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Title: Tobias Smollett
Author: Smeaton, William Henry Oliphant
Language: English
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TOBIAS
SMOLLETT
[Illustration: PAGE DECORATIONS]
TOBIAS
SMOLLETT
BY
OLIPHANT
SMEATON
FAMOUS
SCOTS
SERIES
PUBLISHED BY:
CHARLES
SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK
FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
_The following Volumes are now ready—_
THOMAS CARLYLE. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON
ALLAN RAMSAY. By OLIPHANT SMEATON
HUGH MILLER. By W. KEITH LEASK
JOHN KNOX. By A. TAYLOR INNES
ROBERT BURNS. By GABRIEL SETOUN
THE BALLADISTS. By JOHN GEDDIE
RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor HERKLESS
SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON
THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. GARDEN BLAIKIE
JAMES BOSWELL. By W. KEITH LEASK
TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By OLIPHANT SMEATON
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
BIRTH—PARENTAGE—EARLY YEARS 9
CHAPTER II
YEARS OF EDUCATION 19
CHAPTER III
WANDERJAHRE, OR YEARS OF WANDERING 32
CHAPTER IV
THE WEARY TRAGEDY—SHIFTS TO LIVE 44
CHAPTER V
RODERICK RANDOM 57
CHAPTER VI
PEREGRINE PICKLE—FERDINAND COUNT FATHOM—DOCTOR OF PHYSIC 69
CHAPTER VII
VISIT TO SCOTLAND—THE CRITICAL REVIEW—THE REPRISAL 80
CHAPTER VIII
HISTORY OF ENGLAND—SIR LAUNCELOT GREAVES—THE NORTH
BRITON—HACK HISTORICAL WORK—THE BEGINNING OF THE END 95
CHAPTER IX
SMOLLETT A ‘SWEATER’—TRAVELS ABROAD—ADVENTURES OF AN
ATOM—HUMPHREY CLINKER—LAST DAYS 109
CHAPTER X
SMOLLETT AS A NOVELIST 122
CHAPTER XI
SMOLLETT AS HISTORIAN AND CRITIC 137
CHAPTER XII
SMOLLETT AS POET AND DRAMATIST 147
TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT
CHAPTER I
BIRTH—PARENTAGE—EARLY YEARS
‘Every successful novelist must be more or less a poet, even though he
may never have written a line of verse. The quality of imagination is
absolutely indispensable to him.... Smollett was a poet of distinction!’
Such was the estimate formed by Sir Walter Scott—one of the most
incisive and sympathetic critics that ever pronounced judgment—of the
element of inspiration in every great writer of fiction. Experimentally
conscious of what was of value in his own case,—himself the great
Wizard of Fiction,—he would reason by analogy what would be of power
to inspire other men. If the poetic faculty were indispensable for the
production of _The Heart of Midlothian_ and _Ivanhoe_, equally would it
be needed in _Peregrine Pickle_ and _Humphrey Clinker_. That the poetic
stimulus is the most powerful of all, is a truth that has been remarked
times and oft. That it forms the true key to unlock the otherwise
elusive and self–centred character of Tobias George Smollett, has not,
I think, previously been noted.
To write Smollett’s life with absolute impartiality is more than
ordinarily difficult. The creator of _Roderick Random_ was one for whom
a generous charity would require to make more allowances than man is
commonly called upon to make for man. Actions and utterances that might
be and were mistaken for irritation and shortness of temper, were in
reality due to the impatience of genius, chafing under the restrictions
laid upon it by the mental torpor or intellectual sluggishness of
others. The eagle eye of his genius perceived intuitively what other
men generally attain only as the result of ratiocinative process.
Smollett has unjustly been characterised as bad–tempered, choleric,
supercilious, and the like, simply because the key was lacking to his
character. Far indeed from being any of these was he. Impatient without
doubt he was, but by no means in larger measure than Carlyle, Tennyson,
Dickens, Goethe, or Schiller, and the feeling is wrongly defined as
impatience. It is rather the desire to give less intellectually nimble
companions a fillip up in the mental race, that they may not lag so far
behind as to make intercourse a martyrdom.
Smollett’s distinguishing characteristic in the great gallery of
eighteenth–century novelists was his exhaustless fertility. In his four
great novels, _Roderick Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_, _Ferdinand Count
Fathom_, and _Humphrey Clinker_, he has employed as many incidents,
developed as many striking situations, and utilised as many happily
conceived accidents of time and place, as Richardson, Fielding, Sterne,
Henry Mackenzie, and Mrs. Radcliffe put together. His invention is
marvellously fertile, and as felicitous as fertile. He makes no attempt
to excel in what may be termed the ‘architectonic’ faculty, or the
symmetrical evolution and interweaving of plot. Incident succeeds
incident, fact follows fact, and scene, scene, in the most bewildering
profusion. There is a prodigality visible, nay, an intellectual waste,
indicative of an imaginative wealth almost unique since the days of
Homer. By some critics, following in the footsteps of Sir Walter
Scott, a curious vagary has been rendered fashionable of introducing
the method of comparative analysis into every literary judgment. In
place of declaring in plain, straightforward terms the reason why they
either admire or censure the works of a man of genius, they must now
drag in somebody else, with whom he is supposed to present points of
affinity or contrast, and they glibly descant on the attributes wherein
the author under consideration surpasses or falls short of his rival,
what elements and qualities of style the one possesses which the other
lacks, until in the end the reader is thoroughly befogged to know which
is which and who is who. The higher criticism has its place in literary
judgments as well as in theological, and the change is not for the
better.
Tobias George Smollett resembled William Shakespeare in one respect
if in no other—that a doubt exists as to the precise date of his
birth. The first mention made of the future novelist occurs in no birth
register that is known to exist, but in the parish record of baptisms
in connection with the parochial district of Cardross. Therein,
under the date 19th March 1721, we read: ‘Tobias George, son to Mr.
Archd. Smollett and Barbara Cunningham, was baptised.’ The day in
question was a Sunday, and, as Robert Chambers very properly remarks,
‘it may be inferred that the baptism took place, according to old
Scottish fashion, in the parish kirk.’ This tentative inference may
be changed into certainty when we recall the strict Presbyterianism
of his grandfather’s household, in whose eyes such an injunction as
the following, taken from _The Directory for the Public Worship of
God_, established by Act of General Assembly and Act of Parliament
in 1645, would be as sacredly binding as the laws of the Medes and
Persians:—‘Baptism, as it is not unnecessarily to be delayed, so it is
not to be administered in any case by any private person, ... nor is it
to be administered in private places or privately, but in the place of
public worship and in the face of the congregation.’
So much for the baptism. Now for the date of birth. Here only
second–hand evidence is forthcoming. In one of the unpublished letters
of John Home, author of _Douglas_, which it was recently my fortune to
see, he mentions a walk which Smollett and he had taken together during
the visit of the latter to London, when trying to get his first play,
_Agis_, accepted by the theatrical managers. During the course of the
walk Smollett mentioned the fact that his birthday had been celebrated
two days before. The date of their meeting was the 18th March 1750. If
reliance can be placed on this roundabout means of arriving at a fact,
Smollett’s birth took place on the 16th March 1721.
Genealogies are wearisome. Readers who desire to trace the family of
the Smolletts back to the sixteenth century can do so with advantage
in the Lives of Moore, Herbert, and Chambers. Our purpose is with
the novelist himself, not with his ancestors to the fourth and fifth
generations. Suffice it to say that Tobias George Smollett was the
son of Archibald, fourth son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, a
Dumbartonshire estate situated amidst the romantic scenery of the Vale
of Leven, and in the vicinity of the queen of Scottish lakes, Loch
Lomond.
Sir James Smollett, a stern old Whig of the Revolution type, to whom
‘Prelacy was only less tolerable than Popery, and the adherents of
both deserve hanging,’ had risked property, prospects, and life at
the time when James VII. staked his dynasty against a mass—and lost.
So prominent was the part Sir James Smollett took in influencing
public sentiment in favour of William and Mary, even while one of
the Commissaries or Consistorial Judges of Edinburgh, that the
grateful monarch knighted him, and the Earl of Argyll appointed him
deputy–lieutenant of Dumbartonshire.
A very different character was the novelist’s father. Archibald
Smollett seems to have been, in Scots parlance, ‘as _feckless_ as
his father was _fitty_.’ The characteristic of the rolling stone was
pre–eminently his. Consequently, as regards moss, in the shape of
worldly gear, he gathered not a stiver unto him. But that did not
trouble him. Like Charles Surface, his distresses were so many that
the only thing he could not afford to part with was his good spirits,
which, by the same token, chanced to be the only _good_ thing he had
about him. His health was bad, his morals were bad, his prospects were
bad,—for he never had been brought up to any profession, not having
the steadiness of application to make labour a pleasure; in a word, he
was one of those interesting individuals whose idleness enables his
Mephistophelic Majesty to make a strong bid for the fee–simple of their
soul.
Archibald Smollett, like most youths of good family, with whom, for
lack of employment, time hangs heavy on their hands, was not above
falling in love to lend a zest to the deadly _ennui_ of life. Whether
or no he obeyed Celia’s maxim on the matter, and did so ‘only to make
sport withal,’ is immaterial. The fact remains that, young though he
was, the love–making ended in matrimony. He had been sent to Leyden
to prosecute his studies—Leyden, whose University, from about 1680
to 1730, was the great finishing school of Europe, with the lustre
about it conferred by such professors as Arminius, Gomarus, Grotius,
Salmasius, Scaliger, and Boerhaave. From this seat of learning young
Archibald Smollett returned in ill health, but strong in his conviction
that it is not good for man to be alone. Principles are as empty air
if not reduced to practice. Archibald, therefore, electrified both
the old Commissary and his two celibate brothers by announcing, not
his intention to marry Barbara, the daughter of Mr. George Cunningham
of Gilbertfield, in the county of Lanark, but the fact of its already
having taken place. Probably, had the event been still in prospect,
the stern old judge would have found means to check the course of true
love on the score of his son’s feeble health. Sir James had read his
_Utopia_ to some purpose, and was a stickler for legal penalties being
attached to the union of persons of weak constitution. But there are
limits to the intervention of even a choleric Commissary, and not all
his indignation could put asunder what the Church had joined.
Passing wroth was the old man, doubtless, and tradition reports that he
considered carefully the alternatives—whether to cut off his amorously
inclined son with the proverbial shilling, and thereby set all the
gossips’ tongues in the district a–wagging over man’s inhumanity to
man, and that man a son, or to give him his blessing, along with a
small allowance, and thus keep the name of Smollett from becoming a
byword of reproach.
To induce him to adopt the latter alternative there were such reasons
as these: That Miss Barbara was a young lady of great beauty and
accomplishments—the Commissary had a weakness for a pretty face;
that her family was as old as the Smolletts, though, having fallen
upon evil days, it was not so influential; and finally, that the two
families had already intermarried about a century before, when the
Cunninghams, by the way, had been the more powerful of the two. The
old Commissary, therefore, gave the newly–wedded pair his blessing,
probably considering it better policy to bless than to ban what had
already been done. On the young pair he settled an annual allowance,
amounting, according to the present–day purchasing powers, to £250,
as well as the liferent of the farmhouse and lands of Dalquharn, on
the banks of the Leven, immediately adjoining the Bonhill estate. Well
done, old Commissary, thou wast wise in thy generation. To this day the
district speaks of ‘Good Sir James.’
But Sir James Smollett, if he imagined he had fulfilled all the duties
incumbent on him in the circumstances, and might thereafter forget the
existence of the inconvenient rolling stone, received a rude awakening.
The stone in question accomplished its last revolution by rolling out
of existence; in other words, Archibald Smollett died in 1721, having
only survived his marriage five years. He left a widow with three
young children, James, Jane, and Tobias, wholly dependent on their
grandfather’s bounty.
Of the cant of Puritanic Presbyterianism, of its gloomy severity, of
the frowns it casts on all harmless pursuits, we hear a great deal in
these days of cheap criticism and a ubiquitous press. That may be all
very true. There is, however, one thing in which the type never fails.
Once convince it of the binding nature of any social obligations, and
not all the desires of self, or the weaknesses of human nature, will be
allowed to stand in the way of its fulfilment. In such crucifixion of
self–interest there is conspicuous moral heroism. Of a type of nature
such as this was Sir James Smollett. With a sort of cynical sneer,
that if he were in for a penny he might as well be in for a pound, the
old gentleman continued the allowance to the young widow’s household,
though on a slightly reduced scale. Dalquharn, however, was still to be
the widow’s home, with liberty to make as much as she could out of the
farm. As she was a shrewd, capable woman, who knew the full value of a
shilling, and to whom the gospel of hard work was a living creed more
than a century before Thomas Carlyle preached it, the chances were all
in favour of her doing well. Nay, as the sequel proved, she did better
without her husband than with him, and speedily became, comparatively
speaking, a ‘well–to–do woman,’ as the Scots phrase has it.
It was this unquestioning obedience to those provisions of the Mosaic
law, ‘Ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child: if thou
afflict them in any wise, and they cry at all unto Me, I will surely
hear their cry,’ in which the old Commissary was a firm believer,
that rendered the position of the widow and her fatherless children
as secure as though they had been protected by as many deeds and
settlements as would have filled a muniment room. The consequence was
that, until she was no longer able to look after the farm, that is, up
to the time when Smollett was preparing to go to London, Mrs. Archibald
Smollett retained undisturbed possession of Dalquharn. She then went
to live with her daughter, who had married Mr. Telfer, a lessee of
some of the mines at Wanlockhead, and also proprietor of the estates
of Scotston in Peeblesshire and Symington in Lanarkshire. The old
Commissary, Sir James, was succeeded by his own son James, and then by
his son George’s eldest child, also called James, neither of whom left
any issue. Singularly enough, the present holders of the estates are
the descendants of Archibald Smollett and Barbara Cunningham; the other
branches of the house having become extinct. But by neither Sir James’s
son nor by his grandson was Mrs. Archibald’s allowance reduced.
Into this matter I have gone rather more fully than is warranted by
the space at my command. But I was anxious to clear the memory of Sir
James Smollett from an undeserved slur that has been cast on it by
some biographers, who have been smitten with the mania for reading
the facts of a man’s life into his works. In Smollett’s case, the
opening chapters of _Roderick Random_, and the character of ‘The
Judge’ in particular, have been assumed, on evidence the most slender,
as conveying a true picture of the novelist’s early relations to
his grandfather and uncles. But the statement, as express as it is
explicit, by Smollett himself shortly before his death, that the
scenes were written under a mistaken sense of wrong, and purposely
over–coloured from motives of pique and resentment that had no
foundation in fact, proves that young Smollett cherished mistaken ideas
of his own importance, a failing from which he suffered all his life,
in imagining slights where none were intended.
The childhood and early boyhood of the youthful Tobias would not,
therefore, be unhappy. Youth always looks at the sunny side of things.
If his fare were plain and coarse, it was at least plentiful; if his
attire were of the humblest, it was at least sufficient to keep out
the cold. At this age hope is the dearest possession, and what Allan
Ramsay said of his own youth may, _mutatis mutandis_, be applied to
Smollett’s—
‘Aft hae I wade thro’ glens wi’ chorking feet,
When neither plaid nor kilt could fend the weet
Yet blythely would I bang oot owre the brae,
And stend owre burns as light as ony rae,
Hoping the morn might prove a better day.’
CHAPTER II
YEARS OF EDUCATION
But after the youthful Tobias had passed those momentous years when
the science of suction and the art of following his nose constituted
the principal ends of existence, the Scots pride in giving children a
good education wherewith to begin the world, led his mother to send him
early to school. As usual in such cases, during the first two years of
his intellectual seedtime he was committed to the care of a worthy dame
in the neighbourhood, who fulfilled the duties so admirably described
by Shenstone in his _School–mistress_—the only poem of a worthy poet
that has lived—
‘In every village marked with little spire
Embowered in trees and hardly known to fame,
There dwells in lowly shed and mean attire
A matron old whom we schoolmistress name.’
But from the hornbook and the mysteries of ‘a b, ab,’ and ‘t o, to,’
he was presently called to proceed to the scholastic establishment of
one of the most famous Scots pedagogues of the eighteenth century.
John Love had the reputation of having turned out more celebrated men
from his various seminaries than any other teacher of his age. In
addition to Smollett, Principal Robertson, Dr. Blair, Wilkie, author
of the _Epigoniad_, and many other notable scholars and literary
men, were his pupils. He was successively head teacher of Dumbarton
Grammar School,[1] classical master in the High School of Edinburgh,
and finally rector of the Dalkeith Grammar School,—a position which,
as Robert Chambers says, would not now be considered the equivalent
of the one he resigned to accept it. Love was first the correspondent
and defender against sundry attacks on his Latin Grammar, afterwards
the antagonistic critic of the great Ruddiman,—one of the last of
the mighty Scots polymaths, before the days of specialists and the
extension of the boundaries of learning rendered omniscience, in a
humanist sense, an impossibility.
From Love the youthful Smollett received a thorough grounding in the
classics, particularly in Latin. The days had not dawned when that
human instrument of youthful torture known as ‘the crammer’ had come on
the scene. Education, if conducted on wrong principles in many cases,
was, at least, rational in the end it proposed to accomplish. Boys in
the eighteenth century were not treated like prize turkeys, and stuffed
to repletion with all and sundry items of knowledge, whereof about one
per cent. is found useful in after life. Love did not believe in taking
passing sips from the cup of every classic author, and then relegating
their works to the dust and the spiders. His was not the system to
make a sort of fox–hunt scamper over Latin literature, from Nepos to
Statius, or in Greek, from Homer to Lucian, clearing difficulties at
a bound, and cutting the Gordian knot of vexed passages by the rough
and ready method of omission. His pupils were the ‘_homines unius
libri_’—the men of the single book, who are always to be feared. The
consequence was that to the end of life Smollett acknowledged his
indebtedness to Love. He took an interest in the lad’s progress,
and, knowing the circumstances of his lot, and how much depended on
his proficiency in the subjects of study, he paid every attention to
him, and spared no pains to make him a thoroughly sound if not a very
profound classical scholar. All through the long and laborious life of
Smollett, the lessons of Love bore fruit.
Here, however, I must once more enter a protest against the ready
credulity of several previous biographers, in believing the foul
slander,—manufactured by some one utterly unacquainted with the true
facts of the case,—that the portrait of the pedagogue in _Roderick
Random_ could possibly be intended to represent Love. Disproof the
most convincing is to be found in the fact that the distinguishing
characteristic of the pedagogue in the novel was his resemblance to
Horace’s _plagosus Orbilius_—the flogging Orbilius. But of Love’s
system the glory—and glory it certainly was—consisted in the total
abolition of the degrading corporal punishment, in his successive
schools, at the time when the sparing of the rod by any pedagogue was
esteemed to be unquestionably equivalent to spoiling the child.
As to the estimation in which the youthful Smollett was held by his
companions, there is but scant evidence. He seems, like many another
youth, whom the stirrings of great imaginings within were beginning
to puzzle and in some degree to annoy, as being unlike anything his
companions experienced, to have been masterful, irritable, and proud.
He even appears, with a lad’s lack of judgment, to have exhibited the
snobbery of family pride, that most ignoble form of vulgarity. All
through life Smollett betrayed a smack of this failing—a trait of
character which, long years after, led him to surround himself with his
poor and needy brethren in literature, to whom he played the part of
‘the Great Cham’ of the press.
Mr. Robert Chambers, in his excellent biography of Smollett, in many
respects still one of the best accounts of the great novelist’s life
and works, regards the influence of the surrounding scenery as being
the main factor in turning Smollett’s ideas towards imaginative and
romantic themes. To a certain extent, as we have already pointed out,
the charms of the district must have produced a deep impression on
him. The vividness of his recollections of them in after years, and
the terms of passionate delight wherewith he spoke of them, all go
to prove this. But there was another agency at work. The charms of
our immortal English literature were slowly but surely casting their
glamour over him. From the study of classics he had passed to that of
Milton, Dryden, and of the Restoration drama, with close attention
paid to that great period which had closed but a few years before his
birth—the reign of Queen Anne. Chambers also states that ‘Smollett,
like Burns, was at a very early period struck with admiration of the
character of Wallace, whose adventures, reduced from the verse of
Blind Harry by Hamilton of Gilbertfield, were in every boy’s hand, and
formed a constant theme of fireside and nursery stories. To such a
degree arose Smollett’s enthusiasm on this subject, that, ere he had
quitted Dumbarton School, he wrote verses to the memory of the Scottish
champion.’
But schooldays could not last for ever. Besides, the young Tobias ere
long lost interest in the Dumbarton Grammar School. John Love had been
translated to Edinburgh, and a new pedagogue had arisen who knew not
Tobias. Accordingly, the lad began to plague his mother to allow him to
become a soldier like his elder brother James. The matter, of course,
had to be referred to the family dictator—the old Commissary. But that
stern incarnation of Puritanic duty decided that while the family
interest might procure the advancement of one soldier, two were beyond
its exercise of patronage. Hence he insisted on Tobias being sent to
Glasgow University, to prepare for one of the learned professions,
offering to bear a share in the expense of his education. But as the
old man died almost immediately afterwards, namely, in 1733, before
the youth was actually sent to college, the latter benefited little
from his grandfather’s intentions, because in his will no provision was
made for the children of his youngest son. But his uncle James appears
to have proved more kind–hearted than was anticipated, and to have
assisted him, at least during the first years of his course.
During his attendance on the Arts classes in Glasgow University,—only
one of which seems to have made any deep impression on him, namely,
the lectures of Francis Hutcheson, Professor of Moral Philosophy,
and father of Scots Philosophy,—he made the acquaintance of several
medical students, who were then going through their curriculum,
with a view to graduation in medicine. As in the case of Sir James
Y. Simpson[2] it was the fact of lodging in the same house with two
medical students from Bathgate, to wit, Drs. Reid and M’Arthur, which
gave him the bias towards medicine that was to make the world so much
his debtor, so in Smollett’s case his association with these youths
directed his thoughts also towards the prosecution of medicine as
a career in life. In those days the difficulties of carrying out
such an intention were not so great as now. Medicos were not then
as plentiful as leaves in Vallombrosa, so much so that the great
degree–granting institutions must for their own protection make the
examinations increasingly severe, in order that the survival only of
the scientifically fittest may in time relieve the congestion. When,
therefore, Smollett announced his intention to his mother and his uncle
James (who only recently had succeeded to the family honours), they
appeared to consider that the proposal was one to which they could give
a cordial assent, although surgery had not yet commenced the wonderful
march of progress achieved by it later on in the same century, and
though the prestige of the craft, sadly tarnished by its association
with the trade of the barber and of the phlebotomist, was by no means
one calculated as yet to render its members proud of their connection
with it—in Scotland at least. The genius of the three Alexander
Monroes,—grandfather, father, and son, who consecutively held the
chair of Anatomy in Edinburgh University for a hundred and twenty–six
years, namely, from 1720 to 1846,—of Gregory, of Cullen, and of other
illustrious knights of the knife, was needed to efface the lingering
associations of the razor and basin, and to crown the name of surgeon
with undying laurels.
This, then, was the career which Tobias George Smollett marked out for
himself, hoping in the course of time, by hard work and assiduity, to
obtain a position, first as surgeon’s mate and afterwards as surgeon,
in the navy. Only qualified surgeons were accepted by the Admiralty,
and the prospect stimulated him to put forth all his exertions to
qualify for the post. The friends in the Vale of Leven amongst them
managed to provide the necessary funds. Tobias, in addition, was also
apprenticed to a worthy man, Mr. John Gordon, who, in the quaint old
Trongate of Glasgow, during the fourth, fifth, and sixth decades of
the eighteenth century, discharged the dual vocations of medical
practitioner and apothecary. Smollett’s meagre salary or wage, eked
out by what his mother and the Bonhill folks could furnish, was made
to serve the purpose of paying his way through the medical classes in
the University and of supplying himself with clothing. Mr. Gordon, his
master, gave him a room in his house, and a cover was always laid for
him at the good old surgeon’s table.
A striking insight is thus afforded into the proud, irritable nature
of the youth, whom poverty, in place of teaching lessons of patience
and gratitude to the kindly hearts that were smoothing his life’s path
for him, rather stung into angry repining against such indebtedness,
as well as into emphatic asseveration of their action being no more
than what was due to him. Humility was at no time one of the virtues
in which Smollett excelled. His _amour–propre_ was of so sensitive a
composition that the least breath of contradiction made, so to speak,
‘Each particular hair to stand an–end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine.’
That Smollett studied hard during these years, that, moreover, he took
every means lying within his power to increase his fund of general
knowledge, as well as to amass stores of that information which lay in
the line of his own special studies in medicine and science, has been
recorded for us by some of his early companions. Neither a laggard nor
a dullard in his work was he, as is evinced by the fact that he was
devoting attention to Latin, Greek, and philosophy at the same time
that he was endeavouring to master anatomy and medicine. How he was
able to accomplish the achievement of acquiring even a superficial
acquaintance with the subjects named, at the identical period that he
was serving in his master’s shop from eight in the morning till nine at
night, is a mystery. Strong evidence is it of his zeal in the pursuit
of knowledge, that he cheerfully prosecuted labours so onerous and so
prolonged at a time when his age, according to the most liberal scale
of calculation, could not have exceeded from fifteen to seventeen
years. But through the gates of knowledge he already saw a means of
escape for himself from the grinding penury wherein it was his lot to
be cast.
John Gordon, surgeon and apothecary, to whom so beautiful a tribute
is paid in _Humphrey Clinker_, appears to have shown the youthful
Tobias substantial kindness. A sincere affection, on his side at
least, existed towards Smollett. The latter, however, seems to have
made him somewhat of a poor return for his benevolent disposition
towards him, though really it is questionable whether Smollett was
responsible for his frigid temperament, which showed no interest in
anyone whose goodwill would not in some way react advantageously on
himself. Notwithstanding that Gordon aided Smollett both by precept
and purse during his years of study, the latter was in the habit of
satirising him behind his back in juvenile pasquinades. The same evil
spirit of social Ishmaelitism, the feeling that the world had been
hard on him, and that he was therefore justified by satire and sneers
in ‘taking it out’ of anyone else who might have relations with him,
was present with him until a year or two of his death. Shortly before
the great end came, this vitriolic acidulousness, as well as the
saturnine bitterness of his nature, became somewhat softened. He then
wrote in _Humphrey Clinker_, under the character of ‘Matthew Bramble,’
as follows:—‘I was introduced to Mr. Gordon, a patriot of a truly
noble spirit, who is father of the linen manufactory in that place,
and was the great promoter of the city workhouse, infirmary, and other
works of public utility. Had he lived in ancient Rome, he would have
been honoured with a statue at the public expense.’ Thus he made the
_amende honorable_, but the description in the first instance of Gordon
as ‘Potion’ in _Roderick Random_ was cruelly unjust, though Smollett
in later years declared the portraits of both ‘Crab’ and ‘Potion’ to
be imaginary. In early years such was the ‘sheer cussedness’ of his
disposition, that even at the risk of offending his dearest friends, he
could not refrain from firing off some of his satirical pasquinades.
