Adventures among Books

A >> Andrew Lang >> Adventures among Books


Here, on the margin of the old book, beside these thoughts, so beautiful
if so helpless, like all words, to console, some reader long dead has
written:--

"Pray for your poor servant, J. M."

And again,

"Pray for your poor friend."

Doubtless, some Catholic reader, himself bereaved, is imploring the
prayers of a dear friend dead; and sure we need their petitions more than
they need ours, who have left this world of temptation, and are at peace.

After this loss Saint Augustine went to Rome, his ambition urging him,
perhaps, but more his disgust with the violent and riotous life of
students in Carthage. To leave his mother was difficult, but "I lyed to
my mother, yea, such a mother, and so escaped from her." And now he had
a dangerous sickness, and afterwards betook himself to converse with the
orthodox, for example at Milan with Saint Ambrose. In Milan his mother
would willingly have continued in the African ritual--a Pagan
survival--carrying wine and food to the graves of the dead; but this
Saint Ambrose forbade, and she obeyed him for him "she did extremely
affect for the regard of my spirituall good."

From Milan his friend Alipius preceded him to Rome, and there "was
damnably delighted" with the gladiatorial combats, being "made drunk with
a delight in blood." Augustine followed him to Rome, and there lost the
girl of his heart, "so that my heart was wounded, as that the very blood
did follow." The lady had made a vow of eternal chastity, "having left
me with a son by her." But he fell to a new love as the old one was
departed, and yet the ancient wound pained him still "after a more
desperate and dogged manner."

_Haeret letalis arundo_!

By these passions his conversion was delayed, the carnal and spiritual
wills fighting against each other within him. "Give me chastity and
continency, O Lord," he would pray, "but do not give it yet," and perhaps
this is the frankest of the confessions of Saint Augustine. In the midst
of this war of the spirit and the flesh, "Behold I heard a voyce, as if
it had been of some boy or girl from some house not farre off, uttering
and often repeating these words in a kind of singing voice,

"_Tolle, Lege; Tolle, Lege_,
Take up and read, take up and read."

So he took up a Testament, and, opening it at random, after the manner of
his Virgilian lots, read:--

"Not in surfeiting and wantonness, not in causality and uncleanness,"
with what follows. "Neither would I read any further, neither was there
any cause why I should." Saint Augustine does not, perhaps, mean us to
understand (as his translator does), that he was "miraculously called."
He knew what was right perfectly well before; the text only clinched a
resolve which he has found it very hard to make. Perhaps there was a
trifle of superstition in the matter. We never know how superstitious we
are. At all events, henceforth "I neither desired a wife, nor had I any
ambitious care of any worldly thing." He told his mother, and Monica
rejoiced, believing that now her prayers were answered.

Such is the story of the conversion of Saint Augustine. It was the
maturing of an old purpose, and long deferred. Much stranger stories are
told of Bunyan and Colonel Gardiner. He gave up rhetoric; another man
was engaged "to sell words" to the students of Milan. Being now
converted, the Saint becomes less interesting, except for his account of
his mother's death, and of that ecstatic converse they held "she and I
alone, leaning against a window, which had a prospect upon the garden of
our lodging at Ostia." They

"Came on that which is, and heard
The vast pulsations of the world."

"And whilest we thus spake, and panted towards the divine, we grew able
to take a little taste thereof, with the whole strife of our hearts, and
we sighed profoundly, and left there, confined, the very top and flower
of our souls and spirits; and we returned to the noyse of language again,
where words are begun and ended."

Then Monica fell sick to death, and though she had ever wished to lie
beside her husband in Africa, she said: "Lay this Body where you will.
Let not any care of it disquiet you; only this I entreat, that you will
remember me at the altar of the Lord, wheresoever you be." "But upon the
ninth day of her sickness, in the six-and-fiftieth year of her age, and
the three-and-thirtieth of mine, that religious and pious soul was
discharged from the prison of her body."

