Misanthropy Read online

  Preston suggests that Smollett is a benevolent misanthropist (like Johnson) and a ‘risible’ one (unlike him). The benevolence appears, for example, in the fact that, at heart, Roderick is really something of an indignant ‘man of feeling’, given to a ‘natural tenderness’ he is all too ruefully aware the world will everywhere bruise, and indeed warp.30 This seems to square with what we know of Smollett himself. Friends and contemporaries like John Anderson testified to his being ‘a man of upright principles, and great and extensive benevolence’.31 Others repeatedly noted that he seemed exceptionally thin-skinned, a man with too much sensibility for his own peace of mind. It was as though the world could all too promptly break through to his innards and turn the knife there. What Preston might mean by Smollett’s ‘risibility’ is perhaps a little trickier to grasp. But he is conscious (as was Smollett)32 that, in the eighteenth century, the word had at least two senses, ludicrous (as today), and inclined or disposed to laughter. Like Molière, Smollett was certainly able to see the absurd side of the misanthropic position. At his very best, however, more subtly, he was also able to turn misanthropy inside out, wresting playfulness and even geniality from its very contradictions. This is the case, above all, with Humphry Clinker.

  In Humphry Clinker, Smollett takes a misanthropist, Matthew Bramble, and plays his misanthropy off against both other points of view and its own internal fissures. The epistolary form of the novel – it is composed of letters written by divers hands – allows for a shrewd awareness of how far ‘prejudice and passion’ may be ‘falsifying mediums’ (HC, p. 374). This perspectivism tends to leaven Bramble’s grumbles and makes them seem relative. Thus Smollett follows and counters Bramble’s evocation of London as an ‘immense wilderness’ where only the worthless, trashy and specious flourish (HC, pp. 118–20), as exemplified above all in the pleasure gardens of Ranelagh and Vauxhall, with a letter from his niece Lydia, who is ‘utterly unacquainted with the characters of mankind’ (HC, p. 43). She therefore has the capacity to imagine Ranelagh as like ‘the inchanted palace of a genie’ (HC, p. 123), a perception the more persuasive for its recognizing while containing the fact of metropolitan rowdiness. True, there are others in the novel, like Dr Linden and Lismahago, who at least sporadically coincide with Bramble in his crustiness, and indeed Lydia herself gets much closer to his position as the story wears on. But Bramble himself also keeps on warming to human life. His blood rises at every instance of insolence, cruelty and thanklessness, Smollett tells us, and he can seem as generous, kind-hearted and forgiving as the average philanthropist. It would seem that, as Bramble’s nephew Jery says, his uncle ‘affects misanthropy, in order to conceal the sensibility of a heart, which is tender, even to a degree of weakness’ (HC, p. 45).

  But there is also a more unusual aspect to Bramble. The novel repeatedly stresses his originality, what Jery calls his ‘oddity’ as a ‘humorist’ (HC, p. 36). This is evident, perhaps above all, in that he is a man possessed of a knowledge he persistently refuses to indulge to the full. Peculiarly and paradoxically, in Humphry Clinker, misanthropy looks increasingly like, at one and the same time, an extravagant position, a logical one, and an attitude that should be held at bay, handled with a certain ironical levity. This does not so much cast a doubtful light on the generalities on which misanthropy depends as it underlines the gulf that yawns between the vast panorama of humanity written off by the misanthropist, and the littleness of any particular life, including his or hers. The point is not that the little life is hardly sufficient basis for the big judgement. Rather, the tininess of a life raises the question of whether it is ever worth making any such judgement the centre of one’s view of things. Hence what is often Bramble’s decidedly wry and spirited tone, which has less to do with common sense than his commitment to his own short span, which is best not eaten up with detestations: preferable to remain of good temper, and try to escape noticing the world around one too much. The rural English idyll that Smollett’s virtuous few seem set to enjoy at the end of the novel is helpful in both respects.