In fact, until the offending devil was whipped out of him by the lash
of John Wilkes’ stronger controversial pen, Smollett was too ready to
indulge in satirical outbursts against friend and foe alike, where his
fancied infallibility chanced to be impugned.
Dr. John Gordon seemed to have had some dim, undefinable consciousness
that his proud, irritable, unmanageable apprentice was destined yet
to do something in the world of worthy work. Sir Walter Scott, in his
_Lives of the Novelists_, remarks: ‘His master expressed his conviction
of Smollett’s future eminence in very homely but expressive terms,
when some of his neighbours were boasting the superior decorum and
propriety of the pupils they possessed. “It may be all very true,”
said the keen–sighted Mr. Gordon; “but give me before them all my own
bubbly–nosed callant with the stane in his pouch.”’ And Scott adds
that, without attempting to render the above into English, Southern
readers ought to be informed that the words contain a faithful sketch
of a negligent, unlucky, but spirited urchin, never without some
mischievous prank in his head, and a stone in his pocket ready to
execute it. Better portrait than this of the young Tobias could not
be desired. Only one other boyish trait shall we add to illustrate
his readiness of resource in extricating himself and others from
awkward predicaments. From Dr. Moore’s _Life of Smollett_ we take
it—a volume upon which all succeeding biographers have had to draw,
as he had the privilege of personal intercourse with the novelist. ‘On
a winter evening, when the streets were covered with snow, Smollett
happened to be engaged in a snowball fight with a few boys of his own
age. Among his associates was the apprentice of that surgeon who is
supposed to have been delineated under the name of “Crab” in _Roderick
Random_. He entered his shop while his apprentice was in the heat of
the engagement. On the return of the latter, the master remonstrated
with him severely for his negligence in quitting the shop. The youth
excused himself by saying, that while he was employed in making up a
prescription, a fellow hit him with a snowball in the teeth, and that
he had been in pursuit of the delinquent. “A mighty probable story,
truly,” said the master in an ironical tone. “I wonder how long I
should stand here,” added he, “before it would enter into mortal man’s
head to throw a snowball at me.” While he was holding his head erect
with a most scornful air, he received a very severe blow in the face by
a snowball. Smollett, who stood concealed behind the pillar at the shop
door, had heard the dialogue, and, perceiving that his companion was
puzzled for an answer, he extricated him by a repartee equally smart
and _àpropos_.’
But it must not be supposed, pardonable though it might be, considering
his early love of rollicking fun, that all his spare time was spent
in roistering horseplay like the above. Such an incident as it must
assuredly be relegated to the early days of apprenticeship. Meagre
though the facts are which have descended to us of his residence in
Glasgow, that he studied both hard and perseveringly is proved by
the position he secured in his final medical examination. Not for a
moment do I desire to institute any comparison between the standard
or extent of requirements demanded in order to qualify for a medical
degree nowadays, and that which gave Smollett his first step on the
medical ladder. In those days physicians were in reality supervised by
no competent board as to their qualifications, and surgeons, despite
the navy regulations, were in a case very little better. At the same
time, to accept the description Smollett gives in _Roderick Random_ of
the ‘first and only’ professional examination candidates were expected
to undergo prior to obtaining an appointment in the service, would
be uncharitable. The creator of _Roderick Random_ was still in his
youthfully exuberant period, when fidelity to fact was esteemed by
him as a very secondary consideration, provided a piquant, sarcastic
colouring was imparted to the incidents. Not until he became a
historian did Smollett really learn, in a literary sense, to recognise
the value of truthfulness in delineation.
From the records of Glasgow University for 1738–39, the facts are
to be gleaned that he passed with approbation his examination in
anatomy and medicine, and was thereafter qualified to practise as a
surgeon. But whether comprehensive or not as a course of medical study,
the curriculum was sufficient to endow him with a knowledge of his
profession, quite adequate for all the professional calls afterwards
made on it. From the unconscious testimony of his own works, in the
number and accuracy of the medical references contained therein, we
are able to gauge the range and depth of his surgical and scientific
knowledge. For the times wherein he lived, his acquaintance with
matters the most recondite was extraordinary.
Not only, however, had his studies been of a scientifico–medical
character. English literature in more than one of its manifold
departments was made the subject of systematic reading. To the plays
of Otway, Davenant, Dryden, Rowe, Southerne, and other post–Revolution
tragedy writers, he devoted close attention. To the romantic tales
of French literature, and to their imitations by Robert Greene, Mrs.
Aphra Behn, Mrs. Manley, and others, he likewise turned with delight,
while we learn from his own correspondence at this period that he drank
deep draughts of Milton, Cowley, and Dryden, whose earlier poems he
especially admired. The fruit of these studies appeared in a tragedy
entitled _The Regicide_, written during the last year of his University
work. Dealing with an outstanding event in early Scottish history, an
event that afforded scope for considerable diversity of opinion as
to the nobility or otherwise of the motives actuating the murderers
of James I., the drama could have been made a great psychological
and ethical study in the hands of a stronger writer. But as Smollett
was neither a Cowley nor a Milton, able to produce verse at thirteen
and sixteen worthy to be compared with the work of men twenty years
their seniors, _The Regicide_ is but a sorry production. A curious
problem how far a man is fitted to act as his own critic is raised
by _The Regicide_. Nine readers out of every ten who peruse the work
will toss it on one side contemptuously as the immature ravings of a
callow poet. Yet, until he had been five years editor of the _Critical
Review_,—that _olla podrida_ of everything that was not criticism,
along with a great deal that was of the best type of it,—he believed
almost as implicitly as in his own salvation, that _The Regicide_ was
not much less notable a play than any of Shakespeare’s, but had been
sacrificed by the spleen of envious rivals and knavish managers. But
the point settled by it at this stage of our inquiry is that young
Tobias had not idled his time during his University days. Not only
had he taken a good place in the estimation of his examiners, but the
fruit of the occupation of his spare time is a tragedy, for a youth of
nineteen a sufficiently notable achievement, though not by any means
so when we regard it as the mature expression of manhood’s ideas, as
Smollett later on asserted it to be. In 1738–9, Smollett completed his
studies, passed his examination, and then faced the future manfully, to
see what indications of weal or of woe it might hold for him.
CHAPTER III
WANDERJAHRE
Smollett’s _Lehrjahre_ were over, his _Wanderjahre_ were about to
commence. After passing his examination in Glasgow, he returned for a
time to his mother’s house at Dalquharn, glad once more to feel himself
among the scenes of his early boyhood. Changes great and manifold had,
however, taken place there. His grandfather had, as we have seen,
died some years before, so had his uncle, James Smollett; and now
another James, the son of the old Commissary’s second son, George, and
therefore a full cousin of Tobias, was laird of Bonhill. His mother,
though still undisturbed in her tenancy of Dalquharn, was preparing to
spend at least one half of each year with her daughter Jane, Smollett’s
only sister, who had a month or two before been married to Mr. Telfer.
Home was no longer home to him. His eldest brother was away with his
regiment, the friends of boyhood’s years were either scattered or had
formed new ties. He felt, as he said in one of his letters, ‘like a
bird that returns to find its nest torn down and harried.’
For him in his new profession there was of course no opening in his
native district. The thriving village of Renton did not come into
existence until 1782, eleven years after Smollett’s death. Dumbarton
also was well supplied with medical practitioners; therefore his only
chance lay in going farther afield. His mother would have liked to
keep her Benjamin near her, but Benjamin had all the prodigal son’s
love of roving without his vices. Besides, his studies in English
literature had inflamed him with the desire to throw himself into the
great literary gladiatorial arena—London. His friends were overborne
by his enthusiasm. He was brimming over with all youth’s sanguine
hopes. He would succeed, in fact, he could not fail to succeed, was his
insistent assurance. Alas! he had yet to learn in the hard school of
disappointment that in nine cases out of ten the battle is not to the
strong, nor the race to the swift, but that literary success then as
now was a lottery, wherein the least worthy often bears away the prize.
The days were past when the head of the family, the laird of Bonhill,
could afford material assistance to any youthful scion of the house
proceeding out into the battle of life. Beyond good wishes and a bulky
sheaf of introductions, his cousin, James Smollett, had little to give
Tobias. As it was, however, the future novelist carried away from
his native place the best of all recommendations and heritages, an
unsullied character, with an indomitable love of honest independence
that atones for a multitude of less lovely traits. ‘What kind of work
you individually can do ... the first of all problems for a man to find
out, that is the thing a man is born to in all epochs,’ were the wise
and weighty words of Thomas Carlyle in his Rectorial address. To Tobias
Smollett the problem in question was one whereto he applied himself
with all youth’s jaunty assurance. At nineteen the point at issue
usually is not ‘What career am I fit for?’ but ‘What career shall I
choose?’ a faculty, a capacity for all being confidently presupposed as
a precedent certainty. Youth can make no calculation of probabilities.
The ratios of chance are always esteemed likely to favour the young
gladiator. So with Smollett. With a light heart he went forth to the
deadly battle of life, recking not that the Goliath of failure and
disappointment was waiting for him almost at the parting of the ways,
and that the only pebbles in his bag were a boyish tragedy, and the
certificate of surgical proficiency from an obscure Scottish medical
school. With such weapons, would he prove successful in the impending
strife? From this second point of view the aphorism is once more
apposite, that the battle is not to the strong.
In 1740, therefore, Tobias Smollett took farewell of his Dumbartonshire
home, and turned his face Londonwards—one more tiny unit to be sucked
down for a time into the moiling, whirling, indistinguishable crowd
revolving in the vortex of the mighty social maelstrom. Fearlessly as
Schiller’s ‘Diver’ did the youth plunge into ‘the howling Charybdis
below’; but, alas! the effects of the sufferings, both mental and
physical, which he underwent ere ‘he rose to the surface again,’
were to follow hard on his footsteps, even to the end of life. Even
as Thomas de Quincey, sixty years after, was to find Oxford Street a
stony–hearted stepmother, so Smollett, alone in the mighty metropolis,
was made to realise, with an insistence that burned itself into his
inmost heart, that no solitary in the Sahara is more isolated than he
who is, unknowing and unknown, an atom in a vast London crowd. Men in
after years talked glibly of the irritability of the great novelist.
They could not realise in their shallow complacency what a crucifixion
those years of failure were to the proud, unbending spirit. Had
Smollett been less self–confident, he would have suffered less. To a
mind like his, it was the crushing consciousness of a mistaken estimate
of his own powers that infused into his nature that strain of gall
that manifests itself even in the brightest of his writings.
To London therefore Smollett repaired with high hopes. That these were
based upon his tragedy rather than on his medical acquirements is
evident from his letters of this period, as well as from the preface to
_The Regicide_, when, later on, it was published. Like another Scot,
who nine years afterwards was to ‘hasten’ to London with his tragedy
of _Agis_, only to meet with like mortification, to wit, John Home,
Smollett imagined he had only to present his play to the managers of
the leading theatres to secure its instant acceptance. He was roughly
disillusionised. In the first place, the merits of _The Regicide_ are
of the scantiest. Its boyishness and immaturity, its stiffness and
bombast, are perceptible on every page. The characters, again, are
perpetually firing off such exclamations and expletives as, ‘Tremendous
powers!’ ‘O fatal chance!’ ‘Mysterious fate!’ ‘Infernal homicide!’ and
the like, scarce a speech being ungarnished by one of them. No sooner
had Smollett arrived in London than he hastened to lay his tragedy
before the managers of the theatres. After prolonged delays it was
returned to him declined. Though his vanity was cut to the quick by
this neglect of his genius, as he considered it, he looked so far to
the main chance that he endeavoured to induce Lord Lyttleton to use his
interest with Mr. Rich, Mr. Garrick, or Mr. Lacy, the great theatrical
managers of the day. The only particular wherein that nobleman seems
to have been blameworthy was that, out of excess of amiability, he did
not care to wound the author’s feelings by telling him of the lack of
merit in his play. Smollett, however, accused him and the managers,
along with his other patrons, of well–nigh all the crimes under heaven,
because of their failure to perceive in his tragedy beauties that
had no place there. To resurrect the whole controversy would be as
unprofitable as to retail one of last century’s stale jokes. Those
who desire to pursue the investigation will find the circumstances
recounted by Smollett in his silly preface to _The Regicide_, when,
some years subsequent, he published it by subscription—that is,
after the success of _Roderick Random_ had rendered him famous. He
was weak enough, also, to endeavour to satirise the parties to his
disappointment in the novel in question. The story of Melopoyn and
his attempt to obtain recognition of his dramatic genius is, _mutatis
mutandis_, intended to represent Smollett’s own case.
The small store of guineas which the youth had brought with him from
Scotland were meantime fast vanishing. Any remunerative employment
seemed as far distant as ever. The prejudice in London against
impecunious Scots was then at its height. All very well was it for such
men as Arbuthnot, Thomson, Mallet, and Mickle to speak of the favour
shown them in London by King, Court, and Government. Against these
four, who were wafted into the haven of popularity by propitious gales
almost at the very outset of their literary career, how many scores are
there, little inferior to them in genius, as well as learning, who sank
into Grub Street hacks through not having any patron to recommend their
productions? The patronless man was a pariah, even as in feudal days a
villein without a lord was ranked as a wild beast.
Although the narrative in _Roderick Random_ of the hero’s treatment
at the Navy Office, the examination he passed, the means whereby he
was enabled in the end to get appointed as surgeon’s assistant, are
exaggerated, still there must have been a solid substratum of fact
drawn from the author’s own experience in similar circumstances.
Regarding this period of Smollett’s life the information is exceedingly
meagre. That he went through terrible privations, can be guessed from
the fact that he informed John Home he shuddered whenever he remembered
those days. How he obtained a position on board the _Cumberland_,
an eighty–gun vessel in the fleet commanded by Sir Challoner Ogle,
there is now no means of ascertaining. Whether through the pressgang,
like Roderick Random, or by some other channel more legitimate and
honourable, is unknown. Mr. David Hannay, in his admirable and valuable
life of Smollett, states that there is no certainty which of the
sixteen ships in Ogle’s fleet he served on. Dr. Anderson, in his life
of the novelist, relates that Smollett left his name carved on the
timbers of the _Cumberland_. But an examination of her books reveals no
such name as _Smollett_, though a _Smalley_ does occur, and the shadow
of a probability is thereby raised that a mistake in names may have
been made.
Be this as it may, one fact is certain,—Smollett was present at the
expedition to Carthagena, whatever might be the ship in which he
sailed, and whatsoever the capacity wherein he served. On this point
Carlyle’s statements in _Frederick the Great_ (to be cited further on),
though pronounced by some critics only another example of Carlylean
exaggeration, are by no means wide of the mark. The expedition to
Carthagena was one of the most gigantic crimes ever perpetrated by
a Government, while its mismanagement is an ineffaceable blot on
the British army and navy. Spain had looked with a jealous eye upon
the progress of the British American colonies. All that lay in her
power she did to harass them. British commerce was suffering, but the
Ministry of Sir Robert Walpole seemed utterly indifferent to the
prestige of the national arms, or even to the safety of the colonial
possessions. As Smollett long years afterwards stated in his _History
of England_, ‘no effectual attempt had been made to annoy the enemy.
Expensive squadrons had been equipped, had made excursions, and had
returned without striking a blow. Admiral Vernon had written from
the West Indies to his private friends that he was neglected and in
danger of being sacrificed. Notwithstanding the numerous navy of Great
Britain, Spanish privateers made prizes of the British merchant ships
with impunity.’ A complete paralysis seemed to have fallen on the
national energies, consequent on the _laissez–faire_ policy of the
peace–loving Whig Premier, Sir Robert Walpole. At last the exasperation
of the nation, with the disgraces that had fallen upon it, both in
Europe and South America, burst all bounds, and swept Minister and
Government along with the popular enthusiasm.
As Jamaica had long been threatened by certain Spanish ships of war
with land forces on board, Sir Challoner Ogle was ordered to proceed
with his vessels thither to effect a junction with Admiral Vernon.
Accordingly, the fleet, of which the _Cumberland_ was one, set sail
in November, and reached Jamaica on the 9th January 1741. Vernon
now found himself at the head of the most formidable naval force
that had ever visited those seas, while the land forces were also
strong in proportion. Had this armament been ready to act under the
command of wise and experienced commanders, united in counsels and
steadily attached to the honour and interests of their country, the
whole of Spain’s possessions in the Western Hemisphere would now have
belonged to Britain. But, owing to the death of Lord Cathcart, the
general in command of the land forces, the command devolved on General
Wentworth, a man utterly unfit for the position. Admiral Vernon (also
a nincompoop) and he spent their time and energies in counteracting
each other’s influence, and actually taking steps to frustrate each
other’s plans. Finding that the Spanish admiral, De Torres, had
retired from Jamaica, in place of following him to Havannah, Vernon
decided to attack Carthagena, and sailed thither, despite Wentworth’s
remonstrances. This was blunder No. 1. The second was in attempting
to prosecute the enterprise in the face of such divided counsels. The
consequence was a terrible loss of life by disease and the risks of
war, because neither commander seemed to care how many were killed,
provided they were not his own men. Therefore neither supported the
other. The horrors of that expedition are past belief. Smollett’s
grim and ghastly picture of them, in his ‘Account of the Expedition
against Carthagena,’ in the _Compendium of Voyages and Travels_, and
in _Roderick Random_, is not over–coloured. We shall note it in its
place, but meantime let us see what Carlyle has now to say to the
case. In chapter xii. of _Frederick the Great_, under the heading
‘Sorrows of Britannic Majesty,’ he writes of the Carthagena expedition:
‘Most obscure among the other items in that Armada of Sir Challoner’s
just taking leave of England; most obscure of the items then, but
now most noticeable or almost alone noticeable, is a young surgeon’s
mate—one Tobias Smollett, looking over the waters there and the fading
coasts, not without thoughts. A proud, soft–hearted, though somewhat
stern–visaged, caustic, and indignant young gentleman; apt to be
caustic in speech, having sorrows of his own under lock and key, on
this and subsequent occasions. Excellent Tobias, he has, little as he
hopes it, something considerable by way of mission in this expedition
and in this universe generally. Mission to take portraiture of English
seamen, with the due grimness, due fidelity, and convey the same to
remote generations before it vanish. Courage, my brave young Tobias,
through endless sorrows, contradictions, toils, and confusions. You
will do your errand in some measure, and that will be something.’
To describe in detail the hideous drama of mismanagement and sacrifice
of valuable lives that ensued in consequence of Wentworth’s incapacity,
and of the strained relations between him and Admiral Vernon, would
be out of place here. Suffice it to say that, though British valour,
in spite of adverse circumstances, gained one or two successes, the
expedition as a whole was a ghastly failure. Let us instead exhibit
the awful picture Smollett afterwards drew of the condition of things
immediately prior to the breaking up of the siege—a picture that
thrilled England with horror, and led eventually, along with one or
two other contributory circumstances, to the complete reorganisation
of the naval service of the country. In addition, it blasted for ever,
and deservedly so, the careers of monsters so inhuman as Wentworth
and Vernon. ‘As for the sick and wounded,’ says Smollett, ‘they were
next day sent on board of the transports and vessels called hospital
ships, where they languished in want of every necessary comfort and
accommodation. They were destitute of surgeons, nurses, cooks, and
proper provision; they were pent up between decks in small vessels,
where they had not room to sit upright; they wallowed in filth;
myriads of maggots were hatched in the putrefaction of their sores,
which had no other dressing than that of being washed by themselves
with their own allowance of brandy; and nothing was heard but groans,
lamentations, and the language of despair, invoking death to deliver
them from their miseries. What served to encourage this despondence
was the prospect of those poor wretches who had the strength and
opportunity to look about them. For there they beheld the naked bodies
of their fellow–soldiers and comrades floating up and down the harbour,
affording prey to the carrion crows and sharks, which tore them in
pieces without interruption, and contributing by their stench to the
mortality that prevailed. The picture cannot fail to be shocking to
the humane reader, especially while he is informed that while these
miserable objects cried in vain for assistance, and actually perished
for want of proper attendance, every ship of war in the fleet could
have spared a couple of surgeons for their relief; and many young
gentlemen of that profession solicited their captains in vain for leave
to go and administer help to the sick and wounded; but the discord
between the chiefs was inflamed to such a degree of diabolical rancour,
that the one chose rather to see his men perish than ask help of the
other, who disdained to offer his assistance unasked, though it might
have saved the lives of his fellow–subjects.’
Such, then, was the frightful fiasco of the Carthagena expedition,
in which the young Tobias served, and, by his serving as a humble
surgeon’s mate, was able to render a service to his country, the
beneficial effects of which are felt to this day. Not only did he
expose the awful consequences of personal animosity between the leaders
of a great naval–military expedition. Great as was that service, the
second was greater still. David Hannay felicitously remarks: ‘It was
Smollett’s good fortune that he saw the navy at the very lowest ebb
it has reached since there was a navy in England. In 1740 it was as
little organised as it had been in the seventeenth century. There was
more flogging and more callous cruelty in every way than there had
been a century earlier.’ A truer statement of fact could scarcely be
made. The navy at that period was suffering in common with the army
from the disastrous effects of the Whig Walpole’s peace–at–any–price
policy. In fact, there was no proper Admiralty supervision by permanent
officials. Everything was at the mercy of party scheming and intrigue.
Incompetency ruled in all departments. Not until the accession of the
elder Pitt was there a change for the better. British prestige was
dragged through the mire of disgrace in every corner of the world, and
the affairs of the navy were simply left to direct themselves, while
the individuals nominally in charge squabbled and plotted for place and
power.
It was by his immortal pictures in _Roderick Random_ and _Peregrine
Pickle_ of the horrors of navy service, and of the ignorance and
brutality characterising the men who were proudly termed ‘the tars of
Old England,’ that Smollett really revolutionised the navy. Slow though
the improvements might be in filtering through the various strata of
the service, from Admiralty to seamen, the first note of reform was
struck when Smollett penned that awfully realistic picture of life on
board the _Thunder_ man–of–war, with the characters of Captain Oakum,
Surgeon MacShane, and the others connected with that floating hell. In
our concluding chapters we shall examine the truthfulness or otherwise
of Smollett’s character–painting. Here, however, it may be remarked
that the description of the facts, as well as the local ‘atmosphere,’
have been reported by those present at the attack on Carthagena, and
serving in the navy at the time, to be absolutely correct.
After the failure of the expedition, the shattered and disgraced fleet
betook itself to Jamaica to refit. While here, Smollett decided that
he had seen enough of navy life, and that henceforth his labours
would lie ashore. The beauty of the island tempted him to settle
there. Accordingly, he retired from the service after fifteen months’
experience of it, and started practice as a doctor in the island. What
his success was cannot now be ascertained. In less than two years he is
found in London, namely, in the beginning of 1744, striving once more
to gain a living in the great metropolis.
Only one influence followed him into life from the sunny island of
Jamaica. He there wooed and won Miss Anne or Nancy Lascelles, a young
Kingston heiress. When he returned to London, he returned as an engaged
man. In one of his unpublished letters, he expressly states that he was
not married until 1747, when Miss Lascelles came to England. But, on
the other hand, there is evidence in Jamaica that some sort of ceremony
was performed before Smollett left the island in the end of 1743.
However this may be, Smollett’s _Wanderjahre_ or years of wandering
were now over. He settled down straightway to do the work Heaven laid
to his hand, with all the energy that in him lay.
CHAPTER IV
THE WEARY TRAGEDY—SHIFTS TO LIVE
No sooner had Smollett returned to London than he resumed negotiations
with reference to his ill–fated tragedy. Authors are proverbially blind
to the true merits of their literary progeny. As each fond father’s
geese are swans, so, in the youthful Tobias Smollett’s eyes, fresh
from conquest in the matrimonial arena, this decided objection to have
anything to do with his play could only result from national antipathy
against the Scots. ‘My luckless tragedy is suffering for Bannockburn,’
he remarked on one occasion to Mallet. Our vanity will seize on
any reason rather than the right one to save our _amour–propre_.
Undoubtedly, Rich, Gifford, and Lacy’s treatment of Smollett was far
from generous, nor was Garrick wholly free from blame. They should
have declined the play at once. Let us take the better view of it,
however, and ascribe their action to a mistaken desire to save the
peppery Scotsman’s feelings. Better a hundred times if he had received
the plain, unvarnished truth about that wretchedly crude production
at the outset. A few pangs of wounded vanity, a curse or two at the
Southron’s lack of critical insight, and Tobias probably would have
buried or burned his MS. and forgotten all about it in another year,
while in the long–run his common sense would have come to see the
justice of the managerial decision. But for several years after his
return from Jamaica his expectations were raised and his hopes excited
by vague promises and vaguer hints as to what ‘we will do next year.’
The consequence of all this manœuvring was, that Tobias, with that
obstinate national pride characteristic of him, conceived that in some
occult way patriotic prestige was bound up in his publishing, by hook
or crook, a production so long withheld from a presumably expectant
public by Southron jealousy. More follies have been perpetrated under
the guise of patriotism than through all the vices combined. Let us
detail the finish of a foolish business. After _Roderick Random_ had
rendered him famous, Smollett, imagining that all he wrote or had
ever written would be eagerly devoured by an undiscriminating public,
published _The Regicide_ by subscription. Ten years afterwards he
cursed his indiscretion in no measured terms. The wisdom of thirty
became the folly of forty; and some time during the last two years of
his life, according to tradition, he committed to the flames two or
three dozen copies of the ill–digested tragedy that had entailed on him
so much trouble and brought him so little reputation.
Meantime, the worthy Tobias was oppressed with the all–absorbing
problem wherewithal to live. Rumour credited him with marrying an
heiress. Rumour, as usual, lied. If our ex–surgeon’s mate, whose
philosophy of life at that period seemed summed up in Horace’s
famous injunction, ‘Get money, honestly if you can, but without fail
get money,’ expected that in marrying Miss Nancy Lascelles he was
purchasing the fee–simple of future years of affluence and ease, never
man was more deceived. Let us credit the estimable Tobias, however,
with a moral code more elevated than that. Albeit in the years to
come Miss Nancy found she had not married a blood–relation of the
patient Job’s, and he, that passionate West Indian ‘heiresses’ are
not the ideal wives for hard–working literary men, on the whole the
marriage was as happy as are three out of every five contracted in
this working–day world. But the fortune of Miss Nancy, being invested
in sugar plantations and such accessories as are necessary for the
efficient production of this necessary staple of food, was, alas!
difficult of realisation, and in the end only rolled upon the already
heavily–burdened husband a quiverful of lawsuits. It was the old story!
The lawyers got the cash, the litigants—the unspeakable pleasure of
paying for their law with the object of their law–suit. Thus did Miss
Nancy’s fortune disappear!
