Читать книгу The Member And The Radical - John Galt - Страница 4

One of the first reviewers of The Member, when it was published in 1832, said that he wished that ‘Mr. Galt would do nothing but write imaginary autobiographies’. He was thinking not only of The Member itself, described on its title page as ‘An Autobiography’, but also of Galt’s earlier works, Annals of the Parish (1821) and The Provost (1822). As a novelist Galt was innovative and diverse in subject matter and technique and this particular kind of fictional autobiography was one of his happiest inventions.

There was, of course, nothing new in novels which told the life story, or part of it, of an imaginary character in the first person. Daniel Defoe did that in Robinson Crusoe and Tobias Smollett in Roderick Random and there are innumerable other examples. Galt’s originality lay in some special characteristics of his own, apart from his concentration and brevity. One of these qualities was noticed by Samuel Coleridge in The Provost, but it applies to the others as well. He called it an ‘irony of self-delusion’. The imaginary autobiographer gives away his weaknesses at every turn, evidently without the slightest suspicion that he is doing so. He continues, Coleridge says, in ‘a happy state of self-applause’. Galt gives each of his subjects a personality entirely appropriate to his circumstances, with a style and habit of speech to match, sustained throughout without a single false note.

Another of Galt’s strengths is the smeddum and force of the Scots of Irvine and Greenock where he spent the first twenty-five years and the last five of his life. In a prefatory note to one of his last short stories Galt spoke of ‘the fortunate circumstances of the Scotch possessing the whole range of the English language, as well as their own, by which they enjoy an unusually rich vocabulary’. This richness is less apparent in The Member than in the earlier novels, but again this is appropriate. The imaginary writer, Archibald Jobbry, has spent most of his life in India and can be expected to have lost much of his Scots.

In his Autobiography Galt said that he was convinced ‘that not in character only, but in all things, an author should have natural models before him’. The Member was no exception. Galt says of it:

The gentleman I had in view as the model, was immediately discovered in the House of Commons, and I suspect he is possessed of too much shrewd humour to be offended with the liberty I have taken. I have represented him as neither saying or doing aught, that, I think, as the world wags, he may not unblushingly have done, nor which, in my heart, I do not approve.

Parliament and Whitehall were familiar territory to Galt. He had acted for years as a lobbyist on behalf of the Union Canal between Edinburgh and Glasgow. In 1820 he was appointed to act as the agent for a group of claimants who had suffered loss when the United States invaded Canada in 1812. This involved him both in taking charge of the settlement of part of Ontario and in protracted negotiations with the government.

Galt insisted that his books like the Annals were not novels, but something quite different. They had no plot, and, he wrote, ‘the only link of cohesion, which joins the incidents together, is the mere remembrance of the supposed author. It is, in consequence, as widely different from a novel, as a novel can be from any other species of narration’. He used various phrases to describe them: ‘a kind of treatise on the history of society’, ‘theoretical histories’, or ‘philosophical sketches’. He even went so far as to deny that he hoped to entertain the reader:

I only desire it to be remembered by my readers that, I had an object in view beyond what was apparent. I considered the novel as a vehicle of instruction, or philosophy teaching by examples, parables, in which the moral was more valuable than the incidents were impressive. Indeed it is not in this age that a man of ordinary common sense would enter into competition in recreative stories, with a great genius who possessed the attention of all. I mean Sir Walter Scott.

In his irony, humour and richness of character Galt is one of the most entertaining of novelists. His denial that he had any such intention is therefore curious. Perhaps he was betraying a twinge of Presbyterian conscience over the frivolity of writing novels intended only to entertain. His sympathies with Presbyterianism, indeed with the spirit of the Covenanters, are clear from his great historical novel, Ringan Gilhaize.

At all events. The Member and The Radical are the most obviously ‘philosophical’, or at least political, of his novels. They were both published in 1832 shortly before the passage of the Reform Act which began the process of extending the right to vote in British parliamentary elections to a larger part of the population. Controversy over this measure, which was promoted by the Whigs and opposed by the Tories, was then at its height. The two novels were clearly intended as contributions to the debate. This was another of Galt’s innovations. The Provost was a novel of political satire on the local level. Sir Andrew Wylie (1822) had introduced episodes of political intrigue. The Member and The Radical were the first novels in our literature centered on parliamentary politics.

Archibald Jobbry, the narrator of The Member, is that familiar figure in nineteenth-century literature, the Scot who has made a fortune in India and returns to buy an estate in his own country. He finds that the peaceful enjoyment of his retirement is disturbed by the demands of his kith and kin, ‘all gaping like voracious larks for a pick’. His solution is to buy himself a seat in Parliament, under the old corrupt system before the Reform Act, to get his hands on some government patronage to satisfy them. Having twice survived what he calls ironically his ‘popular election’, he settles down to draw what advantage he can from his support of the government. He finds this easy for ‘a conscientious man’, because he sees little distinction between Whig and Tory. He begins to take a ‘sort of attachment to the House’ (still a not unusual phenomenon) and develops some quite enlightened ideas. Mr Jobbry is no die-hard Tory, but he is inevitably opposed to parliamentary reform, or in his words, ‘giving the unenlightened many, an increase of dominion over the enlightened few’. He sees that his day is over as the Reform Act looms and his seat loses all marketable value. So he retires to his Scottish estate.