  But the trouble with this conclusion is that Smollett’s physical imagination undercuts it, as it tends to undercut resistances to misanthropy throughout his work. The point about Bramble’s loathing of the miscellaneous, swarming crowds of Bath and London (‘without respect of rank, station, or quality, all those of both sexes’, HC, p. 66), their habits, attitudes and opinions, manners and relationships, is that it is very effectively underwritten by bodily loathing. This is notably the case in his great, repulsive vision of the waters of Bath, thick with the matter of scrofulous ulcers and other ‘scourings of the bathers’, ‘the straining of rotten bones and carcasses’, ‘sweat, dirt, and dandriff’ and ‘abominable discharges of all kinds’. The vision was clearly Smollett’s own. His Essay on Water sinks quite as deeply into such noisome matters. Bramble’s Bath is rife with contagion and infection, which for him is commensurate with ‘the folly and the fraud’ of its denizens, its character as a ‘sink of profligacy and extortion’. ‘But what have I to do with the human species?’ asks Bramble (HC, pp. 74–7). Smollett is clearly of the view that, at the very least, it is better to have nothing to do with any fluid that the species has bathed in. Note, too, Dr Linden’s virtuoso meditation on ‘the nature of stink’, chiefly that of faeces. It includes an account of his own habit of raising his spirits by ‘hanging over the stale contents of a close-stool, while his servants stirred it about under his nose’. It also contains details of ‘the last Grand Duke of Tuscany, of the Medicis family, who caused the essence of ordure to be extracted, and used it as a most delicious perfume’ (HC, pp. 43–6). Bramble will later expand on it in his catalogue of the ‘villainous smells’ of Bath (‘putrid gums, imposthumated lungs, sour flatulencies, rank armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues’, etc., HC, p. 96). Alongside the huge imaginative energy that Smollett invests in such passages, their stomach-churning verve and gusto, the sweetness, decency and order of the rural idyll look pallid and insipid.

  For all his geniality, Smollett’s misanthropy can seem fundamental to him and irreducible. It is inseparable from three pathological syndromes (pathological in that they appear everywhere in his work): his fascination with pain and torment, if not what his biographer Jeremy Lewis calls his ‘sadistic relish’ for them;33 his sustained focus on squalor and the ugliness of bodies; and his endless preoccupation with the insides of bodies finishing up outside them, most egregiously in the case of his scatology (preoccupation with excrements) and his descriptions of casualties in battle. Where the first is concerned, Smollett clearly had a seriously violent side, as in the case of his assault on luckless hack Peter Gordon.34 He transferred his sadism most completely to Peregrine Pickle, particularly in the early part of the novel of that name. But one might equally cite, among many such instances, the account in Roderick Random of the scourging of O’Donnell (with nettles), dwelling on its after-effects; the almost lascivious description of the whipping of Roderick’s schoolmaster (which Lewis points out was an entirely invented and strictly unwarranted addition to autobiographical fact); and the extraordinary, protracted account of the American Indians torturing Murphy in Humphry Clinker (HC, p. 228). Such passages often seem caught up in an appalled if somewhat obscure revulsion from both tormentor and victim which may leave room for laughter, but none for kind thoughts.

  There is certainly an abundance of ugliness in Smollett. People colour up vilely (red, orange, green) or go sooty with putrefaction. They have monstrous mouths and noses and grotesque chins, and bear scars, blemishes and pockmarks. Skin and flesh sag and hang down, or dry up and corrugate into numberless wrinkles. Of teeth there are often few (and rotting) or none. Expressions of emotion have extravagant and deforming rather than endearing effects, as when Lavement ‘grins like the head of a bass viol’ when he hears that his wife is (he supposes) unfaithful (RR, p. 106). But what strikes one most is what Lewis calls Smollett’s ‘lavatorial imagination’35 and, more largely, his obsession w
ith secretions, excretions, exudations, protrusions, extrusions, eviscerations and amputations. People squirt (sometimes tobacco-tinctured) spittle, ooze ‘froth and slaver’ and weep gummy or tearful slubber (RR, p. 20). They belch gin-soaked reproaches, and piss or pour chamberpots on each other. They are ‘stinkards’ (RR, p. 198): they smell horribly of shit, farts, decay, stale sweat or just booze and cheese. In battle, body parts are shot off or out and then bounce around or disintegrate, spraying others.