From March 1744, when he returned to London, until January 1748, when
_Roderick Random_ was published, Smollett’s movements are involved in
obscurity. Only by means of meagre references in his own letters, and
chance allusions to him in those of such friends as, in days to come,
having carved their names in the Temple of Fame, had, in consequence,
the somewhat doubtful honour of having their lives written, are we able
to glean aught about his existence at this period. He was only a lad of
some three or four–and–twenty years, unknown, friendless, and left to
fight the great battle of life for himself. Little wonder is it, then,
if, among the half–million inhabitants constituting the population of
the British metropolis about the middle of the eighteenth century, the
young Scots surgeon felt himself lost—as though he had been cut off
from every kindly face and sympathetic voice. He probably was beginning
to form those connections with booksellers which led him, before many
years were over, to degenerate into a mere money–grubbing hack, not
above doing a little literary ‘sweating,’ by obtaining high prices
for work which he got executed by his slaves of the quill on terms
much lower. But of that in its place. Certain it is that during these
four years Smollett must have derived an income, and, what is more, a
moderately good income, from some source. His letters prove that. From
one addressed to his early friend, Richard Barclay, and dated London,
May 22, 1744, we quote the following autobiographical facts:—‘I am
this minute happy in yours, which affords me all the satisfaction
of hearing from you, without the anxiety naturally flowing from its
melancholy occasion, for I was informed of the decease of our late
friend by a letter from Mr. Gordon, dated the day after his death. All
those (as well as you, my dear Barclay) who knew the intimacy between
us must imagine that no stroke of fate could make a deeper impression
on my soul than that which severs me for ever from one I so entirely
loved, from one who merited universal esteem, and who, had he not been
cut off in the very blossom of his being, would have been an ornament
to society, the pride and joy of his parents, and a most inestimable
jewel to such as were attached to him as we were by the sacred ties
of love and friendship.... My weeping muse would fain pay a tribute
to his manes, and were I vain enough to think my verse would last, I
would perpetuate his friendship and his virtue. I wish I was near you,
that I might pour forth my heart before you, and make you judge of its
dictates and the several steps I have lately taken, in which case I am
confident you and all honest men would acquit my principles, however my
prudentials might be condemned. However, I have moved into the house
where the late John Douglas, surgeon, died, and you may henceforth
direct for Mr. Smollett, surgeon, in Downing Street, West.... Your own,
TS. SMOLLETT.
_N.B._—Willie Wood, who is just now drinking a glass with me, offers
you his good wishes, and desires you to present his compliments to Miss
Betty Bogle.—T. S.’
Now, the extracts given above would seem to indicate that Smollett
was, in the first place, in somewhat easy circumstances. As Mr. Hannay
very justly remarks, houses in Downing Street, West, and glasses of
wine for friends, were not to be enjoyed, even in the patriarchal
times of last century, without a periodical production of the almighty
dollar. Circumstances point to the fact that Smollett took the deceased
surgeon’s house with the possible hope of dropping into his practice.
But in addition to that very problematic source of income, there must
have been some other, and that in some degree at least to be relied
upon. Smollett would never have faced the future so gaily with such a
millstone round his neck, unless he had clearly seen his way to a sure
and steady means of revenue. To our mind, that revenue must either have
been yielded by Mrs. Smollett’s property in Kingston, and the ceremony
performed there, prior to Smollett’s departure, must have been regarded
as a marriage, or his industry in hack work for the booksellers must
have been phenomenal. Either alternative presents difficulties. Neither
can be accepted without weighty reservations. Best, under all aspects
of the case, is it to affirm nothing positively, in the absence at
the present time of definite information, which, however, may yet be
discovered.
The years 1745 and 1746 were stirring years in Britain. The rumours
of a great Jacobite invasion of Scotland were rife while the year was
young. They increased in number and definiteness as it gradually grew
older, until, in August 1745, the intelligence reached London that
Prince Charles Edward had actually landed in the Western Highlands.
Smollett, though a sentimental Whig and an actual Tory, though, in
other words, sympathising with the cause of the downtrodden and the
laborious poor, while at the same time he heartily anathematised
Walpole and the Duke of Newcastle, and at this time at least extolled
the Tory Pitt the elder, was no Jacobite. True it was, his peppery
nature was easily aroused by the flagrant and criminal neglect
Scotland had received under Walpole’s administration. He was never
done denouncing this ‘direct descendant of the impenitent thief’—a
phrase afterwards borrowed, with a slight alteration, but without
acknowledgment, by Dan O’Connell, and applied, as everybody knows, to
Benjamin Disraeli. But however deeply Smollett was attached to his
country, it was merely a sentimental attachment, akin to his Whiggery.
He would not endanger his neck by ‘going out’ during the Rebellion of
the ‘45, but he would have been guilty of a little harmless treason
had he met with any kindred spirit with an enthusiasm strong enough
to blow his own into flame. An evidence of the interest Smollett took
in the Rebellion, and the indignation he felt over the atrocities
perpetrated by the Duke of Cumberland on the hapless Highland prisoners
that fell into his hands after the battle of Culloden, is found in
the following anecdote related by Sir Walter Scott, on the authority
of Robert Graham, Esq., of Gartmore, a particular friend and trustee
of Smollett:—‘Some gentlemen, having met in a tavern, were amusing
themselves before supper with a game at cards, while Smollett, not
choosing to play, sat down to write. One of the company, who also
was nominated one of his trustees (Gartmore himself), observing his
earnestness, and supposing he was writing verses, asked him if it were
not so. He accordingly read them the first sketch of his “Tears of
Scotland,” consisting only of six stanzas, and on their remarking that
the termination of the poem, being too strongly expressed, might give
offence to persons whose political opinions were different, he sat
down without reply, and with an air of great indignation subjoined the
concluding stanza:—
“While the warm blood bedews my veins,
And unimpaired remembrance reigns,
Resentment of my country’s fate
Within my filial breast shall beat.
Yes, spite of thine insulting foe,
My sympathising verse shall flow.
Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn
Thy banished peace, thy laurels torn!”’
To which Scott adds: ‘To estimate the generous emotions with which
Smollett was actuated on this occasion, it must be remarked that his
patriotism was independent of party feeling, as he had been bred up in
Whig principles, which were those of his family. Although these appear
from his historical works to have been in some degree modified, yet the
author continued attached to the principles of the Revolution.’
The ‘Tears of Scotland,’ the poem written under the curious
circumstances recounted above, was a generous outburst of patriotic
indignation in favour of Scotland and the Scots, at a time when such
manifestations, owing to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, were liable
to be construed, by a Government as truculent and short–sighted as it
was venal and corrupt, into treason. Notwithstanding the fact that the
‘Tears of Scotland’ was moderately popular in its day, the powers that
were in those days decided to leave the peppery Scot severely alone.
At this period it is also that we obtain a pleasant side–light thrown
upon Smollett’s life and work from the autobiography of Dr. ‘Jupiter’
Carlyle, the minister of Inveresk, in Midlothian, from 1748 to 1805,
who was the friend and associate of nearly all the literary celebrities
of the period—Home, Robertson, Blair, Logan, Henry Mackenzie, Lords
Kames and Monboddo, etc. Fortunately, he preserved and noted down
his impressions of all these great men, though, having done so only
in extreme old age, many of the details are incorrectly stated. Dr.
Carlyle remarks that with Smollett and one or two more he ‘resorted to
a small tavern in the corner of Cockspur Street at the Golden Ball,
where we had a frugal supper and a little punch, as the finances of
none of the company were in very good order. But we had rich enough
conversation on literary subjects, which was enlivened by Smollett’s
agreeable stories, which he told with a peculiar grace. Soon after
our acquaintance, Smollett showed me his tragedy of “James I. of
Scotland,”[3] which he never could bring on the stage. For this the
managers could not be blamed, though it soured him against them, and he
appealed to the public by printing it; but the public seemed to take
part with the managers.’
The following incident, detailed by Dr. Carlyle, also manifests
Smollett in the light of a Scots patriot:—‘I was in the coffee–house
with Smollett when the news of the battle of Culloden arrived, and when
London all over was in an uproar of joy. It was then that Jack Stewart,
the son of the Provost, behaved in the manner I before mentioned.[4]
About nine o’clock I wished to go home to Lyon’s in New Bond Street, as
I had promised to sup with him that night, it being the anniversary of
his marriage–night, or the birthday of one of his children. I asked
Smollett if he was ready to go, as he lived at Mayfair; he said he
was, and would conduct me. The mob were so riotous and the squibs so
numerous and incessant, that we were glad to go into a narrow entry to
put our wigs in our pockets, and to take our swords from our belts,
and to walk with them in our hands, as everybody then wore swords;
and after cautioning me against speaking a word, lest the mob should
discover my country and become insolent, “for John Bull,” said he, “is
as haughty and valiant to–night as he was abject and cowardly on the
Black Wednesday when the Highlanders were at Derby.” After we got to
the head of the Haymarket through incessant fire, the doctor led me by
narrow lanes, where we met nobody but a few boys at a pitiful bonfire,
who very civilly asked us for sixpence, which I gave them. I saw not
Smollett again for some time after, when he showed Smith and me the MS.
of his “Tears of Scotland,” which was published not long after, and had
such a run of approbation. Smollett, though a Tory, was not a Jacobite,
but he had the feelings of a Scotch gentleman on the reported cruelties
that were said to be exercised after the battle of Culloden.’
Sir Walter Scott, with his wonted charity, endeavours to account for
Smollett’s lack of success as a physician. He did not succeed, because
his haughty and independent spirit neglected the bypaths which lead
to fame in that profession. Another writer ascribes it to his lack
of consideration for his female patients, certainly not from want of
address or figure, but from a hasty impatience in listening to petty
complaints. Perhaps, finally, remarks Scott, Dr. Smollett was too soon
discouraged, and abandoned prematurely a profession in which success is
proverbially slow.
In these circumstances, conscious as he must have been of his own
powers, Smollett could only look to his pen for the supply of his
daily needs. And it did not disappoint him. In 1748, besides numerous
ephemeral compilations for the booksellers, he produced his poetical
satire _Advice_, a poem in the manner of Juvenal, wherein several of
the leading political characters of the day were held up to scorn. Our
author certainly did not spare his caustic sarcasm. The consequence
was, _Advice_ became so popular that he published a sequel, or rather
continuation of it, in 1747, under the title of _Reproof_, both being
bound and published together in the succeeding year. When another
edition of each was called for, Smollett had made himself talked about
and feared, in the hope that the Ministry of the day would see it to
their advantage to pension him off with a sinecure office. No such
fortune befell him. He had only sown dragon’s teeth, from which enemies
sprang up to harass and vex him even to the end of his days.
Of the literary merits of the Satires more will be said anon. One
quality in them may be noted here, however, and that was the absolute
fearlessness wherewith Smollett attacked those in power. His sting
was never sheathed out of dread of any man. None were exempt from
the lash of his sarcasm, whose wrong–doings came to his knowledge.
If the innocent sometimes were involved with the guilty in common
condemnation, in most cases the reason was because they continued
in association with the politically or morally depraved after being
cognisant of their character.
The sensation created by these trenchant Satires was great. Literary
London recognised that a new writer of great and varied powers
had risen. The old generation was dying out. Swift, Bolingbroke,
Congreve, Arbuthnot, Pope, were either dead or had ceased to write.
Goldsmith had not yet appeared. Johnson alone held the field; but
he was more of a moral censor than a satirist. There was really no
satirist of surpassing ability tickling the palate of the public,
which dearly loves censure—when directed against other people. The
coarse, sledge–hammer caricature of Tom D’Urfey and Tom Brown, though
still relished by a few, was gradually giving place to a more refined
and incisive, but none the less vitriolic type, wherein Smollett was
an acknowledged master. _Advice_ and _Reproof_ are readable yet for
the pungency of the sarcasm, united to absolute truth as regards the
facts adduced. One does not wonder at the popularity of these pieces.
They are thoroughly ‘live’ epigrammatic productions, aglow with
human interest, and palpitating with that vigorous, honest, healthy
indignation against wrong which awakens a reciprocal feeling in one’s
breast across the chasm of a hundred and fifty years. ‘Dost not fear
the Government, Smollett’? said a timid friend to him after their
publication. ‘Fear the Government?’ was the contemptuous reply of the
other. ‘I might if I showed I dreaded them; but no man need fear a
Government provided he does not show he fears it.’
During the publication of the second part of his Satires, Smollett was
joined in London by the lady who became his wife. In 1747 they set up
house, and for some months he enjoyed the luxury of his own fireside.
Fate was not long to leave him unassailed, but long enough, at least,
to give him a taste of that hymeneal heaven which follows the union
of two loving hearts—long enough for him to have experienced the
sentiments that found expression in the one love–poem he wrote, ‘Ode
to Blue–Eyed Ann.’ Miss Anne or Nancy Lascelles cannot have been the
unresponsive being some of Smollett’s biographers contend, in order to
excuse their hero’s ungallant conduct in later years, when every other
sentiment was sacrificed to ambition, otherwise she could not have
inspired feelings so passionate as these—
‘When rolling seasons cease to change,
Inconstancy forget to range;
When lavish May no more shall bloom
Nor gardens yield a rich perfume;
When Nature from her sphere shall start,
I’ll tear my Nanny from my heart.’
Smollett seemed to have all an Irishman’s love of a quarrel. He never
appeared happier than when he was ‘slangwhanging’ some unfortunate,
though it is a hundred to one the fault was on his own side. To be
‘slangwhanged’ in return, however, was altogether another matter.
Ridicule cut him to the raw. He had the idea that all the world should
submit to his animadversions patiently and uncomplainingly. But if any
dared to retaliate, instantly they were dubbed rogues, and fools, and
blockheads. An instance of this occurred in his relations with Rich,
the theatrical manager. The success of _Advice_ had induced the latter
to lend a favourable ear to Smollett’s proposal to write the libretto
of an opera called _Alceste_, which would have been produced at Covent
Garden, Handel being engaged to write the music for it. All went well,
and the work was actually in rehearsal, when Rich made some suggestions
to Smollett about altering one of the scenes. Immediately the peppery
poet was on his dignity. He declined to alter a line. Thereupon Rich,
preferring to quarrel with his author rather than offend the public,
rejected the piece, to Smollett’s intense chagrin. In vain his friends
begged of him to make some concession to Rich, who seems to have been
exceedingly forbearing all through. The poet declined, and thus another
chance of bettering his prospects was lost.
Handel, on hearing of the transaction, is reported to have remarked,
‘That Scotchman is ein tam fool; I vould have mate his vurk immortal,’
and immediately proceeded to alter the music so as to adapt it to
Dryden’s ‘Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day.’ Verily _Alceste_ would have been
immortal if wedded to those noble harmonies. But it was not to be.
The only result was the addition of another group of powerful social
personages to his already long list of enemies, for of course Tobias
could not refrain from lampooning Rich. ‘O the pity of it!’
CHAPTER V
_RODERICK RANDOM_
We reach now the most important period of Smollett’s life. That he
had fully realised, long before, the splendid nature of the talents
wherewith he was endowed, is more than probable, though he possibly
was in doubt as to the precise outlet his genius would make for
itself. He had tried tragedy, but had been roughly disillusionised
as to his El Dorado being found on the stage. He had neither the
power of compression nor the faculty of seizing upon one central
idea and making all the others subservient and subordinate thereto,
so necessary a qualification in the dramatist. His satire also was a
little too ferocious and vitriolic to entirely please the taste of
the English–reading public, that was gradually looking askance at the
knockdown, sledge–hammer blows of Butler and Swift, and veering round
to the more delicate but none the less effective style of Goldsmith,
Gay, and Johnson. His poetry, moreover, was not sufficiently generous,
either in quantity or quality, to secure for him even a low place in
the Temple of Poesie. His genius, therefore, must find some other
outlet. What was it to be?
In 1740, Samuel Richardson, the father of the English novel, had
produced _Pamela_, a work which at once achieved a lasting success. Not
that novel–writing was unknown previous to that date, as many writers
suppose. The Italian _novelli_ and the Spanish tales were known in
Britain, and had inspired many imitators. While carefully dissociating
the pastoral romances like Sidney’s _Arcadia_ or those ‘romances’
proper, or fiction dealing with feudal customs and illustrative of the
‘virtues’ of chivalry, from ‘novels,’ which, in the early signification
of the word at least, implied stories descriptive of domestic or
everyday life in the period of the writer’s own immediate epoch,
many of the stories written by Robert Greene, the dramatist, Thomas
Nashe, and Nicolas Breton are novels of English life pure and simple,
albeit foreign names may be used. So in Shakespeare all his plays are
distinctively English in atmosphere and sympathies, to say nothing of
sentiments, although Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra,
and the like, are selected as the nominal heroes and heroines of
the piece. The English novel had long been in existence. The only
difference was that the writers did not specialise any period as that
wherein the incidents occurred. They preferred to leave themselves
free, and to people with the creatures of their fancy that mysteriously
delightful era vaguely shadowed forth by ‘long ago’ or ‘once upon a
time.’
The surpassing virtue of Richardson and his successor Fielding was
that they boldly seized upon the time wherein they lived as that which
was to form the background of their stories. Their ‘to–day’ was to
be painted as faithfully and as fondly as those earlier writers had
depicted imaginary epochs. We can scarcely form any idea now of the
overwhelming enthusiasm that greeted Richardson’s _Pamela_. For the
first time readers saw their own age delineated with a fidelity and
withal a fearlessness that had the effect of a supreme moral lesson. Of
course, to our ideas of to–day, many of the descriptions in the novels
of last century are simply revolting, and would be condemned amongst
us as an outrage on good taste. ‘The morals of the young person’ are
our nineteenth–century bogey, which ever and anon rises up to scare any
luckless novelist who dares to paint life as it really is. Thackeray
used to lament that he dared not paint Becky Sharp as she really was,
because all the mammas in the British Islands would taboo his work. But
midway the eighteenth century they were not so queasy–stomached. They
called a spade a spade. If a man went to the devil with wine and women,
they took a delight in chronicling the whole process—as a warning
to others, be it noted, not like the leprous–minded, neurotic school
in our own days, look you, because they wanted to rake in guineas by
chronicling a brother’s or a sister’s shame.
_Pamela_, however, effected a higher purpose than merely affording
pleasure to eager readers. Its exotic morality and exaggerated
sentimentality stirred up into vigorous life the spirit of ridicule
latent in the big, manly, kindly, but coarse–fibred nature of Henry
Fielding. As a caricature of _Pamela_ he produced his novel, _Joseph
Andrews_, the hero of which was the brother of _Pamela_, and was made
to exhibit the same exaggerated virtues as had characterised the
latter. Fielding’s “skit” became the first great character–novel in the
English language, and announced to the world the fact that the greatest
master of contemporary literary portraiture that prose literature has
yet seen, had appeared.
The publication of _Clarissa Harlowe_, by Richardson, towards the end
of 1747, and the announcement made of the appearance of Fielding’s
_Tom Jones_, in parts, seem to have raised the question in Smollett’s
mind whether he also might not be able to create a gallery of fiction
every whit as notable as ‘Pamela,’ or ‘Mr. B——,’ or ‘Parson Adams,’
or ‘Lovelace,’ or ‘Sophia Western.’ The flattering results of success
in the improvement of the material prospects of both Richardson and
Fielding could not but exercise a certain amount of influence on him.
In the month of June 1747, as he tells us, he began the composition of
a novel of his own time, very diffidently, and with the resolve firmly
kept in view, that if the work did not come up to his own expectations,
he would remorselessly burn it.
He was of too original a caste of genius to sink into the subordinate
position of a mere imitator of either Richardson or Fielding. He noted
carefully that the former had monopolised the novel of sentiment, as
the latter had taken as his own the novel of character. But he also
saw that the novel of incident was still unappropriated in English
fiction. This department he determined to make his own. Taking the
_Gil Blas_ of Le Sage as his model, he endeavoured as far as possible
to make his tale interesting by the number and variety of the events
introduced, feeling assured that the portraiture of character would not
be of an inferior type, if only he could draw on his past experiences
for material. While by no means a slavish follower of Le Sage, the
influence of the great French writer is very perceptible in _Roderick
Random_. There is the same breathless succession of incidents, the same
hairbreadth escapes, the same ready ingenuity on the part of the hero
in extricating himself from awkward predicaments. In a word, Roderick
is but a blood relation of _Gil Blas_, though his British parentage and
rearing have modified some of the eccentricities and peccadilloes that
would have scared even the purblind mammas and custodians of national
virtue last century.
_Roderick Random_ was published towards the end of January 1748, having
occupied five months in its composition. Its success was instant and
extraordinary. The British public recognised that a third had been
added to the great masters of fiction—a third whose genius, though
inferior in solidity and sublimity to that of either Richardson or
Fielding, surpassed both in prodigality and wealth of invention. The
first edition of the work did not bear the author’s name, but was
published in two small duodecimo volumes by Osborn of Gray’s Inn Lane
(the same individual knocked down by Dr. Johnson as a punishment for
insolence), the price being six shillings. The interest excited by
the book may be imagined when it was attributed by Lady Mary Wortley
Montague to Fielding. In a letter to her daughter, the Countess of
Bute, as recorded in her works, Lady Mary says: ‘Fielding has really
a fund of true humour. I guessed _Roderick Random_ to be his, though
without his name.’ Later on she adds: ‘I cannot think _Ferdinand
Fathom_ wrote by the same hand, it is every way so much below it.’
The notices of the novel in any contemporary journals are but meagre.
In the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ and in the _Intelligencer_, short
criticisms appear noting it as a work ‘full of ingenious descriptions
and lively occurrences.’ Several of the other periodicals contented
themselves with a mere intimation of its publication. Of puffing and
pushing seemingly the work needed little. Its own merits carried it
into all circles. Even Samuel Richardson, whose antipathy to Fielding
may have inclined him to show favour to any possible rival of the
man who had dared to caricature his pet creation, remarked of it
in comparison with _Tom Jones_, published some months later, that
_Roderick Random_ was written by a good man to show the evils of
vice, _Tom Jones_ by a profligate to render vice more alluring. The
infallible judgment of posterity will not confirm the criticism of
the narrow–minded old bookseller, who abhorred anything that did not
directly or indirectly reflect praise on himself. Edition after edition
of this the latest success in literature was called for. Smollett’s
name was placed on the title–page after the issue of the second
edition, and the public then realised that the popular novel was the
work of none of the elder writers, as was supposed, but of a young,
impecunious surgeon, not yet thirty, who had exhibited a very pretty
talent for satire, as the Dukes of Newcastle and Grafton, the Earls of
Bath, Granville, and Cholmondeley, Sir William Yonge, Mr. Pitt, and
Rich the theatrical manager, could testify to their cost.
Thereupon the town sought to take the young surgeon up and patronise
him, only to discover that he was far from being a patronisable
party—nay, was somewhat akin to the frozen snake which the countryman,
pitying, took up and hid in his bosom to warm it, only to be stung when
the reptile recovered vitality. Smollett all his life was too apt to
mistake genuine kindness for patronage, and to flash out hasty darts
of sarcasm in response to heartfelt wishes to win his friendship. Many
of the leading personages of London now sought to benefit him and
to show him that they desired to count him among their friends. But
Tobias, as already said, was like the fretful porcupine. He had been so
long a stranger to disinterested kindness, so long treated as little
better than a superfluous atom on the world’s surface, that affability
towards him was construed into condescension—a thought which made each
particular hair of his sensitive nature to stand on end. Curious though
the fact, nevertheless it is true that Smollett’s friendship was in
most cases extended to those who differed from him rather than to those
who agreed with him, though at the same time he might be bespattering
the former with all the terms of reprobation in his somewhat extensive
vocabulary of vituperation.
Although _Roderick Random_, coming, as it did, sandwiched in, so to
speak, between _Clarissa Harlowe_ and _Tom Jones_, had to pass through
a trying fire of literary comparison, it emerged from the ordeal more
popular than ever. Readers realised that in him was a writer who was a
story–teller pure and simple, whose moral lessons were conveyed rather
by implication than by positive precept, and to whom the progress of
his story was the prime consideration. The wearisome moralisings of
Richardson and the tedious untwistings of motive so characteristic of
Fielding were unknown in _Roderick Random_. The story for the story’s
sake was evidently the writer’s aim throughout, and nobly he fulfilled
it. By many of our latter–day novelists the imaginative swiftness of
Smollett might with advantage be studied.
All criticism will be reserved for our closing chapters, but at this
point it may not be out of place to state that, although Smollett’s
characters are many of them drawn _from life_, it does not follow
they are portrayed _to the life_. By this distinction I would seek
to relieve him of the imputation, shameful in many cases beyond a
doubt, of having deliberately drawn line for line the portraits of his
relatives, of individuals met with on board the _Cumberland_, and other
fellow–travellers with whom he had fallen in during his journey along
the highway of existence. That suggestions were given to him by the
actions of such men as the commander of the _Cumberland_, the staff of
surgeons on board, and other personages with whom he came in contact,
is perfectly probable. But that he noted through the microscope of his
keen faculty of observation, every trait, every moral feature, and
registered them on the debit or credit side of each character, I cannot
admit, nor would such a course be consistent with the originality of
his genius. The setting of incident may in some cases be drawn from
his own experience, but that we can in any sense rely on each portrait
in his works being a truthful representation of the prototype, that I
deny. The assumption is negatived by his own confession with regard
to his grandfather, and also by his action with reference to Gordon,
his former employer. If the latter were drawn to the life under the
character of either Potion or Crab in _Roderick Random_, as many
biographers contend, Smollett completely ate his own words in _Humphrey
Clinker_ when he remarked that Gordon ‘was a patriot of a truly noble
spirit,’ etc. There is nothing more misleading and at the same time
more unfair to an author than to subject him to this sort of literary
dissection. No author is without suggestions from without in limning
his gallery of characters, but that he draws them wholly from without
is as impossible as that a doctor’s diagnosis is based solely on what
he observes, or on what is visible to the eye, and not also on what is
the result of arguing from the known to the unknown. Captains Oakum and
Whiffle, Squire Gawky, and others, are intentionally exaggerated for
the purposes of literary effect. If they were drawn from nature, then
they would have to be severely condemned as exaggerations.
Sir Walter Scott speaks very decidedly on this point in _The Lives of
the Novelists and Dramatists_: ‘It was generally believed that Smollett
painted some of his own early adventures under the veil of fiction; but
the public carried the spirit of applying the characters of a work of
fiction to living personages much farther than the author intended.’
Dr. Moore, also, while acknowledging that Smollett was not sufficiently
careful to prevent such applications of his characters, yet denies that
they were portraits of living personages.
Smollett now could contemplate the future with hopefulness. _Roderick
Random_ had achieved a success so extraordinary, that even at that
early period in his literary career, the booksellers, or, as they would
now be termed, ‘publishers,’ were bespeaking his wares ahead. Taken all
in all, Smollett accepted his good fortune with conspicuous moderation.
