by Steven Moore
Yorick knows it is scandalous to suggest sexual allure plays a role in moral improvement, that there is often a “sexual motive for the moment of spiritual good” to quote Thirwell again (173), but he also knows it is hypocritical and obtuse to pretend otherwise. It’s no coincidence that moral instructors like Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, Smollett’s Narcissa, Fielding’s Amelia, Buncle’s beautiful braniacs, et al., are also sexually alluring, so Sterne teases “tartufish” (30) readers by way of hints, suggestions, double entendres, and innuendos insinuating a connection between sex and sentiment, from the novel’s enigmatic opening sentence “―They order, said I, this matter better in France—” (we’re never told what exactly “this matter” is) to its concluding ellipsis: “So that when I stretched out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s ” 273 Yorick keeps us guessing until the end whether he’s sincere or not: every sentimental epiphany is followed by a sensual afterthought, every self-congratulatory confirmation of the existence of his soul followed by a concupiscent glance at the next pretty face.
As the novel’s full title indicates, Sterne intended to add a second half that would take Yorick to Italy, but died before he could write it. But even this incomplete novel is a complete triumph, another breakthrough in English fiction. Describing it to his daughter in a letter (23 February 1767), he boasted, “I have laid a plan for something new, quite out of the beaten track,” and lets Yorick metafictionally draw attention to the “Novelty of my vehicle” (16). The novelty consists partly in writing a travel novel that is more about what passes in a man’s mind than what sights he passes, but mostly in the delightfully oblique style: the ever-shifting levels of irony, the daisy chain of self-praising/self-deprecating remarks, the interleaving of biblical rhetoric and bons mots, the Anglicization of French idioms, the sly indirection, the “translations” of body language, the throwaway characterizations—“two upright vestal sisters, unsapp’d by caresses, unbroke in upon by tender salutations” (149)—a flirty, squiggling manner that never allows the reader to get a firm grip on the narrator’s true feelings, to catch hold of Yorick’s
If this chapter were a novel—and it’s growing as long as one—then Tristram Shandy would be the climax, and what follows the denouement. It’s the last great masterpiece of 18th-century British fiction (save one), and in older literary histories, the 40-year period between the publication of the other one, Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771), and Jane Austen’s first novel, Sense and Sensibility (1811), was considered the British novel’s wilderness years; “after Tristram Shandy, it may be said [by McKeon, 419], the young genre settles down to a more deliberate and studied recapitulation of the same ground” plowed by earlier innovators. But it wasn’t a fallow period; authors explored various genres and modes, and though the results are not as impressive as the novels that came before, or that were written during the same period in Germany and France, they do have a small place in the history of the novel.274 Consequently, I will deal only briefly with the noteworthy British novels of the last part of the century, even though, from a different critical perspective, many of these deserve to be more than briefly noted. For convenience they are grouped into genres, and like Tristram Shandy, this will entail some chronological zigzagging.
QUIXOTIC QUESTS
A “more deliberate and studied recapitulation of the same ground” first seeded by Cervantes is what followed Tobias Smollett’s 1755 translation of Don Quixote, still considered the best in English by some (like Carlos Fuentes and Salman Rushdie). The popular concept of the Quixotic hero—a comic if not crazy idealist—had been maintained from Robert Anton’s Moriomachia to Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote, and the Cervantine style wielded brilliantly by Fielding and Sterne, but during the last part of the 18th century novelists began watering down the concept and letting the blade of Cervantic wit and irony grow dull and rusty.
