[1]

TOBIAS SMOLLETT

[2]

[3]

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[10]
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[11]
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[12]
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[13]
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,[14]
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[15]
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.[16]
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[17]
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[18]—

‘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[20]
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
[21]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.

[22]

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[23]
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
[24]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[25]
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[26]
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[27]
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[28]
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[29]
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[30]
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[31]
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[33]
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[34]
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[35]
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[36]
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[37]
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[38]
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[39]
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[40]
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[41]
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[42]
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[43]
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[45]
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[46]’
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.[47]
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[48]
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,[49]
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[50]
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[51]
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,
[52]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.

[53]

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[54]
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[55]
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[56]
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[58]
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[59]
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[60]
‘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[61]
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[62]
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.

[63]

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[64]
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.

[65]

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[66]
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[67]
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
[68]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[70]
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[71]
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[72]
‘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[73]
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.[74]
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[75]
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[76]
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[77]
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.[78]
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[79]
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[81]
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[82]
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[83]
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[84]
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[85]
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[86]
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,[87]
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[88]
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
[89]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,
[90]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,[91]
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[92]
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[93]
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[94]
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[96]
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[97]
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[98]
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[99]
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[100]
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.[101]
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[102]
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[103]
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[104].’
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[105]
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
[106]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[107]
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[108]
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[110]
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.

[111]

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.’

[112]

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[113]
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[114]
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[115]
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[116]
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.[117]
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[118]
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[119]
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[120]
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[121]
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[123]
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[124]
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[125]
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[126]
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[127]
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[128]
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[129]
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[130]
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[131]
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[132]
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[133]
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[134]
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[135]
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[136]
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[138]
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[139]
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[140]
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[141]
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[142]
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[143]
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
[144]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[145]
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

[146]

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[148]
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[149]
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,
[150]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[151]
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[152]
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[153]
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.
[154]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!’

[155]

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[156]
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!