Success did not turn his head. He was not like his characters, Roderick
Random or Peregrine Pickle, extravagantly uplifted by prosperity,
plunged into despair by adversity. More akin to worthy old Matthew
Bramble was he, who, while he took the world at no very high valuation,
and was not averse to accepting its smile, yet did not break his heart
over its frown.
The only foolish action to which he gave way at this period of
popularity was the publication by subscription of _The Regicide_. The
fame accruing to him from the success of his novel was, he reasoned,
a favourable means whereby to enable him to launch his play upon the
waters of public opinion. His reputation certainly ensured the sale of
his play, but the sale of his play materially affected his reputation.
That _The Regicide_ was not a work of merit Smollett never could be
brought to see, until he had criticised for some years the works of
others in the _Critical Review_. Besides, he had sufficient of the
old Adam in him that he wished ‘to have his knife’ into the offending
theatrical managers, and the ‘great little men,’ as he called them,
who had professed to take his play under their patronage. Therefore,
when _The Regicide_ was published in 1749, our author prefixed thereto
a preface full of gall and vinegar—a piece of spleen, of which, in
his later days, he was sincerely ashamed. That preface is not pleasant
reading to those who love the genius of Smollett. A vindictive
schoolboy in the first flush of resentment against his teacher for
giving him a sound but deserved birching could not have perpetrated
anything much worse.
In 1750, Smollett and his wife paid a visit to Paris, in order that the
popular novelist might collect materials for his new work of fiction.
The charms of the gay city, the kindness and consideration shown him
by the Parisians, the adulation showered on him by the literary men
of the French capital, all coloured Smollett’s estimate of the place
and people. ‘To live in Paris,’ he says in one of his letters of the
period, ‘is to live in heaven.’ That he saw reason slightly to alter
his opinion afterwards, was only to be expected. But the delights of
this first visit to Paris remained indelibly impressed on his memory.
He met many persons in France whose characters and circumstances
afterwards suggested to him some of the most notable personages in his
gallery of fiction. For example, Moore, in his memoirs of Smollett,
states that the portrait of the Doctor in _Peregrine Pickle_ was drawn
in some respects from Dr. Akenside, the well–known poet, author of
_The Pleasures of Imagination_, a man of true learning, culture, and
high talents, but whose offence, in Smollett’s eyes, was that he had
cast some sneering reflections upon Scotland in Smollett’s presence,
although, on the other hand, Akenside had studied in Edinburgh, and
acknowledged the excellence of its medical school. Pallet the painter,
also, was suggested to him, adds Moore, by the coxcombry of an English
artist, who used to declaim on the subject of _Virtu_, and often used
the following expressions, familiar enough to readers of the novel
in question—‘Paris is very rich in the arts; London is a Goth, and
Westminster a Vandal, compared to Paris.’
But the most effective episode drawn by Smollett from his French
experiences was, as Anderson says, the story of the Scottish Jacobite
exiles, banished from their country for their share in the Rebellion of
1745. Readers of _Peregrine Pickle_ will remember that at Boulogne the
hero meets a body of these unfortunates, who daily made a pilgrimage
to the seaside to view the white cliffs of Britain, which they were
never more to approach. That incident was drawn from life. Mr. Hunter
of Burnside was the individual amongst them who is mentioned as having
wept bitterly over his misfortune of having involved a beloved wife
and three children in misery and distress, and in the impatience of
his grief, having cursed his fate with frantic imprecations. Dr. Moore
heard Mr. Hunter express himself in this manner to Smollett, and at
the same time relate the affecting visit which he and his companions
daily made to the seaside when residing at Boulogne. From his visit,
then, Smollett drew a wealth of incidents and characteristics, which
he was able with surpassing skill to touch up, recolour, magnify, and
exaggerate as he saw fit in the interests of his story.
At this period, John Home, author of _Douglas_, was paying a visit
to London in order to try to induce Garrick to accept his tragedy of
_Agis_. He met Smollett, introduced to him by their mutual friend
‘Jupiter’ Carlyle, and had much pleasant intercourse with him. From the
Life[5] of Home by Henry Mackenzie, I extract the following details, as
they throw a curious side–light on Smollett’s character. In his letter,
dated 6th November 1749, to Carlyle, he remarks: ‘I have seen nobody
yet but Smollett, whom I like very well.’ Farther on he adds: ‘I am a
good deal disappointed at the mien of the English, which I think but
poor. I observed it to Smollett, after having walked at High–Mall,
who agreed with me.’ Then, a little later, Home writes to ‘Jupiter,’
evidently grateful for some kindnesses shown him by Tobias, in the
following terms:—‘Your friend Smollett, who has a thousand good, nay,
the best qualities, and whom I love much more than he thinks I do, has
got on Sunday last three hundred pounds for his _Mask_.’ What this
_Mask_ was it is hard to say, but in all probability it referred to
some work which Smollett was executing for Garrick. To the _Alceste_
the allusion could not refer, nor to the _Reprisals_. The allusion,
therefore, must be directed to some cobbling dramatic work, of which
Smollett did a great deal for Drury Lane, Covent Garden, and Goodman’s
Fields.
A testimony so independent as this from Home possesses the highest
value. To the virtues and excellences of a much misunderstood man it
offers a tardy but valuable vindication.
Of Smollett, David Hume, who met him somewhat later in life, said: ‘He
is like the cocoa–nut, the outside is the worst part of him.’
CHAPTER VI
_PEREGRINE PICKLE_ AND _FERDINAND COUNT FATHOM_—DOCTOR OF PHYSIC
Both during his stay in Paris, and on his return, Smollett had been
working steadily at his new novel, which he had called _The Adventures
of Peregrine Pickle_. The title of all his books affords a clue to
their character. Incident—vigorous, well described incident, lively,
incessant, exhaustless—such was the ‘mode’ of fiction our author
had determined to make his own. Hence the titles of his works—_The
Adventures of Roderick Random_, _The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle_,
_The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom_, _The Adventures of Sir
Launcelot Greaves_, _The Expedition of Humphrey Clinker_—are genuinely
descriptive of his style of writing. He had no patience for the slow
analysis of character, or the exhibition of wire–drawn sentiments.
His novels were always on the boil. There was no cooling down of the
interest permitted, even for a moment. No sooner was the hero done with
one incident than another was hard on its trail to overtake him. Ennui
and dullness have a bad time of it while one of Smollett’s novels is in
course of perusal.
In 1750, acting upon the urgent solicitations of his wife, he made a
last attempt to establish himself as a physician. Mrs. Smollett did
not exactly appreciate a husband who had no profession. Poor Nancy
does not seem to have been a very suitable yokefellow for our busy
_litterateur_. She had no reverence for literature as such, or for its
professors. She had all a woman’s desire for social distinction. But
in order to take any position in that society after which this poor
little Eve of the eighteenth century panted as eagerly as those of the
nineteenth, an indispensable desideratum was that her husband should
belong to one of the recognised professions, even although it might be
only ‘something in the City’! To hope to settle in London was out of
the question. That had been already tried, and had failed. Perhaps the
good folks of the city of King Bladud might be more amenable to the
recommendations of Dr. Smollett’s skill. Therefore Smollett resolved to
settle at Bath, and see whether he could gain a living as a doctor at
the great eighteenth century Spa.
Before this project could be put into practice, however, medical
etiquette demanded he should take a physician’s degree. Hitherto he
only had secured a surgeon’s certificate, and that was of little
service at Bath. Accordingly, he proceeded to take his degree of
M.D., and thereafter had a right to sign himself ‘Dr. Smollett.’
Considerable doubt existed formerly regarding the University whence
our author obtained his diploma. Even so late as in Dr. Anderson’s
time (1805–1820, the dates of the editions of his book), the question
had not been decided. The statement in his Life of Smollett that
his diploma was probably obtained from some foreign University, and
that ‘the researches which have hitherto been made in the lists of
graduates in the Scottish Universities, have not discovered his name,’
led investigators to every other quarter but the right one. All the
registers of the foreign medical schools were ransacked in vain. To Sir
Walter Scott must be ascribed the honour of settling the matter once
for all, by proving that Smollett was a medical graduate of Aberdeen.
Let Sir Walter speak for himself. He says: ‘The late ingenious artist,
Mr. H. W. Williams of Edinburgh, tells us in his _Travels_, that a
friend of his had seen in 1816, at Leghorn, the diploma of Smollett’s
doctorate, and that it was an Aberdeen one. The present editor thought
it worth while to inquire into this, and Professor Cruikshank has
politely forwarded a certificated copy of the diploma, which was
granted by the Marischal College of Aberdeen in 1750.’ Accordingly,
therefore, for a year or two at least, we must picture the author of
_Roderick Random_ feeling the pulses and examining the tongues of
patients who, in many cases, were mere valetudinarians, or, on the
other hand, feigned themselves ill that they might have an excuse for
visiting the gay city of Bath. With that irritating class of patients
Smollett would have no patience. He would brusquely expose their
petty deceit; and in one case, at least, informed a lady that ‘if
she had time to play at being ill, he had not time to play at curing
her.’ Such a physician was like a wild buffalo let loose over the
conventional _parterres_ of the sentimental femininity of both sexes.
He simply gored with his rude satire the pleasant fictions of lusty
but lazy invalids, or scattered to the winds the fond delusions of
hypochondriacs, in whom too much old port and high living had induced
the demons of dyspepsia. Little wonder is it, then, that Smollett as
a physician was as supreme a failure as Oliver Goldsmith. Within two
years we find him back in London, cursing his folly in ever having
been induced to try an experiment that was doomed to failure from the
very outset. Alas, poor little Mrs. Smollett! her dreams of social
importance were rudely dispelled. From a brief experience of playing
‘the doctor’s dame’ among the good folks of Bath, she had ignominiously
to return to London and sink into the obscurity of a lady who cannot
even aspire to the credit of having a husband who is ‘something in
the City.’ In ‘Narcissa’s’ eyes—for there is little doubt that the
character of Narcissa in _Roderick Random_ was at least suggested by
his wife—her husband’s literary work was worse than degrading. In
common with many others of her time, she deemed ‘a man of letters’ to
be synonymous with a gentleman who spent one–half his time in the Fleet
or the Marshalsea for debt, and the other half in dodging bailiffs from
post to pillar for the privilege of enjoying God’s sunshine without the
walls of a jail.
One piece of work Smollett accomplished before he left Bath. He
published a short treatise on the mineral waters of the place under
the title, _An Essay on the External Use of Water, in a letter to
Dr.——, with Particular Remarks on the Present Method of Using the
Mineral Waters at Bath in Somersetshire, and a Plan for rendering them
more Safe, Agreeable, and Efficacious_ (4to, 1752). The book is full
of sound maxims for the preservation of health. But here and there
he cannot resist girding at those who visited the place for no other
purpose than to participate in its gaieties, and whose ailments were
as fictitious as in many cases was their social standing. This was,
of course, a hit at the crowds of sharpers and adventurers of all
sorts, male and female, that frequented Bath during its palmy days last
century.
While at Bath, however, that is, in March 1751, _Peregrine Pickle_, his
second great novel, was published in two volumes duodecimo, the imprint
being ‘London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by D. Wilson, at
Plato’s Head, near Round Court in the Strand, 1751.’ This implies that
Smollett had found the method more to his advantage to act as his own
publisher, than to submit to the extortion of the greedy Shylocks of
the press in those days. The race of great publishers, taking a genuine
interest in their authors and their work, had yet to arise—that race
of which Scott’s friend Constable was one of the earliest examples and
the best.
The success of the new novel was unparalleled. As Herbert says in his
excellent prefatory Life to the Works of Smollett: ‘It was received
with such extraordinary avidity that a large impression was quickly
sold in England, another was bought up in Ireland, a translation was
executed into the French language, and it soon made its appearance in
a second edition with an apologetic _Advertisement_ and _Two Letters_
relating to the _Memoirs of a Lady of Quality_, sent to the editor by
“a Person of Honour.” This first edition is in our day scarce enough,
and sufficiently coarse to fetch an enhanced price.’ Edition followed
edition of the popular work. If any doubt had previously existed
whether Smollett was worthy to take his place beside Richardson and
Fielding, none could be urged now. In all contemporary records we find
the three bracketed together, as the great fictional trio whose works
were at once the delight and the despair of imitators.
But although his career was so successful, we must not run away with
the idea that Smollett had no enemies—that, in a word, admiration
had swallowed up animosity. Alas, no! Human nature is human nature
through all. Despite all the _furore_ of enthusiasm awakened by the
appearance of his great novel, there were not lacking detractors and
vilifiers, who, too despicable to attack him openly, snapped at him
from under the shield of anonymity. That they were able to do him
harm, or at least to cause him keen chagrin and vexation, is made
manifest by the tone of sorrow and wounded pride wherewith he speaks
in the preface to the second edition of _Peregrine Pickle_. In such
circumstances it is always best to let the aggrieved party speak for
himself without offering any opinion. He says: ‘At length _Peregrine
Pickle_ makes his appearance in a new edition, in spite of all the
art and industry that were used to stifle him in the birth by certain
booksellers and others, who were at uncommon pains to misrepresent
the work and calumniate the author. The performance was decried as an
immoral piece, and a scurrilous libel; the author was charged with
having defamed the characters of particular persons to whom he lay
under considerable obligations; and some formidable critics declared
the book was void of humour, character, and sentiment. These charges,
had they been supported by proof, would have certainly damned the
writer and all his works; and, even unsupported as they were, had an
unfavourable effect with the public. But luckily for him his real
character was not unknown; and some readers were determined to judge
for themselves, rather than trust implicitly to the allegations of his
enemies. He has endeavoured to render the book less unworthy of their
acceptance. Divers uninteresting incidents are wholly suppressed.
Some humorous scenes he has endeavoured to heighten; and he flatters
himself he has expunged every adventure, phrase, and insinuation that
could be construed by the most delicate reader into a trespass upon the
rules of decorum. He owns with contrition that in one or two instances
he gave way too much to the suggestions of personal resentment, and
represented characters as they appeared to him at that time through the
exaggerating medium of prejudice. However he may have erred in point
of judgment or discretion, he defies the whole world to prove that
he was ever guilty of one act of malice, ingratitude, or dishonour.
This declaration he may be permitted to make, without incurring the
imputation of vanity or presumption, considering the numerous shafts
of envy, rancour, and revenge that have lately, both in public and
private, been levelled at his reputation.’
Along with the _Adventures_ of Peregrine were bound up _Memoirs of a
Lady of Quality_—a distinct story, sandwiched, as it were, between the
two halves of the hero’s life. Clumsy indeed is the fictional skill
that permitted such an arrangement. The introduction of the _Memoirs_,
apart altogether from their moral quality, was a constructive error,
inasmuch as the thread of interest of the novel is thereby broken.
Though Smollett received a handsome sum (£150 one account mentions,
£300 another) for granting the favour of their insertion in the novel,
he lived to regret most deeply the indiscretion. So notorious was the
reputation of the lady, that her infamous character in some people’s
estimation condemned the book. The ‘Lady of Quality,’ as is well known,
was the unhappy Lady Vane. Her maiden name was Frances Hawes. She was
married when little more than a child to Lord William Hamilton, who
died shortly afterwards; then to Viscount Vane, who used her with
such cruelty that she was driven to accept the protection of the Hon.
Sewallis Shirley, son of Robert, first Earl of Ferrers; then that
of Lord Berkeley, Lord Robert Bertie, and others. Of course we have
only her ladyship’s side of the story. From other sources, however,
information is forthcoming that she had been at least as much sinned
against as sinning. But although the world may acknowledge thus much,
it will never forgive a woman the breach of her marriage vows, and
Lady Vane, although undoubtedly the most beautiful woman of her decade,
has passed into a byword of reproach. Dr. Johnson in the _Vanity of
Human Wishes_ remarks:
‘Yet Vane could tell what ills from beauty spring,
And Sedley cursed the form that pleased a king.’
But undoubtedly the quality which most of all recommended _Peregrine
Pickle_ to the British public was the marvellously true, albeit
richly humorous, portraits of our seamen in the persons of Commodore
Hawser Trunnion, Lieutenant Hatchway, and Boatswain Tom Pipes. It is
questionable, however, if any of those exhibited so much insight into
the human heart as that of Lieutenant Bowling in _Roderick Random_, a
noble–spirited man if ever one was created. Smollett has since had many
imitators, such as Captain Marryat, Mr. Clark Russell, and others, but
none of them have excelled the inimitable wit and humour which invest
the sayings and doings of these personages. They have become part and
parcel of ourselves. We know them and love them, and they live with us,
so to speak, in our daily life.
He now took up house in Chelsea, and set himself doggedly and
perseveringly to obtain his subsistence as a professional man
of letters. From the Government of the day he could look for no
favours. The unmerciful manner in which he had lashed the Ministry,
says Chambers, precluded all Court patronage, even had it been the
fashion of the Court of George II. to extend it. He depended solely
on the booksellers for whom he wrought in the various departments of
compilations, translations, criticisms, and miscellaneous essays.
The next fruit of his genius was one which has never been popular,
simply because it describes an utterly impossible and repulsive
character. In 1753 appeared _The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom_.
A more depressing and unhealthy work, despite the immense genius
displayed in it, could scarcely be conceived. Sir Walter Scott’s
analysis of the novel is so admirable that we cannot do better than
cite it here in place of any lengthened remarks of our own. ‘It seems
to have been written for the purpose of showing how far humour and
genius can go in painting a complete picture of human depravity....
To a reader of good disposition and well–regulated mind, the picture
of moral depravity presented in the character of Count Fathom is a
disgusting pollution of the imagination. To those, on the other hand,
who hesitate on the brink of meditated iniquity, it is not safe to
detail the arts by which the ingenuity of villainy has triumphed in
former instances; and it is well known that the publication of the
real account of uncommon crimes, although attended by the public and
infamous punishment of the perpetrators, has often had the effect of
stimulating others to similar actions.’
But if the moral features of Count Fathom are thus repulsive, there
can be no question of the supreme art wherewith the developments
of such a character are both conceived and executed. The heartless
villainy wherewith Fathom executes his devilish schemes are related
with a subdued force that is unlike anything else in fiction; while
the scene of the ruin of the unfortunate Monimia is one of the most
terribly dramatic passages in the English language, comparable only to
the terrible remorse scene in _Macbeth_, or to the great last act in
Webster’s _Duchess of Malfi_. The horror is if anything overstrained.
One recoils from it. It leaves an impression on the mind as though
human nature were utterly debased and vicious, without a single
redeeming trait. The novel once more achieved a great success. Though
its weak points were indicated by the critics of the day, their
objections had no influence on the popularity of the book.
The dedication of the novel can refer to no other individual than
himself, because to no other whose friendship he valued would he
dare use the language he employs. The work is inscribed to Dr. *
* * and his own failings of character are therein inscribed with
rare fidelity. ‘Know, then, I can despise your pride while I honour
your integrity, and applaud your taste while I am shocked at your
ostentation. I have known you trifling, superficial, and obstinate
in dispute; meanly jealous and awkwardly reserved; rash and haughty
in your resentments; and coarse and lowly in your connections. I
have blushed at the weakness of your conversation, and trembled at
the errors of your conduct. Yet, as I own you possess certain good
qualities which overbalance these defects and distinguish you on this
occasion as a person for whom I have the most perfect attachment and
esteem, you have no cause to complain of the indelicacy with which
your faults are reprehended; and as they are chiefly the excesses
of a sanguine disposition and looseness of thought, impatient of
caution and control, you may, thus stimulated, watch over your own
intemperance and infirmity with redoubled vigilance and consideration;
and for the future profit by the severity of my reproof.’ From this,
one would gather that Smollett was quite cognisant of his own weakness
of temper—a weakness from which many of us suffer, but few of us are
quite so honest as to own!
The publication of _Count Fathom_ was the indirect means of involving
Smollett in an unpleasant affair, from which he was not extricated
without some trouble. Warmth of temper again! A countryman, Peter
Gordon, had got into difficulties and was brought to the verge of
ruin, when Smollett came to his rescue, and, with more humanity
than worldly wisdom, became security for him. Presently Gordon took
sanctuary within the King’s Bench Prison, and sent defiant and
insolent messages to Smollett when the latter appealed to his sense of
honour to repay him his losses. This conduct so provoked the choleric
Smollett, that on meeting the rascal he soundly caned him. Thereupon
the latter raised an action against him in the Court of the King’s
Bench, exaggerating the assault into attempted murder. Gordon’s counsel
was a lawyer afterwards infamous in many senses, the Hon. Alexander
Hume–Campbell, twin brother of Pope’s Earl of Marchmont. He opened the
case for his client with a speech full of disgraceful and unwarranted
abuse of Smollett. The jury, however, acquitted the latter from any
blame in the matter beyond common assault, probably considering in
their hearts that Gordon only received what he richly deserved.
But Smollett felt keenly the innuendoes cast upon his character by
Campbell. He therefore sent to his friend Daniel Mackercher—already
familiar to us as the Mr. M—— of _Peregrine Pickle_—a long letter
addressed to Campbell, expostulating with him upon his conduct,
demanding an apology, and in the event of it not being forthcoming,
threatening a challenge. The whole action was foolish. Probably
Mackercher acted as a wise friend in the matter, by advising him not
to send the epistle. At any rate, we hear no more of the matter, and
Smollett had relieved his feelings by abusing his enemy—behind his
back. Long years afterwards, the letter appeared in the _European
Magazine_. But both the principals were dead!
CHAPTER VII
VISIT TO SCOTLAND—_THE CRITICAL REVIEW_—_THE REPRISAL_. 1755–1759.
Smollett was from this time forward plunged into a sea of pecuniary
troubles, wherein, with little mitigation, he remained as long as life
lasted. The year 1754, wherein he had to meet the costs of the action
for assault brought against him by Gordon, seems to have been the one
wherein his distresses culminated. For some time he was in danger of
arrest. He skulked about London like ‘a thief at large,’ ever afraid
of feeling a hand on his shoulder, and of beholding a bailiff ready
to conduct him to the ‘sponging–house.’ For some years his monetary
difficulties, like a snowball, had been always increasing. In his Life
of Smollett, Dr. Robert Chambers has drawn a painful picture of the
great genius fretting like some noble steed condemned to pack–horse
duty, at the unworthy tasks he was obliged to undertake. Yet five out
of every six of his embarrassments were the result of his own folly
and extravagance. A man has to cut his coat according to his cloth.
Smollett would never consent to exercise present economy to avoid
future embarrassment. In a letter dated 1752 he complains of lack
of money through failure of his West India revenue. The income from
his wife’s property was now greatly decreased, while what remained
was frittered away on vexatious lawsuits. ‘Curse the law!’ he cried
impatiently on one occasion, ‘it has damned more honest men to
lifelong drudgery than anything else.’ In another letter, in May 1753,
addressed to his friend Dr. Macaulay, he acknowledges having received
a previous loan of £15, but begs for the favour of another £50 to save
him from serious difficulty. He promises payment from the proceeds of
some work he then had in hand, probably _Don Quixote_. By a bankruptcy
he had lost £180, and was obliged to immediately discount a note of
hand of Provost Drummond’s, at a sacrifice of sixty per cent., in
place of waiting for the due–date. In December 1754 he again laments
the failure of remittances from Jamaica and of actual extremities. So
far down was he, that he was compelled to write to his brother–in–law,
Mr. Telfer, begging the favour of a loan, which after some delay he
received. All these accumulated distresses weighed upon his spirits.
‘My life is sheer slavery,’ he wrote to one of his friends; ‘my pen is
at work from nine o’ the clock the one morning until one or two the
next. I might as well be in Grub Street.’ Still he toiled on, though
he realised that the work he was doing was far from being worthy of
him. As Anderson says: ‘The booksellers were his principal resource for
employment and subsistence; for them he held the pen of a ready writer
in the walk of general literature, and towards him they were as liberal
as the patronage of the public enabled them to be. They were almost his
only patrons; and, indeed, a more generous set of men can hardly be
pointed out in the trading world. By their liberality, wit and learning
have perhaps received more ample and more substantial encouragement
than from all their princely and noble patrons.’
Darker and ever darker grows the picture. Whether or not Mrs. Smollett
was a poor housewife, or whether Smollett’s own extravagances were
wholly to blame, certain it is that from the period we have now reached
until his not unwelcome release from life came in 1771, there was no
ease for the toiling hand, no rest for the weary brow of the great
novelist. His daily ‘darg’ had to be accomplished whether in sickness
or in health; his daily tale of bricks to be handed in, if the rod of
poverty’s stern task–mistress was to be averted from his shoulders,
or the wolf of want driven from the door. But, alas, at what an
expenditure of brain tissue was it achieved! He knew he was unable to
take time to produce his best work, and the saddening consciousness
weighed ever more heavily upon him. In March 1755, accordingly, there
appeared his translation of the _History of the Renowned Don Quixote;
from the Spanish of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, with some Account
of the Author’s life, illustrated with 28 new copperplates, designed
by Hayman and engraved by the best Artists_. The volumes, which were
in quarto, were two in number, and were issued by Rivington, being
dedicated by permission to Don Ricardo Wall, Principal Secretary of
State to His Most Catholic Majesty, who, while he was resident in
London as Spanish Ambassador, had exhibited much interest in the work.
Though accomplished Spanish scholars, according to Moore, have accused
Smollett of not having had a sufficient knowledge of the language
when he undertook the task, for to perform it perfectly it would be
requisite that the translator had lived some years in Spain, that he
had obtained not only a knowledge of the Court and of polite society,
but an acquaintance also with the vulgar idioms, the proverbs in use
among the populace, and the various customs of the country to which
allusions are made; still the fact remains that Smollett’s translation
has never been superseded, and that it at once threw into the shade
the previous renderings of Motteux and Jervis. Lord Woodhouselee, in
his _Essay on the Principles of Translation_, has endeavoured, with
a strange perversity of taste, to depreciate Smollett’s version in
favour of that of Motteux. But the verdict of time has proved how
egregiously he was in the wrong. Smollett’s short ‘Advertisement’ to
the work manifests the principles according to which he prosecuted
his translation. He states that his ‘aim in this undertaking was to
maintain that ludicrous solemnity and self–importance by which the
inimitable Cervantes has distinguished the character of Don Quixote,
without raising him to the insipid rank of a dry philosopher or
debasing him to the melancholy circumstances and unentertaining caprice
of an ordinary madman; to preserve the native humour of Sancho Panza
from degenerating into mere proverbial phlegm or affected buffoonery;
that the author has endeavoured to retain the spirit and ideas without
servilely adhering to the literal expressions of the original,
from which, however, he has not so far deviated as to destroy that
formality of idiom so peculiar to the Spaniards, and so essential to
the character of the work.’ It is not often that genius is brought to
the service of translation. When it is, however, as in the case of
Lord Berners’ _Froissart_ and Smollett’s _Don Quixote_, the result
is memorable. Smollett, alas! reaped little immediate benefit from
its publication. The work had been contracted and paid for five years
before!
