological and moral confusion stands "Smollett," the implied author whose position is defined chiefly through the irony of clashing accounts, none of them entirely reliable, but some clearly more accurate than others. The reader must infer

Smollett's position by determining this implied author's moral distance from each narrator, a distance measured by the extent to which the character's observations

deviate from our inferred reconstruction of events.

Working from the evidence of disparate reports, we form

hypothetical conceptions of characters that account for

the differences we observe, hypotheses that are adjusted, refined, or born out as the "data" comes in. We thus collaborate with "Smollett" in perceiving and correcting

the narrators' perceptual failings by forming assessments of character that explain contradictory reports and characteristic narratorial behavior. Our basis of anal­ ogous experience helps us to recognize the characters behind the letters. Knowing, for example, the conventions

of melancholic traveler, physician-satirist, and

Juvenalian satire helps the reader to see the character behind Bramble’s letters,’*'0 thus explaining their characteristic slant. As physician-satirist, Bramble reacts with physical illness to his encounters with moral evil.■*■■*■ The evil he notes is real, for the testi­ mony of other narrators confirms many of his impressions.

But as humors character and Juvenalian satirist, Bramble, in the throes of spleen, overreacts to that single aspect 12 of the external world with which he is preoccupied, painting the cities as unsavory pits of moral corruption and covering his letters with the moral disease, slime, and stench that he finds everywhere about him. The reader, faced with such biased, unreliable testimony, 137 must employ his experience to act as moral philo­

sopher and traveler within the world of the novel,

explaining the "causes'1 of "moral effects"— the characters

behind the letters— and piecing together a more secure vision of the novel's "reality."

The divergences between the narrators' accounts should be examined in the context of similar manifes­ tations of isolation and division of characters in the first half of the novel. The narrators' failings as travelers are closely related to their egocentric sepa­ ration from the rest of mankind. Johnson's Journey repeatedly illustrates the traveler's need to perceive how other men see and why they see the ways that they do if he is to comprehend the world in its moral complexity. As a student of human nature, the traveler must plumb human motives and ideas. Such moral vision demands considerable negative capability: the observer must see beyond his own point of view, sympathetically apprehending the per­ spectives of other men. Smollett's travelers lack sympathetic vision. Each is, for much of the novel, a discrete monad, spiritually and perceptually isolated and self-absorbed. Able to see the external world only through his own humorously idiosyncratic vision, he sees a limited segment of reality. 138

Narratorial isolation and self-absorption are most

extreme at the very beginning of the novel, when the letters are most fragmented, chaotic, and cryptically allusive. Bramble’s contentious opening letter, with its peevish concern for his own ills and its occupation with personal business, sets the tone for the letters that follow. The narrators, in various ways, frantically retreat within themselves, gathering their property about them and, like hedgehogs, spinily defending their own interests. Bramble commands Dr. Lewis to "lock up all my drawers, and keep the keys till meeting; and be sure you take the iron chest with my papers into your own custody"

(I, 8); Tabby sends for her belongings and orders Mrs.

Gwyllim to guard Brambleton Hall as though it were under siege: "clap a pad-luck on the wind-seller, and let none of the men have excess to the strong bear— don't forget to have the gate shit. . . . partake the house, with the blunderbuss and the great dog; and . . . have a watchfull eye over the maids" (I, 9)* Holding tightly to that which is their own, both Bramble and Chowder are constipated

(I. 7, 9).13 Jealously watching their own interests, Smollett's characters distrustfully hide secrets while ferreting out those of their neighbors. Jery discovers Lydia's romance, and she strives to conceal its continuing effects.

Winifred Jenkins requests that her property be stashed 139 beneath the bed, lest Mrs. Gwyllim "be a prying into my

secrets, now my back is turned" (I, 10). Characters

observe one another not in disinterested pursuit of moral

knowledge, but to discover secrets and penetrate hidden motives. Tabby spies upon Bramble to prevent his secret charity (I, 30-2) and, to protect her interests, subjects

the servants of Brambleton Hall to unflagging telescopic

scrutiny. Winifred Jenkins knows precisely the extent of

Tabby's amours (I, 61, 153; II. 103. 166) and slyly regards her knowledge as leverage with her mistress (I,

61). Though scrutiny may be performed with good inten­

tions, it distances and alienates characters. With

"prying eyes," Jery acts as "an indefatigable spy" in searching for signs of Lydia's continuing love for

Wilson; founded on distrust, his relentless attention threatens to exclude him from his sister's affection

(II, 169). Lydia herself is hedged in by the suspicious attention that encompasses her for most of the novel, leaving her "surrounded . . . with . . . eyes" (II, l?3-*0 •

Valuing narrow, selfish interests, Smollett's characters neglect friendship and clarity. Absorbed in their own affairs, jostling to overreach others in self- serving chicanery, Londoners, Bramble complains, seem to have no "room left for sentiment or friendship" (I, 173).

The writers to whom Jery is introduced are so fearful of their own standing and so jealous of the reputations of their colleagues that they sit "in a state of mutual repulsion, like so many particles of vapour, each sur­ rounded by its own electrified atmosphere" (I, 165).

Charity, we are repeatedly informed, begins at home (I,

32, 221, 247). Bramble would willingly shed responsi­ bility for his niece and nephew: "what business have people to get children to plague their neighbors?" (I,

7). Hell is other people, who subtract from the attention to be lavished on oneself: "why the devil should not I shake off these torments at once? I an’t married to

Tabby, thank Heaven! nor did I beget the other two: let them choose another guardian: for my part, I an't in a condition to take care of myself . . (I, 16). Although he is often charitable, Bramble covers his good works as though fearing to leave signs of vulnerability (I, 8);^ and Jery fears to relieve the distress of the ensign’s widow, unwilling to be "detected in a weakness, that might entail the ridicule of the company . . (I. 32).

In a world fearing charity, relations between men are often legal. The legal system is not, however, a means to social concord; reflecting the selfish values of individuals, the law serves as an instrument of punitive confinement and, often, divisive calculation and self­ advancement. In the first substantial episode of the novel, Jery and Wilson are "bound over" (I, 10, 19), the peace restored only by unjust threats to prosecute M

Wilson (I, 19). Bramble makes punitive use of the law to humble his neighbor (I, 8), and though unwilling to

"have recourse to justice," he is quite willing to use it as coercive threat (I, 20). The prefatory letters place the novel in a world in which men corrupt the spirit of the law, evading its prosecution while attempting to use its power to personal advantage. The imprisonment of

Humphry Clinker, an innocent victim, near the middle of the novel reveals the grasping corruption prompting the very officials charged with legal administration (I, 208-

10, 215). Wrapped in cocoons of egocentrism, Smollett’s char­ acters engage only in aggressive or defensive contact with other men. Isolation is deepened to near solipsism by the fact that all of the narrators are confined, in varying degrees, to private worlds of their own vision.

Not only do Smollett's characters fail to agree upon the causes of effects, but they also disagree as to the effects they have seen. The narrators' reports of the external world are often unreliable reflections of their own characters and preoccupations. Spying upon Bramble's meeting with the ensign's widow, Jery, who gives us most of the novel's sentimental scenes, sees the Man of

Peeling relieving distress, while Tabby, true to her humor

(and appealing to the evidence of her senses to support her argument), sees a scene of seduction (I, 31-2). The 1^2

adolescent Lydia perceives Bath as a "paradise" of ele­

gance and beauty (I, 55-6), whereas the more cynical and militantly unaffected Bramble sees a "nauseous stew of

corruption" (I, 91), a center of disease and stench, noise and chaos. In diagnosing his own illness, Bramble

disagrees with Dr. L n (Linden) on both its cause and, more profoundly, his very symptoms; and Dr. L n, in perverse idiosyncrasy, employs reason to defend an abstract philosophy that defies common sense, twisting sensory perception to an absurd extreme of absolute relativity in his encomium on stink (I, 2^-6).