The grief of Augustine was not less keen, it seems, than it had been at
the death of his friend. But he could remember how "she related with
great dearness of affection, how she never heard any harsh or unkind word
to be darted out of my mouth against her." And to this consolation was
added who knows what of confidence and tenderness of certain hope, or a
kind of deadness, perhaps, that may lighten the pain of a heart very
often tried and inured to every pain. For it is certain that "this green
wound" was green and grievous for a briefer time than the agony of his
earlier sorrows. He himself, so earnest in analysing his own emotions,
is perplexed by the short date of his tears, and his sharpest grief: "Let
him read it who will, and interpret it as it pleaseth him."

So, with the death of Monica, we may leave Saint Augustine. The most
human of books, the "Confessions," now strays into theology. Of all
books that which it most oddly resembles, to my fancy at least, is the
poems of Catullus. The passion and the tender heart they have in common,
and in common the war of flesh and spirit; the shameful inappeasable love
of Lesbia, or of the worldly life; so delightful and dear to the poet and
to the saint, so despised in other moods conquered and victorious again,
among the battles of the war in our members. The very words in which the
Veronese and the Bishop of Hippo described the pleasure and gaiety of an
early friendship are almost the same, and we feel that, born four hundred
years later, the lover of Lesbia, the singer of Sirmio might actually
have found peace in religion, and exchanged the earthly for the heavenly
love.




CHAPTER IX: SMOLLETT


The great English novelists of the eighteenth century turned the course
of English Literature out of its older channel. Her streams had
descended from the double peaks of Parnassus to irrigate the enamelled
fields and elegant parterres of poetry and the drama, as the critics of
the period might have said. But Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and
Sterne, diverted the waters, from poetry and plays, into the region of
the novel, whither they have brought down a copious alluvial deposit.
Modern authors do little but till this fertile Delta: the drama is now in
the desert, poetry is a drug, and fiction is literature. Among the
writers who made this revolution, Smollett is, personally, the least well
known to the world, despite the great part which autobiography and
confessions play in his work. He is always talking about himself, and
introducing his own experiences. But there is little evidence from
without; his extant correspondence is scanty; he was not in Dr. Johnson's
circle, much less was he in that of Horace Walpole. He was not a popular
man, and probably he has long ceased to be a popular author. About 1780
the vendors of children's books issued abridgments of "Tom Jones" and
"Pamela," "Clarissa" and "Joseph Andrews," adapted to the needs of infant
minds. It was a curious enterprise, certainly, but the booksellers do
not seem to have produced "Every Boy's Roderick Random," or "Peregrine
Pickle for the Young." Smollett, in short, is less known than Fielding
and Sterne, even Thackeray says but a word about him, in the "English
Humorists," and he has no place in the series of "English Men of
Letters."

What we know of Smollett reveals a thoroughly typical Scot of his period;
a Scot of the species absolutely opposed to Sir Pertinax Macsycophant,
and rather akin to the species of Robert Burns. "Rather akin," we may
say, for Smollett, like Burns, was a humorist, and in his humour far from
dainty; he was a personal satirist, and a satirist far from chivalrous.
Like Burns, too, he was a poet of independence; like Burns, and even more
than Burns, in a time of patronage he was recalcitrant against patrons.
But, unlike Burns, he was _farouche_ to an extreme degree; and, unlike
Burns, he carried very far his prejudices about his "gentrice," his
gentle birth. Herein he is at the opposite pole from the great peasant
poet.