No sooner did he get this portion of his stipulated labour off his
hands, than he determined to visit his relatives in Scotland. His
heart yearned to see his mother. Fifteen years had passed since the
raw lad, with his tragedy in his pocket, had set out for London, as
he fondly hoped, conquering and to conquer. He now returned to his
native country the pale, weary, toil–worn man, older–looking than his
years by at least a decade. Dr. Moore relates the pathetic scene of the
recognition of her celebrated son by the aged mother, then living with
her daughter, Mrs. Telfer, at Scotston. Let us quote Dr. Moore’s words:
‘With the connivance of Mrs. Telfer, on his arrival, he was introduced
to his mother as a gentleman from the West Indies who had been
intimately acquainted with her son. The better to support his assumed
character, he endeavoured to preserve a very serious countenance,
approaching a frown; but while the old lady’s eyes were riveted with a
kind of wild and eager stare on his countenance, he could not refrain
from smiling. She immediately sprang from her chair, and, throwing her
arms around his neck, exclaimed, “Ah, my son, my son, I have found
you at last.” She afterwards told him that if he had kept his austere
look, and continued to _gloom_, as she called it, he might have escaped
detection some time longer; “but your old roguish smile,” added she,
“betrayed you at once.”’
Smollett returned to his native country under very different
circumstances from those under which he left it. Then, his family
connections were anxious to get rid of him, rejoiced, in fact, to see
him launched upon any profession that would remove him from their
midst. He left, a poor, lonely, depressed, yet at the same time
high–spirited lad, eating his heart out owing to the necessity for
showing respect to those who lacked the one claim to it acknowledged by
him—intellectual eminence. Now he returned, the most popular, perhaps,
for the time being, of any of the three great masters of British
fiction—a ‘lion,’ with whom to hold intercourse was an honour indeed.
That Smollett was not wholly without feelings of this nature, his
letters evince. ‘I have returned a little better than when I set out,’
he is reported to have said to John Home as they walked together down
the Canongate of Edinburgh.
His reception in the Scots metropolis, from which Scotston is distant
only some twenty–three miles, was gratifying in the extreme. Smollett
had the advantage of seeing the town in all its antiquity before the
migration of the better classes took place to George Square and to
‘the New Town’ across the Nor’ Loch. In 1756 it was still the quaint,
formal, interesting, self–assertive place it had been before the Union
in 1707. Here is a description of it by Gilbert Elliot, one of the
Lords of the Admiralty, and one of the few friends Smollett had who
were connected with the Government. ‘I love the town tolerably well;
there is one fine street, and the houses are extremely high. The gentry
are a very sensible set of people, and some of them in their youth
seem to have known the world; but by being too long in a place their
notions are contracted and their faces are become solemn. The Faculty
of Advocates is a very learned and a very worthy body. As for the
ladies, they are unexceptionable, innocent, beautiful, and of an easy
conversation. The staple vices of the place are censoriousness and
hypocrisy. There is here no allowance for levity, none for dissipation.
I am not a bit surprised I do not find here that unconstrained noble
way of thinking and talking which one every day meets with among young
fellows of plentiful fortunes and good spirits, who are constantly
moving in a more enlarged circle of company.’
With Dr. ‘Jupiter’ Carlyle of Inveresk he renewed that acquaintance
begun some years before, when neither of them had attained the fame
that came to them in the course of time. Carlyle introduced him to
many of his influential friends, and, in consequence, Smollett’s visit
to Edinburgh proved an exceedingly happy one. ‘It was also in one of
these days that Smollett visited Scotland for the first time,’ says
Carlyle, ‘after having left Glasgow immediately after his education was
finished, and his engaging as a surgeon’s mate on board a man–of–war,
which gave him an opportunity of witnessing the siege of Carthagena,
which he has so minutely described in his _Roderick Random_. He came
out to Musselburgh and passed a day and a night with me, and went
to church and heard me preach. I introduced him to Cardonnel the
Commissioner (of Customs), with whom he supped, and they were much
pleased with each other. Smollett has reversed this in his _Humphrey
Clinker_, where he makes the Commissioner his old acquaintance. He
went next to Glasgow and that neighbourhood to visit his friends, and
returned again to Edinburgh in October, when I had frequent meetings
with him, one in particular in a tavern, where there supped with him
and Commissioner Cardonnel, Mr. Hepburn of Keith, John Home, and one or
two more.... Cardonnel and I went with Smollett to Sir David Kinloch’s
and passed the day, when John Home and Logan and I conducted him to
Dunbar, where we stayed together all night.’
Smollett’s picture of the Edinburgh of his time in _Humphrey Clinker_
is exceedingly graphic. ‘In the evening we arrived,’ writes Melford,
‘at this metropolis, of which I can say but very little. It is very
romantic from its situation on the declivity of a hill, having a
fortified castle at the top and a royal palace at the bottom. The first
thing that strikes the nose of a stranger shall be nameless; but what
first strikes the eye is the unconscionable height of the houses, which
generally rise to five, six, seven, and eight storeys, and in some
cases, as I am assured, to twelve. This manner of building, attended
by numberless inconveniences, must have been originally owing to want
of room. Certain it is the town seems to be full of people.’ In the
next letter Matthew Bramble adds: ‘Every storey is a complete house
occupied by a separate family, and the stair being common to them
all is generally left in a very filthy condition; a man must tread
with great circumspection to get safe housed with unpolluted shoes.
Nothing, however, can form a stronger contrast between the outside and
inside of the door, for the good women of this metropolis are very
nice in the ornaments and propriety of their apartments, as if they
were resolved to transfer the imputation from the individual to the
public. You are no stranger to their method of discharging all their
impurities from their windows at a certain hour of the night, as the
custom is in Spain, Portugal, and other parts of France and Italy; a
practice to which I can by no means be reconciled, for, notwithstanding
all the care that is taken by their scavengers to remove this nuisance
every morning by break of day, enough still remains to offend the
eyes as well as the other organs of those whom use has not hardened
against all delicacy of sensation.’ Nor can we omit what the inimitable
Winnifred Jenkins—the prototype and model of all future _soubrettes_
in fiction—says on the subject: ‘And now, dere Mary, we have got to
Haddingborough (Edinburgh) among the Scots, who are cevel enuff for
our money, thof I don’t speak their lingo. But they should not go
for to impose on foreigners, for the bills on their houses say they
have different _easements_ to let; but behold there is nurra geaks in
the whole kingdom, nor anything for pore sarvants, but a barril with
a pair of tongs thrown across, and all the chairs in the family are
emptied into this here barril once a day, and at ten o’clock at night
the whole cargo is flung out of a back windore that looks into some
street or lane, and the Made cries “Gardyloo” to the passengers, which
signerfies, “Lord have mercy upon you,” and this is done every night
in every house in Haddingborough, so you may guess, Mary Jones, what a
sweet savour comes from such a number of profuming pans. But they say
it is wholesome; and truly I believe it is; for being in the vapours
and thinking of Issabel (Jezabel) and Mr. Clinker, I was going into
a fit of astericks when this fiff, saving your presence, took me by
the nose so powerfully that I sneezed three times and found myself
wonderfully refreshed; this, to be sure, is the raisin why there are no
fits in Haddingborough.’
From Edinburgh, Smollett, as we have seen, proceeded to Dumbartonshire,
and then to Glasgow. His cousin was still laird of Bonhill, and
welcomed him with much warmth back to the scene of his early years. In
Glasgow he renewed his acquaintance with Dr. Moore, who had succeeded
him as apprentice with Mr. Gordon, and was now a physician of repute in
the western metropolis. With the latter he remained two days, renewing
old associations both at the College and elsewhere. Unfortunately, very
little information can be gleaned regarding this visit of Smollett’s to
Glasgow. Moore dismisses it in two or three lines, and every succeeding
biographer, Anderson, Walter Scott, Chambers, Herbert, and Hannay,
although mayhap spinning out a few more sentences, really do not add a
tittle to our facts.
On returning to Edinburgh in October, he was welcomed by all the
_literati_ of the capital, and was specially invited to a meeting
of the famous _Select Society_,[6] first mooted by Allan Ramsay the
painter, as Mr. John Rae tells us in his _Life of Adam Smith_; but
the fifteen original members of which had increased well–nigh to a
hundred, comprising all the best–known names in literature, philosophy,
science, and the arts. There he met or saw Kames and Monboddo (not
yet ‘paper lords’ or lords of Session), Robertson and Ferguson and
Hume, Carlyle and John Home, Dr. Blair, Wilkie of the _Epigoniad_,
Wallace the statistician, Islay Campbell and Thomas Miller of the Court
of Session, the Earls of Sutherland, Hopetoun, Marchmont, Morton,
Rosebery, Errol, Aboyne, Cassilis, Selkirk, Glasgow, and Lauderdale;
Lords Elibank, Gray, Garlies, Auchinleck, and Hailes; John Adam the
architect, Dr. Cullen, John Coutts the banker, and many others.[7]
The Society met every Friday evening from six to nine, at first in a
room in the Advocates’ Library, but when that became too small for the
numbers that began to attend its meetings, in a room hired from the
Masonic Lodge above the Laigh Council House; and its debates, in which
the younger advocates and ministers, men like Wedderburn and Robertson,
took the chief part, became speedily famous over all Scotland, as
intellectual displays to which neither the General Assembly of the Kirk
nor the Imperial Parliament could show anything to rival.
On returning to London, Smollett at once threw himself into the
feverish excitement and worry of a journalistic life. In other words,
he assumed the editorship of the new _Critical Review_, representative
of High Church and Tory principles. This periodical, with its older
rival, the _Monthly Review_ (started by Griffiths in 1749 as the Whig
organ), may be considered the prototypes of that plentiful crop of
monthly magazines wherewith we are furnished to–day. The _Critical
Review_ was the property of a man named Hamilton, a Scotsman, whose
enlightenment and liberality, remarks Herbert, had been proved by his
listening to Chatterton’s request for a little money, by sending it to
him and telling him he should have more if he wanted it. The _Critical
Review_ for its age was really a very creditable production, though
there was little to choose between the rivals as to merit, for the
_Monthly_, at the date of the founding of its antagonist, was edited
by a young man of surpassing ability, who won for himself a name in
English literature even more distinguished than Smollett’s—Oliver
Goldsmith. Thus the authors of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ and of
_Peregrine Pickle_—compositions wide as the poles apart in
character—were thrown into rivalry with each other. That it was a
rivalry embittered by any of the rancour and acrimony distinguishing
Smollett’s future journalistic relations with John Wilkes, cannot be
supposed, inasmuch as Goldsmith contributed several articles to the
_Critical Review_, and as a return compliment Smollett four, at least,
to the _Monthly_. The proprietors of the opposing periodicals may have
had their squabbles and bespattered each other with foul names, but the
editors seem to have been on the most amicable of terms and to have
united in anathematising both parties.
Much of Smollett’s time was frittered away on work for the _Review_
which would have been more remuneratively employed in other fields.
But the pot had to be kept boiling, and there was but little fuel in
reserve wherewith to feed the fire. He was far from making an ideal
editor,—indeed, to tell the plain truth, he made an exceedingly
bad one. He never kept his staff of contributors in hand. They were
permitted to air their own grievances and to revenge their own quarrels
in the _Review_. His criticisms, also, are very one–sided. The remarks
on John Home’s _Douglas_, though true so far, are much too sweeping
in their generalisations. The play has many merits, but the _Critical
Review_ would fain persuade one it had next to none. The same remarks
are true of Wilkie’s _Epigoniad_, by no means a work of great genius,
but deserving better things said of it than the _Critical_ meted out.
With respect to the criticism on Dr. Grainger, the writer simply
displayed the grossest and most culpable ignorance and impertinence
towards the productions of a learned and refined Englishman. In a
word, the injustice, the intemperance of language, and the inexcusable
blunders which characterised Smollett’s occupancy of the editorial
chair of the _Critical Review_, caused it to be deservedly reprobated
by those who admired justice and fair play, to say nothing of cultured
criticism.
In one case, however, he was clearly in the right. A certain Admiral
Knowles, who had so disgracefully failed in conducting to a successful
issue the secret expedition to Rochelle in 1757, along with Sir John
Mordaunt, wrote a pamphlet to justify his actions in the face of the
storm of condemnation raised against him after a court–martial had
acquitted Mordaunt. This pamphlet fell into Smollett’s hands, who
characterised the writer as ‘an admiral without conduct, an engineer
without knowledge, an officer without resolution, and a man without
veracity.’ Knowles entered an action against the printer, giving as
his reason ‘his desire to find out the writer, in order to obtain the
satisfaction of a gentleman, if the writer’s character would admit of
it.’ On Smollett learning this, he at once came forward, acknowledged
himself as the writer, and declared his willingness to meet the admiral
with any weapons he chose. But the latter was a poltroon and a coward.
He had obtained a judgment of the Court, and he sheltered himself under
it. Smollett was mulcted in £100, and in 1759 sentenced to three
months’ imprisonment. Knowles seems to have merited Sir Walter Scott’s
severe terms of reprobation: ‘How the admiral reconciled his conduct to
the rules usually observed by gentlemen we are not informed, but the
proceedings seem to justify even Smollett’s strength of expressions.’
But we have suffered our account of his relations to the _Critical
Review_ to run ahead of the narrative of his life. For several
years the works he published were mostly hack–compilations for the
booksellers. The most notable among these was _A Compendium of
Authentic and Entertaining Voyages_, exhibiting a clear view of the
Customs, Manners, Religion, Government, Commerce, and Natural History
of most nations of the world, illustrated with a variety of Maps,
Charts, etc., in 7 vols. 12mo. To this day Smollett’s collection
is read with appreciation, and only two years ago another edition
(abridged) was published of this most interesting and instructive work.
Immense as was the reading and investigation required for such a
compilation, Smollett cheerfully gave it, and really there are
extraordinarily few errors in it notwithstanding the rapidity wherewith
it had been produced. The publisher was Dodsley, and among the voyages
recorded are those of Vasco da Gama, Pedro de Cabral, Magellan,
Drake, Raleigh, Rowe, Monk, James, Nieuhoff, Wafer, Dampier, Gemelli,
Rogers, Anson, etc., with the histories of the Conquest of Mexico and
Peru. Also included therein was his own account of the expedition to
Carthagena.
Some time before this Smollett had inserted in the _Critical Review_
the following panegyric on Garrick, evidently intended to compensate
for his bitter reflections on him in _Roderick Random_ and _The
Regicide_. Smollett’s eyes were being opened to the more correct
estimate of his own powers. Accordingly he wrote: ‘We often see this
inimitable actor labouring through five tedious acts to support a
lifeless piece, with a mixture of pity and indignation, and cannot help
wishing there were in his age good poets to write for one who so well
deserves them. He has the art, like the Lydian king, of turning all he
touches into gold, and can ensure applause to every fortunate bard.’
Was the wish father to the deed? Be this as it may, within a short time
Garrick accepted Smollett’s comedy of _The Reprisal_, or _The Tars of
Old England_, an afterpiece in two acts. The year 1757–58 had been a
period of national disaster. Smollett, indignant at the timorous policy
of the Government of the day, wrote the comedy in question to rouse the
warlike spirit of the nation. The prologue begins—
‘What eye will fail to glow, what eye to brighten,
When Britain’s wrath aroused begins to lighten,
Her thunders roll—her fearless sons advance,
And her red ensigns wave o’er the pale flowers of France;
Her ancient splendour England shall maintain,
O’er distant realms extend her genial reign,
And rise the unrivall’d empress of the main.’
_The Reprisal_ was performed at Drury Lane with great success, and
Garrick’s conduct on the occasion was generous in the extreme. It
laid the foundations of a lifelong friendship between the two. The
piece was afterwards published, and for some time held the stage as a
‘curtain–raiser’ or ‘curtain–dropper,’ but is now entirely forgotten.
At this period Smollet was on terms of intimate friendship with the
famous John Wilkes, who has been often called ‘the first Radical.’ With
Samuel Johnson also he had some friendly intercourse, though they were
too alike to desire a great deal of intimate association with each
other. Smollett, however, through his influence with Wilkes, was able
to obtain the release of Dr. Johnson’s black servant, Francis Barber,
who had been impressed and put on board the _Stag_ frigate. On the
occasion Smollett wrote to Wilkes in the following terms:—
‘CHELSEA, _March 16, 1759_.
‘I am again your petitioner in behalf of that Great Cham of literature,
Samuel Johnson. His black servant, whose name is Francis Barber, has
been pressed on board the _Stag_ frigate, Captain Angel, and our
lexicographer is in great distress. He says the boy is a sickly lad of
a delicate frame, and particularly subject to a malady in the throat,
which renders him very unfit for His Majesty’s service. You know what
manner of animosity the said Johnson has against you, and I daresay you
desire no other opportunity of resenting it than that of laying him
under an obligation.’
The application was successful, and Francis Barber returned to the
lexicographer’s service. Dr. Johnson always spoke of Dr. Smollett
thereafter with great respect:—‘A scholarly man, sir, although a
Scot.’
CHAPTER VIII
_HISTORY OF ENGLAND_—_SIR LAUNCELOT GREAVES_—_THE NORTH BRITON_—HACK
HISTORICAL WORK—THE BEGINNING OF THE END.
Despite all his hastiness of temper and irritability, despite his
wife’s lack of management, despite, too, the fact of the burden of debt
weighing him down, the Chelsea home must have been a very happy one.
At this time Smollett had one child, a daughter, Elizabeth, to whom he
was tenderly attached. Nothing rejoiced him more than a frolic with
his little one. ‘Many a time,’ he remarks in one of his unpublished
letters, now in the possession of Mr. Goring, ‘do I stop my task and
betake me to a game of romps with Betty, while my wife looks on smiling
and longing in her heart to join in the sport: then back to the cursed
round of duty.’
Mrs. Smollett appears to have been of a most affectionate and loving
disposition, though, like himself, she was affected with a hasty
temper. Though they had many quarrels, they were deeply and sincerely
attached to each other. ‘My Nancy’ appears in many of his letters in
conjunction with expressions of the tenderest and truest affection.
The home was always bright and cheerful for the weary worker, hence,
when absent from it, he is ever craving ‘to be back to Nancy and little
Bet’ Yet these were feelings Smollett scrupulously concealed from his
fellows, so that the world might suppose him the acidulous cynic he
desired to be esteemed. What Smollett’s reason for so acting was, is
now hard to divine. His Matthew Bramble in _Humphrey Clinker_ is the
exact reproduction of his own character. His kindliness of nature only
broke out like gleams of sunshine on a wintry day, while, like Jonathan
Oldbuck, the very suggestion of gratitude seemed to irritate him. He
was one who all his life preferred to do good by stealth.
In 1758, Smollett published a work that had occupied his attention
throughout the better part of eighteen months—_The Complete History
of England, deduced from the descent of Julius Cæsar to the Treaty
of Aix–la–Chapelle in 1748_. It was published by Messrs. Rivington &
Fletcher, in four vols. 4to, and embellished by engraved allegorical
frontispieces, designed by Messrs. Hayman & Miller. It has been stated,
and never contradicted, says Anderson (substantiated also by Herbert),
that the history was written in fourteen months, an effort to which
nothing but the most distinguished abilities and the most vigorous
application could have been equal. When one considers that he consulted
three hundred books for information, that he had other literary work
to prosecute in order to keep the pot boiling, and when one has regard
also to the high literary character of the composition, this rapidity
of production is simply marvellous. Of course none of the facts were
new, but the method was novel, and the treatment fresh and brilliant.
As Sir Walter Scott justly remarks, ‘All the novelty which Smollett’s
history could present, must needs consist in the mode of stating facts,
or in the reflections deduced from them.’ The success which attended
the publication of the history surpassed the expectations of even
Smollett himself. His political standpoint had been that of a Tory and
an upholder of the monarchy. In writing to Dr. Moore early in 1758,
Smollett says: ‘I deferred answering your kind letter until I should
have finished my History, which is now completed. I was agreeably
surprised to hear that my work had met with any approbation in Glasgow,
for it is not at all calculated for that meridian. The last volume
will, I doubt not, be severely censured by the West Country Whigs
of Scotland. I desire you will divest yourself of prejudice before
you begin to peruse it, and consider well the facts before you pass
judgment. Whatever may be its defect, I profess before God I have, as
far as in me lay, adhered to truth, without espousing any faction.’
Then in September of the same year he again writes to Dr. Moore: ‘You
will not be sorry to hear that the weekly sale of the History has
increased to above 10,000. A French gentleman of talents and erudition
has undertaken to translate it into that language, and I have promised
to supply him with corrections.’
But sadder and still more sad grows the picture of distress. During
the whole time he was writing his History he was pestered by duns,
and could not leave his home without dodging bailiffs. When all was
over, he found himself a man broken in health and spirits, and already
‘earmarked’ for the tomb. For fourteen years he was to live and labour,
like the brave, honest, independent spirit he was, but the end was
only a question of time. That he realised this fact about this period
is almost certain. Henceforth his diligence was redoubled. Like the
stranger from another world in the fable, when confronted with the fact
of inevitable death, he cried, ‘I must die, I must die; trouble me not
with trifles; I must die.’
But his publication of the History was not suffered to pass without
the formation of another party bent on injuring him. The extensive
sale of Smollett’s work alarmed the proprietors of Rapin’s History,
who caballed and encouraged his political adversaries to expose what
they termed ‘the absurdities, inconsistencies, contradictions, and
misrepresentations of the book,’ most of which existed solely in
the minds of his malignant enemies. In the Whig periodicals of the
time Smollett is vilified and abused, represented as a partisan and
panegyrist of the House of Stuart, a Papist and a prostitute. The
following pamphlet, written, however, by a man of some learning and
discernment, would have been valuable and useful had it only been
penned with more moderation and good sense. But party zeal is an
enemy to good sense, and the truth of this remark has seldom been
more clearly demonstrated than in ‘_A Vindication of the Revolution
in 1688_, and of the character of King William and Queen Mary,
together with a computation of the character of King James II., as
misrepresented by the author of the Complete History of England, by
extracts from Dr. Smollett: to which are added some strictures on the
said historian’s account of the punishment of the rebels in A.D. 1715
and 1746, and on the eulogium given to the History of England by the
critical reviewers, by Thomas Comber, B.A. 8vo, 1758.’ Comber was
a clergyman, and a relative of the Duke of Leeds. He was, in fact,
engaged by the Whig Ministry to undertake the duty, as none of the
professed _litterateurs_ of the day in the Whig ranks cared to cross
swords with the Tory champion in his own field. The publication of his
History did Smollett much good in the eyes of the learned and cultured.
Henceforth to them he was no longer a mere ‘teller of tales,’ but one
of the great historians of the epoch—an author deservedly honoured for
his integrity and impartiality.
In 1761 the _British Magazine_—a sixpenny monthly on whose staff
Oliver Goldsmith was one of the leading writers—published _The
Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves_, the fourth of Smollett’s novels,
but the one which we could quite well have spared, provided something
in the same vein as _Humphrey Clinker_ had taken its place. It was
written hastily, and to supply the demand for _copy_. Scott relates
that, while engaged on it, he was residing at Paxton in Berwickshire,
on a visit to Mr. George Home. When post time drew near, he was wont
to retire for half an hour or an hour, and then and there scribble off
the necessary amount of matter for the press. But he never gave himself
even the trouble to read over and correct what he had written. Work
written under such circumstances did not deserve to succeed. And yet,
singularly enough, in this novel are to be found some of Smollett’s
most original creations and most felicitously conceived situations. The
design of the work is far from happy. Obviously suggested by his recent
study of _Don Quixote_, Sir Launcelot is only a bad imitation of the
immortal Knight of La Mancha. Of this, indeed, Smollett himself seems
to have had a suspicion. In the course of the dialogue he makes Ferret
express an opinion like that to Sir Launcelot, who sternly repudiates
it. ‘What! you set up for a modern Don Quixote? The scheme is too stale
and extravagant. What was a humorous and well–timed satire in Spain
near two hundred years ago will make but a sorry jest when really
acted from affectation at this time of day in England.’ The knight,
eyeing the censor, whose character was none of the best, replied, ‘I
am neither an affected imitation of Don Quixote, nor, as I trust in
Heaven, visited by that spirit of lunacy so admirably displayed in the
fictitious character exhibited by the inimitable Cervantes. I see and
distinguish objects as they are seen and described by other men. I
quarrel with none but the foes of virtue and decorum, against whom I
have declared perpetual war, and them I will everywhere attack as the
natural enemies of mankind. I do purpose,’ added Sir Launcelot, eyeing
Ferret with a look of ineffable contempt, ‘to act as a coadjutor to the
law, and even to remedy evils which the law cannot reach, to detect
fraud and treason, abase insolence, mortify pride, discourage slander,
disgrace immodesty, stigmatise ingratitude.’
The work was written in part during his imprisonment. Taking this into
consideration, as well as the rapidity of production, the conception,
amid the sordid surroundings of the King’s Bench Prison, of such
cleverly drawn characters as Aurelia Darnel, Captain Crowe, and his
nephew, Tom Clarke, the attorney of the amorous heart, is passing
wonderful. Although the least popular of his works, and deservedly so,
the book in some parts is redolent of ‘Flora and the country green.’
Not a moment could his busy pen afford to rest. No sooner was one
piece of work thrown off than another must be commenced. In 1761,
Smollett lent his assistance to the furtherance of a great work.
This was the publication, in 42 vols. 8vo, of _The Modern Part of an
Universal History, compiled from Original Writers_. In this colossal
undertaking we know that Smollett’s share was the Histories of France,
Italy, and Germany. Not alone these, however, were the fruit of his
industry. Other authors failed to produce their quota. There was one
pen that never failed. The willing horse had to do the work. Though
this additional labour brought in guineas, it still further exhausted
his strength, and left him little better than a confirmed invalid.
From this drudgery he passed on to something else that was a little
more agreeable and congenial, namely, his _Continuation of the History
of England_. The first volume was published in the end of 1761, the
second, third, and fourth in 1762, and a fifth some years after (1765),
bringing the narrative down to that period. It is stated that Smollett
cleared £2000 by his History and the Continuation. He sold the latter
to his printer at a price which enabled the purchaser to sell it to Mr.
Baldwin the bookseller at a profit of £1000. From these facts one can
gather the extraordinary popularity of Smollett’s work at that period.
