The Columbia History of the British Novel

also rewarded the reader's expectation for modernity and temporality by raising 'the contempo-148- rary city' (London, Edinburgh, Bath) to the level of major theme awaiting the satirist's lash for 'London's vile milk.' His sharp eye misses nothing in London's economies, traffic between import and export, conspicuous consumption, corruption, inflation, luxury, high living, late nights, and gluttony. All converge to a Swiftian type of decay that no amount of «romance» or «Quixotism» can abrogate.

The characters promote their own hobbyhorses: Matt a patriarchal view of society, which he extends from 'the body politic,' an old trope, to his own 'natural body' in his words 'an hospital these fourteen years'; Jery the leveling out of the social classes and systems of patriarchy to such extremity that social 'chaos is to me a source of infinite amusement'; Clinker, the ragged postilion and child of Methodist love whose real father is none other than Bramble, a desire to find out who he really is; Win the wish to see the 'inner light' of every spirit; and Tabby, the human embodiment of sex over sensibility, the demonic quest to market herself as marriage material. Even lesser characters have their hobbyhorses, for example, the grotesque Lismahago, a Scottish soldier scalped by North American Indians, 'a tall meager figure, answering with his horse, the description of Don Quixote mounted on Rozinante,' whose imagination dwells on his exotic adventures. Of the five main figures, Jery and Matt play off each other: young and old, sensible and irritable, rational and sentimental. Careful scrutiny of Bramble is needed before his type of sentimentalism is understood, but there are also similarities between the two men when it becomes evident that Bramble's earlier libertinism accompanied an ingrained benevolence. Indeed, this coupling of robust sexuality and human goodness seems to be one of Smollett's main themes, and literally produced the hero for whom the book is named, Humphry Clinker-Matt's real son.

The remarkable twist in character development is that Bramble's satiric proclivity wanes as he recovers the 'good life' (as described above). Smollett suggests through his satiric persona that the healthier we grow, the less we carp about the physical and moral decay surrounding us; and he defines «health» as equally partaking of 'mind and body.' Still, Smollett's materials did not end here. He catered to the reader's need for being 'right up to the moment' by inserting diverse subjects then hotly debated in Britain. Humphry Clinker is, after all, a novel published in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War and conceptualized during a period (the late 1760s) when the most basic ideas of liberty and freedom, democracy and government, isolation and nation-149- alism, were coming under fire. It is a postwar novel (as is Roderick Random, for a different war) as well as something else: a sociological treatise on the quality of life and the dangers encroaching on human happiness. Economics and luxury, pro and con, loom on every page, as does social commentary, and Smollett writes at his best in this last novel when anatomizing present conditions. Here, in a work that is the inverse of Greaves, an acquired historical narrative technique (Smollett had written prolific histories of England and Scotland) helped him less than a vivid prose style and energetic sentence structure, dominated by active verbs, adverbs, and pleonasms directed at the five senses.

Three of Smollett's topical subjects in Humphry Clinker make the point: the satire on Methodism, the incorporation of materials about the New World, and the philosophical treatment of the concept of regeneration. By 1771, readers of fiction had come to expect hostility to Methodism, with its mad enthusiasm, its professions of 'new light,' and its sudden 'epiphanic moments' (think of Fielding's attacks on such hypocritical Methodists as Blifil). Smollett's tack is different. He suggests that Methodism is an urban religion, the result of new forms of alienation in which city dwellers pay a quid pro quo for their separation from the land. Even Tabby's conversion to 'the New Light' implies dislocation from her native heath. In this critique of urban Methodism, Smollett reveals himself as a kind of English physiocrat, claiming that when people become ecologically uprooted and join a culture without 'a history,' they pay a price. The inclusion of exotic accounts of the New World (Lismahago's life among the Iroquois and Miami and his romantic adventures with Squinkinakoosta) is Smollett's way of addressing readers who are informed about foreign news.

Finally, his theory of regeneration is so intrinsic to the novel's main themes-the city and the country, primitive and civilized societies, the social classes and the professions, human health, leisure, travel, sex, marriage, luxury, simplicity-that it is impossible to imagine Humphry Clinker without it. What a different story this would be without the triple sets of weddings at the end, 'romantic closure' for all the travelers except Bramble, and-despite his continued celibacy-Bramble's own physical recovery on a rustic, if feudal, country estate in Scotland. The symbolic journey reflects Smollett's profound belief in the country over the city and in provincial integrity over urban decay; and what is regeneration if not the ability to begin anew and survive? But his version of bodily and spiritual rejuvenation is not Fielding's: it is not the -150- country estate, with its moral hierarchies and inscriptions of the providential order, which resuscitates the fallen and depraved, but a plain ethic of rusticity and simplicity; almost the belief that the return to nature and the land has the greatest healing effect on mankind.