In their extreme individuality, Smollett’s humors characters perceive a world refracted through the spec­ tacles of ego. The wildly disparate reports of narrators viewing the same events are, however, only one aspect of the moral and intellectual chaos fostered by egotism. The luxuriant individuality and puffed self-importance^ of those filling the ranks of urban Bath and London appear repeatedly in Bramble's complaints of moral and social anarchy. Londoners, "engrossed by schemes of interest or ambition" (I, 173)# feel "that all regulation is in­ consistent with liberty; and that every man ought to live in his own way, without restraint" (I, 172); in the promiscuous mingling of classes at Bath, "Every upstart of fortune . . . presents himself . . . as in the very focus of observation" (I, 52). The architecture at Bath 143 reflects the moral lives of its residents, who chase

individual pursuits without concern for social harmony.^

Bramble criticizes the Circus for its failure to unite

its architectural parts into a formally integrated whole;

the aesthetic and emotional satisfaction of organic unity

is lost in the incoherent cultivation of individual frag­

ments :

the great number of small doors belonging to the separate houses, the inconsiderable height of the different orders, the affected ornaments of the architecture, which are both childish and misplaced . . . destroy a good part of its effect upon the eye .... (I, 49)

Bath, according to Bramble, is a chaos of separate enti­

ties, thrown up without reference to one another:

one sees new houses starting up in every out-let and every corner in Bath; contrived without judgment . . . and stuck together with so little regard to plan and propriety, that the different lines of the new rows and buildings interfere with, and intersect one another in every different angle of conjunction. They look like the wreck of streets and squares disjointed by an earthquake . . . or, as if some Gothic devil had stuffed them altogether in a bag, and left them to stand higgledy piggledy, just as chance directed. (I, 51)

Vauxhall, too, is "an unnatural assembly of objects" whose freakish parts are conceived "without any unity of

design, or propriety of disposition" (I, 126); Bramble's 144

catalogue of its contents suggests their utter lack of

connection:

Here a wooden lion, there a stone statue; in one place, a range of things like coffee-house boxes, covered a-top; in another, a parcel of ale-house benches; in a third, a puppet shew representation of a tin cascade; in a fourth, a gloomy cave of circular form, like a sepulchral vault half lighted; in a fifth, a scanty slip of grass-plat, that would not afford pasture sufficient for an ass's colt. (I, 126)

The moral conditions of city life reduce men to

frail and vulnerable atoms, condemned to carry out their

lives in irrational or mechanical action that highlights

their frustration and isolation. Greater London is a madhouse of frantic activity and vain pursuits that

threaten to leave Bramble "stifled" or "pressed to death

in the midst of post-chaises, flying-machines, waggons, and coal-horses" (I, 91); Bramble actually passes out in the press of the crowds at Bath (I, 93» 95)• In this chaotic and claustrophobic world, men act as if possessed or bound by a spell of sinister enchantment. The crowd at Vauxhall, its members engaged in vain and gluttonous pursuit of happiness, seems to Bramble "possessed by a spirit, more absurd and pernicious than any thing we meet with in the precincts of Bedlam . . (I, 127).

Attempting to escape London to ride on the Downs, Bramble finds himself trapped, like a balked salmon, in a nightmare of helplessness and frustration:

. . . I have made divers desperate leaps at those upper regions; but always fell backward into this vapour-pit, exhausted and dispirited by those ineffectual efforts; and here we poor valetudinarians pant and struggle, like so many Chinese gudgeons, gasping in the bottom of a punch-bowl. By Heaven, it is a kind of enchantment! If I do not speedily break the spell, and escape, I may have to give up the ghost in this nauseous stew of corruption . . . . (I, 91)

Absolute freedom does not, in the world of Humphry Clinker, lead to happiness; the society of egocentrism leads not

to self-fulfillment but to incompleteness and alien­ ation.^ The cities carry English liberty to its absurd

extreme, exalting individual impulse at the expense of

established principles and reasoned judgment. The resulting clamor of conflicting voices threatens nearly every aspect of life with moral chaos. The enthusiasm of

Winifred Jenkins, Tabby, and Clinker for the "new light" of Methodism reflects the spread of rampant individualism to the precincts of established religion. Freedom of the press enables any man in the frenzy of partisan politics to pass irresponsible judgments with no necessary relation to fact. Parties, in fact, are as humorous as individ­ uals, viewing the world from a position of frozen dogma that vitiates sound judgment (I, 1UU-U8). Envy and 146 partisan interest corrupt "Even the world of literature and taste" (I, 148). London authors judge works not by the test of time, but through a mist of critical dogma, with no reference to the works or their reputation (I,

145-46). In the impact of colliding egos, communication may become completely impossible. The bizarre eccentri­ cities of affectation and habit among the Grub street hacks (I, 1?6), in conjunction with their varied talents, nations, and dialects, leads to a "conversation" resembling

"the confusion of tongues at Babel" (I, 178).

Language, in fact, often serves in the letters of

Tabitha and Winifred Jenkins as a yardstick to individual eccentricity; each woman unconsciously employs language as a uniquely personal medium, thereby suggesting her unique vision of the external world. Though both writers assume they express meaning by communal signs that clearly refer to established ideas, words shiftily become dis­ tinctively private signs, clues to individual character and keyholes upon the "inscape" of individuated reality.

Confronting the world of words, each woman, in her mis­ spellings and malapropisms, her unintentional puns, her twistings of cliche and proverb, remakes that world in her own image. Writing the words she hears spoken around her, Win often "translates" them into versions of her own coinage, cast from the simpler, more homely, and more concrete world in which she moves. "Disparage" thus ■becomes "disporridge" (II, 166), and "dudgeon," "gudgeon"

(I, 152); "calamanco" is metamorphosed (or "matthewmur- phy'd") into "gallow monkey" (II, 210, 209) > while "syllable" appears as "syllabub" (II, ^4), and "odious" as "odorous" (I, 101). Win's religious lexicon con­ sistently reduces spiritual abstracts to homely tangi­ bles. "Soul" is repeatedly written as "sole," (I, 152;

II, 211), and the divine "grace" of the Methodists becomes the decidedly more material "grease of God"

(I, 220; II, 166, 231); she transforms the proverbial

"vale of tears" into a "veil of tares" (II, 211) and

turns a "pious" Methodist sermon into a "pyehouse sermon"

•1 Q (I, 15^). Some of her coinages reflect her preoccupation with clothes: she describes her momentary infatuation with the foppish Dutton as a temptation by "Sattin"

(II, b2) and, in an unconscious but revealing slip, defends Clinker’s birth, despite his failure to "enter in caparison with great folks of quality" (I, 231). The limits to Win's language indicate the boundaries of her world. These borders are set by the limits of her experience, a fact that is evident in her occasional verbal quibbles: knowing a word in its common use, she misreads its application in a more refined or euphe­ mistic sense. She condemns Scottish lodging houses for deceptively advertising "easements to let" when "there is nurro geaks Cjakes] in the whole kingdom, nor any thing 148

for poor sarvants, but a barrel with a pair of tongs

thrown a-cross ..." (II, 43). At the calling of the

banns for Tabby, Win peevishly objects to her mistress

being named a "spinster": "he mought as well have called

her inkleweaver, for she never spun and hank of yarn in

her life" (II, 210).19

Of all the narrators, Tabitha is the most self-

absorbed. Her letters reflect little of her environ- 20 ment, for her mind is engrossed with her own affairs—

be they financial or amatory. Her language does, however,

reflect her moral condition. Struggling to express

herself in the public sphere of language, Tabby, shut off

in egotism from the rest of humanity, is condemned to an eccentric language that repeatedly betrays her by failing

to communicate what she intends to say. Her malapropisms

either lead her to say something quite contrary to what

she means or, very often, serve to expose a side of her character that she strives to conceal. Complaining of Dr. Lewis' failure to answer her letter, she dis­ misses him from any further title to her grace— or so she thinks. The conventional scene that she imagines— the woebegone lover pleading cruel lady— is quite different from the scene she actually describes: . . 1 shall never favour him with another [letter!], though he beshits me on his bended knees" (I, 221). Frequently, Tabby’s letters reveal her preoccupation with finding a husband. a search prompted, her letters suggest, chiefly "by lubri­ city. When the price of flannel drops just as she sells, her complaint to Mrs. Gwyllim is as apt a description of her romantic life as of her commercial disappointments:

"When I go to market to sell, my commodity stinks; but when I want to buy the commonest thing, the owner pricks it up under my nose; and it can't be had for love nor money" (I, 63). Locked in the world of her own ego,

Tabby cannot share the language of her fellow mortals.

Her prose repeatedly forges language anew, unconsciously casting words in the mold of her selfish ruling passions.

Her attack upon Dr. Lewis for the role she assumes he bears in giving her buttermilk to Roger Williams is thoroughly at odds with her intent: "... Roger gets this, and Roger gets that; but I'd have you to know, I won't be rogered at this rate by any ragmatical fellow in the kingdom" (I, 111). The term "roger," with its las- 21 civious reference to copulation, unintentionally voices

Tabby’s reasons for avarice and her fears of continuing celibacy. Her warning of religious duty is equally infelicitous and revealing, for her libidinous desires

» * paint the last judgment as a scene of maeaphysical coi­ tion: "you must render accunt, not only to your earthly master, but also to him that is above . . ." (I, 220).