The obvious reading of The Member is that it is a satire aimed at the corruption of the pre-Reform parliament, a contribution to the case for reform, and therefore support for the Whigs and an attack on the Tories. If we can believe what he says himself in his Autobiography, this was not Galt’s intention:

In the Member, I tried to embody all that could, in my opinion, be urged against the tories of my own way of thinking, and I was not aware that it could be deemed very bad, till I saw my friend, Dr. Bowring’s account of it, in the Westminster Review, in which he considered it as a reluctant concession to the spirit of the times. I am sure, however, that Mr. Jobbry is not made to make any acknowledgement unbecoming an honest man of the world, nor such as a fair partizan may not avow. [Then follows the passage, which I quoted above, about the ‘model’ for the character.]

Galt, as here, often describes himself as a Tory, but this is difficult to reconcile with the attitudes which appear throughout his writings. He is no respecter of inherited privilege from the monarch downwards and he is particularly contemptuous of landowners. His sympathies lie with the poor and oppressed and it is not only in The Member that he describes the Tories as corrupt. In the Last of the Lairds, for example, a character says of ducks in the rain that they are ‘as garrulous with enjoyment, as Tories in the pools of corruption’. A man of Galt’s sharp intelligence was unlikely to be unaware of this paradox; but I do not know of any attempt that he made to explain it.

The William Holmes MP, to whom the book was dedicated, was a real person, described in the Dictionary of National Biography as ‘the adroit and dexterous whip of the tory party … a most skilful dispenser of patronage’. Galt tells us that the dedication was written by J.G. Lockhart, the son-in-law and biographer of Sir Walter Scott, who, like Galt, was associated with the Edinburgh publisher, William Blackwood. Galt says of the dedication that it was a clever jeu d’esprit, and so admirably in keeping with the character of Jobbry that he was proud to have it ascribed to him.

The Member was described on the title page as ‘By the author of The Ayrshire Legatees etc. etc.’. Even without this, it is clearly from the same pen as the best of Galt, shrewd, ironic, humane and enriched by Scots vocabulary and turn of phrase. This time, the irony is directed more against the institution than the individual. The Radical, in contrast, is so different in atmosphere and style that it would be impossible on internal evidence to conclude that it had been written by the same man. Once again the style is appropriate to the narrator; but, unlike any of the others, it is dry and abstract with a strong flavour of self-obsessed fanaticism. This time Galt presumably had no model, for the book is not in his usual style of social realism. It is not so much a novel with satirical overtones as a satire disguised as a novel. It is entirely in English, although a schoolmaster is given the name Mr Skelper.

The narrator, Nathan Butt (which has a significance to an ear tuned to Scots) is more of an anarchist than a radical. From his schooldays onwards he is opposed to all authority. His goal is ‘nothing less than [naethin but] the emancipation of the human race from the trammels and bondage of the social law’. He wants to abolish property, religion, law, marriage and all ‘coercive expedients in the management of mankind’; but he still marries and expects absolute obedience from his wife. Like Mr Jobbry, he is no democrat because ‘the wise are few, and the foolish numerous’. He is prepared to pose as a Whig and support parliamentary reform as a means to his own ‘high and great purposes’. Although elected as a Whig, his election is declared invalid. He will not be in the House to vote for the Reform Bill, which was in fact passed in June 1832, only a few weeks after the publication of the book.

Although the approach of these two books to parliamentary reform is apparently so different, there is perhaps a common idea behind them, which may also be a clue to Galt’s idiosyncratic Toryism. It was a commonplace of Scottish Enlightenment thought, expressed for instance by Adam Ferguson, that society was so complex a mechanism that any attempt to change it was liable to have unforeseen and possibly disastrous consequences. Change should therefore be undertaken only when clearly necessary and after very careful consideration. Galt in his youth had steeped himself in the Greenock Subscription Library in the works of Robertson, Hume, Smith, Ferguson and the rest. Like Walter Scott, he accepted the doctrine of the need for political caution. What he is probably saying in The Member is: ‘All right. The House of Commons is unrepresentative and corrupt, but it does not do much harm. It is probably better to leave it alone.’ The Radical makes the point that an apparently moderate and desirable reform may open the way to extremists bent on the destruction of all law and social order.

In his Autobiography Galt said that The Radical was more philosophical in its satire than The Member. His object was ‘to show that many of these institutes, which are regarded as essentials in society, owe their origin to the sacrifice required to be made by man, to partake of its securities’. He did not think that he had failed in writing it, but he had to admit that it had not sold well. He thought that this might be because it had dealt in truths that were unpalatable at the time. In his Literary Life Galt said that the sales of both books had been unsatisfactory; ‘although on the Continent, they have attracted more attention than any other product of my pen, they have almost been still-born here’.

The Member was published in January 1832 and The Radical in May. The unsold sheets of both were issued as a single volume, The Reform, in November. While Blackwood’s held the copyright of Galt’s best-known novels and kept most of them almost continuously in print for more than 100 years, they were not involved with the two political novels. The Member was not reprinted until Ian A. Gordon edited an edition for the Scottish Academic Press in 1973, which was reissued as a paperback in 1985. This text of The Member and its notes is used with the kind permission of Professor Gordon. The Radical is reprinted here for the first time since its original appearance.

Paul H. Scott