  All part of eighteenth-century life, my gruff pragmatist might snort, and a lot of it certainly was. We should also note Smollett’s training and work as a surgeon, particularly his experience, as a surgeon’s mate, of the harshness and cruelty of eighteenth-century British naval life. In the eighteenth century, moralists repeatedly harnessed bodily disgust to satirical ends (not least where armies and navies were concerned), as Hogarth and other contemporary artists amply testify. The titles of prints like The Festival of the Golden Rump and The Evacuation, or the Shitten Condition of the King of Prussia are indicative. But if Smollett’s most scathingly satirical work, The History and Adventures of an Atom, is also his most scatological, from the very start, when the Atom begins its textual life ‘discharged’ in a Dutch’s mariner’s ‘scorbutic dysentery’ at the Cape of Good Hope, the scatology takes on a life of its own and has its own independent raison d’être.36 This is typical.

  Furthermore, though the eighteenth-century realist in Smollett makes plentiful reference to sexual encounters, unlike his scatological passages, his descriptions of them are invariably matter of fact. Sex has to happen, it seems, but Smollett conveys no sense of any possible excitement or pleasure involved. Indeed, he seldom has any language for the physical beauty of men and women, save the conventional, hackneyed and vaporous. His evocation of the grotesque appearance of the bluestocking who takes Roderick on as her valet, with her ‘chin peaked like a shoemaker’s paring-knife’, her upper lip exhibiting ‘a large quantity of plain Spanish’, her habit of spitting in her snuff-box and wiping her nose with her cap and her decision to retain her urine so she can put out the ‘general conflagration’ when it comes (RR, pp. 218–19, 222), has power and vitality. By contrast, the descriptions of the bluestocking’s supposedly entrancing niece, Narcissa, whom Roderick will finally and quite improbably wed, are notably lacking in both. Narcissa’s body tends to disappear into clusters of abstract nouns. Smollett the moralist and man of sensibility wanted his novels to have a certain impact. He really did think that literature ought ‘to inculcate sentiments of virtue and honour’ and ‘inspire a horror of vice and immorality’.37 His attempts at such inculcation are sometimes so implausible as to seem almost self-mocking, as in the case of the transformation of the aristocratic, amoral, eponymous hero of The Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom into an obscure, retiring, pious Yorkshire doctor. But it is the sheer vividness of Smollett’s bodily imagination that, by generating effects quite apart from positive moral ones, most comprehensively overpowers his official messages. It ensures that his misanthropy continues to prevail to a greater extent than he might finally have wished.

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  The Anglo-Irish Swift is perhaps the misanthropist who looms largest in this book. He was a writer of great learning, wit and imagination and a scintillating ironic gift. He was also a man of rare conscience, acute sensibility and extraordinary penetration in moral and political affairs, though these qualities often drove him to despair. Furthermore, he was given to the kind of reckless, quicksilver, speculative audacity that one usually associates with later, more modern minds, like Nietzsche. Though he was a churchman for much of his life, his world sometimes seems closer to shelving into modern philosophical nihilism than finding a buttress in religious belief. Indeed, others continually questioned his faith. John Sharp, Archbishop of York under Queen Anne, understandably supposed that the man who wrote A Tale of a Tub had to be an atheist at heart, and Thomas Smedley’s verses after Swift’s death said more or less the same:

  And now, where’er his deanship dies,

  Upon his tomb be graven:

  ‘A man of God here buried lies,

  Who never thought of Heaven’.38

  Swift’s Argument Against Abolishing Christianity turns a beautifully toned, exquisite scorn on those whose religious commitment is fundamentally ‘safe’ and ‘prudent’, worldly and pragmatic. It is nonetheless evident that neither the argument nor the ironic perspective it implies refers us to any spiritual values, though we are told that they existed ‘in primitive times’ now superseded.39 Indeed, Swift’s writings and particularly his sermons and correspondence suggest that, unlike Pascal or Johnson, he was not a spiritual man. In effect if not in theory, the terrestrial appears to have been substantially his only world. This underwrote his immense rage against humanity, an aggrandizement of Juvenalian saeva indignatio quite foreign to the French philosopher and English sage. It helped make Swift’s specific form of misanthropy what it was.