Two potent characteristics of his country were at war within him. There
was, first, the belief in "gentrice," in a natural difference of kind
between men of coat armour and men without it. Thus Roderick Random, the
starving cadet of a line of small lairds, accepts the almost incredible
self-denial and devotion of Strap as merely his due. Prince Charles
could not have taken the devotion of Henry Goring, or of Neil MacEachain,
more entirely as a matter of course, involving no consideration in
return, than Roderick took the unparalleled self-sacrifice of his barber
friend and school-mate. Scott has remarked on this contemptuous and
ungrateful selfishness, and has contrasted it with the relations of Tom
Jones and Partridge. Of course, it is not to be assumed that Smollett
would have behaved like Roderick, when, "finding the fire in my apartment
almost extinguished, I vented my fury upon poor Strap, whose ear I
pinched with such violence that he roared hideously with pain . . . " To
be sure Roderick presently "felt unspeakable remorse . . . foamed at the
mouth, and kicked the chairs about the room." Now Strap had rescued
Roderick from starvation, had bestowed on him hundreds of pounds, and had
carried his baggage, and dined on his leavings. But Strap was not gently
born! Smollett would not, probably, have acted thus, but he did not
consider such conduct a thing out of nature.

On the other side was Smollett's Scottish spirit of independence. As
early as 1515, James Ingles, chaplain of Margaret Tudor, wrote to Adam
Williamson, "You know the use of this country. . . . The man hath more
words than the master, and will not be content except he know the
master's counsel. There is no order among us." Strap had the instinct
of feudal loyalty to a descendant of a laird. But Smollett boasts that,
being at the time about twenty, and having burdened a nobleman with his
impossible play, "The Regicide," "resolved to punish his barbarous
indifference, and actually discarded my Patron." _He_ was not given to
"booing" (in the sense of bowing), but had, of all known Scots, the most
"canty conceit o' himsel'." These qualities, with a violence of temper
which took the form of beating people when on his travels, cannot have
made Smollett a popular character. He knew his faults, as he shows in
the dedication of "Ferdinand, Count Fathom," to himself. "I have known
you trifling, superficial, and obstinate in dispute; meanly jealous and
awkwardly reserved; rash and haughty in your resentment; and coarse and
lowly in your connections."

He could, it is true, on occasion, forgive (even where he had not been
wronged), and could compensate, in milder moods, for the fierce attacks
made in hours when he was "meanly jealous." Yet, in early life at least,
he regarded his own Roderick Random as "modest and meritorious,"
struggling nobly with the difficulties which beset a "friendless orphan,"
especially from the "selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of
mankind." Roderick himself is, in fact, the incarnation of the basest
selfishness. In one of his adventures he is guilty of that extreme
infamy which the d'Artagnan of "The Three Musketeers" and of the
"Memoirs" committed, and for which the d'Artagnan of _Le Vicomte de
Bragelonne_ took shame to himself. While engaged in a virtuous passion,
Roderick not only behaves like a vulgar debauchee, but pursues the
meanest arts of the fortune-hunter who is ready to marry any woman for
her money. Such is the modest and meritorious orphan, and mankind now
carries its "base indifference" so far, that Smollett's biographer, Mr.
Hannay, says, "if Roderick had been hanged, I, for my part, should have
heard the tidings unmoved . . . Smollett obviously died without realising
how nearly the hero, who was in some sort a portrait of himself, came to
being a ruffian."

Dr. Carlyle, in 1758, being in London, found Smollett "much of a
humorist, and not to be put out of his way." A "humorist," here, means
an overbearingly eccentric person, such as Smollett, who lived much in a
society of literary dependants, was apt to become. But Dr. Carlyle also
found that, though Smollett "described so well the characters of ruffians
and profligates," he did not resemble them. Dr. Robertson, the
historian, "expressed great surprise at his polished and agreeable
manners, and the great urbanity of his conversation." He was handsome in
person, as his portrait shows, but his "nervous system was exceedingly
irritable and subject to passion," as he says in the Latin account of his
health which, in 1763, he drew up for the physician at Montpellier.
Though, when he chose, he could behave like a man of breeding, and though
he undeniably had a warm heart for his wife and daughter, he did not
always choose to behave well. Except Dr. Moore, his biographer, he seems
to have had few real friends during most of his career.