Though obviously a great admirer of Don Quixote, Smollett simplified the complexity of the original in his fourth novel, The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves (1760–62). This was the first English novel to be serialized with illustrations before book publication, and reads like something written for a magazine audience, complete with cliffhanging endings to each chapter. Disappointed when his hopes to marry the beautiful Aurelia Darnel are dashed by her dastardly guardian, 30-year-old Sir Launcelot Greaves decides to distract himself by donning his great-grandfather’s armor and sallying forth on his steed Bronzomarte “to honour and assert the efforts of virtue; to combat vice in all her forms, redress injuries, chastise oppression, protect the helpless and forlorn, relieve the indigent, exert my best endeavours in the cause of innocence and beauty, and dedicate my talents, such as they are, to the service of my country.”275 Although the narrator asserts that one can tell from his eyes that “his reason was a little discomposed,” and his Sancho Panzan squire agrees he “ran mad for a wench” (22), he bears little resemblance to his seriously deluded, book-mad predecessors in The Extravagant Shepherd, The Mock Clelia, Pharsamond, and The Female Quixote. Sir Launcelot is a sensible, public-spirited man who later admits his knight-errancy was just a “frolic,” which he abandons as soon as he realizes it “might have very serious consequences with respect to his future life and fortune” (23). After a month of playing a costumed vigilante, he arranges to rescue Aurelia—by legal means, not chivalric—and marries her.
It’s a mildly amusing novel, with some knockabout farce among the minor characters—two of whom imitate the protagonist and become knights—and comes stocked with Smollett’s specialties: phonetically rendered dialect, an ex-sea captain who speaks in nautical terms, a comically misspelled letter, and funny names like Dolly Cowslip, Hodge Dolt, Richard Bumpkin, and Madge Litter. Some of the self-deprecating chapter titles resemble those in Don Quixote, such as 3 (“Which the Reader, on Perusal, May Wish Were Chapter the Last”) and 8 (“Which Is Within a Hair’s Breadth of Proving Highly Interesting”). Smollett acknowledges the premise is shaky: the villain of the piece, a misanthropist named Ferret (based on novelist John Shebbeare), mocks Sir Launcelot’s quest: “What (said Ferret) you set up for a modern Don Quixote?—The scheme is rather too stale and extravagant.—What was a humourous romance and well-timed satire in Spain, near two hundred years ago, will make but a sorry jest, and appear equally insipid and absurd when really acted from affectation, at this time a-day, in a country like England” (2). Smollett’s solution was to portray a character acting, as Sir Launcelot claims, “not in the character of a lunatic knight-errant, but as a plain English gentleman, jealous of his honour, and resolute in his purpose” (19). With Sir Launcelot as his champion, Smollett tilts against the disgraces of his time: the electoral process, the justice system, legal and medical practices, the prison system, and other social outrages, implying that it’s England that is mad, not Sir Launcelot. “I think for my part one half of the nation is mad,” a minor character says, “and the other not very sound” (6). Sir Launcelot rejects the ridiculous aspects of knight-errantry that Don Quixote embraced, but insists “chivalry was a useful institution while confined to its original purposes of protecting the innocent, assisting the friendless, and bringing the guilty to condign punishment” (18), all of which he accomplishes. Smollett’s knight-errant is not a crazed idealist but a good British citizen; everyone should be as “mad” as he is.
The idea of Don Quixote as the pattern for an English gentleman takes on a Christian hue in The Fool of Quality (1765–70), a five-volume pedagogical romance by the Irish dramatist and poet Henry Brooke (1703–83). The most distinctive feature of the first half of the novel is the dialogue between the author and the reader (unctuously called “Friend”) at the end of each chapter, where they evaluate the progress of the novel and discuss issues raised in it.276 In the dialogue at the end of chapter 4, the author claims the greatest modern hero is not a king or military leader but a “madman” to be found “In a fragment of the Spanish history bequeathed to the world by one Signior Cervante
s.” Quixote is his hero because he devoted himself to “the righting of wrongs, and redressing of injuries, lifting up the fallen, and pulling down those whom iniquity had exalted.” He admits the knight’s madness caused some difficulties, but his heart was in the right place: “If events did not answer to the enterprises of his heart, it is not to be imputed to the man but to his malady” (1:152–54). Ignoring (like most readers) the fact that Don Quixote did more harm than good to people, the author later praises him as “the finest gentleman we read of in romance” for two specific qualities: his “charity to the poor” and his “delicacy of behavior toward” women (2:196–98)—Don Quixote as a gentlemanly philanthropist.