Henceforward the story of his life is summed up in little more than
the dates of the publication of his books. Of relaxation there was no
interval for him. His expenses of living were considerable, though he
never was a man who loved luxury or display. But he had been hampered
by debts, by lawsuits, to pay the costs of which he had to borrow money
at sixty per cent. Had Smollett’s feet been free from the outset,
the £600 per annum, at which he reckoned his income, would have more
than sufficed for all his wants. But the interest of borrowed money
is like the rolling snowball of which we spoke before,—unless it be
paid regularly, it constantly adds to the bulk of the original. Poor
Smollett! A more pitiable picture can scarcely be conceived than this
splendid genius yoked like a pug–mill horse to tasks the most ignoble,
in order that he might keep his wife and daughter from feeling the
pinch of want. A hero—yea, a hero indeed—one of those heroes in
commonplace things, whose virtues are every whit as praiseworthy in
their way as though he had led England’s armies to victory, or swept
the seas of her enemies.
In connection with Smollett’s historical work, it should be mentioned
here, that although his History has not held its place as a standard
work, his Continuation undoubtedly has. To this day it is printed along
with Hume’s volumes, under the title of _Hume and Smollett’s History
of England_, and is justly held in esteem for its impartiality and
accuracy. His other historical works have long since met the fate they
deserved. They were hack–work, designed to supply a temporary need.
When that need was met by something better, they were forgotten.
We must note here, however, in disproof of that jealousy of
contemporaries which has been laid to his charge, the following
generous estimate of those who were his _collaborateurs_ in some
respects, his rivals in others. In the Continuation he thus repairs the
hasty judgments of immature years: ‘Akenside and Armstrong excelled
in didactic poetry. Candidates for literary fame appeared even in the
higher sphere of life, embellished by the nervous style, superior
sense, and extensive erudition of a Coke, by the delicate taste, the
polished muse, and tender feelings of a Lyttleton. There are also
the learned and elegant Robertson, and, above all, the ingenious,
penetrating, and comprehensive Hume, whom we rank among the first
writers of the age, both as a historian and a philosopher. Johnson,
inferior to none in philosophy, philology, poetry, and classical
learning, stands foremost as an essayist, justly admired for the
dignity, strength, and variety of his style, as well as for the
agreeable manner in which he investigates the human heart, tracing
every interesting emotion, and opening all the sources of morality!’
And this was the man whom his political opponents accused of never
speaking of a man save to depreciate him.
We reach now a period in Smollett’s career which must always give pain
to those that are lovers of his genius. Hitherto, though dabbling in
politics, and though editing, professedly on the Tory and High Church
side, the _Critical Review_, his sympathies had been so predominatingly
literary that he was able to maintain the friendliest of relations
with prominent politicians on the Whig side, notably with John Wilkes.
Now, in an evil hour, he was prevailed upon to accept a brief on the
Tory side by assuming the editorship of the new weekly paper, _The
Briton_, founded for the express purpose of defending the Earl of
Bute. That nobleman, who owed his advancement to the favour wherewith
he was regarded by George III.(recently come to the throne), was, on
the 29th May 1762, appointed First Lord of the Treasury, and assumed
the management of public affairs. Although an able, honourable, and
indefatigable Minister, he lacked experience in the discharge of
public duties. Besides, the nation was still strongly Whig in its
political inclinations. For the monarch, by an arbitrary exercise of
his prerogative, thus to override the sentiments of his people and
to dismiss their chosen representatives, was both a high–handed and
a foolish action. More foolish still was Lord Bute that he permitted
himself thus to be made a tool to gratify the king’s jealousy. The
consequence was, that the appointment was received all over England
with a storm of indignation, and no Ministry was ever more unpopular
than that whereof the Earl of Bute was chief.
To stem the tide of adverse criticism, and endeavour to win Englishmen
to view more favourably the advent of Lord Bute to power, _The Briton_
was started, and Smollett was chosen as editor, inasmuch as his was
the keenest pen on the Tory side. On hearing of the appointment of his
friend to the post, John Wilkes, with a generosity that was quite in
keeping with many of the actions of that strangely constituted man,
remarked that ‘Lord Bute, after having distributed among his adherents
all the places under Government, was determined to monopolise the wit
also.’ A few days subsequent, the Whigs proposed that, to encounter
_The Briton_, which had gone off with a great flourish of trumpets,
as well as with some very bitter political writing, Mr. Wilkes should
publish a paper, to be called ‘The Englishman.’ He agreed to the
proposal, except that he did not adopt the title recommended, but chose
another, that of _The North Briton_—the first number of which appeared
on the 5th June 1762, or exactly a week after _The Briton_.
Wilkes exhibited great forbearance towards Smollett at the outset. The
good–natured demagogue, it is believed, would have been content, like
many another pair of friends, to fight strenuously for principles, and
avoid personalities; or, if that were impossible, to confine their
antagonism to the press alone, leaving the intercourse of friendship
unimpaired. But Smollett was not of the stuff whereof great journalists
are made. One of the prime qualities is that they should belong to
the genus of literary pachydermata. Smollett was not so. He was
sensitive to a degree. He imagined slights and insults where none were
intended. Within a few days, therefore, of the issue of _The North
Briton_, Smollett took umbrage at something said about _The Briton_,
and retorted angrily with some personalities on Wilkes. Even then the
latter would have passed over the ill–natured jibes with a jest. This,
however, maddened Smollett more than aught else. He believed Wilkes
despised him as an assailant. From that day Smollett devoted himself
to the most unsparing personal castigation of Wilkes. The demagogue
replied, and presently the two that had been such warm friends could
not find terms bitter enough to hurl at one another.
But Smollett was not a match for Wilkes. The former was scrupulously
careful in alleging nothing against his opponent but what he could
prove. The latter fought with characteristic unscrupulousness. A
matter of no moment to him was it whether a charge were true or false,
provided it served the purpose of galling his adversary. Wilkes was
absolutely impervious to abuse and vilification. He gloried in his
indifference to all social restrictions and customs. The publication
to the world of his debaucheries and lack of principle only extorted
a horse–laugh from him. With all his generosity and faithful devotion
to the cause of popular freedom, Wilkes was a man of absolutely no
principle. He sneered at his family relations, was one of Sir Francis
Dashwood’s Medmenham ‘Cistercians,’ who sought to outbid the ‘Hellfire’
and ‘Devil’s Own’ Clubs in abandoned wickedness and impiety. And yet
this was the man who was capable of the most splendid sacrifice in the
cause of national liberty. His abilities would have carried him to fame
in any career. M. Louis Blanc states that many of his sayings are still
repeated and admired in France as are those of Sydney Smith among us.
Mr. J. Bowles Daly[8] relates that his wit was so constantly at his
command, that wagers have been gained that from the time he quitted his
house till he reached Guildhall, no one could address him or leave him
without a smile or a hearty laugh. His bright conversation charmed away
the prejudice of such a Tory as Dr. Johnson, fascinated Hannah More,
and won over the gloomy Lord Mansfield, who said, ‘Mr. Wilkes is the
pleasantest companion, the politest gentleman, and the best scholar I
know.’
This, then, was the man who was selected to do battle with Smollett
and to demolish the Ministry of Lord Bute. Certainly the latter had
given Wilkes ample handle for assailing him by selecting as his
Chancellor of the Exchequer Lord Sandwich, one of the dissolute
Medmenham monks, a man glaringly deficient in ability, and so utterly
incompetent in finance as to cause the wits of the time to describe
him as ‘a Chancellor of the Exchequer to whom a sum of five figures
was an impenetrable mystery.’ The first sentence of _The North Briton_
has often been copied and adopted as the motto of succeeding journals:
‘The liberty of the press is the birthright of the Briton, and is
justly esteemed the firmest bulwark of the liberties of this country.’
The aim of Wilkes’ paper was to vilify Scotland, because Lord Bute,
being a Scotsman, had wormed himself into the favour of the king.
Not a very elevated principle, certainly, but quite characteristic
of the low _morale_ of the period, when personal pique was elevated
into the domain of principle. His abuse of Scotland was quite of a
piece with his political profligacy on every other point than national
liberty. ‘He would have sold his soul to the devil for £1000 could
he have induced his Satanic majesty to have invested in so worthless
a commodity,’ said one of his own friends. As a specimen of the
journalism wherewith Wilkes fought the battle of popular liberties,
take the following paragraph, to pen which nowadays not the neediest
penny–a–liner of gutter–journalism would stoop, notwithstanding the
jealousy of Scotland and the Scots which still exists. Playing on the
popular jealousy of Scotland, Wilkes went on to say that ‘The river
Tweed is the line of demarcation between all that is noble and all that
is base; south of the river is all honour, virtue, patriotism—north
of it is nothing but lying, malice, meanness, and slavery. Scotland is
a treeless, flowerless land, formed out of the refuse of the universe,
and inhabited by the very bastards of creation; where famine has fixed
her chosen throne; where a scant population, gaunt with hunger and
hideous with dirt, spend their wretched days in brooding over the
fallen fortunes of their native dynasty, and in watching with mingled
envy and hatred the mighty nation that subdued them.’
This was the type of writing which Smollett strove to meet with pithy
argument and epigrammatic smartness. No wonder it produced little
effect, and less wonder is there that, after fighting the battle of
the Ministry for nearly a year, he threw the task up in disgust (12th
February 1763). Lord Bute had not given him the support he had a right
to expect; and the Minister’s own fall followed hard upon the cessation
of _The Briton_, namely, on the 8th April of the same year. Writing to
Caleb Whiteford, a friend, some time after, he remarked: ‘The Ministry
little deserve that any man of genius should draw his pen in their
defence. They inherit the absurd stoicism of Lord Bute, who set himself
up as a pillory to be pelted by all the blackguards of England, upon
the supposition that they would grow tired and leave off.’
Back once more to hack–work was our weary, brain–worn veteran. So
pressing were his needs that he had to condescend to tasks beneath
them. He translated and edited the works of Voltaire, and compiled a
publication entitled _The Present State of all Nations_, containing a
geographical, natural, commercial, and political history of all the
countries of the known world. Fancy Smollett engaged on such a task!
Let us hope that only his name was given, not his labour. Next year we
know his work became so great that he had to hire others to do portions
of it for him. In a word, he became a literary ‘sweater.’
Alas! in this same year, 1763, when his own health was failing so
rapidly, one of the links binding him most strongly to earth was
severed. His daughter Elizabeth, a beautiful girl of some fifteen or
sixteen years of age, and amiable and accomplished as well, was taken
from him by death—the saddest of all deaths, consumption. Henceforth
he was to tread the Valley of the Shadow alone. Even more than his
wife, Elizabeth had been able to sympathise with her father’s feelings
and to soothe his irritation. The light of his life had verily gone out!
But still no rest! Sorrow, however deep, must not check the pen that
is fighting for daily bread. ‘I am writing with a breaking heart,’ he
says in one letter. ‘I would wish to be beside her, were the wish not
cowardly so long as poor Nancy is unprovided for.’ Brave, suffering
heart! The end is nearing for you, though you know it not. Seven
more years of increasing labour, and also of increasing anguish and
suffering, and then—‘He giveth His beloved sleep!’
CHAPTER IX
SMOLLETT A ‘SWEATER’—TRAVELS ABROAD—_THE ADVENTURES OF AN
ATOM_—_HUMPHREY CLINKER_—LAST DAYS.
So deeply did grief over the death of his charming young daughter prey
on his health and spirits, that there were for a time grave doubts
whether his reason had not been slightly unsettled. Constitutionally of
a nervously sensitive nature, excessive joy or sorrow had a thoroughly
unhinging effect upon him. He had not the self–command requisite
to look upon grief as one of those ills to which flesh is heir. In
his estimation, everything affecting himself was in the superlative
degree. Never were sorrows so overwhelming as his, he considered, and
oftentimes he seriously mortified people by brusquely breaking in upon
their anguish with the statement that they did not really know what
grief meant in comparison with him.
After Elizabeth’s death, therefore, Smollett, entirely oblivious of
his poor wife’s mental sufferings, seems to have abandoned himself
to an excess of grief that seriously accelerated the progress of the
maladies by which he was afflicted. Though he could not afford to
stop work altogether, he appears from this date to have instituted a
sort of literary factory, where works were turned out by the score.
Smollett’s name was now so popular, that on a title–page it virtually
meant success to the publication. He therefore contracted the habit of
undertaking far more work than any man single–handed could accomplish,
but getting it executed at a reduced rate by those whom he retained in
his employment. He appears to have kept them in food and clothing, and
to have been in the main exceedingly kind to many a struggling author,
who would not otherwise have obtained employment; but one cannot
approve of methods like these, which degrade the noble profession of
‘man of letters’ into that of a literary task–master. Dr. Carlyle gives
a description of Smollett’s relations to what ‘Jupiter’ called his
‘myrmidons,’ which, however, affords a somewhat one–sided picture of
the novelist’s methods, though the date is scarcely correct. Smollett,
although he had employed others to do his work for him when he found
it to be too onerous, did not really institute his ‘literary factory’
until well on in the ‘sixties’ of the eighteenth century, when his
health was beginning to fail. ‘Jupiter’ describes the ‘factory’ as in
full swing in 1758–59. But as the chatty old clerical gossip wrote
his Autobiography after his seventy–ninth year, and as many of his
dates with respect to other matters have been proved incorrect, we
may, without much injustice to the best of Scots unepiscopal bishops,
ascribe to the mental feebleness of age an error which otherwise would
affix a serious stigma on Smollett’s name. Though every _litterateur_
worth the name will reprobate such a blood–sucking method as literary
‘sweating,’ prosecuted though it has been by men to whom we owe so much
as Smollett and Dumas (to say nothing of at least one ‘popular’ author
in our own day who engages in the despicable practice), we would fain
believe, in the former’s case, that it resulted from failing strength,
and from the maddening consciousness of being obliged to leave his
wife, if he died, dependent on strangers.
But let us to ‘Jupiter’:[9] ‘Principal Robertson had never met Smollett
(though he had seen him at the Select Club), and was very desirous
of his acquaintance. By this time the Doctor had retired to Chelsea,
and came seldom to town. Home and I, however, found that he came once
a week to Forrest’s Coffee–house, and sometimes dined there; so we
managed an appointment with him on his day, when he agreed to dine with
us. He was now become a great man, and, being a humorist, was not to be
put out of his way. Home and Robertson and Smith and I met him there,
when he had several of his minions about him, to whom he prescribed
tasks of translation, compilation, or abridgment, which, after he
had seen, he recommended to the booksellers. We dined together, and
Smollett was very brilliant. Having to stay all night, that we might
spend the evening together, he only begged leave to withdraw for an
hour, that he might give audience to his myrmidons. We insisted that
if his business permitted, it should be in the room in which we sat.
The Doctor agreed, and the authors were introduced, to the number
of five, I think, most of whom were soon dismissed. He kept two,
however, to supper, whispering to us that he believed they would amuse
us, which they certainly did, for they were curious characters. We
passed a very pleasant and joyful evening. When we broke up, Robertson
expressed great surprise at Smollett’s polished and agreeable manners,
and the great urbanity of his conversation. He had imagined that a
man’s manners must bear a likeness to his books, and as Smollett had
described so well the characters of ruffians and profligates, that he
must of course resemble them.’
In addition to the pitiful lack of taste and good feeling in making
a raree–show of wretchedness, and holding up the misery of the
unfortunate authors to a curiosity that was worse than contempt,
the whole incident exhibits the characters of Smollett, Carlyle,
Robertson, and Home in an exceedingly unfavourable aspect—the
first–named as glorifying himself as the Mæcenas of starving Grub
Street quill–drivers, the others because they could entertain any other
feeling than that of sympathy for honest talent in tatters!
In June 1763, Smollett’s health and spirits became alike so
unsatisfactory that his medical adviser informed Mrs. Smollett that
change of air was the only chance for him. His sorrow was preying on
his vitality. As that was low enough at any time, the prospect was
grave indeed! Alas, poor Nancy! She pled with her obdurate husband for
many a week before he consented to wind up his numberless projects in
England and go abroad. His creditors also seem to have behaved with
commendable consideration. Perhaps the fact that a small legacy of
£1200 left to Mrs. Smollett by one of her relatives, and which, with
true wifelike generosity, she at once applied to the relief of her
unfortunate husband, may have facilitated matters. That he left England
with arrangements made whereby his ‘myrmidons’ were to forward their
‘copy’ to him, whithersoever he might be, goes without the saying.
The booksellers, also—Newbery, Baldwin, Dodsley, Cave (jr.), and
others—all exhibited a willingness to assist the man who had done so
much for them. But therein they did no more than their duty.
For nearly three years Smollett and his wife remained abroad,
travelling in France and Italy, but allocating a portion of every
day to the discharge of those tasks which kept the chariot rolling.
When he returned to England in 1766, he published, as the fruit of
his trip, _Travels through France and Italy: containing Observations
on Character, Customs, Religion, Government, Police, Commerce, Arts,
Antiquities, with a Particular Description of the Town, Territory, and
Climate of Nice; to which is added a Register of the Weather, kept
during a Residence of Eighteen Months there_. In 2 vols. 8vo. The book
takes the form of letters written by Smollett to friends at home; and
in the first letter he remarks: ‘In gratifying your curiosity I shall
find some amusement to beguile the tedious hours, which without some
employment would be rendered insupportable by distemper and disquiet.’
The spirit wherein Smollett went on tour is perceptible in the
following passage: ‘I am traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, and
overwhelmed by the sense of a domestic calamity which it was not in the
power of fortune to repair.’
Travelling and brooding do not accord well together, if one is to
receive any pleasure from the scenes passed through. As Dr. Anderson
charitably puts it: ‘His letters afford a melancholy proof of the
influence of bodily pain over the best disposition.’ Letters written
under such circumstances should never have been published. In the
exquisite scenery through which he passed, in the objects of interest
in the galleries and museums, he appears only to have discovered
subjects whereupon his bitter, acidulous humour could expend
itself. Dr. Moore well observes: ‘Those who are disgusted with such
descriptions are not the only people to whom Smollett gave offence:
he exposed himself also to the reprehension of the whole class of
connoisseurs, the real as well as the far more numerous body of
pretenders to that science. For example, what is one to think of a man
who likened the snow–clad glories of the Alps to frosted sugar; who
said of the famous Venus de Medicis, that has awakened the admiration
of ages, “I cannot help thinking there is no beauty in the features
of Venus, and that the attitude is awkward and out of character”; and
who remarked of the Pantheon, “I was much disappointed at sight of the
Pantheon, which, after all that has been said of it, looks like a huge
cockpit open at the top”?’
The chastisement came, but from the one man who, of all others, should
have remained silent—a man whose whole life was a pitiful epitome
of those faults he sought to reprehend in Smollett—Laurence Sterne.
Jealousy, of course, was the motive. The author of _Tristram Shandy_
could never forgive the fact that the public preferred _Peregrine
Pickle_ to the prurient puerilities of Uncle Toby. Sterne did not take
into consideration, moreover, the state of Smollett’s health, and how
it would colour every estimate he formed of men, manners, and things.
The last in the world was the author of _Tristram Shandy_ to have sat
as moral or æsthetic critic on Smollett. How the mighty sledge–hammer
of contempt wielded by Sir Walter Scott crushed the unfeeling, though
far from radically ill–natured critic! Sterne wrote: ‘The learned
Smelfungus travelled from Boulogne to Paris, from Paris to Rome, and so
on, but he set out with the spleen and the jaundice, and every object
he passed by was discoloured and distorted. He wrote an account of
them, but it was nothing but an account of his miserable feelings. I
met Smelfungus in the grand portico of the Pantheon. He was just coming
out of it. “It is nothing but a huge cockpit,” said he. “I wish you had
said nothing worse of the Venus Medicis,” replied I—for in passing
through Florence I had heard he had fallen foul upon the goddess, and
used her worse than a common strumpet, without the least provocation
in nature. I popped upon Smelfungus again in Turin, in his return
home, and a sad tale of sorrowful adventures he had to tell, wherein
he spoke of “moving accidents by flood and field, and of the cannibals
which each other eat, the Anthropophagi.” He had been flayed alive and
bedeviled, and worse used than Saint Bartholomew at every stage he had
come at. “I’ll tell it,” said Smelfungus, “to the world.” “You had
better tell it,” said I, “to your physician.”’ Now, though Smollett
deserved castigation for inflicting his miseries on the public and
ridiculing many of their most cherished ideals at a time when he was
mentally unfit to judge, the passage cited above is not the manner in
which such literary punishment should be given. Thereupon says Sir
Walter: ‘Be it said without offence to the memory of that witty and
elegant writer (Sterne), it is more easy to assume in composition an
air of alternate gaiety and sensibility, than to practise the virtues
of generosity and benevolence which Smollett exercised during his whole
life, though often, like his own Matthew Bramble, under the disguise
of peevishness and irritability. Sterne’s writings show much flourish
concerning virtues of which his life is understood to have produced
little fruit; the temper of Smollett was—
“Like a lusty winter,
Frosty, but kindly.”’
Alas! not long now was the worn tenement of the great novelist to hold
his fiery spirit. After 1766 the end was known to be only a question
of a year or two at most. Manfully and nobly did he receive the
intelligence. There was no repining at the hardness of his lot. ‘My
poor Nancy; let me make the best use of the time for her.’ Constant
rheumatism, and the pain arising from a neglected ulcer which had
developed into a chronic sore, had so drained his strength that there
was no recovering the lost ground. A premature break–up of the system,
rather than the positive disease of consumption, numbered his days.
Soon after returning home from the Continent, he repaired to Scotland
to visit his aged mother. Affecting in the last degree was that visit.
To both the knowledge was present that never more on earth would they
meet. The old lady, with that keen insight into the future which often
distinguishes the aged, said, ‘We’ll no’ be long parted, any way. If
you go first, I’ll be close on your heels: if I lead the way, ye’ll no’
be far behind me, I’m thinking.’ And so it proved. Though in Scotland
he enjoyed a partial restoration to health that cheered some of his
friends, his mother knew better. ‘The last flicker of the candle is aye
the brightest,’ she said. While in Scotland he visited, with his sister
Mrs. Telfer and his biographer Dr. Moore, the Smolletts of Bonhill,
where he received a warm welcome from his cousin, who pressed him to
stay there for some months and get his health thoroughly established.
But the treadmill in London was waiting for its victim. In the
beginning of 1767 he returned to London, having sojourned at Bath
for a time with Mrs. Smollett. Once more he was back tugging at the
oar, doing odd work for the _Critical Review_, compiling travels,
translating from French, Spanish, or Latin sundry books of merely
ephemeral interest. Then he contributed to the periodical literature of
the day—anything, in fact, to keep that wolf from the door which every
year seemed to approach nearer and yet nearer.
Only two more works of any moment was he to live to accomplish—one,
an indifferent production judged by his own high standard—the other,
like the dying cygnet’s song in Grecian fable—the greatest and the
last! In 1769 appeared _The History and Adventures of an Atom_, in 2
vols. 12mo. This is a politico–social satire, wherein are represented
the several leaders of political parties from 1754 till the dissolution
of Lord Chatham’s administration in 1762, but under the thin veil of
Japanese names. George III. was consumed with the fallacy that he
was the first statesman in the Europe of his day. His experiments
in diplomacy nearly brought Britain to ruin. Had he not bullied and
badgered the elder Pitt into resignation, America would have been
to–day an integral part of the Empire, which would have feared no
rival from pole to pole. But such was not to be. Besides, out of the
blundering of the honest but short–sighted monarch the liberties of
the English people were to be evolved. _The History of an Atom_ was
successful, but is to–day the portion of Smollett’s writings with which
we could most comfortably dispense. It is a satire, or intended for
such, but accommodates itself to none of the known rules of any school
of satiric writing. Neither to Swift, Arbuthnot, Steele, nor Butler
does it exhibit affinity.
Towards the middle of 1768 the fact became evident to all, that if
Smollett’s life was to be preserved, he must henceforth live far from
the bitter winters of England. To leave his fatherland he was not
sorry. Faction had embittered his existence during the past few years,
and faction was jealously to pursue him with its malice even to the
end. His only political friends neglected him who had fought so well
and indefatigably for them. The Earl of Bute with but little exertion
could have placed Smollett at once beyond the necessity of such killing
labour. But the Butes, then, were proverbially notorious for their
callousness and their ingratitude.
When the final verdict was given, Smollett endeavoured to obtain some
consulship abroad, that would have lessened his labours. He was still
dependent on his pen for daily bread. Almost despairingly he implored
even his political enemies to help him to some means whereby he might
demit some portion of his killing work. But his ‘noble’ friends were
all deaf. Lord Shelburne was applied to, but stated the consulships at
Nice and Leghorn were already promised to some of his own political
creatures. One man only stood his friend; one man only, and he an
opponent albeit a countryman, did his best for Smollett, but, alas!
unavailingly. All honour to David Hume the historian, then Under
Secretary of State! In the end the dying novelist was disappointed
at all points. He had to go abroad depending on the staff that had
supplied him with bread all through the long years until now—and which
alone would not now fail him—his pen!
Smollett left England in December 1768, and proceeded to Leghorn _via_
Lucca and Pisa. Here he settled at Monte Nova, a little township
situated on the side of a mountain overlooking the sea. Dr. Armstrong,
his friend and countryman, had secured for him a beautiful villa on the
outskirts of the village. Here he gradually grew weaker, but was tended
with the utmost devotion by his wife, and some of the English families
in the neighbourhood. Here, too, he penned the greatest of his novels,
the work that for its subtle insight into human nature, its keen and
incisive studies of character, its delightful humour, its matchless
_bonhomie_ and raciness, takes rank amidst the treasured classics of
our literature—the immortal _Humphrey Clinker_.
But with this exertion the feeble flame of the great novelist’s life
slowly flickered out. His work was done, and nobly done. He had carved
for himself an imperishable niche in the great Temple of Fame. His last
words were spoken to his wife—‘All is well, my dear;’ and on the 21st
October 1771, in the 52nd year of his age, Tobias George Smollett laid
down the burden of that life which had pressed so wearily upon him, and
passed—within the Silence!
He had the pleasure of seeing _Humphrey Clinker_ in its published form
a day or two before his death. When the public learned that the hand
which so often had delighted them in the past would now delight them
no more, a mournful interest was exhibited in his last work. Edition
after edition was exhausted. But what booted it to him, then, when the
strife and the anguish as well as the exultation born of success were
all over? ‘After labour cometh rest, and after strife the guerdon.’
Alas! too late the latter came to cheer him whose life had been one
long–drawn–out epic of anguish from the cradle to the grave!
Had Smollett lived four years longer, he would have inherited the
estate of Bonhill and an income of £1000 per annum, which in default of
him passed to Mrs. Telfer, his sister, and her heirs. O the irony of
fate! Alas! the thorn of apprehension which disturbed his dying pillow
proved too true a dread. His wife was left in Leghorn in dire penury,
until relieved by the charity of friends who were _not_ relatives, and
also by the proceeds of a theatrical performance given in her aid after
some years by Mr. Graham of Gartmore. An indelible stain is it upon
the Telfers and the Smolletts that they should have allowed the widow
of their most distinguished relative to die dependent on the charity
of strangers. But relatives are proverbially the hardest–hearted of
potential benefactors when the day of trouble comes. Poor “Narcissa”!
the lines of her life were not cast in pleasant places.