As to persons whom he chose to regard as his enemies, he was beyond
measure rancorous and dangerous. From his first patron, Lord Lyttelton,
to his last, he pursued them with unscrupulous animosity. If he did not
mean actually to draw portraits of his grandfather, his cousins, his
school-master, and the apothecary whose gallipots he attended--in
"Roderick Random,"--yet he left the originals who suggested his
characters in a very awkward situation. For assuredly he did entertain a
spite against his grandfather: and as many of the incidents in "Roderick
Random" were autobiographical, the public readily inferred that others
were founded on fact.

The outlines of Smollett's career are familiar, though gaps in our
knowledge occur. Perhaps they may partly be filled up by the aid of
passages in his novels, plays, and poems: in these, at all events, he
describes conditions and situations through which he himself may, or
must, have passed.

Born in 1721, he was a younger son of Archibald, a younger son of Sir
James Smollett of Bonhill, a house on the now polluted Leven, between
Loch Lomond and the estuary of the Clyde. Smollett's father made an
imprudent marriage: the grandfather provided a small, but competent
provision for him and his family, during his own life. The father,
Archibald, died; the grandfather left nothing to the mother of Tobias and
her children, but they were assisted with scrimp decency by the heirs.
Hence the attacks on the grandfather and cousins of Roderick Random: but,
later, Smollett returned to kinder feelings.

In some ways Tobias resembled his old grandsire. About 1710 that
gentleman wrote a Memoir of his own life. Hence we learn that _he_, in
childhood, like Roderick Random, was regarded as "a clog and burden," and
was neglected by his father, ill-used by his step-mother. Thus Tobias
had not only his own early poverty to resent, but had a hereditary grudge
against fortune, and "the base indifference of mankind." The old
gentleman was lodged "with very hard and penurious people," at Glasgow
University. He rose in the world, and was a good Presbyterian Whig, but
"had no liberty" to help to forfeit James II. "The puir child, his son"
(James III. and VIII.), "if he was really such, was innocent, and it were
hard to do anything that would touch the son for the father's fault." The
old gentleman, therefore, though a Member of Parliament, evaded attending
the first Parliament after the Union: "I had no freedom to do it, because
I understood that the great business to be agitated therein was to make
laws for abjuring the Pretender . . . which I could not go in with, being
always of opinion that it was hard to impose oaths on people who had not
freedom to take them."

This was uncommonly liberal conduct, in a Whig, and our Smollett, though
no Jacobite, was in distinct and courageous sympathy with Jacobite
Scotland. Indeed, he was as patriotic as Burns, or as his own Lismahago.
These were times, we must remember, in which Scottish patriotism was more
than a mere historical sentiment. Scotland was inconceivably poor, and
Scots, in England, were therefore ridiculous. The country had, so far,
gained very little by the Union, and the Union was detested even by
Scottish Whig Earls. It is recorded by Moore that, while at the
Dumbarton Grammar School, Smollett wrote "verses to the memory of
Wallace, of whom he became an early admirer," having read "Blind Harry's
translation of the Latin poems of John Blair," chaplain to that hero.
There probably never were any such Latin poems, but Smollett began with
the same hero-worship as Burns. He had the attachment of a Scot to his
native stream, the Leven, which later he was to celebrate. Now if
Smollett had credited Roderick Random with these rural, poetical, and
patriotic tastes, his hero would have been much more human and amiable.
There was much good in Smollett which is absent in Random. But for some
reason, probably because Scotland was unpopular after the Forty-Five,
Smollett merely describes the woes, ill usage, and retaliations of
Roderick. That he suffered as Random did is to the last degree
improbable. He had a fair knowledge of Latin, and was not destitute of
Greek, while his master, a Mr. Love, bore a good character both for
humanity and scholarship. He must have studied the classics at Glasgow
University, where he was apprenticed to Mr. Gordon, a surgeon. Gordon,
again, was an excellent man, appreciated by Smollett himself in after
days, and the odious Potion of "Roderick Random" must, like his rival,
Crab, have been merely a fancy sketch of meanness, hypocrisy, and
profligacy. Perhaps the good surgeon became the victim of that "one
continued string of epigrammatic sarcasms," such as Mr. Colquhoun told
Ramsay of Ochtertyre, Smollett used to play off on his companions, "for
which no talents could compensate." Judging by Dr. Carlyle's Memoirs
this intolerable kind of display was not unusual in Caledonian
conversation: but it was not likely to make Tobias popular in England.