The foolish knight of Brooke’s novel is Henry Clinton, second son of an earl, who is neglected by his father and educated instead by his rich uncle, who kidnaps him and raises him to practice selfless Christian benevolence. As the goody-goody boy grows up, he is compared a few more times to “a knight in romance,” and for his unconventional, idealistic behavior he, like Don Quixote, is labeled by conventional people “a fool.” (Someone actually pins that on his back at a royal reception.) But his uncle and author make it clear that Clinton takes his cues not from romance novels but from the New Testament, and as the novel progresses it turns into religiose mush, heavy on sentimental tales of ruin and redemption, and aimed at the kind of reader who listens to the elder Clinton’s sob story: “I love to weep! I joy to grieve! It is my happiness, my delight, to have my heart broken in pieces” (3:49). Readers today are more likely to react to the novel as Mr. Meekly does in the final volume: “Let me go, let me go from this place, my lord, cried Meekly! this boy will absolutely kill me if I stay any longer. He overpowers, he suffocates me with the weight of his sentiments” (5:22).
This is a shame, because The Fool of Quality gives promise at the beginning of a more Cervantic novel. The title comes from a sardonic line in Pope’s Dunciad (1:298), and there’s a reference to Swift’s Tale of a Tub in the impudent dedication. The preface begins, “I hate prefaces. I never read them, and why should I write them?” and the author sounds like Tristram Shandy when he discusses his publication plans with the reader:
Fr[iend]. How many volumes do you expect this work will contain?
Aut[hor]. Sir, a book may be compared to the life of your neighbour. If it be good, it cannot last too long; if bad, you cannot get rid of it too early.
Fr. But, how long, I say, do you propose to make your story?
Aut. My good friend, the reader may make it as short as he pleases. (1:70)
The “Friend” later doubts whether the author “laid any kind of plan before you set about the building” (1:221). Again like Sterne, Brooke fills his novel with fables, interpolated histories, sermons, “sentimental observations and pertinent digressions” (1:247), even a lengthy formal essay on the “beauties” of the British constitution (which can be skipped, he says, “if the reader loves amusement preferable to instruction”).
But the repetitious sentimental situations, wildly coincidental reunions, unexpected inheritances that lift good people out of undeserved poverty, and young Clinton’s Christlike perfection overwhelm the novel’s unconventional qualities. Many critics hated it but John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, loved it and issued an abridged edition in 1781, not surprisingly dropping the metafictional devices and the few other interesting things about The Fool of Quality, including the title. He changed it to The History of Henry, Earl of Moreland, identifying him as a member of “quality” rather than as a holy fool, like Don Quixote.
John Wesley makes a brief appearance in The Spiritual Quixote (1773) by Richard Graves (1715–1804), but he would have hated this keen satire on Methodism, a cult that appealed to the worst sort of people, according to most novelists of the period, other than pious ones like Richardson and Brooke. (In Tom Jones, Blifil joins them at the end; Pompey the Little nips at their heels; Captain Greenland guys them.) Graves returns to the original concept of Quixote as a deranged enthusiast who is derided rather than respected for his idealism. In a funk, 25-year-old Geoffry Wildgoose falls under the spell not of chivalric romances but of 17th-century Puritan tracts, real books like The Marrow of Divinity, The Crumbs of Comfort, Honey Out of the Rock, and Directions for Weak Distempered Christians to Grow Up to a Confirmed State of Grace—the last two of which Graves retitles Honeycombs for the Elect and The Spiritual Eye-salves and Cordials for the Saints and Shoves for Heavy-arsed Christians (1.4). Enlisting a local cobbler named Jeremy Tugwell as his Sancho Panza, he sallies forth to preach the lessons from this “crude trash” to the British rabble, with comic results. A blow to Wildgoose’s head while preaching knocks the sense back into him near the end, and after an edifying talk with an established clergyman, he ends his spiritual adventure and returns home.