Smollett was interred in the English cemetery at Leghorn, with the blue
Mediterranean stretching in front of his last resting–place. Many are
the pilgrims that journey to his tomb, and as the years roll on they
increase rather than diminish. A plain monument was erected by his wife
over the remains, the Latin inscription on which was written by his
friend Dr. Armstrong, the poet. At Bonhill, a splendid obelisk, over
sixty feet high, was raised on the banks of the Leven, by his cousin
James Smollett (a few months before his own death), the inscription
being revised and corrected by Dr. Johnson.
Dr. Moore, as the friend of Smollett, has preserved for us the
appearance and portrait of the great novelist in the following
description: “The person of Dr. Smollett was stout and well
proportioned, his countenance engaging, his manner reserved, with
a certain air of dignity that seemed to indicate that he was not
unconscious of his own powers. He was of a disposition so humane and
generous that he was ever ready to serve the unfortunate, and on some
occasions to assist them beyond what his circumstances could justify.
Though few could penetrate with more acuteness into character, yet
none was more apt to overlook misconduct when attended by misfortune.
Free from vanity, Smollett had a considerable share of pride and great
sensibility; his passions were easily moved, and too impetuous when
roused. He could not conceal his contempt of folly, his detestation
of fraud, nor refrain from proclaiming his indignation against every
instance of oppression. He was of an intrepid, independent, imprudent
disposition, equally incapable of deceit and adulation, and more
disposed to cultivate the acquaintance of those he could serve than of
those who could serve him.”
Such being the character of the man, the key is obtained to the enigma
of Smollet’s lack of political and social success. He was of too
honest a nature to do the dirty work of the ‘Ministers’ of the time,
amongst whom independence of character was rated as a sin of the first
magnitude. But in the hearts of the admirers of his literary works,
Smollett will also live as one of the greatest of our countrymen—a man
whose virtues are yearly becoming recognised in their true light, as
readers realise he is one of the world’s great moral teachers, whose
lessons are communicated by exhibiting the naked hideousness of vice.
And so the star of his fame will shine more and yet more clearly unto
the perfect day!
CHAPTER X
SMOLLETT AS A NOVELIST
Smollett, although gaining distinction in other branches of literature,
was primarily and essentially a novelist. He wrote history, and wrote
it well; drama, and wrote it only passably; travels but little better,
and poetry decidedly mechanically, save in the ‘Ode to Independence.’
In the novel alone did he by prescriptive right take his place in
the front rank of British writers of fiction. Wherein then lay his
strength, and in what respects did he differ from Richardson and
Fielding? To institute any comparative estimate between the three is
foolish in the last degree. The grounds for such a comparison do not
exist, save in the initial fact that all three wrote novels!
Smollett was, like Scott, an unequalled observer. Nothing missed his
‘inevitable eye,’ either in a situation, an incident, or a landscape.
If he had not Fielding’s keen power of vision into the mental and
moral characteristics of his fellow–men, he had twice his aptness
of objective photography. The ludicrous aspects of a circumstance
or of a saying impressed him deeply. He never seemed to forget the
humorous bearings of any experience through which he had passed, or
of which he had learned. The _affaire de cœur_ with Melinda in
_Roderick Random_, the challenge and arrest through the affection of
Strap, also the inimitable ‘banquet after the manner of the ancients’
in _Peregrine Pickle_, were described from incidents occurring in
Smollett’s own history. To few writers has the faculty been given in
measure so rich of projecting objectively the scenes he was describing
upon some outward, yet imaginary canvas, whence he transferred them to
his pages. The naturalness of setting in the case of all the incidents
is so marked, and stands out in such glaring contrast to those recorded
in the _Memoirs of a Lady of Quality_ (published in _Peregrine
Pickle_), that one scarcely knows which to admire most—the originality
of the genius or the wonderful fidelity and impressiveness of the
painter’s reproduction.
Smollett’s strength lay in his great power of self–restraint. He knew
what he could do, and with rare wisdom he kept himself within the
limits of his imaginative ability. He could very easily have made
either Roderick Random or Peregrine Pickle a sentimental amorist,
sighing after his mistress, and suffering all the delicious hopes and
fears and ups and downs of the knights–errant of love. But therein he
would have trenched upon Richardson’s province, and placed himself in
a decidedly unfavourable comparison with the author of _Pamela_ and
_Clarissa Harlowe_. He might have developed a splendid character–study
out of the colossal Borgia–like wickedness of Ferdinand Count Fathom,
who can alone claim kindred, in the pitiless thirst for crime which
possesses him, with that repulsively brutal creation of Shakespeare’s
early days, Aaron in _Titus Andronicus_, who, when dying, curses the
world with the words—
‘If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.’
But had he done so, he would have entered into direct competition
with Fielding; a competition he knew he was unfitted to support. But
in his own department he was supreme. In fertility of invention and
apt adaptation of means to end he had no rival. His novels present
one bewildering succession of accidents, entanglements, escapes,
imprisonments, love–makings, and what not, until the mind positively
becomes cloyed with the banquet of incident provided for it. A less
profound genius than Smollett would in all probability have worn
itself out in a vain attempt to rival his great contemporaries, on the
principle ‘never venture, never win.’ Smollett was a surer critic, on
this point at least, than many of his friends, who were continually
urging him to attempt something in the mode of Fielding. ‘There is
but one husbandman can reap that field,’ he replied. He knew what he
_could_ do and what he _could not_ do, and therein, as has been said,
lay his strength.
Viewing his novels as a whole,—_Roderick Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_,
_Ferdinand Count Fathom_, _Launcelot Greaves_, _The Adventures of an
Atom_, and _Humphrey Clinker_,—the first quality which strikes a
critical reader is the family likeness existing between all the leading
characters. Dissimilar though Roderick Random and Ferdinand Count
Fathom may be in their impulses toward evil, distinct though Peregrine
Pickle is from Launcelot Greaves, Matthew Bramble, and Lismahago in
what may be termed his nobler qualities, there is nevertheless in
all that happy–go–lucky carelessness, that supreme indifference to
consequences, that courage that never flinches from the penalties of
its own misdeeds, but accepts them without a murmur—in a word, a
_bonhomie_ diversified by egotism, that appears in equal measure in
no other novelist of his time. Richardson displays that sentimental,
melodramatic, watery ‘gush’ which the taste of last century
denominated pathos—the sort of thing Dickens long after described
in the phrase ‘drawing tears from his eyes and a handkerchief from
his pocket’; but of that quality there is not the faintest trace
in Smollett. If anything, his characters are too callous, too fond
of the rough–and–tumble Tom–and–Jerry life in which their creator
so perceptibly revelled. Fielding, on the other hand, patiently
elaborates his characters, adding here a line and there a curve,
heightening the light in one place, deepening the shading in another,
never picturing an incident or a trait without some definite end to
be served in perfecting the final portrait. Smollett never takes time
for such microscopic character studies. He is a veritable pen–and–ink
draughtsman. With bold, rapid, vigorous strokes, he sketches, through
the agency of incident, the outlines of his characters, filling in
these outlines with but few subsidiary details regarding the feelings
and moral impulses of his creations. For such he has neither the time
nor the space. Let any reader lift the conceptions of Roderick Random,
or Peregrine Pickle, or Matthew Bramble out of the setting of the story
and study them apart, paying no heed to anything affecting the other
personages, and he will see at once how completely Smollett relied
on incident to do the work of explaining and analysing the feelings
of his heroes. Fielding was the greater artist, Smollett the better
story–teller; Fielding was the greater moral teacher, Smollett the
more vigorous painter of contemporary manners. Further, let the reader
carefully study Lovelace in Richardson’s _Clarissa Harlowe_, Blifil in
Fielding’s novel of _Tom Jones_, and Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom,
and he will perceive in even a stronger degree the diverse method of
the three great novelists. Richardson builds up what might be called
the ‘architectonic’ of the creation by a series of great scenes wherein
dialogue plays the greatest part. Lovelace has all the light–hearted
villainy of a man to whom virtue is a myth, who has no conscience, and
whose standard of right is his gross animal devilishness. Richardson
does everything by square and rule. He expends at the outset a wealth
of ingenuity in portraying the most insignificant qualities of
Lovelace’s nature. And so fully does he make us acquainted with his
nature, that at the end of the novel we know in reality very little
more of him than we did at the outset. Fielding, on the other hand,
winds his way into the very heart of a character, ‘like a serpent
round its prey,’ as Goldsmith said of Burke’s treatment of a subject
in conversation. Every chapter gives us some addition to the creation,
even to the very close of the novel. But when that is reached, the
great synthesis is complete. Not a trait is lacking, and Master
Blifil stands pilloried to all time as the type of everything that is
contemptible and deceitful. Not so Smollett. In the case of Ferdinand
Count Fathom the initial description of the character is reduced to a
minimum. Everything is left to the effect produced by incident. All
Fathom’s pitilessness, his absolute love of vice for its own sake, his
colossal selfishness, are in reality merely suggested to the reader’s
own mind, by the thread of rapidly succeeding incident, not formally
labelled as such. In the case of both Richardson and Fielding the
author is constantly present in his creation. So with Smollett, he is
ever in evidence. None of them attain that superb art of Walter Scott,
who simply effaces himself in his creations, or, as Hazlitt says: ‘He
sits like a magician in his cell and conjures up all shapes and sights
to the view; but in the midst of all this phantasmagoria the author
himself never appears to take part with his characters. It is the
perfection of art to conceal art, and this is here done so completely,
that, while it adds to our pleasure in the work, it seems to take away
from the merit of the author. As he does not thrust himself into the
foreground, he loses the credit of the performance.’
By the critical student closely attentive to the development of
Smollett’s genius, the fact will assuredly be noted that in the gallery
of his characters, chronologically considered, there is a definitely
progressive growth or increase in the power wherewith he limned
character. Bearing in mind our initial position, that in Smollett’s
art incident was the prime element, and the delineation of character
subordinate to the artistic arrangement of the links in the chain of
circumstance, I would invite attention to the following analysis, as
being, in my opinion, the conclusion to be deduced from a patient,
faithful, and impartial study of the personages named. My contention
is that in the character sequence we have a series of ascending
psychologic gradations, each one presenting features of greater
complexity and philosophic force, as the author realised more clearly
the value of a system in that concatenation of event which influenced
so intimately his personages.
_Roderick Random_ is little else than the _Gil Blas_ of Le Sage
Anglified, with some hints borrowed from the excellent _Lazarillo
de Tormes_ of Hurtado de Mendoza. In his Preface to the novel
Smollett acknowledges his indebtedness to French and Spanish fiction,
and announces his conviction of the superiority of the novel of
circumstance over all others. _Roderick Random_, therefore, as a
novel consists of a succession of incidents, some startling, some
improbable, some foolish, and some highly effective, but all loosely
strung together without much artistic arrangement or relative affinity
to each other. The book is a record of the ‘adventures’ of the hero
from his cradle to his marriage. As in the case of all such books,
the peg whereon the incidents are hung is very slender. All is loose
and disjointed, happy–go–lucky in narration, rapid, swift, and
evanescent in the mental pictures produced. Roderick is only a big
schoolboy, full of animal spirits and animal passions, far, very far
from being a saint, yet as far from being an irreclaimable sinner. He
is the plaything of his passions, carried like a straw on the stream
of circumstance. He takes everything as it comes, be it weal be it
woe, be it good fortune or evil, with supreme nonchalance. He shows
little regard or gratitude to his uncle, Lieutenant Bowling. He treats
his poor friend Strap, whose only fault was his fidelity, worse than
indifferently. He is not by any means faithful, and certainly not
very respectful, to his lady–love, Narcissa; nay, he even takes the
discovery of his long–lost father—a circumstance materially altering
his social station—quite as a matter of course. Roderick Random was
the spirit incarnate of the cold–blooded, coarse–fibred, religionless
eighteenth century—a century wherein virtue was perpetually on the
lips, and vice as perpetually in the hearts of its men, a century
wherein its women were colourless puppets, without true individuality
or definite aims, but oscillating aimlessly between Deism and Methodism
to escape from the ennui that resulted from the lack of true culture.
Roderick Random as a creation was a purely adventitious one, resulting
from the fortuitous concourse of incidents. How the character was
to shape itself, morally or mentally, seemed to trouble the creator
little, provided the events were sufficiently lively and brisk, and
the interest in the story was maintained unflaggingly. Incidents were
piled up, whether tending to heighten the effect of the _dramatis
personæ_, or not. There was no conservation of material, no wise
economy, no evidence of careful selection. Prodigality and profusion
were everywhere present, with the signs of youth and inexperience writ
large over all. In fact, the character of Roderick Random, critically
estimated as a work of art, is little better than Lobeyra’s Amadis de
Gaul, a portrait limned wholly out of incident, flung on the canvas
without premeditation, and frequently presenting inconsistencies and
conflicting traits. There is no gradual development of character
contemporaneously with the evolution of event. The character has
gathered no wisdom during its course. It is represented to us in quite
as immature a state at the end of the story as at the beginning. There
is a heartlessness, a moral callousness about Roderick which all his
experiences never seemed to remove. Excessively repulsive is this phase
of the hero’s character; nay, the novel is only saved from being as
darkly shaded and as morally repellent as Count Fathom, by the pathetic
doglike fidelity of poor Strap, who exhibits more true nobility of
nature in a chapter, than Roderick Random in the whole book.
From the criticisms on _Roderick Random_, Smollett learned many
lessons. He noted that, though his free and easy method of letting
character shape itself through the medium of incident had its
advantages, these were liable to be counterbalanced unless the chain of
incident was so forged that each link would be related to the leading
characters of the novel, so as to promote their development and tend
to fill in the bare black and white outlines by some distinguishing
trait, mannerism, or eccentricity. In _Peregrine Pickle_, therefore,
the characters are seen to be more vertebrate. They are no longer the
stalking lay figures of the first novel. Albeit Peregrine is only
Roderick under another name, and endowed with a year or two more of
experience and sense,—the subtle differentiation of personages visible
in _Humphrey Clinker_ having yet to be learned,—there is a marked
improvement in the _technique_ of the novel. The chain of incident
is every whit as varied, the events as events are more stirring and
startling than in the first novel, but there is now the attempt—though
as yet but an attempt—to subject the unflagging flow of incident to
an artistic adaptation towards definite ends. Incident is no longer
piled on incident regardless of the fact whether it tend to advance the
development of the characters or not. Then Smollett has learned the
value of contrast in character–painting. Peregrine is contrasted with
such humorous creations as Godfrey Gauntlet, Commodore Hawser Trunnion,
Lieutenant Hatchway, and Bo’sun Tom Pipes. The virtue of relative
proportion among his characters according to their ratio of importance
in influencing the story, though still faulty, has been carefully
studied. Peregrine therefore is supreme as hero. There is no Strap to
dispute the honours with him, and as a portrait he is more consistent
than in the case of Roderick. Though the same callous indifference to
morality is manifest, though the likeness to Lazarillo de Tormes is
even more patent in this latter creation than in the former, though
the same polite villainy passes current under the name of gallantry,
the same cheap appreciation of female honour,—witness that degrading
scene so reprobated by Sir Walter Scott, where Peregrine assails Emilia
Gauntlet’s chastity,—the hero is not so glaring a moral imbecile as
Roderick. He has gleams of better things. But, as in the former novel
so in the latter, the noblest character of the book is the foil or
contrast to Peregrine—Godfrey Gauntlet, on whom Smollett seems to
lavish all his powers.
Then comes _Ferdinand Count Fathom_, indicating a still further
advance in the _technique_ of novel–writing. In this work the stage
is not so crowded as in _Roderick Random_ and _Peregrine Pickle_. The
whole interest centres in the career of crime of this archfiend,
this pitiless Nero, Iago, and Cæsar Borgia in one. A more terrible
picture of human depravity has never been drawn unless in _Othello_
and _Titus Andronicus_. But Smollett had now learned the lesson of the
conservation of imaginative power. There are no needless incidents
in this novel. Everyone reveals the character of the hero in a new
light. Relative proportion, differentiation, and contrast have all
been carefully studied. Notwithstanding our loathing of crimes so
unspeakable, notwithstanding our hatred of animalism so unbridled
as would sacrifice the trustful Monimia to his base passions, a
sort of sneaking sympathy with Fathom begins to find entrance into
the breast. As in _Paradise Lost_ one feels a sorrow for Satan’s
position after his magnificent resistance to the Almighty, so here
the same sentiment finds place. One hopes Fathom may have time given
him wherein to repent. But Smollett was now too consummate an artist
for that concession to sentimentalism. In _Roderick Random_ he might
have committed such an artistic mistake. Not now. Fathom receives
retributive justice, and only repents when he has expiated to the
uttermost his sins and wrong–doings.
Passing by _Sir Launcelot Greaves_ and _The History of an Atom_ as
outside the pale of our criticism, inasmuch as they were written when
he was worried and distracted with other matters, besides being in
wretched health, so that they are unworthy of his genius, we come
to the consideration of Matthew Bramble and Lieutenant Lismahago in
_Humphrey Clinker_. They are undoubtedly the two greatest characters
in the Smollett gallery of imaginative portraits. They must be viewed
together. To separate them is to lose the reflected lustre they cast
by contrast on each other. Likenesses many and important they have.
Both are sufferers from the world’s fickle changes. Both are weary
and irritated with society’s meannesses and petty falsehoods. Both
are testy, tetchy, and prickly–tempered. But how truly men! Smollett
had now reached the meridian of his powers. He realised now that in
a great novel incident and the delineation of character must occupy
co–ordinate positions. To assign excessive predominance to either, is
to mar the ultimate effect. Therefore in _Humphrey Clinker_, while
still revelling in inexhaustible variety of incident, Smollett assigns
to the synthesis of character its proper place. In place of portraying
the characters himself, he adopted the course, so favoured by his
great rival Richardson, and long years after to be employed with
such rare effect by Walter Scott and William Makepeace Thackeray, of
achieving the evolution of character through the medium of letters, a
mutual analysis as well as a distinctive synthesis. Risky though the
expedient was, for it demanded a man of the highest genius to make the
letters popular, in Smollett’s hands it proved eminently successful. We
accordingly have Matthew Bramble alternately described by himself and
Jerry Melford, each giving varying phases of the same kindly, dogmatic,
generously obstinate, and wholly noble–hearted fellow. Lismahago’s
character, besides being drawn by the two above–named fellow–travellers
in that expedition to Scotland wherein Humphrey Clinker was the footman
and hero, has the blanks in the portrait filled in by Miss Tabitha
Bramble, the bitter–sweet spinster whom he afterwards married, and
the inimitably delightful lady’s–maid, Winnifred Jenkins. More highly
finished pictures could scarcely be desired. Side by side with Scott’s
Dugald Dalgetty and Thackeray’s Esmond, Lismahago may assuredly be
placed, while Matthew Bramble falls little short, in completeness
of details, of Jonathan Oldbuck in the _Antiquary_. Yet Bramble is
still Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle purged of their faults and
follies, and with the experience of years upon them. We realise that
Bramble possesses all their shortcomings, albeit held in check by his
strong good sense, while they potentially had all his virtues, though
the fever of youth i’ the blood obscured them for the nonce. A noble
gallery do these five characters compose. If Fathom be the Cain or the
Esau of the company, he has many of the family features to show to what
race he belongs.
In one imaginative type Smollett has never been approached as a
creator, to wit, in his delineation of British seamen. Captain Marryat
exhibits a greater knowledge of nautical affairs than Smollett, but
nothing in the younger novelist quite touches the racy humour of
Commodore Hawser Trunnion, Lieutenant Bowling, Hatchway, and Pipes.
David Hannay, in his introduction to _Japhet in Search of a Father_,
says: ‘Captain Savage of the _Diomede_, Captain M—— of the _King’s
Own_, Captain Hector Maclean in _Jacob Faithful_, Terence O’Brien, the
mate Martin, the midshipman Gascoigne, Thomas Saunders the boatswain’s
mate, and Swinburne the quartermaster, are beyond all question not
less lifelike portraits of the officers and men of the navy than
Trunnion and Bowling, Pipes and Hatchway. In one respect Marryat had
an inevitable advantage over his predecessor. Smollett never shows
us the seaman at his work. He could not, because he did not know it
sufficiently well to understand it himself.’ That is perfectly true.
But, on the other hand, Marryat’s intimate knowledge was often a
hindrance to his art. It led him to inflict the minutiæ of the service
on his readers more than was needful. Hence the reason why some parts
of Marryat’s books are decidedly tiresome. Smollett’s are never so.
His sense of artistic proportion was finer than Marryat’s, and he
avoided the pitfall whereinto the other fell. As a delineator of the
nautical character, Mr. Clark Russell is the greatest we have had
since Smollett, and in him the latter finds his most dangerous rival.
Yet, if Mr. Russell has equalled his master in many other respects, it
is doubtful if he has quite reached the high–water mark of Commodore
Trunnion and Lismahago.
Finally, Smollett’s women are deserving of a word. Sainte Beuve said he
judged a novelist’s powers by the manner in which he drew his female
characters. If so, Smollett would not have excited much sympathy in the
mind of the brilliant author of the _Causeries du Lundi_. His women
are of varying excellence. Narcissa in _Roderick Random_ and Emilia in
_Peregrine Pickle_ are only sweet dolls. Until his closing years he
could not differentiate between puling sentimentality and piquancy.
Into the charming perversity, the delightful contradictoriness,
that often make up for us one–half the attractiveness of the female
character, he could not enter. To rise to the height of spiritual
insight that was requisite to conceive and execute a Di Vernon, an
Ethel Newcome, or a Rose Vincy, was for him impossible, simply because
he could not realise in his earlier years of authorship that women
are the equals, not the inferiors of man. The hapless Miss Williams
in _Roderick Random_ exhibits this feeling on the part of Smollett.
She was nobility itself in character, yet she was made over to Strap.
One of the finest of his creations is the hapless Monimia in _Count
Fathom_. Tenderness, purity, grace, and beauty are all united in her.
She falls, it is true, but her fall left her virtue unimpugned, seeing
that her betrayer resorted to means as cruel as they were irresistible
to accomplish his diabolic purpose. Monimia occupies a pedestal apart,
but, she excepted, the two most delightful creations in all his works
are those in _Humphrey Clinker_, Tabitha Bramble and Winnifred Jenkins.
Lydia Melford is too milk–and–waterish, but the two first–named are
drawn with masterly precision and force. Tabitha Bramble is a capital
portrait of the soured, disappointed old maid, whose lover had died
long before, but to whose memory she had been ever faithful—a woman
whose nature is only encrusted with prejudice, not inter–penetrated
by it, so that we may justly hope that, under the loving care of
Lieutenant Lismahago, her frigidity may thaw, and that in matrimony
she may discover the world not to be so very bad after all. Winnifred
Jenkins is the prototype of Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan’s _Rivals_, and
is infinitely more amusing. All the vanity, self–assertiveness, and
jealousy of a small mind, conjointly with the love of appearing to
move in a higher circle of society than she really does, are admirably
sketched, while her misappropriate use of the language of that circle
is most felicitously rendered. The portrait is Smollett’s best, and
no touch is finer than Winnifred’s conduct in the menagerie. Let her
speak for herself. ‘Last week I went with mistress to the Tower to see
the crowns and wild beastis. There was a monstracious lion with teeth
half a quarter long, and a gentleman bid me not go near him if I wasn’t
a maid, being as how he would roar, and tear, and play the dickens.
Now I had no mind to go near him, for I cannot abide such dangerous
honeymils, not I—but mistress would go, and the beast kept such a
roaring and bouncing that I tho’t he would have broke his cage and
devoured us all; and the gentleman tittered forsooth; but I’ll go death
upon it, I will, that my lady is as good a firgkin as the child unborn;
and therefore either the gentleman told a phib, or the lion ought to
be set in the stocks for bearing false witness against his neighbour.’
Tabitha Bramble and Win Jenkins are those two in Smollett’s gallery of
fiction which the world will not willingly let die.
Such, then, is Smollett as a novelist—the great master of incident
and humorous narration, the painter of the faults, foibles, and
eccentricities of his fellow–men. In his own sphere he was unrivalled,
and he in nothing showed more saliently his good sense than by refusing
to attempt works for which he knew he was both by temperament and
training unfitted. I cannot quite agree with Professor Saintsbury’s
view in his charming and sympathetic Life of Smollett, prefixed to what
bids fair to be the standard edition of his works.[10] ‘The only one of
the deeper and higher passions which seems to have stirred Smollett was
patriotism, in which a Scot rarely fails, unless he is an utter gaby
or an utter scoundrel.’ Does not the worthy Professor, following the
popular definition, fail to differentiate between an _emotion_ and a
_passion_. In depicting the passions, Smollett, I grant, was singularly
deficient; in such emotions as patriotism, sympathy with the oppressed,
and a pure devotion to the cause of truth, he showed himself a man
whose heart was permeated with the warmest and deepest enthusiasm.
CHAPTER XI
SMOLLETT AS HISTORIAN AND CRITIC
A hundred and thirty years ago, if one had been asked to name the six
great historians then alive, Smollett with marked unanimity would have
been mentioned amongst the first. In fact, Hume, Robertson, and he were
then reckoned as the illustrious triumvirate of Scots whose genius,
in default of others native born, had been consecrated to the task of
lauding for bread and fame the annals of the land whose glories were
supposed to be to them so distasteful. The Union of the countries was
not yet sufficiently remote to have borne as its fruit that harvest
of commercial, political, and agricultural benefits that have accrued
to both lands as its result. The jealousy wherewith Scotsmen were
regarded in England was a legacy from the days when the subjugation of
the territory north of Tweed was a standing item in English foreign
policy, from the reign of that greatly misjudged monarch, Edward I.
(Longshanks), to the days of the fourth of his name, who recognised
the younger brother of James III., the exiled Duke of Albany, as
King of Scots under the title of Alexander IV., on condition that he
acknowledged Edward as lord paramount and feudal superior.
The school of historians represented by Rapin, Oldmixon, Tindal,
Carte, and Hooke, honest, hard–working investigators, but without any
sense of method or proportion in classifying or arranging materials,
and vigorous anti–Scots, was alarmed by the success attending the
publication of Hume’s _History of England_ in 1754–61, Principal
Robertson’s _History of Scotland_ in 1758–59, and Smollett’s _History
of England_ in 1758. When the Continuation by the last–named appeared
in 1762, it was exposed, as we have seen, to a perfect broadside of
misrepresentation and unjust reflections, prompted by the historians
above–named and their booksellers, whose literary property seemed to
them to be endangered. That some of the criticisms were just, and
founded upon the discovery of genuine errors and blemishes in the
history, cannot be denied. But, on the other hand, three–fourths of the
allegations were baseless, because proceeding from spleen, and not from
genuine enthusiasm in the cause of historic truth.
For example, the objections urged by the friends and supporters of
Rapin’s History were that Smollett was too hurried in his survey, that
he took too many facts on trust, that he was unfair in his critical
estimates of eminent personages, and finally, that his style was one
better adapted for the novel than for historical compositions. To these
allegations the friends of Oldmixon added that he permitted party
prejudice to colour all his judgments. In replying to such charges we
virtually analyse Smollett’s merits as a historian. A double duty is
therefore discharged by so doing.
Smollett as a historian might say with Horace, and assuredly with
truth, ‘_Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri_—a slavish disciple
of the tenets of no master am I.’ Though unstinted in his praise
of Hume’s calm, lucid survey, of his careful generalisations and
eminently comprehensive method, though likewise a generous admirer of
Robertson’s brilliant word–pictures and glowingly eloquent narrative,
wherein the long dead seemed to live again, he had his own ideal of
the writing of history, and it savoured rather of Tacitus than of
Thucydides. His method consisted in presenting a series of great
outstanding events covering the entire period under notice, and round
these to group the subordinate occurrences either resulting from or
happening contemporaneously with them. He was a firm believer in the
doctrine that political freedom and commercial honesty are the two
great bulwarks of any State. Though a Tory in name, he was in reality
more of a philosophical Whig, rather a champion of the rights of the
people than a lover and defender of aristocracies, oligarchies, and
monopolies. ‘That country only is truly prosperous that is in the
highest sense free, and that country alone is free where a hierarchy
of knowledge governs, uninfluenced by faction and undisturbed by
prejudice,’ he wrote in the _Critical Review_. The sentiments are
somewhat vague and indefinite, but they show that he was striving to
emancipate himself from the leading–strings of party prejudice.
Although the fact is beyond doubt that Smollett’s historical works
were written exceedingly rapidly, on the other hand, we must remember
that the rapidity of production merely applied to the mechanical work
of transcribing what had been already carefully thought out. Like Dr.
Johnson, Smollett was possessed of a most retentive memory. He rarely
committed any of his works to paper until he had thoroughly thought
them out in his mind, and had tested them over and over again in that
searching alembic. In neither case, therefore, was the _composition_
hurried. All that was done was to expedite its transcription.
Smollett’s historical judgments, in place of being hastily formed,
were the result of patient study and thought. On this point we have
the evidence of Wilkes, who, in one of his epigrams, more forcible
than delicate, remarked that Smollett travailed over the birth of his
historical judgments so much that he (Wilkes) had often to play the
part of the critical midwife.
The next charge, that Smollett was too prone to take his information at
second hand, cannot be altogether controverted, though it was not yet
the custom of historians to betake themselves to the MS. repositories
of the country for their materials. More mutual reliance was placed
by historians on each other’s _bonâ fides_ and faculty of critical
selection than seems to be the case now. But we have it on his own
assurance that he consulted over three hundred authorities for his
facts. That number may be small compared with those eight hundred names
which Buckle prints at the commencement of his noble and imperishable
_History of Civilisation in England_, but in Smollett’s day the number
of his references was considered phenomenal. He greatly surpassed Hume
in the range and appropriateness of his references, and rather prided
himself on the collateral evidences of facts which he was able to
adduce from his miscellaneous reading. That Smollett was consciously
unfair in his judgment of any character in his historical works cannot
be credited. He was too warm a friend of truth to be seduced into
wilfully distorting the plain and straightforward deductions from
ascertained facts. That he may have been misled I do not deny, that
his political predilections may have led him insensibly to colour
his judgments at times with the jaundice of partisanship, is quite
possible, yet that such was done deliberately, no student of Smollett’s
character for a moment will credit. Many of his political opponents
were castigated, it is true, so were many of his political friends;
but, on the other hand, the fact is to be taken into account that many
of his bitterest enemies obtained a just and impartial criticism from
Smollett when such was denied to them by many of the writers numbered
among their own friends. Finally, that his style was more adapted to
the treatment of imaginative themes than of sober historical narrative,
was a charge that might have some weight in the middle decades of last
century. It can have none now. No special style is distinctively to be
employed in historical composition. It affords scope for all. True it
is that Echard and his school, in the early decades of the eighteenth
century, contended that history should be written in a style of sober
commonplace altogether divested of ornament, as thereby the judgment
was not likely to be led astray. But such nonsensical reservations
have long since been relegated to the limbo of exploded theories,
and in historical composition the brilliancy of a Macaulay and of
an Alison finds a place as well as the sober sense of a Hallam or a
Stubbs; the picturesqueness of a Froude, as well as the earnest vigour
and tireless industry of a Freeman. Smollett’s style, so nervous,
pointed, and epigrammatic, so full of strength and beauty as well
as of scintillating sparkle, was somewhat of a surprise in his day.
Hume’s easy, flowing, pithy Saxon, and Robertson’s stately splendour,
had both carried the honours in historical composition to the grey
metropolis of the North. The fact that another Scot, albeit resident
in London, should repeat the success, and in some respects excel both,
was the most crushing blow the elder school of history had received.
Thenceforward we hear nothing of them. Rapin and Oldmixon slumbered
with the spiders on the remotest shelves of the great libraries. Their
day was past. A new school of British historians had arisen.
Smollett’s historical works, his _History of England_, his
_Continuation of the History of England_, his _Histories of France,
Italy, and Germany_, are characterised by the following sterling
qualities:—a felicity of method whereby the narrative flows on easily
and consecutively from beginning to end, and whereby, through its
division into chapters, representing definite epochs, one is able
to discover with ease any specific point that may be desired; an
exhibition of the principles whereon just and equitable government
should proceed, namely, that of a limited monarchy; a judicious
subordination of the less to the more important events in the
narrative; short, pithy, but eminently fair and appreciative criticisms
of all the more outstanding personages in the country under treatment,
and a convincing testimony borne to the axiom that only by national
virtue and the conservation of national honour can any nation either
reach greatness or retain it. If Smollett did not possess Hume’s power
of reaching back to first principles in tracing the evolution of a
country’s greatness, or Robertson’s stimulating eloquence that fired
the heart with noble sentiments, he had the virtue, scarcely less
valuable, of keeping more closely to his theme than either of them,
and of producing works that read like a romance. If Hume were the
superior in what may be styled the philosophy of history, if Robertson
in picturesqueness and eloquence, Smollett was the better narrator of
the circumstances and facts as they actually occurred. In many respects
he resembles Diderot, and the analogy is not lessened when we compare
the private lives of the two men. To Smollett history was only of value
insomuch as we are able to read the present by the key of the past,
and to influence the future by avoiding the mistakes of the past and
present. Smollett was a patriot in the broad catholic signification of
the word. He had no sympathy with the patriotism that is synonymous
with national or racial selfishness. More crimes have stained the
annals of humanity under the guise of patriotism than can be atoned
for by cycles of penitence. To Smollett the soul of patriotism was
summed up in sinking the name of Scot in the generic one of Briton,
and in endeavouring to stamp out that pitiful provincialism that
considered one’s love of country to be best manifested in perpetuating
quarrels whereon the mildew of centuries had settled. Smollett in his
historical works showed himself a truer patriot than that. Though a
leal–hearted Scot, he was likewise a magnanimous–spirited Briton, ready
to judge as he would wish to be judged. Writing of the Union of 1707,
he remarks in his Continuation: ‘The majority of both nations believed
that the treaty would produce violent convulsions, or, at best, prove
ineffectual. But we now see it has been attended with none of the
calamities that were prognosticated, that it quietly took effect, and
answered all the purposes for which it was intended. Hence we may learn
that many great difficulties are surmounted because they are not seen
by those who direct the execution of any great project; and that many
great schemes which theory deems impracticable will yet succeed in the
experiment.’
Some critics have urged that Smollett might have taken a broader view
of the sources and progress of national expansion and development.
Minto rather off–handedly designates his style as ‘fluent and loose,
possessing a careless vigour where the subject is naturally exciting,’
and concluding with the words, ‘the history _is said_ to be full
of errors and inconsistencies.’[11] Now, this last clause is taken
word for word from Chambers’s _Cyclopedia of English Literature_,
who took it from Angus’s _English Literature_, who borrowed it from
Macaulay, who annexed it from the _Edinburgh Review_, which journal had
originally adopted it with alterations from Smollett’s own prefatory
remarks in the first edition of the book. How many of these authors had
read the history for themselves, to see if it really contained such
errors and inconsistencies? Criticism conducted on that mutual–trust
principle is very convenient for the critic; is it quite fair to
the author? Now, anyone who faithfully reads Smollett’s _History of
England_ and its _Continuation_ will not discover a larger percentage
of either errors or inconsistencies than appear in the works of his
contemporary historians, Tytler, Hume, and Robertson. Smollett is as
distinguishingly fair and impartial as it was possible for one to be,
influenced so profoundly by his environment as were all the historians
of the eighteenth century. The mind of literary Europe was already
tinged by that spiritual unrest and moral callousness that was to
induce the new birth of the French Revolution.
As a literary critic, during his tenure of the editorial chair of
the _Critical Review_, Smollett’s judgments were frequently called
in question, especially in the case of Dr. Grainger, the translator
of _Tibullus_ and of the Greek dramatists, and author of the _Ode to
Solitude_; Shebbeare, a well–known political writer of the period,
whose seditious utterances had been chastised; Home, the author of
_Douglas_, and Wilkie of the _Epigoniad_. Now, in nearly all the cases
wherein exception was taken to the articles, these were not written by
Smollett. But even as regards those of his own composition that have
been complained of, careful perusal alike of the volume criticised
and of the critique evince Smollett to have been as just and fair
in the circumstances as he could well be. For example, the opinion
he formed of Churchill’s Poems was that in which the British public
within thirty years was to acquiesce,—nay, is that which to–day is the
prevailing literary verdict upon these once popular works. Smollett
unfortunately left his contributors a perfectly free hand. Many of
them were men of no principle, who permitted private grudges to colour
their critical estimate of literary works produced by those with whom
they had some quarrel or disagreement. Smollett was to blame for not
exercising his editorial scissors more freely on the verdicts of his
_collaborateurs_. His own opinions of current literature were expressed
with a fairness leaving little to be desired. Though not a Sainte Beuve
in critical appreciation of the work of others, though his verdicts
never possessed the keen spiritual and emotional insight of the famous
_Causeries du Lundi_ in the Paris _Constitutional_, still they are the
fair, honest, outspoken opinions of a man who, as Morton said of Knox,
‘never feared the face of man,’ and therefore would not be biassed by
favour or fear. Dr. Johnson was at the same time criticising literature
in his new _Literary Magazine_. Interesting it is to compare the two
opinions on the books they dealt with. Smollett’s style is well–nigh
as distinguishable as Johnson’s among his fellow–contributors. If the
decrees of ‘the Great Cham of Literature’[12] are more authoritative,
they are but little more incisive and searching than those of
the author of _Roderick Random_. The former had a more extensive
vocabulary, the latter was the more consummate literary critic. Wit,
humour, pathos, and epigram were all at the service of Smollett, and
though, in depth of thought and soaring sublimity of reasoning powers,
the author of the _Rambler_ excelled his contemporary, in the lighter
graces of style Smollett was the better of the two. Though he had not
Johnson’s Jove–like power of driving home a truth, he frequently
persuaded, by his calm and lucid logic, where the thunder of the Great
Cham only repelled. If blame be his, then, with regard to the exercise
of his critical authority, it was due more to sins of omission than of
commission, more to believing that others were actuated by the same
high ideals in criticism as himself. In reading some of the numbers
of the _Critical Review_ for the purposes of this biography, nothing
struck me more in those papers that were plainly from the pen of
Smollett, than the power he possessed of placing himself at the point
of view assumed by the writer of the work under criticism, so that he
might be thoroughly _en rapport_ with the author’s sympathies. How few
critics have either the inclination or the ability to do likewise!
CHAPTER XII
SMOLLETT AS POET AND DRAMATIST
Tradition states that Smollett, on being asked on one occasion why he
did not write more poetry, replied that he had ‘no time to be a poet.’
The answer can be read in a dual sense—either that poetry demanded an
absorption so complete in its pursuit that all other interests were
as naught; or, on the other hand, that his time was so fully occupied
that he could not devote attention to poetical composition without
neglecting other things at that time of more value. As weighed against
his fiction, little regret can be felt by any admirer of Smollett, that
he did not pursue poetry more diligently. The specimens we possess
of these fruits of his genius are not of such value as to awaken any
desire to peruse more of his metrical essays. Small in bulk though his
poetical works are, even these, as well as his dramatic compositions,
we would gladly have spared in exchange for such another novel as
_Humphrey Clinker_.
Smollett’s genius was by no means of that purely imaginative, highly
spiritual type from which great poetical compositions are to be
expected. He was rather an unsurpassed observer, who, having noted
special characteristics of mind as being produced by the fortuitous
concourse of certain incidents, straightway proceeded to expand and
idealise them; than a mighty original genius, like Shakespeare, Milton,
Spenser, Shelley, or Keats, that from the depths of his spiritual
consciousness evolved original creations that are representative not
of any age, but of all time. Smollett had none of the isolating power
of the true poet, whereby for the time he raises his theme into the
pure ether of imagination, dissociated from the world and all its
concerns. Smollett loved the world too well to seek to sever himself
from it. His workshop, his studio, his school, and observatory, it
was in one. Like Balzac, he was more taken up with what men did than
with what they thought. From the outward evidence of action he worked
back to the predisposing thought, not predicting _à priori_ from the
thought what the action must necessarily be. Therefore, as Smollett’s
genius was more practical than imaginative, dealing more with the
reproduction of facts than the creation of fancies, his poetry rose
little above the dead level of commonplace. Only in two poems does he
rise into a distinctively higher altitude of poetic inspiration—these
are ‘The Tears of Scotland’ and ‘The Ode to Independence.’ In both
cases, however, the influence of patriotism and that keen sympathy with
the oppressed which he always entertained, contributed to impart to
the compositions in question loftier sentiments and more impassioned
feelings than would otherwise have been the case. We have already
seen that the horrors wrought in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 by
the Duke of Cumberland were on his mind when he wrote ‘The Tears of
Scotland’; while the heroism of the noble Corsican Paschal Paoli was
the stimulating motive in the composition of the latter.
There is a great difference between the two. The former was written in
1746, while the ‘Ode to Independence’ was not produced until the last
years of his life, and was not published until 1773, when the Messrs.
Foulis of Glasgow, printers to the University of Glasgow, put it out,
with a short Preface and Notes by Professor Richardson. In both, the
language is spirited and striking, the thoughts elevated and just.
In the ‘Ode’ he takes as his models Collins and Gray. The first and
last stanzas of it—or, more properly, the opening strophe and the
concluding antistrophe—are the finest in the poem, and are well worthy
of quotation—
‘Thy spirit, Independence, let me share,
Lord of the lion–heart and eagle eye:
Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare,
Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.
Deep in the frozen regions of the North,
A goddess violated brought thee forth,
Immortal Liberty, whose look sublime
Hath bleached the tyrant’s cheek in ever–varying clime.
What time the iron–hearted Gaul,
With frantic Superstition for his guide,
Armed with the dagger and the pall,
The Sons of Woden to the field defied;
The ruthless hag by Weser’s flood
In Heaven’s name urged the infernal blow,
And red the stream began to flow,
The vanquished were baptised with blood.
ANTISTROPHE.
Nature I’ll court in her sequestered haunts
By mountain, meadow, streamlet, grove or cell,
Where the poised lark his evening ditty chants,
And Health and Peace and Contemplation dwell.
There Study shall with Solitude recline,
And Friendship pledge me to his fellow–swains;
And Toil and Temperance sedately twine
The slender cord that fluttering life sustains:
And fearless Poverty shall guard the door,
And Taste unspoiled the frugal table spread,
And Industry supply the frugal store,
And Sleep unbribed his dews refreshing shed;
White–mantled Innocence, ethereal sprite,
Shall chase afar the goblins of the night,
And Independence o’er the day preside:
Propitious power! my patron and my pride.’
His two satires, _Advice_ and _Reproof_, evince on the part of their
author the qualities we have already noted—keen power of observation,
a felicitous deftness in wedding sound to sense, considerable force of
satiric presentation, with humour and wit in rich measure. But there is
no such elevation as we discover in Johnson’s _London_ or _The Vanity
of Human Wishes_, or in the satiric pieces of Pope or Dryden. The
moment the poems rise from the consideration of facts to principles,
Smollett becomes tedious and prosy. As a song–writer, however, he has
made some eminently successful essays, the well–known lyric—
‘To fix her: ‘twere a task as vain
To combat April drops of rain,’
which has been so often set to music, having been written by him soon
after the publication of _Roderick Random_. It possesses grace, point,
and rhythmic harmony—the three great desiderata in a good lyric.
The following verse has a faint echo of the subtle beauty of Wither,
Lovelace, Herrick, and the Cavalier poets:—
‘She’s such a miser eke in love,
Its joys she’ll neither share nor prove,
Though crowds of gallants gay await
From her victorious eyes their fate.’
Of his remaining poems there are only one or two that really merit
notice. Smollett was too apt to run into the opposite extreme from
sacrificing sense to sound, and prefer a repelling roughness both in
metre and assonance to altering the sequence of thought in a poem that
would not have been injured by the change. His Odes to Mirth and to
Sleep are marred by being too didactic. His images are frequently
so recondite as to awaken no corresponding ideas in the mind of the
reader. His ‘Love Elegy’ is in imitation of those of Tibullus, and
there are several lines that are well–nigh as tenderly pathetic
as those of its great original, while the verses ‘On a Young Lady
playing on the Harpsichord,’ so much admired by Sir Walter Scott, are
undoubtedly amongst his finest efforts for happy union of glowing
thought and graceful expression—
‘When Sappho struck the quivering wire,
The throbbing breast was all on fire;
And when she raised the vocal lay,
The captive soul was charmed away:
But had the nymph possessed with these
Thy softer, chaster power to please,
Thy beauteous air of sprightly youth,
Thy native smiles of artless truth,
The worm of grief had never preyed
On the forsaken, love–sick maid;
Nor had she mourned an hapless flame,
Nor dashed on rocks her tender frame.’
Had Smollett cultivated the art of metrical expression more
persistently and enthusiastically, there are sufficient indications to
show that he might have produced work which, if not in the very highest
grade of excellence in the school presided over by Collins, Gray, and
Goldsmith, would have attained a standard sufficiently worthy to be
ranked among the minor products of that decidedly prosaic epoch. We
need not regret his abstention.
Finally, in the drama Smollett’s restless genius sought expression at
two periods of his life when his hopes were at their highest. In his
nineteenth year, we have seen that the fruit of his historical studies,
and his wanderings in the glorious Elizabethan drama, had been given
to the world in _The Regicide_—a drama founded on the murder of James
I. of Scotland. Written at that point in a youth’s life when the Will
o’ the Wisp of literary fame seemed an angel of light, when the prizes
incident on intellectual eminence had only recently attracted his
gaze, and when his judgment, therefore, was dazzled by the expectation
of reaching such a reputation as his countrymen Thomson, Mallet, and
Arbuthnot had already won, it had all the faults though but few of
the merits of a youthful production. The other piece, _The Reprisal;
or, The Tars of Old England_, was executed when his fame was assured,
when he was no longer the tyro in composition, but the editor of the
_Critical Review_ and a critic of the works of others. It is widely
different from the _Regicide_, both in style, method, motive, and
execution. Yet a beginner in the work of criticism could detect that
both were written by the same hand. _The Regicide_, as a drama, is,
as we have already said, a very mediocre production. Dealing with a
period of Scottish history where there was scope for the aids of a
brilliant historic background and of the customs and costumes of the
time, Smollett has availed himself of none of these. The characters of
the drama are men and women of the eighteenth century, masquerading
in anomalous forms of speech and mysterious lines of action, which
no one out of Bedlam would have ever considered befitting a king or
his nobility. For example, in the play, in place of the _dramatis
personæ_ being designated as ‘James I., King of Scotland,’ and ‘Joanna
Beaufort, Queen of Scotland,’ we have simply ‘King’ and ‘Queen,’
while the nobles and conspirators bear such utterly inappropriate and
unhistoric names as Angus, Dunbar, Ramsay, Stuart, Grime, and Cattan.
The action is spasmodic and jerky, altogether lacking in artistic
dramatic dovetailing of incidents into each other and of symmetrical
consecutiveness of circumstance. James lacks heroism, dignity, and
power; Grime—probably meant for Sir Robert Graham—and Athol are very
declamatory villains, who, if they put off as much time in firing
off expletives at the real scene of the murder, must inevitably have
permitted their victim to escape. We seem to be reading a play of
Dekker’s or Greene’s, so very elementary is the stagecraft displayed
in contriving exits and entrances for the personages. The characters
are all more or less wooden. They talk in stilted, high–flown language,
such as a boy of nineteen would suppose the courtiers of a monarch
like James I. to employ. They never for a moment descend from their
stilts; and even in dying, Dunbar and Eleonora declaim to the audience
in rounded and rhetorical periods. Eleonora philosophises as follows
within a second or two of her death:—
‘Life has its various seasons as the year;
And after clustering autumn—but I faint,
Support me nearer—in rich harvest’s rear
Bleak winter must have lagged. Oh! now I feel
The leaden hand of death lie heavy on me—
Thine image swims before my straining eye,
And now it disappears. Speak—bid adieu
To the lost Eleonora. Not a word?
Not one farewell? Alas, that dismal groan
Is eloquent distress! Celestial powers,
Protect my father; show’r upon his—Oh! [_Dies._]’
Whereupon Dunbar also replies in similar heroics as death approaches—
‘There fled the purest soul that ever dwelt
In mortal clay! I come, my love, I come.
Where now the rosy tincture of these lips!
The smile that grace ineffable diffused!
The glance that smote the soul with silent wonder!
The voice that soothed the anguish of disease’—
After which he also cries ‘Oh!’ and dies. Now, it is very easy to
laugh at all this, and to make fun of the inappropriate ‘hifalutin.’
But, dangerously near bombast though it is, the scene has a pathetic
power in it, which, after discounting all its demerits, brings out the
balance on the right side of the ledger of praise and blame. Boyish and
immature, full of weak and silly passages as the drama is, there are,
nevertheless, portions of it which give presage of the genius lying
latent beneath the rant and fustian. Mediocre though the piece be,
viewed as a whole, isolated passages and lines could be selected from
it of the pure imaginative and intellectual ore,—lines and passages,
in fine, that lovers of Smollett’s genius treasure in their hearts as
worthy of the master. Such a passage as the following, being one of the
speeches addressed by Dunbar to Eleonora, is aflame with the fiery glow
of supreme passion—
‘O thy words
Would fire the hoary hermit’s languid soul
With ecstasies of pride! How then shall I,
Elate with every vainer hope that warms
The aspiring thought of youth, thy praise sustain
With moderation? Cruelly benign,
Thou hast adorned the victim; but alas!
Thou likewise giv’st the blow! Though Nature’s hand
With so much art has blended every grace
In thy enchanting form, that every eye
With transport views thee, and conveys unseen
The soft infection to the vanquished soul,
Yet wilt thou not the gentle passion own
That vindicates thy sway!’
And this, one of Eleonora’s replies to Dunbar, is pervaded by an
exquisite pathos, as tender as it is true—
‘O wondrous power
Of love beneficent! O generous youth,
What recompense (thus bankrupt as I am)
Shall speak my grateful soul? A poor return
Cold friendship renders to the fervid hope
Of fond desire!’
_The Reprisal_, on the other hand, is little more than a comedietta.
It has all the merits of a light, farcical, after–dinner piece, all
the faults of a composition that savours more of froth and folly
than aught else. The characters of the lovers, Heartly and Harriet,
are lightly etched in; but those of Oclabber, an Irish lieutenant,
and Maclaymore, a Scots captain, both in the French service, are
drawn with great humour and power. Haulyard the midshipman, Lyon the
lieutenant, and Block the sailor, all in the English navy, are spirited
creations, designed to represent the seamen of Old England at their
best. The incidents of the drama are full of life and movement, and the
characters are well contrasted as differentiated types. The language,
however, is still somewhat stilted and pedantic, so that one can easily
detect, amidst all the fun and frolic of _The Reprisal_, the same hand
that executed the dark and gloomy _Regicide_.
And now, with the great body of his work before us, looking back also
upon all he did, and thought, and said for the good of his brethren of
mankind, what is the ultimate verdict which Time has passed on his life
and labours? Secure of his niche in the very front rank of the great
fathers of English fiction, Smollett’s name and literary legacy are
precious possessions in the treasure–house of British fiction. Though
he is not a ‘Scots novelist’ in the restricted sense of the term as
applied to the writers of these latter days, he has done much to make
Scotsmen proud that their country had produced such a son. The works
he has executed are assuredly an imperishable memorial. But even more
than they do we cherish the example he has set of stern, unflinching
devotion to duty, of an honesty that has never been impugned, and of
a mighty love for the welfare and the improvement of his brethren of
mankind. Every line he wrote was permeated by this intense love of his
fellows, and for the amelioration of the lot of the downtrodden he was
ready to face both obloquy and danger. A Scot, in the narrow sense of
the word, he cannot be considered. As a Briton he will be loved and
cherished by a larger family of readers than would be the case did he
only appeal to the sympathies of Scotland and the Scots. But though
this is so, it does not lessen the regard wherewith his countrymen
regard him. After the inspired singer of ‘Auld Langsyne,’—after the
mighty magician who created such diverse types as Baron Bradwardine,
Vich Ian Vohr, Dominie Sampson, Di Vernon, Halbert Glendinning,
Jeannie Deans, Rob Roy, and Dugald Dalgetty,—comes he whose children
three—Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Matthew Bramble—will
find readers while our language lasts. Proud though we be as Britons to
own such a genius as of our tongue, prouder still are we, as Scots, to
hail him as akin to us in blood; and so in a double sense rejoicing in
his greatness and his glory, we once more bid him farewell!
FOOTNOTES:
[1] At this school the celebrated George Buchanan had been educated, as
Mr. Hume Brown indicates in his life of the Scots Scaliger.
[2] See _Sir James Y. Simpson_, by Eve Blantyre Simpson—‘Famous Scots’
Series.
[3] This was _The Regicide_. It was originally named ‘James i.,’ but
afterwards changed.
[4] Provost Stewart of Edinburgh was a warm Jacobite, and was suspected
of assisting the Prince to capture the town.
[5] _Works of John Home, now first collected, with a Life of the Author
by Henry Mackenzie._ London, Cadell, 1810.
[6] See _Minutes Select Society_, Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh.
[7] See John Rae’s _Adam Smith_.
[8] _The Dawn of Radicalism._
[9] _Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of
Inveresk._
[10] Works of T. G. Smollett, edited by George Saintsbury. London:
Gibbings & Co.
[11] _Manual of English Prose Literature._
[12] The title Smollett gave to Johnson when requesting the aid of
Wilkes to free Francis Barber, Johnson’s black servant, from service on
board the _Stag_. It is the older form of _Khan_.
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.
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