Thither he went in 1739, with very little money, "and a very large
assortment of letters of recommendation: whether his relatives intended
to compensate for the scantiness of the one by their profusion in the
other is uncertain; but he has often been heard to declare that their
liberality in the last article was prodigious." The Smolletts were not
"kinless loons"; they had connections: but who, in Scotland, had money?
Tobias had passed his medical examinations, but he rather trusted in his
MS. tragedy, "The Regicide." Tragical were its results for the author.
Inspired by George Buchanan's Latin history of Scotland, Smollett had
produced a play, in blank verse, on the murder of James I. That a boy,
even a Scottish boy, should have an overweening passion for this unlucky
piece, that he should expect by such a work to climb a step on fortune's
ladder, is nowadays amazing. For ten years he clung to it, modified it,
polished, improved it, and then published it in 1749, after the success
of "Roderick Random." Twice he told the story of his theatrical mishaps
and disappointments, which were such as occur to every writer for the
stage. He wailed over them in "Roderick Random," in the story of Mr.
Melopoyn; he prolonged his cry, in the preface to "The Regicide," and
probably the noble whom he "lashed" (very indecently) in his two satires
("Advice," 1746, "Reproof," 1747, and in "Roderick Random") was the
patron who could not get the tragedy acted. First, in 1739, he had a
patron whom he "discarded." Then he went to the West Indies, and,
returning in 1744, he lugged out his tragedy again, and fell foul again
of patrons, actors, and managers. What befell him was the common fate.
People did not, probably, hasten to read his play: managers and
"supercilious peers" postponed that entertainment, or, at least, the
noblemen could not make the managers accept it if they did not want it.
Our taste differs so much from that of the time which admired Home's
"Douglas," and "The Regicide" was so often altered to meet objections,
that we can scarcely criticise it. Of course it is absolutely
unhistorical; of course it is empty of character, and replete with
fustian, and ineffably tedious; but perhaps it is not much worse than
other luckier tragedies of the age. Naturally a lover calls his wounded
lady "the bleeding fair." Naturally she exclaims--

"Celestial powers
Protect my father, shower upon his--oh!" (Dies).

Naturally her adorer answers with--

"So may our mingling souls
To bliss supernal wing our happy--oh!" (Dies).

We are reminded of--

"Alas, my Bom!" (Dies).
"'Bastes' he would have said!"

The piece, if presented, must have been damned. But Smollett was so
angry with one patron, Lord Lyttelton, that he burlesqued the poor man's
dirge on the death of his wife. He was so angry with Garrick that he
dragged him into "Roderick Random" as Marmozet. Later, obliged by
Garrick, and forgiving Lyttelton, he wrote respectfully about both. But,
in 1746 (in "Advice"), he had assailed the "proud lord, who smiles a
gracious lie," and "the varnished ruffians of the State." Because
Tobias's play was unacted, people who tried to aid him were liars and
ruffians, and a great deal worse, for in his satire, as in his first
novel, Smollett charges men of high rank with the worst of unnamable
crimes. Pollio and Lord Strutwell, whoever they may have been, were
probably recognisable then, and were undeniably libelled, though they did
not appeal to a jury. It is improbable that Sir John Cope had ever tried
to oblige Smollett. His ignoble attack on Cope, after that unfortunate
General had been fairly and honourably acquitted of incompetence and
cowardice, was, then, wholly disinterested. Cope is "a courtier Ape,
appointed General."

