Published in Comparative Literature Studies 33.1 (1996): 15-34
Citizen of Whose World? Goldsmith's Orientalism
The eighteenth century saw not only the rise of Britain as a great empire, it saw also the emergence of the modern spirit of cosmopolitanism, represented substantially in the flood of foreign-travel and foreign-observer fictions let loose by Europe's, particularly England's, newly-enlarged access to the rest of the world. The relationship between the growth of the Empire and these texts, although obvious, is more complex than it at first appears. Whether as trenchant satire on English customs, mentalities, and politics, or as a fanciful evocation of exotic mores, the traveller's story is in complex ways informed by England's growing geopolitical visions--its developing demand for foreign markets and its quest for power. This paper attempts a reading of Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World (1762). It deviates from received views of Goldsmith's cosmopolitanism and seeks to reveal an Orientalist discourse in his work--his ideological use of China, or of what was known of China in eighteenth-century Britain, which can be said to have been filtered already through European lenses. I will argue that this use and the confrontation between fact and conventional distortion in Goldsmith's work paradigmatically disclose the "Orientalizing" rhetorical and conceptual strategies built into the eighteenth-century British geopolitical lexicon.
The perspective of my argument stems form Edward Said's work on "Orientalism," which he defines as
the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it, in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient.
It is a hegemonic Western discourse, a "systematic discipline" by which European cultures ever since the early modern period "was able to manage--and even produce--the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically, and imaginatively."[1] But it
is not a mere political subject matter or field that is reflected passively by culture, scholarship, or institutions; nor is it representative and expressive of some nefarious 'Western' imperialist plot to hold down the 'Oriental' world. It is rather a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical and philological texts. (Or., 12)
My paper also benefits from G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter's work on "exoticism." In their discussions of the "exotic" as among the many categories to be "scapegoated for reasons of difference," they point out that it is created to "guarantee the normalcy" and therefore, I might add, the superiority "of its inventors and persecutors."[2] The Orient, then, as a cultural Other, is a prominent paradigm of the "exotic." However, Said's deliberation on Orientalism is not without its problems, and has consequently drawn the attention of a number of critics.
In a discussion of the "formidable" methodological problems in Said's work, Dennis Porter points out his vacillations over the opposition between truth and ideology. Having given the reason why this contradiction goes unresolved in Said's book as the incompatibility of the thought of Said's two acknowledged maitres, Foucault and Gramsci, of discourse theory and hegemonic theory, Dennis Porter offers three alternatives to Orientalism: first, the heterogeneity of the literary works and their capacity for internal ideological distanciation that is usually absent from political tracts or statesmen's memoirs. Second, the possibility that more directly counter-hegemonic writings or an alternative canon may exist within the Western tradition. Third, the feasibility of a textual dialogue between Western and non-Western cultures.[3]
In his essay Porter reflects on only the first alternative. To support the alternative Porter studies the "generic heterogeneity, which he takes to be "the most obvious quality" in T. S. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence's book is chosen because it is widely resented as a book which in many ways "lends itself to a reading that relates it directly to the tradition of hegemonic Western discourse which Said has dubbed Orientalism" (155). While admitting there are "passages that reproduce a generalized Orientalist discourse," Porter cites "textual dissonances that constitute a challenge to Western hegemonic thought" (156). As evidence, he quotes a passage that describes Ashraf camel riders, and comments,
if this is the East, it is an East that recalls the heroic age of Greek epic; it is a reminder of the classical European past. . . . The desert Arab becomes in part an expression of the age-old nostalgia for the supposed lost wholeness of the primitive world, a modern noble savage. (159)
So in effect, what that passage says to Porter is that the East has value only as a foil to European glory, a glory that only belongs to the past, and its worth is solely nostalgic. Nostalgia is, of course, a way of mourning the dead. In the dominant Western ideology of history as progress, an East that is associated with the past is associated with stagnation and death. As such, it warrants not only change but alterations that conform to the West. In addition, he points out that the scene is made against "contemporary European world weariness," and comments, "it is far from clear that in the implied contrast between Western civilization and Eastern barbarism--the traditional Orientalist trope--the good is on the European side" (159). Where the good lies may very much depend on the reader. But the perspective which sees the "fact" of "Eastern barbarism" clearly lies with the European West. Not only does the passage fail to provide a counter discourse to Orientalism's preconceptions, but Porter's reading of the passage, contrary to his purpose, discloses a state of mind hardly heterogeneous to the ideology to which an alternative is being sought.