Existing and perceiving as self-enclosed entities, each of Smollett's narrators believes his judgment most accurately comprehends the external world. Characters repeatedly justify their own position "by dismissing the

judgment of another. Jery rejects Lydia's esteem for

Wilson with the claim that she lacks experience and is

ignorant of the world (I, 11), and Tabby dismisses her nephew's assessment of Bramble's encounter with the ensign's widow by arguing that "you know nothing of

the world" (I, 32). Bramble describes what he regards as his niece's deception by Wilson as natural in "a simple girl, utterly unacquainted with the characters of man­ kind" (I, 19), though in the preceding letter we have learned that she has knowingly bribed Jarvis to carry her letter to Miss Willis (I, 14). Responding to Jery's surprise that he tolerates Tabby's shrewishness, Bramble snaps that "'A young fellow, . . . when he first thrusts his snout into the world, is apt to be surprised at many things, which a man of experience knows to be ordinary and unavoidable" (I, 87). Lydia, unable to employ the argu­ ment to experience, turns the tactic inside out, dis­ missing her uncle’s reaction to Vauxhall by claiming that his vision has been corrupted by experience and illness

(I, 132). The unwarranted confidence of Smollett's narrators in their own judgment is one aspect of their failure to know themselves adequately. Their inward vision dis­ torted by egocentrism, Smollett's writers often fail to 151 see the faults they share with other men. Rather, each

sees himself as a special, exalted being, a breed apart

from the rest of humanity. Jery, the cool Horatian 22 observer, consistently presents himself as one apart

from and superior to the scenes of human folly he so often

describes. The theatrical images he frequently employs

suggest the moral distance he feels between himself and 23 the lesser beings who perform for his amusement. J Only

the final discovery of Wilson's true character forces

Jery to recognize his own moral and perceptual short­

comings (II, 202-03). Significantly, though he continues

to describe the world as stage, he joins the other

characters to act in a series of farces at the end of the

novel (II, 222).

Bramble is not irretrievably absorbed within him­

self, nor is he devoid of self-knowledge. He is charit­ able, though he treats his charity as a weakness to be disguised, and he feels genuine concern for his niece's

condition (I, 20). He also recognizes the possibility

that his observations may be tainted with bias, par­

ticularly when he pauses in his attacks to imagine Dr.

Lewis' response to his remarks. Reporting, for example, his substantial agreement with George Heathcote's assess­ ment of mankind, Bramble qualifies so pessimistic a judg­ ment with the possibility that he might be wrong: 152 . . . I know you will say, G. H. ______saw imperfectly through the mist of prejudice, and I am rankled by the spleen— Perhaps, you are partly in the right; for I have perceived that my opinion of mankind, like mercury in the thermometer, rises and falls according to the variations of the weather.2^ (I, 109)

Despite such reasonable qualifications of his own position

(concessions which are, after all, partly rhetorical),

Bramble's knowledge of himself is severely limited. Al­ though he insistently claims medical knowledge of his own ailments (I, 7* 33» 3*0» it is not until midway through the novel that Bramble fully recognizes the nature of his illness (I, 217-18).2^ His usual pride in his vision and experience leads to cynicism and complacency. He smugly brushes aside the study of human nature, having, to his dismay, mastered the subject: “With respect to the characters of mankind, my curiosity is quite satisfied: I have done with the science of men, and must now endeavour to amuse myself with the novelty of thingsM (I,15'l) •

Bramble's satiric tirades repeatedly imply a qualitative moral difference between himself and those he attacks.

Even his charitable "adoption* of Humphry Clinker, follow­ ing Clinker's naive listing of his accomplishments, is per­ formed with an ironic sense of the gap separating master and footman: "Foregad! thou art a complete fellow,(cried my uncle,still laughing), I have a good mind to take thee into ray family"(I,119)• Overwhelmed by the folly and immorality he observes around him, Bramble's "misanthropy increases

every day" (I, 67). He fails, however, to see his own t involvement in the moral faults of mankind: . . I am

conscious of no sins that ought to entail such family-

plagues upon me" (I, 16); ". . . what have I to do with

the human species?" (I, 67). Like Gulliver, Bramble fears

contamination from the moral plague that surrounds him

and shies in revulsion from human contact. To "purify"

himself from the infection of the public waters, he

retreats to the "stifling" confines of a private bath

(I, 65)- In his fear of associating with immorality, he

seeks, with an intensity that at moments approaches mad­

ness, an existence of cloistered self-sufficiency:

"'Sdeath! how do I know what miserable objects have been

stewing in the bed where I now lie!— I wonder, Dick, you did not put me in mind of sending for my own matrasses"

(I, 67). Bramble's stunted existence is suggested by the confinement and narrow rooms of which he frequently com­ plains (I, 168, 229). His journey to Scotland expands

Bramble's experience with human possibility; as he tempers his overly narrow, "Juvenalian" vision of mankind, he moves from satirist to humorist. With the final dis­ covery that he and Clinker are indeed of the same family, he recognizes his own full share in human folly (II, 182) and completes his reconciliation with those around him. Confronted with the fragmented world defined, in

part, through the disparate reports of unreliable narra­

tors, Smollett's reader must balance and reconcile con­

flicting accounts. This demands that we recognize each

writer's characteristic biases. Knowledge of these biases

is certified by close observation of variant reports.

The contradictions and biases of the letters describing

life at Clifton and Hot Well, to take a substantial but

restricted example, will illustrate what is required of

the reader implied by Smollett's narrative. Lydia's

pastoral description of Hot Well, appropriately placed at

the end of this stage of the journey, is the most suspect

description of the spa. Her confined experience (Hot

Well is the first prolonged stop beyond the walls of her

school in Gloucester) and the vapors of adolescent romance

induce Lydia to see her experience in terms of romantic

convention. Her stock "poetic" diction— "vernal livery,"

"tender bleating wanton lambkins," "sweet Philomel" (I,

38)— confirms Bramble's statement that "she has got a

languishing eye, and reads romances" (I, 16). Lydia's

description of the company and its enjoyments is equally

suspect, and again her prose style is responsible, in part, for the reader's distrust:

we go down to the nymph of Bristol spring, where the company is assembled before dinner; so good-natured, so free, 155 so easy; and there we drink the water so clear, so pure, so mild, so charmingly maukish. There the sun is so chearful and reviving; the weather so soft; the walk so agreeable; the prospect so amusing; and the ships and boats going up and down the river, close under the windows of the Pump-room, afford such an enchanting variety of moving pictures, as require a much abler pen than mine to describe. (I, 38)

The long series of breathlessly intensive "so's," along

with such affected description as "enchanting" and

"charmingly maukish," portrays an eye that is less than

rigorously critical.

Smollett's readers are not, of course, limited to

stylistic clues in judging Lydia's description, which is

undercut by the letters of Jery and Bramble. Bramble,

for example, dismisses the "charmingly maukish" waters as

a useless placebo (I, 33)» and while there is no doubt

of the spa's rural situation, he finds no pastoral en­

chantment upon the Downs that Lydia praises as "so agree­

able" (I, 38). The "soft" and sunny weather is, in

Bramble's letter of April 1?, an endless monsoon: "It makes me sick to hear people talk of the fine air upon

Clifton-Downs: how can the air be either agreeable or

salutary,, where the demon of vapours descends in a per­ petual drizzle?" (I, 16). The waspish, absolute tone of

Bramble's complaint should discourage complete faith in

his observation. Indeed, his use of the colloquial intensive, "It makes me sick," contains more truth than

Bramble, at this point in the novel, seems to realize;

as physician-satirist, he manifests extreme physical responses to the affectation and folly at Hot Well. The heightened, nervous sensitivity with which Bramble reacts

to moral phenomena is suggested in the repeated hyperbole

of his attacks upon conditions at the spa: "the man

deserves to be fitted with a cap and bells, who, for such

a paltry advantage as this spring affords . . . exposes

himself to the dirt, the stench, the chilling blasts, and perpetual rains, that render this place to me unbearable"

(I, 33)* Smollett, furthermore, provides a pointed indi­

cation of Bramble's limited vision in the letter of April

20, in which Bramble alludes to his encounter with "a Jew- pedlar": dickering over a pair of spectacles, Bramble fails to see Wilson in disguise (I, 35» 36).