Like Don Quixote, The Spiritual Quixote begins with a facetious fanfare of front matter—dedication, a “Prefatory Anecdote” by the editor explaining how he acquired the manuscript, a postscript, an advertisement, another dedication (by the putative author, Christopher Collop, “the comely Curate of Cotswold”), and an introduction—and like Cervantes, Graves includes interpolated stories, mock-heroic diction, and essayistic digressions, including an “Essay on Quixotism.” Here he defines Quixotism as a “frantic notion” brought on by an “absurd imagination” that leads to error: Don Quixote “mistook windmills for giants, and a harmless flock of sheep for an army of pagans,” while Wildgoose sees average British citizens in the grip of “the powers of darkness” due to ignorance of the true (Methodist) message of the Bible (2.3). That message privileged faith over works, which appealed to those who felt free to engage in riotous behavior as long as they “believed.” As in A Tale of a Tub, dissenting religion is a cover for sublimated sexuality: a landlord who has observed Methodists says “there is nothing but whoring and rogueing among them” (5.2), confirmed by one enthusiast named Deborah who pants, “Such ravishing ministers. They come so close to the point; and does so grapple with the sinner! They probe his sores to the very quick, and pour in such comfortable balsam!” (5.3; her emphasis). At one prayer meeting, a 13-year-old girl cries out “that she was pricked through and through by the power of the word,” which Graves quotes directly from Methodist founder George Whitefield’s Journal.
The Spiritual Quixote is a smart, cleverly written satire—it’s always fun to see religious rubes roasted—but it breaks no new ground. It is set in the 1740s and was begun around 1757, and thus really belongs with the first generation of Fieldingesque novels of the ’50s. Its style and manner were somewhat dated by the time it was published in 1773, but that didn’t prevent it from well-deserved popularity, and it remains one of the finest English novels of the last third of the 18th century. But Graves also diluted the concept of Quixotism: Geoffry Wildgoose is a full-strength example, but in the “Essay on Quixotism” the author mentions “another species, or rather slighter degree of Quixotism, which proceeds merely from . . . a desire of imitating any great personage whom we read of in history,” which is usually harmless, even admirable, as is the desire to reform abuses: a philosopher Wildgoose meets tells him “I cannot reflect with patience upon the many absurd practices and opinions which prevail in the world, and have often been tempted to turn itinerant myself and sally forth in order to reform mankind, and set them right in various particulars. [¶] When I hear of a father’s marrying his daughter against her inclinations, and sacrificing her happiness to her grandeur, I am ready, like the Spanish Don, to challenge him to mortal combat, and rescue the unhappy victim from the power which he abuses” (4.11). Graves even extends Quixotism to include an animal-rights advocate.
This notion of Don Quixote as an admirable reformer began to supersede that of the deluded busybody: the statesman Edmund Burke was called a “political Quixote,” which was considered an insult by some, but which he took as a compliment.277 The complimentary sense persists in late 18th-century novels like The Philosophical Quixote (1782) by John Harcourt
and Samuel Dennis—an epistolary novel about a country apothecary who is a little too enthusiastic about recent discoveries in science, but is a benevolent person, not a mad scientist—and The Amicable Quixote (1788), an anonymous novel in which the Quixote is merely a nice guy who amicably courts and marries a nice woman. This diluted sense of the term also pervades William Thornborough, the Benevolent Quixote (1791) and The History of Sir George Warrington; or, The Political Quixote (1796–97), both by sisters Jane and Elizabeth Purbeck; in the latter, a man flirts with revolutionary ideas, especially those expressed in Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, then realizes such ideas are too idealistic and settles back into the comforts of a constitutional monarchy. By the end of the century, the adjective “quixotic” settled into its modern sense: someone who is quaintly idealistic rather than dangerously wrong, which is not what Cervantes meant at all.