Of Lawrence's challenge to Western hegemony, another piece of evidence, which Porter finds within this admittedly Orientalist text and with which he concludes his search, reads: "We got off our camels and stretched ourselves, sat down or walked before supper to the sea and bathed by hundreds, a splashing, screaming mob of fish-like naked men of all earth's colours" (159). On that scene Porter comments, "The imagery of baptism and of a fresh emergence from the sea as a collectivity of races . . . amounts to a politically Utopian idea as well as a homoerotic phantasm. It is in any case an altogether unthinkable thought within the discourse of Orientalism as defined by Said." The irony here is that Porter sees only "fish-like naked men of all earth's colours" as an image of the collectivity and fraternity of all races, but does not see that his baptism is an imagery laden with Christian-European aesthetic, nor that "utopian ideas" and "homoerotic phantasms" are typical ways in which the exotic other is fantasised. Not only the evidence, but also Porter's comments, fit unwittingly right in with Orientalism, which is defined by Said, among other things, as "a distribution of geopolitical awareness," or I might say geopolitical unconscious, into the aesthetic.
Porter's second alternative can be seen as in the same spirit with his first. They can together be called "internal" alternatives. Since Goldsmith's The Citizen is generally known as promoting an idea of cosmopolitanism, it may be looked upon as evidence to the alternative canon that Porter considers. Therefore, my reading of that book can also be taken as a response to Porter's strategy, especially to his second alternative.
1. A Cosmopolite Contextualized
The Citizen of the World first appeared as a series of letters each published in a different issue of the Public Ledger, a mercantile daily paper, during January 1760 - August 1761, a period when Britain was about to become the biggest colonial power. Britain's "industrial revolution" had made access to new markets and sources of raw material a necessity which, among other things, triggered off political conflicts in Parliament over whether Britain was to remain a self-contained, isolationist nation, avoiding foreign and imperial entanglements, or whether it was to take advantage of its naval, military, and industrial strength and its position athwart the world's trade routes to expand into a great commercial world power. Britain eventually chose the latter. Having won the Seven Years' War ("The War for the Empire"), "Britain emerged from the Peace of Paris in 1763 the gainer by two subcontinents, Canada and India, with unsurpassed naval and military might, a huge war debt . . . and an irrevocable commitment to commercial and imperial expansion."[4]
Even though during that conflict he was expressly against the war and excessive colonization, "Oliver Goldsmith carefully crafted a reputation for being apolitical."[5] When he collected his "Chinese Letters" into a book, he changed that generally known title into The Citizen of the World. The move was "full of meaning."[6] As many critics note, he was intending to teach a cosmopolitan humanism, which would transcend political and national confines.[7] This cosmopolitan ideal was shared by many of the enlightenment philosophers or philosophes in Europe. Yet, the period was full of political and national issues such as the Seven Years' War, ministerial instability, and the coronation of a new king (George III). And inevitably Goldsmith's journalistic work addressed the topical, political issues that appealed to coffee-house readers of London newspapers and magazines (Taylor, 71). Goldsmith's political stance as a Tory loyalist opposing the Tory war policy is clearly stated in his journalistic "Chinese letters." In Letter XXV, Goldsmith has his protagonist meet a politician who supports the idea of expanding the British Empire. "We are a commercial nation," the politician contests, "we have only to cultivate commerce like our neighbours the Dutch; it is our business to encrease trade by settling new colonies: riches are the strength of a nation" (75).[8] Cultivating commerce and building the strength of the nation, which provided the rationale behind Britain's colonialist endeavours abroad, sound like such innocent motives. But in this context the commerce was cultivated with fire and sword, and the strength of the English nation built at the expense of other nations. The politician's views disclose the typical egotistic imperialism which shows no consideration for the independence of the colonies being thus settled, or for the strength of those nations. Goldsmith exposes this position in order to refute it. But paradoxically, the concerns of that position not only backed Britain's expansions which provided background for Goldsmith's writing, but were shared by Goldsmith himself despite his superficial rejection of expansionism.
For Goldsmith, an enlightenment humanist and cosmopolite, such overt colonialist inclinations were hardly commendable. He articulates his reasons against expanding the British Empire through the figure of Lien Chi Altangi, who is but Goldsmith thinly disguised. We should know, Lien Chi says,
that extending empire is often diminishing power; that countries are ever strongest which are internally powerful; that colonies, by draining away the brave and enterprising, leave the country in the hands of the timid, and the avaricious; . . . that too much commerce may injure a nation as well as too little; and that there is a wide difference between a conquering and a flourishing empire. (79)
These observations are drawn from the story of the kingdom of Lao, a parable obviously patterned on the British colonization of North America. In that passage Goldsmith expressed his general political stance against colonization. Yet if one reads closely, one soon finds that these comments do not constitute philosophical opposition to colonialism and cultural chauvinism as such. Rather, they boil down to a concern over possible weakening of the colonial power. They reflect considerations neither humanistic nor cosmopolitan, but more like an alternative tactics of imperial power politics. They are not about the injustice of political and cultural domination inflicted upon the colonized people, but about how much commerce exactly the empire needed to impose on other nations. Simply put, Goldsmith was preoccupied with the well-being of his Empire. His warnings about excessive colonization and his posture against carrying out the war with France should "[b]y no means . . . be viewed as anti-war idealism" (Taylor, 81).