"Then Pug, aghast, fled faster than the wind,
Nor deign'd, in three-score miles, to look behind;
While every band for orders bleat in vain,
And fall in slaughtered heaps upon the plain,"--

of Preston Pans.

Nothing could be more remote from the truth, or more unjustly cruel.
Smollett had not here even the excuse of patriotism. Sir John Cope was
no Butcher Cumberland. In fact the poet's friend is not wrong, when, in
"Reproof," he calls Smollett "a flagrant misanthrope." The world was out
of joint for the cadet of Bonhill: both before and after his very trying
experiences as a ship surgeon the managers would not accept "The
Regicide." This was reason good why Smollett should try to make a little
money and notoriety by penning satires. They are fierce, foul-mouthed,
and pointless. But Smollett was poor, and he was angry; he had the
examples of Pope and Swift before him; which, as far as truculence went,
he could imitate. Above all, it was then the fixed belief of men of
letters that some peer or other ought to aid and support them; and, as no
peer did support Smollett, obviously they were "varnished ruffians." He
erred as he would not err now, for times, and ways of going wrong, are
changed. But, at best, how different are his angry couplets from the
lofty melancholy of Johnson's satires!

Smollett's "small sum of money" did not permit him long to push the
fortunes of his tragedy, in 1739; and as for his "very large assortment
of letters of recommendation," they only procured for him the post of
surgeon's mate in the _Cumberland_ of the line. Here he saw enough of
the horrors of naval life, enough of misery, brutality, and
mismanagement, at Carthagena (1741), to supply materials for the salutary
and sickening pages on that theme in "Roderick Random." He also saw and
appreciated the sterling qualities of courage, simplicity, and
generosity, which he has made immortal in his Bowlings and Trunnions.

It is part of a novelist's business to make one half of the world know
how the other half lives; and in this province Smollett anticipated
Dickens. He left the service as soon as he could, when the beaten fleet
was refitting at Jamaica. In that isle he seems to have practised as a
doctor; and he married, or was betrothed to, a Miss Lascelles, who had a
small and far from valuable property. The real date of his marriage is
obscure: more obscure are Smollett's resources on his return to London,
in 1744. Houses in Downing Street can never have been cheap, but we find
"Mr. Smollett, surgeon in Downing Street, Westminster," and, in 1746, he
was living in May Fair, not a region for slender purses. His tragedy was
now bringing in nothing but trouble, to himself and others. His satires
cannot have been lucrative. As a dweller in May Fair he could not
support himself, like his Mr. Melopoyn, by writing ballads for street
singers. Probably he practised in his profession. In "Count Fathom" he
makes his adventurer "purchase an old chariot, which was new painted for
the occasion, and likewise hire a footman . . . This equipage, though
much more expensive than his finances could bear, he found absolutely
necessary to give him a chance of employment . . . A walking physician
was considered as an obscure pedlar." A chariot, Smollett insists, was
necessary to "every raw surgeon"; while Bob Sawyer's expedient of "being
called from church" was already _vieux jeu_, in the way of advertisement.
Such things had been "injudiciously hackneyed." In this passage of
Fathom's adventures, Smollett proclaims his insight into methods of
getting practice. A physician must ingratiate himself with apothecaries
and ladies' maids, or "acquire interest enough" to have an infirmary
erected "by the voluntary subscriptions of his friends." Here Smollett
denounces hospitals, which "encourage the vulgar to be idle and
dissolute, by opening an asylum to them and their families, from the
diseases of poverty and intemperance." This is odd morality for one who
suffered from "the base indifference of mankind." He ought to have known
that poverty is not a vice for which the poor are to be blamed; and that
intemperance is not the only other cause of their diseases. Perhaps the
unfeeling passage is a mere paradox in the style of his own Lismahago.