Though Bramble's judgments must be qualified, they are essentially more accurate than Lydia's. In fact,

Lydia's description of the spa verifies the fundamental reliability of Bramble’s observations, for her letter mirrors the very affectation he condemns. The folly, affectation, and immorality that Bramble detects in Hot

Well are also confirmed in Jery's description of the eccentric Dr. L n, who "tests" his female venereal patients to ensure that they have been thoroughly cured

(I, 2^-8). The reader must, of course, adjust for the 157 bias of Jery's observations. To an extent, the narratives

of Jery and Bramble validate one another. Jery's anec­

dotes provide ample evidence of moral corruption in Bath

and London, making us certain that Bramble’s remarks are

not merely the misanthropic effluvia of a fevered mind.

When describing the same events, each usually supports the

other's assessment: both men, for example, agree that

Barton's political opinions are hopelessly warped by party

bias (I, 135* 144-45). Jery's comment, however, to Phillips, his correspondent, that "you and I . . . are

still . . . unbiassed" (I, 135) provides some insight into

the aspect of his character that contributes most to the limited unreliability of his accounts— his inaccurate and

inflated opinion of himself. His family pride leads to

his blind judgment of Wilson, and his conceit is evident

in his dismissal of the guests at Hot Well: "As there is

nothing that can be called company . . ., I am here in a

state of absolute rustication" (I, 23). His remarks and

actions attest to the justice, allowing for characteristic

overstatement, of Bramble’s opening analysis of his

character: "a pert jackanapes, full of college-petulance

and self-conceit; proud as a German count, and as hot and hasty as a Welch mountaineer" (I, 16). Jery’s pride is also evident in the distanced observation, noted earlier, that characterize his letters. His failure to assist the ensign’s widow, lest he be "detected in a weakness, that might entail the ridicule of the company" (I, 32), suggests the insecurity behind his repeated disassociation from the human scene he satirically peruses. Generally, the aloof and superior tone of Jery's letters tells us much about the writer without greatly invalidating his accounts; the exception occurs in his judgment of Wilson, when Jery is, for once, an involved participant in the action, and not a mere observer. His heroic recounting of his own actions in the miscarried duel (I, 11) is under­ cut by his need to refute Mansel's tale of the same event, a "quarrel with a mountebank's merry Andrew at Gloucester"

(I, 23), which widens the range of unreliable report in an equally exaggerated direction.

Smollett's reader must judge conflicting accounts carefully and flexibly, for no one point of view is entirely reliable or unreliable. Though Bramble and

Jery are usually more trustworthy than Lydia, neither is able to see Wilson accurately. Bramble's judgment of

Wilson as a rascal and adventurer is wrong, despite his enclosure of Wilson's letter as evidence to back his position (I, 17-22). It is Lydia's spontaneous judgment, despite her inexperience "with the characters of mankind"

(I, 19), that events show to be correct: "I am still persuaded that he is not what he appears to be . . ."

(I, 13)• How do we know what to believe? Even before the first clues that Lydia is right appear (I, 18, 37)» the 159 suspicions of the experienced reader are likely to be raised by the clear hint of so conventional a ploy as the disguised lover. The demands of Smollett's narrative imply a reader who perceives and employs a variety of clues to determine probability, rectify opinion, and disentangle perplexity, using his experience of language and literature to comprehend why the characters see as they do. To reconcile the unreliable accounts of ego­ centric travelers and to achieve more adequate knowledge of the novel's moral world, Smollett's reader must act as hiw own "traveler" and moral observer.

In the course of the work's comic action, the barr­ iers of egocentrism, alienation, and eccentricity that separate the narrators in the first half of the novel partially dissolve. Sympathy and harmony largely replace selfishness and discord, while anagnorisis and marriage establish family unity among characters formerly asserting themselves as independent entities. The reader’s tasks diminish as the narrators, drawing more closely together, resolve the tensions established in the first half of the novel, for as they cease to exist as isolated units, Smollett's writers present the reader with accounts that approach perceptual consensus. Shedding the traits of egotism and prejudice that refract vision, Smollett's travelers become a more integrated group of more reliable 160 observers. Travel, as Jery comes to recognize, plays an

essential part in providing the moral experience needed to correct vision, refine judgment, and know ourselves:

I am . . . mortified to reflect what flagrant injustice we every day commit, and what absurd judgment we form, in viewing objects through the falsifying medium of prejudice and passion. Had you asked me a few days ago, the pic­ ture of Wilson the player, I should have drawn a portrait very unlike the real person and character of George Dennison— Without all doubt, the greatest advantage acquired in travel­ ling and perusing mankind in the original, is that of dispelling those shameful clouds that darken the faculties of the mind, preventing it from judging with candour and precision. (II, 203)

With the release of Humphry Clinker from Clerken- well, Smollett's characters begin to escape the narrow cells in which they have lived confined, stifled, and enchanted. Clinker's deliverance is hailed by Winifred

Jenkins in an outburst of magical and religious images that portray Bramble's footman as a comic Christ, bursting death’s bonds and relieving the family’s "constipation"

(I, 219):

the gates of hell have not been able to prevail again him.— His virtue is like poor gould, seven times tried in the fire. . . . The 'squire . . . could not prevent his being put in chains, and confined among common manufactors, where he stud like an innocent sheep in the midst of wolves and tygers.— Lord knows what mought have happened to 161

this pyehouse young man, if master had not applied to Apias Korkus, who . . . is, they say, five hundred years ould . . . and a congeror: but, if he be, sure I am he don't deal with the devil, otherwise he wouldn't have fought out Mr. Clinker . . . in spite of stone walls, iron bolts, and double locks, that flew open at his command; for Ould Scratch has not a greater enemy upon hearth than Mr. Clinker, who is, indeed, a very powerfull labourer in the Lord's vineyard. (I, 219)

Clinker's release by conjuration is the first in a series of rescues and liberations, reunions and metamorphoses— comic, sentimental, and miraculous— which accompany the gradual reemergence of the moral and social paradise

Bramble has earlier associated with rural life at

Brambleton Hall (I, 167-68), Bramble is twice saved from drowning (I, 259-60; II, 175-76), a death suggesting the fate of the self-absorbed man, and Lismahago, assumed drowned at low tide in the quicksands of Solway Firth, is suddenly discovered alive, looking like "an inhabitant of another world" (II, 108-09). Captain Brown returns from the East Indies to free his brother from prison and his father from debt (II, 10^-07), while Lydia, who describes herself as a prisoner longing for deliverance (II, 96), is released from sorrow by the sudden metamorphosis

(II, 210) of Wilson who appears to both Lydia and Jery as a "phantom," a spectral horseman (II, 169, 173)* The timely death of his wife enables Baynard to escape the 162

"thraldom" in which her vain and selfish "tyranny" has

held him bewitched, to escape a "shameful spell" that has

bound him as if "enchanted" (II, 146, 14-8, 1^-2). Clinker's

release, moreover, initiates one of the central deliver­

ances in the novel, for the episode enables Bramble to

recognize the nature of his affliction, the first stage

in his liberating exodus to sound health and accurate

perception from the bondage of psychosomatic illness and

its biasing humors:

I find my spirits and my health affect each other reciprocally— that is to say, every thing that discomposes my mind produces a correspondent disorder in my body; and my bodily complaints are remarkably mitigated by those considera­ tions that dissipate the clouds of mental chagrin.— The imprisonment of Clinker brought on those symptoms which I men­ tioned in my last, and now they are vanished at his discharge. (I, 217-18)

These manifold liberations accompany the travelers'

general deliverance from city to country, from the

luxurious confines of Bath and London to the primitive,

social "paradise" (II, 86, 88) of Scotland. This change

in the external, moral landscape of the journey reflects

and stimulates the moral progress of the narrators, who

break from the self-enclosed worlds in which they have

previously existed. Exposed to the benign and wholesome

society of Scotland, the narrators move toward the reconciliation and unity that achieve fruition on the Dennisons' estate. The journey to and from Scotland comprises a series of episodes that contrast to the generous hospitality and social harmony of the Scots. As the expedition approaches and leaves Scotland, Smollett's writers encounter various emblematic manifestations of vain selfishness, barren hospitality, and familial dis­ cord, as well as two sterling instances of friends and family reunited in selfless love and ideal community.

The narrators' changing reactions to such encounters suggest the extent of their progress beyond the stunted moral state portrayed in the first half of the novel.