One could argue that in making the above points Goldsmith is merely showing that even patriotism should not argue for colonial expansion, and that a broader view and a more generous spirit of cosmopolitanism is just what Goldsmith is propagating in his Citizen of the World. Yet the cosmopolitan sentiments embodied in The Citizen and informed by the empire's broadening geopolitical experiences necessarily express an imperialist politics even though this politics remains to a great extent implicit and is masked in particular by the rhetoric of humanistic cosmopolitanism.
2. Goldsmith's Use of China
Early eighteenth-century Europe was fascinated with China. The accounts of that Eastern land by Jesuit missionaries, such as Louis Le Compt and J. B. Du Halde,[9] though with inevitable partiality, brought Europe new conceptions of social customs and new theories of human behaviour. Their accounts served as sources of information on China for Goldsmith. By the time he was writing, many had grown tired of chinoiserie, and his persona often reflects this weariness. Nevertheless, China could still be presented as a utopia idealized for its cultural history, wisdom, and perfect mores in contrast to English and European ways.
But China, of course, was appreciated not for what it was - i.e., not for what it can be argued that even Goldsmith knew it to be - but as an available and effective vehicle of Goldsmith's cosmopolitan sentiments or his criticism of the British. Although, on one side of Goldsmith's satire, China as the Other is often frivolously appreciated as the ideal, on the other side, it is also tacitly itself the butt of criticism. Donna Isaacs Dalnekoff aptly finds that
[w]hile Chinese nationality renders the protagonist a convenient satirist, it renders him an equally convenient object of satire. Goldsmith exploits the associations of China with extreme formality, pedantry, and ceremonialism to turn his philosopher into a figure of ridicule.[10]
This is true not only of Lien Chi the protagonist but also of China and things Chinese in general. They all provide, at once, contrasting images to ridiculous English idiosyncrasies and images to be ridiculed.
China, as an abstract utopian construct, is admired for many things. First of all, there is the Chinese political system. In Letter XLII, Fum Hoam boasts of Chinese excellence in "the greatest of all arts, the art of governing kingdoms and ourselves." He says of China that "the whole state may be said to resemble one family, of which the emperor is the protector, father, and friend"; the emperors "in general considered themselves as the fathers of their people; a race of philosophers who bravely combated idolatry, prejudice, and tyranny" (140-41).
Yet the validity of any such smugness seems preempted in Goldsmith's narrative. In Letter IV Lien Chi is shown as quite taken aback by the oddity of English politics. In our well-managed country, he writes to Fum Hoam in Pekin, "the Emperor endeavours to instruct the people, in theirs, the people endeavour to instruct the administration"(10). Although Goldsmith is known to have advocated greater monarchical power and can therefore be taken as genuine in his criticism of such anarchism as the people instructing the administration, his criticism of the Chinese politics is also unmistakable. Europeans have always mythologized Oriental political systems by associating them with despotism as well as benevolent tolerance, and Goldsmith's treatment of Chinese government is a case in point. His praise of the Chinese political system is feigned, and its insincerity is easy to detect in that the ostensible positive view is soon rebutted by hard "facts." Fum Hoam writes to Lien Chi in Letter VI:
Our great emperor's displeasure at your leaving China, contrary to the rules of our government and the immemorial custom of the empire, has produced the most terrible effects. Your wife, daughter, and the rest of your family have been seized by his order, and appropriated to his use; all except your son are now the peculiar property of him who possesses all.(17)
The son, whom Fum Hoam had saved from his pursuers, later turns out to have fled China, and to have fallen into captivity in the hands of barbarians. The grieved philosopher cannot but lament, "Every account I receive from the east seems to come loaded with affliction"(67). The ill consequences of acting contrary to the so-called Chinese "rules of government" and its "immemorial custom" extend even to remote areas where "[t]he governors, and other officers, who are sent yearly from Pekin, abuse their authority, and often take the wives and daughters of the inhabitants to themselves," and where due to such arbitrary and incompetent administration "cities are plundered" and the emperor's "subjects [are] carried into captivity" (25-26). Thus from the topmost to the lowest echelons of Chinese government, administrators methodically "abuse their authority," notably by taking other people's wives and daughters for their own use - and this particular abuse is notable because the exotic is therein also erotic. Instead of affording a fine and ideal example of combatting "idolatry, prejudice, and tyranny," the Chinese administration does exactly the opposite--it practises them. To redouble the irony, Lien Chi is made naively to exclaim, "How little does our wise and good emperor know of these intolerable exactions!"(26)
Chinese politics may be a disgrace to the millennia-old ethics, civility and politeness of China, but these, nevertheless, would appear to deserve some praise. "In China," for example, "if two porters should meet in a narrow street, they would lay down their burthens, make a thousand excuses to each other for the accidental interruption, and beg pardon on their knees; if two men of the same occupation should meet here [in London], they would first begin to scold, and at last to beat each other"(314). The Londoners surely want civility, but the Chinese sort of civility betrays hypocrisy. In another instance, Goldsmith notes that "[t]he very Chinese, whose religion allows him two wives, takes not half the liberties of the English in this particular," that is, in promiscuity (22). By giving such ostensible credit to the Chinese, Goldsmith is, of course, criticising the English who "keeps as many wives as he can maintain." But he is clearly using a double-edged weapon: the old Chinese practice of polygamy, which in Goldsmith's account of Chinese religion appears to be methodical, gets at least its share of the criticism - and this is very much at the expense of China, as part of the mysterious and evil ethos of the "Orient." Goldsmith's satire participates blatantly in the wilful European concoction of the exotic. By Goldsmith's time, it was common knowledge, that there has never been a "Chinese religion" as such. The same material that provided Goldsmith with information on China convinced the philosophes, as it should have done Goldsmith, that China could do "with a minimum of dogmatic religion or even no religion at all".[11] Further, as Goldsmith might equally have known from these sources, no religion in China touches on polygamy, therefore there is no "allowing" or forbidding to talk about. To claim that the Chinese had a religion, the way the English do, and that it limited the number of wives one was allowed to "two," is a clever contrivance. The opposition between English and Chinese practice in this respect is set up in a way that both get derided. But whereas the criticism of the English aims at its improvement, the Chinese manners become fictionalized.