With regard to literary history, Smollett was the first of the major eighteenth-century British novelists to descant freely on the dialectic between metropolitan and provincial values, a topic that mushroomed into national debate by the end of the century. For Smollett, regeneration occurred specifically by communion with rusticity, the only solace for one who had been dislocated by the jumble of city life, its violent assault on the physical senses, and the leveling and confusing of the social classes. Smollett had always been attuned to the theme of city versus country, and to the ways the new leisured classes were changing the face of Britain by leaving certain regions uninhabited and occupying others. But his idiosyncratic method in Humphry Clinker elevates place and setting and prompts him to include the inset stories of Baynard, Dennison and Lismahago. This, then, is a new version of romantic pastoral featuring the theme of res in urbis (the country brought into the city).

One other concern pertaining to Bramble is essential: the loop of 'mind and body' that runs throughout the story-a type of exuberant discourse derived from medical lore. Indeed, it may be that Bramble's prickliness and benevolence notwithstanding (the biblical Matthew) the reason his names begins with M and B is further to enrich the story along the lines of mind and body, just as Swift enriched Lemuel The Wanderer by calling him «Gulliver» (gull). Bramble's health is poor at the start, both in 'mind and body,' but Smollett the physician knew that his semiautobiographical protagonist would not mend until both mind and body improved. During the years (1761 to 1768) when Sterne was winning acclaim for Tristram Shandy, Smollett proposed a competing theory of the human organism based on a monism of the vital organic self: one in which mind and body were linked through nerve and sense in a perpetual neural feedback system. Bramble's benevolence as well as his irritability stem from precisely this neural physiognomy, as novelist and protagonist make plain that both are anatomical monists rather than latter-day Cartesian dualists.

This view suggests that a valid sense of selfhood occurs only when individuals consult their anatomies in relation to their souls, hence mind and body rather than either in exclusion. In his masterpiece, Sterne had proposed an equally vitalistic model, which centered on an -151- integrated system of animal spirits and nerves, for understanding the workings of the human imagination in relation to 'he springs of life.' But Smollett's version implies that we can understand Bramble for the princely heart he is-as a modern 'man of feeling'-only by consulting the psychoanatomical loop that pours out its impressions in 'letters to my doctor.' The incorporation of this neural material into epistolary fiction was another of Smollett's inventions, a concession to temporality that provided his readers with a sense that their novelist was working for them all the time in being 'right up to the minute.'

Smollett's achievement, then, in Humphry Clinker is various, brilliant if uneven, and in some fundamental way experimental once again. It is as if he had been searching all along for a new paradigm for the novel while working within competing models to Fielding, Richardson, and, self-consciously in the last years of his life, Sterne. As an acute observer of the social scene, particularly the contemporary «cannibalistic» city, he had no peer: his vision of the balance of power between the city and country is altogether different from that of Richardson, for example, whose plots thrive on socially aggressive and upwardly mobile middleclass families, like the Harlowes, who exploit the poor within the city, and pour money into their country estates (Harlowe Place) to ape the manners of the aristocracy. And even if Sterne, Austen, and others abjured Smollett's version of 'the raw and coarse' or failed to acknowledge their indebtedness to his work, it is hard to imagine their own novels without Smollettian predecessors. So much brick and mortar did he give to the temple of the English novel.

All his novels are in some rudimentary sense 'satirical'-but satirical in ways that embrace and incorporate realism, comedy, romance, and the picaresque. Moreover, the novels differ from each other, and it would be erroneous to think that all his books are constructed as 'simple satirical novels'-no better than to believe that Tristram Shandy is such. Smollett's loyalties in fiction-to satire, the picaresque, the comic and grotesque-altered from book to book, even changed within one book, and if we cannot appreciate why these divergent allegiances were so consequential for him, this has much more to do with our own sense of plot, character, time, space, and the rest of the Aristotelian unities in the aftermath of Jamesian fiction than with Smollett's sense of the developing