Savage: A Bastard's Pride

Richard Savage, the poet, is almost a nonentity. But Savage as the friend of Pope and Samuel Johnson becomes a highly important figure in early eighteenth century English literature. And as the claimant to the title of "bastard son of the late Earl Rivers" he has created an aura of wonder which approaches an unfinished fairy tale.

Professor Clarence Tracy of the University of Saskatchewan has attempted to sort legend from fact in The Artificial Bastard. In a scholarly, dispassionate way, he weighs the existing evidence about Savage, reaches conditional conclusions, and in doing so reveals the social and literary environment of the eighteenth century. Like all Savage's biographers, Tracy is particularly concerned with His claim to nobility as it seems to be the key to Savage's complex personality.

Tracy believes that "it he was an imposter, he was an unwitting one." For proof he turns to Savage's life long dispute with his supposed mother, his somewhat pitiful accusations of "statutory" infanticide, and his unceasing disposition to bear himself and be known as Richard Savage, natural son of Lord Rivers.

Inheriting nothing, Savage was solely dependent on whatever patron his great personal charm could procure for him. His supposed mother occasionally paid him a sum that was either conscience money or silence money. And, among other, Ann Oldfield, the most beautiful actress of the time, gave him an annual allowance. Well aware that political favor was all important for his subsistence, ho made no qualms about forgetting his Tory sentiments, and often curried the favor of a potential Whig patron, at the negligible expense of self respect.

Samuel Johnson was his good friend, and wrote an account of the Life of Mr. Savage in 1744. Savage provided Johnson with his best study of character--a great arrogant pride, amasing personal charm, and yet both equalized by a knack of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. When George II took the throne in 1727, Savage wrote a poem eulogizing him, but typically made the mistake of praising George I whom George II hated. This was the pattern for most of his mistakes, for diplomatically he was a blockhead. Pope seemed to fascinate him, and together they attacked the men who had once been Savage's literary friends. Here too he made enemies of those who would have supported him.

Professor Tracy gives many examples of Savage's poetry in The Artificial Bastard, and his well reasoned interpretations of such passages show the stages of his subject's mind. In the Wanderer, Savage imagines himself a divinely inspired poet. The Bastard glorifies his illegitimate birth. Much in the same vein as Edmund in King Lear, he cries," Blest be the Bastard's birth! He lives to build, not boast, a generous race; no tenth transmitter of a foolish face."

Because The Artificial Bastard attempts to bring into one small volume all the known data about Richard Savage, it is slightly fact-heavy. But Clarence Tracy's straightforward, clear prose style does much to counterbalance this, and the facts are by no means jumbled. Sometimes, his dispassionate manner gets away from him, and he understates almost ludicrously. "If this charge had been proved it would have gone hard one Savage, in that age of disembowling."

These small adverse criticisms in no way detract from the value of the first complete, factually correct biography, that has been written of Savage, his society, and friends.