The Chinese sense of beauty, as well, is purposely distorted and denigrated in Goldsmith's narrative. Lien Chi nostalgically pictures "the small-footed" "beauties of China" as follows, "How very broad their faces; how very short their noses; how very little their eyes; how very thin their lips; how very black their teeth." Except for the small feet, which were in fact considered a criterion of beauty during a certain span of China's history, all of these supposed marks of beauty would be incomprehensible as criteria in the "Chinese" context apart from their imaginary opposition to European qualities, and the black teeth part in particular is a transplant.[12] Briefly, Goldsmith half-lifts his mask of the Chinaman and comments, "Here a lady with such perfections would be frightful"(7). This latently derisive perspective is not only momentary or exceptional. In a seemingly inadvertent, but telling, way, Goldsmith backs it up in another letter where Hingpo slanders the "daughters of the east, whose education," he comments, "is only formed to improve the person and make them more tempting objects of prostitution!"(204) The positively contrasting figure this time is quite overtly the "beautiful Christian" Zelis, perfect in body and mind, whom Hingpo always admires and eventually chooses to marry, and who turns out in the end to be a native of England. At first glance, the cosmopolitan idea of such interracial union may appear commendably unprejudiced. However, whereas the Oriental man must use the Anglo-Saxon woman in the most courteous manner possible, the Western gentlemen can take the daughters of other peoples for what use they please. Whether as a nation where the wives and daughters of others are often available for free use, or where one is allowed two wives, or where all women are considered potential prostitute, depending on the mood of the viewer, China unmistakably functions in Goldsmith's text as one of the exotic Oriental locales onto which white male Europeans are authorized to project, or where they might be expected to act out, their sexual fantasies, recklessly and guiltlessly.
Rousseau and Porter call "the invention of images of alienness which were simultaneously critical (of Europe) yet condescending" towards the exotic natives "yet another twist in the changing evaluation of the exotic, sometimes superior, sometimes inferior, and sometimes simply instantiations of 'alterity'" (7). Although this is said of the turn exoticism took in the nineteenth century, it can be said equally well of Goldsmith's manipulation of China. Once China the Utopia has performed its functions, it is replaced with China in "reality" - if it were only reality. At any rate, in the reality as defined by the novel, China is a kingdom, for all its past and idealized glories, now obsolete, where the living are indiscriminately persecuted and from which they must flee, especially if they tend to become citizens of the world. It is as if a resplendent civilization in theory as well as in history turns into a wasteland or dark abyss once it is encountered in present-day reality. This is a small wonder, for typically "Europe was disposed increasingly to treat the exotic as the obsolete: a vestige of an earlier order of things which could not, would not, should not, must not, survive the test of time" (Rousseau, 14). Furthermore, the desolate and obsolete "reality" of exotic China as seen in The Citizen is mostly fictitious, fabricated by Europeans, and further fabricated by Goldsmith. It is simply an invented reality.
Invention is the essential way in which the Orientalist manages the Orient. Arbitrary management of China was prevalent in eighteen-century Britain - one of its manifestations being the China fad, or chinoiserie, which was later mocked by many including Goldsmith. The Citizen offers a good case of such satire for study. Here the management of China proceeds on at least two levels: first, the knowledge of the Orient and of China collected "from fictions every day propagated here, under the titles of eastern tales and oriental histories" (108), and, second, the assiduous and admirable efforts made by the Chinaman (Goldsmith) in yet another fiction to "straighten" things out. Instances of these reported fictions and the Chinaman's putative attempts to correct them are numerous. When the Chinese traveller is invited to a dinner given by a lady of distinction, instruction about China is imprudently forced upon him, instead of being sought from him. Such instruction ranges from the use of chopsticks to the function of similes and metaphors in Chinese rhetoric (XXXIII). Ill-grounded English assumptions about China are so widespread and self-assured that pedants argue about China while a Chinese looks on. More than once Goldsmith's Chinese philosopher is shocked into exclaiming, "Heavens, this man pretends to know China even better than myself!"(258) Goldsmith is ostensibly indignant at such presumptuous assumed knowledge about China. He expresses this feeling through the mouth of his Chinaman, after a gentleman "talked of Chinese cities, mountains, and animals, as familiarly as if he had been born in Quamsi, but as erroneously as if a native of the moon," thus:
I could not avoid smiling to hear a native of England attempt to instruct me in the true eastern idiom; and after he looked round some time for applause, I presumed to ask him whether he had ever travelled into the east; to which he replied in the negative; I demanded whether he understood Chinese or Arabic; to which also he answered as before. 'Then how, Sir,' said I, 'can you pretend to determine upon the eastern style, who are entirely unacquainted with the eastern writings?' (110-111)
These accusations, well placed and well justified, can be equally turned on Goldsmith himself. For, with perfect knowledge that he, like the accused English gentleman, was himself a "native" of Britain and had neither travelled to the East nor understood Chinese (or Arabic!?), Goldsmith has the audacity to assert - still in the voice of the Chinaman - that "[i]n the east, similes are seldom used, and metaphors almost wholly unknown." His Chinese is even made to neglect his chopsticks, just to go against those at the dinner who make a mystic association of China with chopsticks. Chopsticks may have been treated as excessively fascinating, but to deny that the Chinese use them at all is certainly no less an absurdity. Again, at a first level of misrepresentation, if it is ever so absurd to assert, as one dinner guest does, that "the Chinese never eat beef," but just "Bear's claws" or "Bird's nests," the retort by the "real" Chinese is an equally outlandish second-level distortion. Even if the Chinaman has never tasted such rare dishes as either "Bear's claws" or "Bird's nests," as a student of Mentius, the sage who happened to take "bear's palm" as preferable to fish to make a point in one of his better-known essays, he should not be "utterly unacquainted" with these delicacies. Furthermore, it would be disgracefully ignorant if he were not versed in one of the three canonical modes of versification, namely the "bi," or metaphor, let alone if he utterly denies its use in China. In fact, evidence shows that Goldsmith had knowledge of the Chinese use of metaphors. "In the half-serious, half-humorous Preface Goldsmith tells us that 'the metaphors and allusions are all drawn from the East. This formality our author [i.e. Lien Chi] carefully preserves."[13] Goldsmith's satirical virtuosity should, of course, be given its due. Deliberately, and with his tongue in his cheek, he constantly exploits and subverts the available knowledge about China to make his points. However, the effect, and not a totally innocent one, is an indistinguishable mixture of facts and fiction, exactly what the exotic and the "Oriental" are fashioned to be.
Strikingly, Goldsmith's Chinese philosopher frequently uses the word "east" interchangeably with "China" and takes "Chinese or Arabic" as the language needed in order to know this "east" or China. The east is, of course, mapped out only in relation to the sovereign West. And so far as the European is concerned, all the nations and cultures thus mapped out are just instances of the Other, which is to be treated as such - it does not matter whether China or India or Turkey is in question, or whether the narrative about them consists of facts or fiction or a conglomeration of both. This narrative is the "Orient."
Another instance of the "Orientalizing" management of China is in Lien Chi's descriptions of gardens in his country. After some complaints about English gardening, the philosopher avows that
there is scarce a garden in China which does not contain some fine moral, couched under the general design, where one is not taught wisdom as he walks, and feels the force of some noble truth or delicate precept resulting from the disposition of the groves, streams, or grottos.(102)
While this general statement may seem rather acceptable (for can it not always be argued that we do learn from nature as well as from humanly made works of beauty?), Lien Chi's illustration of it with his own gardens in Quamsi is quite a different matter. The passage to his gardens, he tells us, leads to two gates. The righthand gate, which teaches virtue, has the motto "PERVIA VIRTUTI." It is "planned with utmost simplicity, or rather rudeness; . . . dragons and serpents were seen in the most hideous attitudes, to deter the spectator from approaching; and the perspective view that lay behind seemed dark and gloomy to the last degree" (102). The other gate, the gate of vice, appears "light, elegant, and inviting;" it bears the words "FACILIS DESCENSUS" but leads eventually to endless misery. To associate dragons chiefly with hideousness, let alone to put dragons and serpents together, is a European conflation; it is a conflation in which the malignity of the European dragon is imposed on the people whose very culture it represents. Such an allegorical garden plan as Lien Chi's makes sense only to those educated by the itinerary of John Bunyan's Christian.
When, in Letter XLVIII, this one-time Chinese mandarin says that "a mandarin of China thought a minute acquaintance with such mechanical trifles [as painting] below his dignity"(163), either he is revealing his total ignorance of the mandarins' universal cultivation in calligraphy and painting - of the fact that even the Emperor Zhaoji of Song Dynasty was a proficient painter, and Emperor Qianlong an acclaimed calligrapher--or he is, again, deliberately confusing facts with fiction. The chronology in the succeeding tale confirms the latter. It tells of "the kingdom of Bonbobbin, which, by the Chinese annals, appears to have flourished twenty thousand years ago"(163) - and which, by its name reminiscent of the much inflated Swiftian exotic land of Brobdingnag, is unmistakably an exaggeration that reveals Goldsmith's satirical inclinations. This obviously deliberate echo and anachronism can only be explained as Goldsmith's satiric manipulation of China to direct subtle sarcasm at the boasts made about China's history in the context of the European fad of chinoiserie. It can be said either that Goldsmith took advantage of the by then popular appetite for things Chinese in order to revile China, or that he used China as an absent and silent Other that would serve as a convenient target in his attack on the English. Both may be true, but the evidence given here suggests that the former is a much more consistent effect of The Citizen. In any case, China is severed from what it really is, and in the process is mythologized or invented. Such management of China necessarily takes part in the pervasive "Orientalizing" rhetoric of eighteenth-century Britain's geopolitical awareness.
3. The World and Its Citizens: Goldsmith
The geographical extent of Goldsmith's world, as covered in these letters, seems to include the vast expanse between China and Britain, or the Eurasian continent - other parts of the globe are scarcely mentioned. Yet in this shortchanged but nevertheless enormous world, there seem to be, at the first glance, only two bright, civilized spots. One is China in the east, to be sure. The other is Britain in the West - even though, or perhaps just because, the British have their minor absurdities, for they can be seen as absurdities of a civilized people just as savages and barbarians have their primitive virtues (346). Most other nations and peoples are in an uncivilized or even barbaric state. In Asia, the Persians have become a barbarous race: "[a] nation once famous for setting the world an example of freedom is now become a land of tyrants, and a den of slaves. . . . Thousands pine here in hopeless servitude, and curse the day that gave them being"(117). Other peoples, including "Goths, Huns, Vandals, Saracens, Turks, Tartars, Myriads of men," are but "animals in human form, without country, without name, without laws, outpowering by numbers all opposition, ravaging cities, overturning empires"(302). European nations, granted, have had their share of civility, but, alas, Russia is "relaxing into pristine barbarity"(192); the German empire is "on the eve of dissolution"(193); "Sweden, . . . though now seemingly a strenuous assertor of its liberties, is probably only hastening on to despotism;" the Dutch are "without a friend to save them in distress, and without virtue to save themselves, their government is poor, and their private wealth will serve to invite some neighbouring invader;" only the French "are imperceptibly vindicating themselves into freedom," which, nevertheless, cannot yet be guaranteed (194).
Finally, in reading on, one gradually realizes that China is also, though more subtly, excluded from the civilized world. It is an inhuman place that tellingly resembles Persia. We remember the fate of Lien Chi's wife and daughter. His son Hingpo almost becomes a slave of the cruel Chinese emperor and has to escape at the risk of his life, just as he later falls into the hands of a cruel Persian lord from whom he escapes. China is actually said to be "declining . . . fast into barbarity": "her laws are now more venal, and her merchants are more deceitful than formerly; the very arts and sciences have run to decay"(219). It is even suggested that the Chinese are like the savages of the "desolate region" of Siberia: "the uninterrupted commerce between China and Russia serves as a collateral confirmation"(346). In a word, China is not fit for truly human habitation - especially for a citizen of the world.
China, in particular, is a stagnant society; it hardly ever changes - at least for the better. Comparing himself in Europe with his friends in China, and also Europe with China, Lien Chi deploringly remarks, "I wander, but they are at rest; they suffer few changes but what pass in my own restless imagination; it is only the rapidity of my own motion gives an imaginary swiftness to objects which are in some measure immovable" (218-9). Goldsmith's conceptualization of China, in other words, partakes of the same classic Orientalism that was to be crystallized in Lord Alfred Tennyson's celebrated "Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay"[14] in the next century.
Such a stagnant, obsolete, and exotic country essentially provides only a foil for the British Empire, the last hope that remains for the world.
Exoticism offered home truths; from China to Peru, each society had its very own moral message, as Goldsmith suggested in the Traveller, applicable to the courts and capitals of Europe (and Goldsmith saw particularly clearly how exotic models simultaneously flattered and flayed European manners). (Rousseau, 11)
Goldsmith's management of the Orient is not really in the interest of a cosmopolitan world, but addresses home Britain, which is "simultaneously flattered and flayed." What China is, Goldsmith does not care - he could easily have replaced China with any other exotic place, and have done his job equally well. Goldsmith is thus by no means a Sinophile, as is sometimes suggested, but rather he sees China as just an example of the "other," and a vicious one at that. What he actually cares for is first and foremost his own people.
For all the absurdities of Londoners - their affectations, vanity, and politics - Goldsmith finds Britain as truly great, both in its own history and in relation to the rest of the world, both ethically and geographically. By his time, according to Goldsmith, "the nation had already achieved a reputation throughout Europe as the 'land of philosophers and of liberty'"[15] - his ideal land. Indeed, Goldsmith notes that "[t]he empire of England now happily finds itself in the most glorious circumstances it has hitherto ever experienced; more formidable abroad, and more united at home" (quoted in Taylor, 79). Such high appraisal of the British empire pervades The Citizen. In this vein, Goldsmith tell a parable about a "Chinese" prime minister who, upon being banished for alleged failure in governing his nation, requests to be sent to a "ruined town, or desolate village in the country [he has] governed." The Queen grants the request as reasonable; but not being able to find such a place, she concludes that the country has been well governed, for "[h]ow can that country be ill-governed which has neither a desolate village nor a ruined town in it?" Times are good and Goldsmith's country is prosperous. So what if his countrymen have some eccentricities, buy two wives, fear mad dogs, wear powder and wigs, and so on?
Flaying one's own people does not automatically imply a cosmopolitan attitude. Denouncing the pettiness or provincialism of the British may be intended to exhort them to contribute to creating a more cosmopolitan world, and it may urge them to prepare themselves for it. Goldsmith's intention in calling his book Citizen of the World, we remember, is to teach benevolence to Englishmen first and foremost. However, though Englishmen need such teaching, they are superior precisely in being capable of improving from it. The cosmopolitan vision is based on ethnocentrism. Flattering his own people and their empire is Goldsmith's constant strategy in these letters.
Commenting on the last letter, in which Hingpo and Zelis get married and become "fixed for life here"(412) in England, Charles A. Knight observes, "The two young people will now get married, and in so doing they potentially provide Lien Chi . . . with a home and country which he lost at the opening."[16] The British world may give some people of other cultures a home and country, provided that they transform themselves almost into Englishmen; but it certainly does not include or accommodate the barbarous ethos from which they come. The world, an inhabitable one, is effectively a Eurocentric world, and more to the point, or much more reliably, it is an Anglocentric one.
"The Citizen of the world is, of course, the Wanderer Altangi, who so often in his acts shows himself cosmopolite, and a 'lover of man'" (Brockington, 15); Hingpo is potentially another citizen of the world. Both of them travel through the world, the father in search of truth and happiness, and the son following his father's footsteps. In transforming themselves into citizens of the "world," both Lien Chi and his son forsake China, as China does them. On the only occasion when Lien Chi expresses his wish to go back to China, it is because he wishes to die where he was born. But even the strong desire to return home to die is eventually abandoned. In abandoning China, this citizen of the world identifies himself with the English. Even as "an enemy to nothing in this good world but war," he says,
I have interested myself so long in all the concerns of this people that I am almost become an Englishman; I now begin to read with pleasure of their taking towns or gaining battles, and secretly wish disappointment to all the enemies of Britain. (292)
This declaration of the philosopher's sentiment should, of course, fare well with its intended audience the patriotic British public, for the speaker is, after all, a loyal British subject in the guise of a citizen of the world.
Other citizens of the world are also Englishmen, who alone, Goldsmith believes, are "capable of such exalted virtue"(71). Particularly striking among those universally benevolent English who come to the relief of French war captives is "one who writes these words upon the paper that enclosed his benefaction. The mite of an Englishman, a citizen of the world, to Frenchmen, prisoners of war, and naked"(71). Here "a citizen of the world" stands seamlessly in apposition to "an Englishman." Another citizen of the world may be the Man in Black, with whose universal benevolence Goldsmith identifies himself, as his sister remarked (Taylor, 89). Apart from Englishmen, in reality or in disguise, not a single other citizen of the world can be found in the whole book published under this title.
In case restricting that "exalted virtue" to the English alone might seem too prejudiced, Goldsmith makes some qualifications. In his essay "On National prejudices," which appeared while the "Chinese Letters" were well under way, Goldsmith makes clear who are the intended readers whom he wants to teach to be "citizens of the world," and what his world chiefly, if not exclusively, consists of. He complains, "We are now become so much Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards, or Germans, that we are no longer citizens of the world."[17] Citizens of the world will be Europeans including "Englishmen, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Spaniards, or Germans," et al, less their "national prejudices" and their provincial absurdities. They certainly do not include those "animals in human form" that Goldsmith so detests. Taking into consideration the fact that Goldsmith had travelled "everywhere,"[18] which is supposed to serve "to remove prejudices" and foster cosmopolitan sentiments, but which turns out to be nowhere beyond Europe, one is left with little doubt that Goldsmith's "world" is nothing more than an ethnocentric European vision, fostered by his own prejudices and colonial sentiments.
4. Conclusion
Goldsmith, unmistakably, annexes his "China" to Europe. China is, as has been shown, a projection of Goldsmith's European ideal and/or fantasy, a figure in contrast to English idiosyncrasy, an exotic locale of strangeness and abnormality--in European eyes. Simply put, what China in reality is Goldsmith neither knew well nor cared; what is useful to him is that China is either the same, or different, in reference to Britain or Europe. Even where he did have some knowledge, he would readily manage it to make the evidence fit his binary schema. Goldsmith's cosmopolitanism, as applied to the "Orient," becomes nothing short of "Orientalism"; and Orientalism is a thinly covered form of colonialism. As Rousseau and Porter point out, insinuations of exotic, strange, therefore inferior, therefore sinister cultures and peoples, in the "dinner-table observations of diplomats, . . . could provide legitimations for European colonialism, or at least hegemony" (6). Similarly, Goldsmith may oppose Britain's practices of colonization, but not its colonialism, which he himself practices in the form of discourse.
In literary criticism, Goldsmith has always retained the image of an apolitical humanist and cosmopolite until Taylor probed the politics of his journalism. However, no study until now has attempted to decipher the politics of his cosmopolitanism. As the present paper has tried to show, this politics, when understood in its historical context, emerges as a masked accomplice to British colonialism, and it fails to qualify as an example of an alternative canon to Orientalism, if it existed, within the Western tradition.
McGill University
Notes
I am indebted to Professors Michael D. Bristol and David C. Hensley for invaluable advice in shaping the argument and refining the style of this paper.
[1]. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978) (hereafter Or), 3.
[2]. "Introduction to Exoticism in the Enlightenment (Manchester and N.Y.: Manchester UP, 1990) (hereafter "Rousseau"), 4.
[3]. Dennis Porter, "Orientalism and Its Problems," Colonial Discourse and Post-colonial Theory (ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993), 151.
[4]. Donald Greene, The Age of Exuberance: Backgrounds to Eighteenth-century English Literature (New York: Random House, 1970), 77-78.
[5]. Richard C. Taylor, "The Politics of Goldsmith's Journalism," in Philological Quarterly , Winter, 1990, 71 (hereafter "Taylor").
[6]. W.A. Brockington, ed., The Citizen of the World (London: Black & Son, 1895), "Introduction," 15.
[7]. See ibid., and David Wei-yang Dai, "A Comparative Study of D'Argens' Lettres chinoises and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World", in Tamkang Review, 10 (1979), 183-97.
[8]. Unless otherwise indicated, quotations followed only by numbers in parentheses are taken from Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (London: Routledge, 19--).
[9]. Le Compt's Nouveaux Memoires sur l'Etat Present de la Chine and Du Halde's Description geographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l'empire de la Chine appeared in French both in 1696, and in English in 1698 and 1736 respectively.
[10]. Donna Isaacs Dalnekoff, "A Familiar Stranger: The Outsider of Eighteenth Century Satire", in Neophilologus, 57(1973), 124.
[11]. For the way the philosophes used accounts of China, see William W. Appleton, A Cycle of Cathay: The Chinese Vogue in England during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, New York: 1951, and Basil Guy, "The French Image of China before and after Voltaire," Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol.21, 1963. Arnold H.Rowbotham, in "China and the Age of Enlightenment in Europe", Chinese Social and Political Science Review, 19 (1935), 176 - 201, also discusses the contribution Chinese atheism made to the Enlightenment.
[12]. In his annotation of this particular passage, Brockington assigns teeth-dying to "the savages of Malay," and finds no place for nose-borers in China(p.168). This may be correct, but an inclination to cultural chauvinism is betrayed here and elsewhere in Brockington's notes. See, for example, his claim that in Chinese theatre "the dramatic unities are not observed; the representation is, of consequence, attended by all those offences to dramatic propriety, which arise from a want of 'scenic deception'. On the whole, a Chinese stranger in Garrick's London should have found more matter of admiration, than complaint" (p.173).
[13]. Martha Pike Conant, The Oriental Tale in England in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia UP, 1908) 192.
[14]. "Locksley Hall" (1842), 184.
[15]. J.A. Dussinger, "Oliver Goldsmith, Citizen of the World," in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 55 (19 ), 449.
[16]. In "Ironic Loneliness: The Case of Goldsmith's Chinaman," in Journal of English And Germanic Philology, 82 (1983), 348.
[17]. British Magazine, August 1760, quoted by David Wei-yang Dai, 187.
[18]. See Thomas J. Schlereth, The Cosmopolitan Ideal in Enlightenment Thought (Notre Dame & London: The University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 2.