  Swift’s saeva indignatio is devastating partly because he refuses to take at face value even the subtlest ruses by which people escape noticing the monstrosity of their own conduct, or the conduct in which they are implicated, rather cruelly laying both monstrosity and ruses bare. Paradoxically, the means by which he expresses but channels and controls his indignation also enhance and intensify it. There has hardly been a greater master of the ironical mimicry of a cogent but finally specious logic, a logic so plausible that it cannot but seem to coincide, not only with the way of the world, but also with a moral decision which, if imperfect, must surely be the best in the circumstances, and which we therefore cannot but make. The refined and civilized manner, the wise nod of the urbane and even (as far as is sensible) benevolent realist, the poised, equable, judicious, reasonable tone, the seemingly incontrovertible claim to the unquestionably superior, common-sense position: Swift not only grasps them with extraordinary accuracy, but takes them to a point where they reveal the moral inadequacy they have previously concealed, their failure to acknowledge the moral sum of their conditions. He thus repeatedly raises the shocking question of how far good sense may not also be moral madness. Indeed, making it sound mad is integral to his purposes.

  This is precisely the point with A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Ireland From Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country. Swift’s Anglo-Irish speaker argues a case for a demented political economy. The Irish Catholic poor are having too many children and are unable to support them. This not infrequently leads mothers to the shameful crimes of infanticide and abortion. The repercussions of this situation are a grievance to the Kingdom. The solution to the problem is to recognize that ‘a young healthy Child well Nursed is at a year Old a most delicious nourishing and wholesome Food, whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked or Boiled’, and to treat such children accordingly.40 Swift was exposing what he himself took to be an implicitly cannibalistic social system, as he slyly makes clear when he has his speaker suggest that the flesh of children will be particularly suitable to the diet of the landlord class, ‘as they have already devoured most of the Parents’ (MP, p. 24). But the great tour de force of the Modest Proposal is the passage in which the speaker decides that, on balance, it would be better not to extend his proposal to using under-14s to supply ‘the Want of Venison’. He well-nigh squirms with anxiety over so delicate an issue, concluding in the end that ‘it is not improbable that some scrupulous People might be apt to Censure such a Practice, (although indeed very unjustly) as a little bordering upon Cruelty’, and the extension would therefore be ill-advised (MP, pp. 25–6). The supposedly ‘scrupulous People’ represent a point of misgiving beyond which, even if one does not share their doubts, it is better not to proceed. Swift exactly captures the moment at which, by setting a limit to moral or political evil, a practical decision ends up making those indefinitely preceding it and bound by no such limit look not only prudent, shrewd and indeed just necessary, but also moderate as far as it was possible to be so, and even virtuous. This is
doublethink and doublespeak in action. It is the task of irony to expose it as such. Hence Swift’s biographer David Nokes calls him ‘a hypocrite reversed’.41 His misanthropy is a reversal, above all, of our most intimate hypocrisies.

  Swift’s art is profoundly unnerving, since it suggests that there is an absolutely imperious human will to comfort above all things. On the one hand, it reveals itself as a will to prosper, a desire for the good life however defined, intentness on promoting one’s own interests. On the other, it takes the form of incessant self-justification. This reflects an imperative need to believe in one’s pardonability, if not innocence, that will always ensure that one shrinks from any serious confrontation with moral truth. Here Swift partly follows La Rochefoucauld, who he asserted was his favourite author, finding his ‘whole character’ in him.42 Certainly, one can emerge from reading Swift only finally to shrug one’s shoulders again, and stay firmly on the side of good sense. One is perhaps almost bound to. Part of his aim, however, is to show us that the more this becomes a choice, the more obscene it looks. Yet he also tells us that such obscenity is the very stuff of humanity. This, if you like, is what the structure of our DNA actually looks like. So much is clear from another superb passage in A Modest Proposal: