Romantic Liberalism and the Juridical Comedy: Robert Bage’s Hermsprong

ANAHID J. NERSESSIAN Romantic Liberalism and theJuridical Comedy: Robert Bage’s Hermsprong C omedy’s conciliatory function—its aptitude for solving Mys­ teries, restoring fortunes, and making sure everyone who matters gets married—enables a rapprochement between literary romance and literary realism. It sands down the protuberant edges of what Samuel Johnson called “tale[s] of wild adventures” and molds them around the contours of the everyday and the ordinary.1 This is a very general, slightly distended claim, but it bears entertaining alongside the emergence of another sort of realism and that is the political realism ofthe Romantic period. By “politi­ cal realism” I mean to designate the descriptive and proscriptive account of how things are in the domains where earthly life meets historical moder­ nity, and where the saturation of experience by what we might very broadly call governance becomes a formal condition of “experience” as such. Yet this genre of realism is also romantic, insofar as it traffics in an aspirational orientation toward progress as a way ofmaintaining an impov­ erished but no less trenchant fidelity to the desire for utopia or, more sim­ ply, for better worlds and better ways of living in them. Realism in this sense designates a specific form of attachment to the political as a zone of utopian possibility, or what Hannah Arendt calls “the space ofappearance,” that is nonetheless constrained by the probabilistic framework within which political conventionality, or what we call politics as usual, unfolds.2 This essay tests realism’s alternately timid and imprudent energies, and it does so through a reading ofRobert Bage’s 1796 novel Hermsprong; or, Man as He is Not, a small-town picaresque that ends with the revelation that its eccentric American protagonist is really a wealthy British aristocrat in dis1 . See A Dictionary of the English Language: An Anthology, ed. David Crystal (New York: Penguin, 2007), 4952 . Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 199. SiR, 50 (Winter 2011) 639 640 ANAHID J. NERSESSIAN guise. Hermsprong is that rare item in the archive ofRomantic prose fiction: a comedic text that is genuinely funny. Furthermore, it uses humor to measure the distance between Bage’s “man as he is not,” and those charac­ ters who represent an archaic mode of power, based on the hereditary ownership ofland. Although Hermsprong turns out to have just this sort of power, he spends most of the novel in the closet, obfuscating his class posi­ tion rather than his sexual preference. Critics have disparaged this masquer­ ade as a contrivance that softens the novel’s satirical bite, but it is my claim that Hermsprong’s disjunction of class from manner, and the laughs he gets from it, narrate a foundational myth of liberal citizenship. As a form of control over the proliferation ofcomic effects, the humor ofHermsprong in­ stalls an intentional actor in place of a historical one, making exemplary the pleasure its protagonist takes in being absolved from political commitment or concern. In the vacated place where something like belief or ideology might reside, aesthetic effects like irony, tone, and implicature lend coher­ ence to Hermsprong while fudging his immediate legibility. The result is that Hermsprong always acts as a placeholder for himself, and for the chi­ merical man-as-he-is-not whose existence he seems to promise. Herm­ sprong, in short, undertakes a comedic negotiation of the relationship be­ tween political attachment and political disinterest. It hypothesizes as an alternative to equality an apparently meritocratic form of occupying the historical present, letting characterological lability give content to liberal­ ism’s empty but durable architecture. This is nowhere more clear than when Hermsprong, brought to court on trumped-up charges of fomenting a wage riot, concedes his true iden­ tity only after being cleared of all wrongdoing. His innocence is, in fact, hyperbolically constituted. Eyewitness testimony infomas the jury that not only is Hermsprong no agitator, he actually broke up the riot and chastised its motives (shades of Felix Holt).3 Invoking a passage from William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, Hermsprong is reported to have told the crowd, “we cannot all be rich: there is no equality of prop­ erty...