At the estates of his relatives, Squire Burdock and Mr. Pimpernel, Bramble encounters in microcosm the vices of Bath and London. Burdock's family is divided by the selfish vanity of husband, wife, and son, each seeking to indulge and aggrandize himself while ignoring, oppressing, or demeaning his neighbors. Burdock, who

"piques himself" upon the enormous sums he spends to uphold English hospitality (I, 231), satisfies his appetites and his pride "by saying and doing, at his own table, whatever gratifies the brutality of his disposi­ tion, or contributes to the ease of his person" (I, 233); his bounteous display affords cold hospitality to his own kinsman. Burdock's wife, ever "sensible of her own superior affluence," treats her guests with an "arrogant civility" (I, 232) designed to remind them of their 164

inferior status. Husband and wife are bound in a marriage of hate, each partner seeking to gain control, yet fearing the other's power (I, 232). Burdock's son, an effete macaroni who displays "the most perfect contempt for his own father" (I, 233)» joins forces with his mother in attempting to have the Squire trepanned (I, 234-35)*

Pimpernel's family is reduced to subhuman conditions by the greedy despotism of the father, who embodies grasping selfishness in each of his social avatars, "a brutal husband, an unnatural parent, a harsh master, an oppress­ ive landlord, a litigious neighbor, and a partial magi­ strate" (I, 242). The house of Pimpernel, even shorter on manners and hospitality than Burdock's, is, according to Bramble, "the lively representation of a gaol" (I.

242). In contrast to the "society" of the two estates stands the sentimental reunion of the Grieves and the

Melvilles, occurring during the visit to Burdock's.

Grieve, the Machiavellian hero of Ferdinand Count Fathom, reappears in Humphry Clinker as a selfless and "sincere convert to virtue" (I, 240). Though formerly ruled by ruthlessly covetous vices, Grieve has changed his name to avoid the undeserved generosity of his adopted brother and former dupe, Count Melville. Living "upon his own industry and moderation" (I, 241), Grieve has devoted himself not to pursuing wealth, but to "performing all the duties of a primitive Christian" (I, 239)• Grieve's 165 years of penance conclude with the two families restored to communion when he risks his life at the hands of highwaymen to save strangers who prove to be the Mel- villes.

Though "greatly affected by this pathetic recog­ nition, " the travelers remain uninvolved spectators of the "moving scene" (I, 240), shyly distanced from the renewed society on stage. Appalled at the evil of

Burdock's household, in which Tabby readily joins the backbiting (I, 237-38)» Bramble actively struggles to distance himself from corruption. Stricken, once more, with illness, he seeks relief in escape, "In hope of riding it down before it could take fast hold on my con­ stitution . . ." (I, 241), but his ride takes him to

Pimpernel's, where his sickness worsens (I, 2*1-2). In the

"Stygian bath" (I, 243) at Harrogate, Bramble again seeks his cure in a more extreme form of escape, isolated with­ drawal, and the results.are the same as at Bath— a descent into hellish moral "suffocation":

At night, I was conducted into a dark hole on the ground floor, where the tub smoaked and stunk like the pot of Acheron, in one corner, and in another stood a dirty bed provided with thick blankets, in which I was to sweat after coming out of the bath. My heart seemed to die within me when I entered this dismal bagnio, and found my brain assaulted by such insufferable effluvia. . . . After having endured all but real 166

suffocation . . . in the tub, I was moved to the bed and wrapped in blankets. . . . I was carried to my own chamber, and passed the night . . . the most miserable wretch in being. (I, 243)

Bramble's heart does not, however, "die within" him; with his descent into the underworld of complete isolation, the travelers begin to ascend to the fresh air and daylight of moral harmony and social unity. Even

Tabby, who feels pity for Lismahago (I, 267), begins to display, at moments, more selfless emotions: she pays lip service to friendship (I, 249) and gives in charity to the blacksmith's widow (I, 263). His contacts with others lead Bramble out of himself, forcing him to recognize other points of view. Clinker, the comic savior, symbolically initiates this spiritual rebirth at Scarborough, hauling his master naked from the sea to "rescue" him from drowning. Clinker's selfless, if misguided action draws

Bramble out of his self-absorbed isolation: though he first strikes Clinker and shuts himself in the bathing machine, he soon feels compassion for his footman and, opening the door, redresses his action (I, 259-60). His contact with Lismahago, whose polemical "self-conceit"

(II, 18) makes him an appropriate addition to the party, forces Bramble to exercise tolerant hospitality (II, 1-2).

Lismahago's long arguments, moreover, lead Bramble, despite his angry objections, to consider new opinions 167 (II, 23) and, eventually, to admit the essential truth of

many of the Captain's observations about Scotland (II,

127). Indeed, Lismahago is often a spokesman for Scotland

and its people, subjects on which the English, as Jery

remarks, and the travelers are "woefully ignorant":

"What, between want of curiosity, and traditional sar­

casms, the effect of ancient animosity, the people at

the other end of the island know as little of Scotland as

of Japan" (II, 34). Bramble and his party learn through

experience to see Scotland as it really is, and not

through the eyes of prejudice (II, 36, 44, 58) . ^ In Scotland, Smollett's travelers encounter the

national embodiment of the social values central to their oO moral development. As their journey progresses from urban to rural, from Edinburgh to Glasgow to the High­

lands, the travelers witness an increasingly unified and

harmonious society, in sharp contrast to the chaotic cities

of Bath and London. The narrators' own growing unity is

evident in the increased conformity of their accounts.

Gone are the gross disparities of fact and assessment.

Bramble, Jery, and Lydia concur in describing the High­

lands as "romantic" (II, 69, 83* 86, 96), and Bramble, Jery, and Winifred Jenkins all agree in noting simi­

larities between the Scots and Welsh (II, 71-2, 81, 101).

The travelers are most in accord, however, in remarking

the courtesy (II, 96), the civility (II, 43, 45, 96), 168 and the harmony (II, 87) of the Scots. From their arrival in Edinburgh, the group is treated with hospitality that disarms even Tabitha's prejudice (II, 36), and Bramble finds the Scots preeminent in the social virtues: "...

I have met with more kindness, hospitality, and rational entertainment . . . than ever I received in any other country during the whole course of my life" (II, 58)•

Jery describes Scottish women as "the best and kindest creatures upon earth," and Scottish conversation as a model of politeness and good manners:

Not a hint escapes a Scotchman that can be interpreted into offence by any individual in the company; and national reflections are never heard. . . . the Scots . . . have a real esteem for the natives of South-Britain; and never mention our country, but with expressions of regard. (II, 46)

Such tolerance and moderation permeate Scottish civili­ zation; Bramble reports with amazement that even the

Presbyterian clergy, "so long reproached with fanaticism and canting, abounds at present with ministers celebrated for their learning, and respectable for their moderation"

(II. 61). These social graces are the product of a coherent and integrated society free of the vain social competition of

Bath and London; classes easily mingle while decorously maintaining proper social subordination. The citizens of Edinburgh, "the people of business . . . and even the genteel company," assemble in the street for a daily

concert of "well-toned" church bells; the "agreeable" and

harmonious entertainment contrasts sharply with the noise and chaos of London pleasures (II, ^1). The same decorous fellowship characterizes Scotland's national sport— golf:

"Of this diversion the Scots are so fond, that when the weather will permit, you may see a multitude of all ranks,

from the senator of justice to the lowest tradesman, mingled together in their shirts . . ." (II, 51). The "cawdies'" banquet displays the same casual, democratic conviviality. As errand boys and messengers, the cawdies function as social agents, bringing people together.

Though "shabby in their appearance, and rudely familiar in their address" (II, 52), the cawdies are not the cal­ culating, opportunistic rogues of criminal literature, but trusted employees: "there is no instance of a cawdy's having betrayed his trust" (II, 52). The cawdies' gathering joins all ranks in a festive celebration with classical precedent:2^ "lords, and lairds, and other gentlemen, courtezans and cawdies mingled together, as the slaves and their masters were in the time of the

Saturnalia in ancient Rome" (II, 53)* The "sallies" spicing the meal promote a communal "spirit of mirth and good humor" (II, 53)» and amidst the general bawdiness of the toasts, Jery is saluted with a wish for national 170 unity: "may a' unkindness cease "betwixt John Bull and his sister Moggy” (II, 53). Symbolic of the familial fellow­ ship that prevails, the company names the nobleman volun­ teering to foot the bill the '"Father ojf the Feast'"

(II, 54-5). As the travelers proceed on their journey in Scot­ land, they continue to encounter a tightly unified and harmoniously subordinated society. Bramble describes

Glasgow as "a perfect beehive" of industry (II, 79)» a metaphor suggesting not only busyness, but ordered and cooperative activity within a subordinated social structure.-^0 Bramble's discussion of the insurance scheme devised by Glasgow's merchants suggests the security and advantage derived from group action; observing that their ships sailing to America follow a route seldom taken by privateers, the merchants banded together to insure one another, saving money in their cooperative venture (II,

81). Beyond Glasgow, at the moral center of Scotland, lie the Highlands, which Bramble repeatedly praises as a

"paradise" (II, 86, 88), "the Arcadia of Scotland" (II,

83, 96). The clan society of the Highlands is not, Bramble insists, "feudal," but "patriarchal" (II, 92); the clan is, quite literally, a family, its members hierarchically connected by love and respect, despite parliamentary dissolution of feudal obligations: 171 It is founded on hereditary regard and affection, cherished through a long succession of ages. The clan consider the chief as their father, they hear his name, they believe themselves descended from his family, and they obey him as their lord, with all the ardour of filial love and veneration; while he, on his part, exerts a paternal authority, commanding, chastising, rewarding, protecting, and maintaining them as his own children. (II, 92)

In the fragmented world of London, freedom enabled men to devote themselves exclusively to indulging their own whims and interests: the familial unity of the Highlands, however, entails both privilege and responsibility, rights and duties. Chief and subjects occupy stations defined by family tradition and guaranteed by family love. So jealously does the clan conserve "the ancient customs of the family" (II, 72), that the Macdonalds refuse to allow their chief to abolish the traditional din of the clan's hereditary piper. But though such loyalties may lead to comic rigidity, they also foster a tenaciously cohesive society. Impoverished and scattered by the banishment of their chief after the '45, the Camerons rally to welcome and reestablish his returned son (II, 93)• Such self­ less, socially responsible behavior is far removed from the self-interested pursuits of the English cities. In­ deed, Bramble suggests that the surest way to destroy the benevolent clan loyalties is to give the subjects a draught of "property and independence" (II, 93)» ‘the 172

intoxicants driving the citizens of urban England.

The family unity of the clan embraces not only its own members, but also outsiders. Highland hospitality

transcends even that of Edinburgh, and contrasts markedly with the scant welcome suffered earlier in the journey at the hands of Bramble’s own relations. The Highlanders entertain Bramble's party "not barely with hospitality, but with such marks of cordial affection, as one would wish to find among near relations after an absence of many years" (II, 88). As the travelers reenter England, they

immediately encounter, in the homecoming of Captain Brown,

just such a reunion of separated relatives. Bramble's reaction to this incident differs notably from his earlier reaction to Grieve's reunion with the Melvilles, a para­ llel episode, and reflects the changes his travels and observations have brought to his character. No longer content to remain a mere spectator of the scene he has observed, Bramble actively participates in the festive celebration of the restored family, which reaches out to include the community that surrounds it (II, 105-0?).

The same active identification with hospitality, benevolence, and courtesy appears in Bramble's collision with Lord Oxmington, a host cut from the same stuff as

Burdock and Pimpernel:

His lordship is much more remarkable for his pride and caprice, than for his 173 hospitality and understanding; and, indeed, it appeared, that he considered his guests merely as objects to shine upon, so as to reflect the lustre of his own magnificence. (II, 130-31)

When Oxmington rudely dismisses the company, Bramble attempts to engage his host's hospitality with a toast to

"’the. best in Christendom'" (II, 13l)» the same bawdy toast offered in good fellowship at the cawdies' banquet

(II, 53)• This peaceful overture failing, Bramble mili- tantly defends civility, challenging Oxmington to a duel

(II, 131-33): active and violent confrontation, as Lydia's bout with Baynard's son suggests (II, 150), may be a 31 justified response to offensively antisocial behavior.J

The social discord born of bad manners proves contagious, temporarily threatening the travelers' union when Lismah- ago, acting as Bramble's second, challenges Bramble for abuses received in performing his duties; only with

Tabby’s intervention are the two "perfectly reconciled"

(II, 134). Oxmington is finally compelled to apologize not by Bramble's single combat, but rather, as Jery emphasizes, by the coercive power of the travelers acting as a group:

we proceeded to deliberate upon the means of taking vengeance for the insults they had received .... In consequence of our deliberations, we next day . . . proceeded in a body to his lordship’s house, all of us, with our servants, including the coachman . . . . (II, 134) At Baynard’s estate, Bramble finds more fruitful and benevolent channels in which to direct his newfound social activism. Baynard's property, "turned topsy­ turvy" by the vanity of his wife (II, 140, 138), mirrors the moral chaos wrought by selfishness in the English cities. The quiet, tasteful, functional beauty of house and grounds have been ravaged by Mrs. Baynard's ego­ centric love of "shew and ostentation" (II, 138). Baynard himself, though longing for a life of healthful,, rural retirement, lives on the verge of consumption, "hurried about in a perpetual tumult, amidst a mob of beings pleased with rattles, baubles, and gew-gaws . . (II, 142).

In the midst of conspicuous display, Mrs. Baynard greets her guests "with a coldness of reserve sufficient to freeze the very soul of hospitality" (II, 149), and the frosty dinner is thawed only by Baynard’s warm, good nature (II, 150). Faced with the evil at Baynard's,

Bramble does not respond, as he did at Burdock's, with passive sickness and active retreat. Rather, hoping to help his friend avoid ruin, he urges Baynard to throw off the domestic "trammels” (II, 151) that bind him: . . 1 shall think myself supremely happy, if, by my means, a worthy man, whom I love and esteem, can be saved from misery, disgrace, and despair" (II, 152). Bramble has turned from thinking only of himself to feeling and acting for others. 175 Clinker's second rescue of Bramble initiates the discoveries and unions that affirm and extend family ties among the travelers. Lydia's hysterical joy at learning of her uncle's miraculous escape from drowning indicates the place he has assumed in her affections: "Are you— Are you indeed my uncle— My dear uncle!— My best friend!

My father!" (II, 177). Bramble's reunion with Dennison, who proves "a perfect miracle of goodness and generos­ ity" (II, 180), leads to the discovery that Clinker is

Bramble’s son (II, 181-82); Bramble, in fact— who enters the novel childless, denying his relation to niece and nephew— leaves it as father to Clinker and spiritual father to Lydia and Jery.-^ The marriages that conclude the novel join Bramble's party to the Dennisons (II, 196-200)-^ and unite the travelers in a "family of love" (II, 211).

In the harmonious environs of Dennison's restored estate (II, 190-96), the travelers flourish in mind and body; "the vinegar of Mrs. Tabby is remarkably dulci­ fied" (II, 203-0*0, and Lismahago, who "had been soured and shrivelled by disappointment and chagrin, is now swelled out, and smoothed like a raisin in plumb-porridge"

(II, 223). Increased self-knowledge crowns the travels of both Jery and Bramble, and precedes the climactic "country-dance" (II, 20*0 of unity and fruition. The discovery of Clinker’s and "Wilson's" true identities reveals to uncle and nephew the unwitting folly and 176 blindness of past actions and judgments (II, 182, 202-

03). Bramble has learned the nature of his illness (I,

217-18) and recognized the importance of travel and moral stimulation to a healthy body and a well regulated mind:

. . . I am disposed to bid defiance to gout and rheumatism.— I begin to think I have put myself on the superannuated list too soon, and absurdly sought for health in the retreats of laziness— I am persuaded that all valetudinarians are too seden­ tary, too regular, and too cautious— We should sometimes increase the motion of the machine, to unclog the wheels of life: and now and then take a plunge amidst the waves of excess, in order to case-harden the constitution. I have even found a change of company as necessary as a change of air, to promote a vigorous circulation of the spirits, which is the very essence and criterion of good health. (II, 213)

For Bramble and for all of the travelers, health lies in active, thoughtful participation in the moral world, not in pathologically self-absorbed responses to moral phe­ nomena. Acting on his newfound knowledge, Bramble weds himself to the interests of another: he carries Baynard, for whose infatuation he shows considerable sympathy

(II, 213),^^ to Brambleton Hall to begin his friend's rehabilitation (II, 228-29).

Despite the numerous elements of romance and the miraculous visible in the second half of the novel, perfect accord among men is not, in the world of

Smollett's work, an attainable social reality. Although 177 the travelers journey beyond the symbolic death suggested in Bramble's dark night of isolation at Harrogate, their union is fragile and incomplete. Brambleton Hall and the

Dennisons' estate are enclaves that survive only by excluding the world of Bath and London. Bramble and

Dennison, joined by those "few individuals of moderate fortune" who adopt a similar "stile of living" (II, 195)* form an archipelego of rational values surrounded by the ocean of England that we have seen in the first half of the novel, a realm that remains unchanged. The moral corruption of Bath and London, however, menaces Bramble's idyllic community less from without than from within.

Tabitha and Winifred Jenkins, although part of the uni­ fied society concluding the novel, remain, as their continued contortions of language suggest, eccentric humors, unintegrated units whose continued concern for themselves threatens the stability of the family. Tabby closes her last letter promising to be "more oecumenical than ever" (II, 230), while Win, exalted to a new rank by her marriage to Clinker-Loyd, closes the novel by stu­ diously emphasizing the "distance" between herself and "the lower sarvants of the family" (II, 232)— including her erstwhile correspondent. Win's vanity gives us every reason to believe that she will indeed "live upon dissent terms of civility" (II, 232) with Mrs. Gwyllim. The very bonds of marriage uniting the travelers are described in 178 ambiguous terms suggesting a future much less glowing than the first blush of marriage. Jery describes Clinker and his bride as "two cooing turtles . . . caged for life"

(II, 225), while Win herself describes the three couples as "chined . . . in the holy bands of mattermoney" (II,

231). Mrs. Loyd's statement that "our satiety is to suppurate" (II, 231) rings with more truth than she in­ tends .

These comic omens portend the partial slippage into worldly ways that will inevitably occur at Brambleton

Hall. Such signs control the tone of Smollett’s con­ clusion, giving us a form quite different from the kind of comedy that we would experience given a more sentimental conclusion. These morally realistic reservations, how­ ever, only modify the unifying principle of comic recon­ ciliation, the principle that provides an organic unity to

Humphry Clinker, imbuing Smollett's selection of the work's parts with artistic rightness. Reconciliation, of course, demands prior separation--established in the first half of the novel. There Smollett presents the narrators as representative inhabitants of an egocentric universe in which men are profoundly isolated from one another, confined through self-absorption to lives of private perception and experience. Character, point of view, metaphor, and setting are, along with the fractured, isolating effect of epistolary presentation, among the 1?9 more prominent parts which Smollett employs in creating

a comic "world" of solipsistic alienation.

In separating his narrators from one another,

Smollett also carefully distances his reader from the narrators. This distance is attained through a combi­ nation of the narrators' moral shortcomings— their numerous manifestations of selfishness— and their per­ ceptual shortcomings. The implicit, assimilated values and assumptions of moral travel play an important role in

shaping the reader's attitude toward Smollett's writers.

Though entrusted as travelers with the task of comprehend­ ing the lives of those they observe, the narrators' observations are, in varying degrees obscured by the

"shameful clouds that darken the faculties of the mind, preventing it from judging with candour and precision"

(II, 203). Smollett, in fact, implies a "philosophic" reader superior to such perceptual failings, able to

"read" the novel's ironies and compensate for the trave­ lers' unreliable narration by employing his own "principles of reasoning." Collaborating with "Smollett" (perceived behind the irony of conflicting accounts) this reader stands ironically distanced from each of the narrators, above the perceptual weaknesses that plague them all.

Such detachment does not preclude sympathy, but our degree of sympathy for each narrator is generally commensurate with the distance that we infer his accounts fall from reality. Our estimate of a narrator's moral

character in Humphry Clinker derives in part from our

assessment of his perceptual accuracy. Indeed, moral worth and perceptual reliability are inextricably inter­

twined, for the eccentric vision of each narrator is

chiefly a product of self-absorption, and the degree of

eccentricity serves as a yardstick to the extent of

selfishness. While we do not, then, completely identify with any narrator, we extend a far greater share of

sympathy to Bramble than to Tabby. Some degree of sym­

pathy for all of the narrators seems assured by the relatively comic innocence of their selfishness in com­ parison to the world of Bath and London against which we

see them. Though reflecting the moral lives of the

travelers, the English cities do so with magnified inten­

sity; even Tabby’s thorough selfishness dims, harmlessly ridiculous, against the more glaringly pernicious back­ drop of egocentric London society.

Despite the narrators' failings, we extend them our sympathy and wish them good fortune. Although our wishes for Tabby are certainly less ardent than those for

Bramble, we quickly recognise that any change in Bramble's condition is necessarily contingent upon his sister's successfully snaring a husband. Indeed, since improved moral health for any of the narrators is clearly tied to his achieving some degree of unity with his fellow travelers, we must, in desiring good fortune for any narrator, extend our wishes (in varying degrees) to all.

The insights and changes brought about by the narrators' travels institute such unity. In the course of their exposure to Scottish life and manners, Smollett's narra­ tors expand as moral beings, and their enlightenment is reflected in their increased accord among themselves.

One integral aspect of this accord is the general con­ sensus of their accounts in the second half of the novel; moral and perceptual development are, in the world of

Humphry Clinker, inseparable. As the comic action ushers in the reconciliation that we wish for Smollett's narra­ tors, the ironic disparities between letters disappear, thus diminishing not only the distance between the writers, but the distance between writers and reader. Our sympathy for the narrators grows with their reliability: insofar as he moves beyond the selfishness of his earlier, in­ adequate point of view, each narrator becomes more sym­ pathetic. The decreasing distance between narrators and implied reader heightens the reader's satisfaction with the travelers' union and is essential to the novel's form--which lies in the comic pleasure we experience at the travelers’ initial separation and ultimate recon­ ciliation. The values and assumptions of moral travel are important to Humphry Clinker and Johnson's Journev in very different ways. The concerns of moral philosophy dictate the kinds of things that Johnson, as traveler, finds worthy of observation. Travel, for Johnson, is one aspect of the intellectual quest to comprehend the human condition with more breadth and certainty; Johnson's performance as traveler mirrors his performance as critic and biographer. The interests and occupations of the moral traveler define the form of the Journey, which seeks to portray the nature of moral judgment. Smollett is writing not as a traveler, but as a novelist; the ideas and values of moral travel play a far less visible part in Humphry Clinker, a part thoroughly subordinated to the very different ends of a comic action. The values of moral travel are implicit to the novel and essential in controlling the reader's attitude toward the perceptual shortcomings of Smollett's travelers. And the idea that travel is one major source of the experience needed to make and certify moral judgments stands behind the per­ ceptual and judgmental changes that are an important dimension of Smollett's novel of comic reconciliation. Notes to Chapter V

Henry Fielding, The History of Tom Jones. A Foundling, ed. Martin C. Battestin and Fredson Bowers, The Wesleyan Edition of the Works of Henry Fielding (^Middletown, Conn.]: Wesleyan Univ. Press; Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975). II. 6l4. 2 The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunvan to Beckett (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 197^), pp. 57. 67. 69, 70. -^See James L. Battersby, "Coded Media and Genre: A Relation Reargued," Genre. 10 (1977), 355, 357*

^Battersby, "Coded Media," p. 355. ^Iser is but one of a number of critics who equate the "form" of Humphry Clinker with something less than the sum of the novel's parts. John Valdimir Price also believes that Smollett has "loaded his work with several literary forms and formulas ..." (Tobias Smollett. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. Studies in English Liter- ature, No. 51 LLondon: Edward Arnold, 19733. p. 8). Tuvia Bloch discusses the novel's form entirely in terms of its narrative point of view; the form of the work is thus defined entirely by the first-person, epistolary format that Smollett employs as a means of comic expo­ sition ("Smollett's Quest for Form," Modern Philology. 65 [1967], 103, 110-13). M. A. Goldberg sees the novel's organization as being "more dependent upon theme than upon plot"; the novel's structure, Goldberg asserts, derives chiefly from Smollett's dialectical synthesis of the antithetical ideas of progress (England) and primiti­ vism (Scotland) (Smollett and the Scottish School:Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought LAlbuquerque: Univ.of New Mexico Press, 19593, pp. 175-76). Paul-Gabriel Bouce also argues that the virtuosity of the novel lies not in its "threadbare" plot, but in its complex "the­ matic structure": "There are three major articulations in Humphry Clinker, and, within the movements thus deter­ mined, a triple dialectic, socio-economic psychological CsicH and moral is developed" (The Novels of Tobias ^ Smollett. trans. Antonia White and Paul-Gabriel Bouce 183 184

[London and New York: Longman, 1976], p. 206). In con­ trast to Goldberg and Bouc^, Robert Giddings finds the novel a formal success, but a failure in its lack of serious thematic content: "The novel seems to have no moral themes to hold its parts together, and is only saved from diffuseness and incoherence by the very slender and plain narrative sequence" (The Tradition of Smollett [London: Methuen, 1967], pp. 141, 148); Smollett failed, Giddings claims, to notice the thematic chestnut that lay ripe at his feet: "There is a moral point made in the novel, and it is such a good one, it is surprising that Smollett, who seems for the most part unaware of it, should not have developed it more completely. It is the difference between the appearance and the reality" (p. 149). It is not clear why we should be surprised at Smollett’s failure to develop that of which he seems unaware, but Smollett has clearly failed to write Giddings' novel. Robert Sekora, in his generally ex­ cellent book on the idea of luxury in Humphry Clinker. reads the novel as a formal attack on luxury (Luxur~ The Concept in Western Thought. Eden to Smollett LBalti- more and London: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1977]» p. 218); I would argue, rather, that Smollett employs the traditional attack upon luxury (which Sekora's book defines) as one major element in his novel, subordinating that tradition to the ends of his comic form.

^Several critics discuss the novel as comedy. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Prince­ ton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957)* P- 179; Sheridan Baker, "Humphry Clinker as Comic Romance," Papers of the Michigan Academy of Science. Arts, and Letters. 46 (1961), 645-54; William Park, "Fathers and Sons— Humphry Clinker." Literature and Psychology. 16 (1966), 166-74; William A. West, "Matt Bramble's Journey to Health," Texas Studies in Literature and Language. 11 (1969)• 1197-1208; Robert Folkenflik, "Self and Society: Comic Union in Humphry Clinker." Philological Quarterly. 53 (197*0» 195-204. In an illuminating but brief reading of Humphry Clinker. John M. Warner, arguing what he sees as the development of Smollett's novels from satire to irony, discusses the use of multiple, unreliable points of view in Humphry Clinker and relates this technique to the novel's "expediting" movement from subjective isolation to social fellowship ("Smollett's Development as a Novelist," Novel. 50971- 72], 148-61).

"Oser, pp. 60-1. See also Charles L. Batten, Jr., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in Eight­ eenth-Century Travel Literature (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1978), pp. 21-4; Batten argues, 185 unconvincincingly, I think, that Humphry Clinker should not he read as a novel, hut as "a fictional travel hook" (p. 29). g The Expedition of Humphry Clinker. The Shakespeare Head Edition, 2 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1925). I, 3* All future references are to this edition and will he cited in the text hy volume and page. Q ^See Batten, p. 24; Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1967)» p. 204.

10Paulson, pp. 194-98; Thomas R. Preston, "Smollett and the Benovolent Misanthrope Type," (PMLA, 79 (1964), 51-7; John F. Sena, "Smollett's Persona and the Melan­ cholic Traveler: An Hypothesis," Eighteenth-Century Studies. 1 (1968), 353-69; John F. Sena, "Smollett's Matthew Bramble and the Tradition of the Physician- Satirist," Papers on Language and Literature. 11 (1975). 380-96; Michael Rosenhlum, "Smollett as Conservative • Satirist," ELH, 42 (1975), 5?6. ■^Sena, "Physician-Satirist," pp. 381-95* 12 Splenetic distortion and overreaction were tra­ ditional characteristics of the melancholic traveler; see Sena, "Smollett's Persona," pp. 366-6 9 . See also Paul­ son, pp. 197-98; Rosenhlum, pp. 569-71, 576. 13 Jk suggestion of constipation also occurs in Ta- hitha's command to Mrs. Gwyllim (just quoted) "to have the gate shit" (I, 9). 14 Concealed benovolence is, according to Thomas Preston, characteristic of the benevolent misanthrope type ("Benevolent Misanthrope," p. 51)*

■^Images of gaseous bloating, diseased swelling, unchecked growth, and disasterous floods appear freq­ uently in Bramble's descriptions of the English cities and their inhabitants. The parvenu "cit" is "a mushroom of opulence" (I, 81), and Bath's newly built streets and buildings are "growing excrescences" (I, 51), 'the product of a swollen "torrent of folly and extravagance" (I, 53), a "flood of luxury" (I, 81). London, filled with rural residents swept to the city on the same "tide of luxury," is a diseased and "overgrown monster" (I, 123), a "mishapen and monstrous capital, without head or tail, members or proportion" (I, 128), growing, like "a drop­ sical head," at the expense of the body that feeds it (I, 186

123). Baynard's estate, a microcosm of urban vices, stands "in a fair way of being burst by the inflation of female vanity" (II, 148). The travelers themselves suffer from various ills amidst the "fetid effluvia" and "frowzy steams" of city life (I, 93). Bramble is swollen, if not dropsical (I, 26, 35)» while Chowder is "bloated" (I, 62) and Tabby flatulent (I, 64).

■^For an extended analysis of the moral importance of architecture to the novel, see John F. Sena, "Ancient Designs and Modern Folly: Architecture in The Expedition of Humphry Clinker." Harvard Library Bulletin. 27 (1979)» 86-113. 17 1 Lydia's depiction of Bath and London as para­ dises of miraculous enchantment (I, 55-6, 130-31) form an ironic counterpoint to Bramble's portrayal of London, a "paradise" (I, 91) of hellish conjuration. Lydia's descriptions are immediately undercut by her own narra­ tive, which corroborates the traditionally diabolic noise, stench, and confusion that Bramble finds in both cities (I, 56, 131). Winifred Jenkins, furthermore, finds that "the sarvants at Bath are devils in garnet" (I, 100) and even encounters the devil at Sadler's-wells, a place of "inchantment," in the person of the "fine gentleman" who exposes his "cloven futt" (I, 153-54). 1 ft The phrase, of course, also suggests the satiric fate of bad writing at the hands of pastry cooks.

■^For a more extended discussion of the language of both Win and Tabby, see Bouc£, pp. 335-40. See also W. Arthur Boggs, "Dialectical Ingenuity in Humphry Clinker." Papers on English Language and Literature. 1 (1965)» 327-37. 20 Paulson, p. 202. 21 John S. Farmer and W. E. Henley, Slang and Its Analogues. Ill (London, 1903; rpt. New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation, 1965)» 44; Eric Partridge, A Dic­ tionary of Slang and Unconventional English. 6th ed. (New York: Macmillan, 1967). PP^ 703» 1332. ^Faulson, pp. 201-02.

2-^See, for example, I, 69. See also Jery's equally detached description of Lismahago rescuing Tabby from the upset coach, a scene he describes as a dramatic episode portrayed in comic statuary: "She was supported by the 187

captain, distilling drops from his uncurled periwig, so lank and so dank, that he looked like father Thames with­ out his sedges, embracing Isis, while she cascaded in his urn" (II, 177). oh For a similar qualification, also responding to Bramble’s imagining of Dr. Lewis' objections, see I, 48.

2-^See Sena, "Physician-Satirist," pp. 387-89; West, p. 1205.

Paulson, p. 208; Sena, "Physician-Satirist," p. 396.

^ S e e Bouc^, pp. 232-36; Folkenflik, pp. 200-02. pQ For another view of this material, see Rosen- blum's discussion of Scotland and the paternal estate as the embodiments of Smollett's satiric norm ("Smollett as Conservative Satirist," pp. 572-75). on 7See Sena, "Ancient Design," for the general im­ portance of classical norms to the novel.

-^Sena, "Ancient Design," p. 108.

-^Sir Thomas Bullford, who entertains himself "by- exhibiting his guests in ludicrous attitudes" (II, 152), with neither thought nor sympathy for the consequences of his japes, also suggests the fate of the man who wills himself beyond the pale of society— repayment in his own coin (II, 155-64).

-^2See Park, pp. 166-67; Sekora, pp. 251-57* -^Not only does Lydia marry George Dennison, but the elder Dennison gives Tabby away, acting in "the office of her father" (III, 224). 24 Bramble's sympathy is perhaps drawn from his own experience. His description of Tabby as a thorn who has "become insensibly a part of my constitution," an ulcer­ ous "noli me tangere in my flesh, which I cannot bear to be touched or tampered with" (I, 87), is quite similar to his description of Baynard's accommodation and attach­ ment to his wife (II, 213). Bibliography

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