Adventures among Books

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With or without a chariot, it is probable that Tobias had not an
insinuating style, or "a good bedside manner"; friends to support a
hospital for his renown he had none; but, somehow, he could live in May
Fair, and, in 1746, could meet Dr. Carlyle and Stewart, son of the
Provost of Edinburgh, and other Scots, at the Golden Ball in Cockspur
Street. There they were enjoying "a frugal supper and a little punch,"
when the news of Culloden arrived. Carlyle had been a Whig volunteer:
he, probably, was happy enough; but Stewart, whose father was in prison,
grew pale, and left the room. Smollett and Carlyle then walked home
through secluded streets, and were silent, lest their speech should
bewray them for Scots. "John Bull," quoth Smollett, "is as haughty and
valiant to-day, as he was abject and cowardly on the Black Wednesday when
the Highlanders were at Derby."

"Weep, Caledonia, weep!" he had written in his tragedy. Now he wrote
"Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn." Scott has quoted, from Graham of
Gartmore, the story of Smollett's writing verses, while Gartmore and
others were playing cards. He read them what he had written, "The Tears
of Scotland," and added the last verse on the spot, when warned that his
opinions might give offence.

"Yes, spite of thine insulting foe,
My sympathising verse shall flow."

The "Tears" are better than the "Ode to Blue-Eyed Ann," probably Mrs.
Smollett. But the courageous author of "The Tears of Scotland," had
manifestly broken with patrons. He also broke with Rich, the manager at
Covent Garden, for whom he had written an opera libretto. He had failed
as doctor, and as dramatist; nor, as satirist, had he succeeded. Yet he
managed to wear wig and sword, and to be seen in good men's company.
Perhaps his wife's little fortune supported him, till, in 1748, he
produced "Roderick Random." It is certain that we never find Smollett in
the deep distresses of Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith. Novels were now in
vogue; "Pamela" was recent, "Joseph Andrews" was yet more recent,
"Clarissa Harlowe" had just appeared, and Fielding was publishing "Tom
Jones." Smollett, too, tried his hand, and, at last, he succeeded.

His ideas of the novel are offered in his preface. The Novel, for him,
is a department of Satire; "the most entertaining and universally
improving." To Smollett, "Roderick Random" seemed an "improving" work!
_Ou le didacticisme va t'il se nicher_? Romance, he declares, "arose in
ignorance, vanity, and superstition," and declined into "the ludicrous
and unnatural." Then Cervantes "converted romance to purposes far more
useful and entertaining, by making it assume the sock, and point out the
follies of ordinary life." Romance was to revive again some twenty years
after its funeral oration was thus delivered. As for Smollett himself,
he professedly "follows the plan" of Le Sage, in "Gil Blas" (a plan as
old as Petronius Arbiter, and the "Golden Ass" of Apuleius); but he gives
more place to "compassion," so as not to interfere with "generous
indignation, which ought to animate the reader against the sordid and
vicious disposition of the world." As a contrast to sordid vice, we are
to admire "modest merit" in that exemplary orphan, Mr. Random. This
gentleman is a North Briton, because only in North Britain can a poor
orphan get such an education as Roderick's "birth and character require,"
and for other reasons. Now, as for Roderick, the schoolmaster "gave
himself no concern about the progress I made," but, "should endeavour,
with God's help, to prevent my future improvement." It must have been at
Glasgow University, then, that Roderick learned "Greek very well, and was
pretty far advanced in the mathematics," and here he must have used his
genius for the _belles lettres_, in the interest of his "amorous
complexion," by "lampooning the rivals" of the young ladies who admired
him.

Such are the happy beginnings, accompanied by practical jokes, of this
interesting model. Smollett's heroes, one conceives, were intended to be
fine, though not faultless young fellows; men, not plaster images; brave,
generous, free-living, but, as Roderick finds once, when examining his
conscience, pure from serious stains on that important faculty. To us
these heroes often appear no better than ruffians; Peregrine Pickle, for
example, rather excels the infamy of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, in certain
respects; though Ferdinand is professedly "often the object of our
detestation and abhorrence," and is left in a very bad, but, as "Humphrey
Clinker" shows, in by no means a hopeless way. Yet, throughout, Smollett
regarded himself as a moralist, a writer of improving tendencies; one who
"lashed the vices of the age." He was by no means wholly mistaken, but
we should probably wrong the eighteenth century if we accepted all
Smollett's censures as entirely deserved. The vices which he lashed are
those which he detected, or fancied that he detected, in people who
regarded a modest and meritorious Scottish orphan with base indifference.
Unluckily the greater part of mankind was guilty of this crime, and
consequently was capable of everything.

Enough has probably been said about the utterly distasteful figure of
Smollett's hero. In Chapter LX. we find him living on the resources of
Strap, then losing all Strap's money at play, and then "I bilk my
taylor." That is, Roderick orders several suits of new clothes, and
sells them for what they will fetch. Meanwhile Strap can live honestly
anywhere, while he has his ten fingers. Roderick rescues himself from
poverty by engaging, with his uncle, in the slave trade. We are apt to
consider this commerce infamous. But, in 1763, the Evangelical director
who helped to make Cowper "a castaway," wrote, as to the slaver's
profession: "It is, indeed, accounted a genteel employment, and is
usually very profitable, though to me it did not prove so, the Lord
seeing that a large increase of wealth could not be good for me." The
reverend gentleman had, doubtless, often sung--

"_Time for us to go_,
_Time for us to go_,
_And when we'd got the hatches down_,
'_Twas time for us to go_!"

Roderick, apart from "black ivory," is aided by his uncle and his long
lost father. The base world, in the persons of Strap, Thompson, the
uncle, Mr. Sagely, and other people, treats him infinitely better than he
deserves. His very love (as always in Smollett) is only an animal
appetite, vigorously insisted upon by the author. By a natural reaction,
Scott, much as he admired Smollett, introduced his own blameless heroes,
and even Thackeray could only hint at the defects of youth, in "Esmond."
Thackeray is accused of making his good people stupid, or too simple, or
eccentric, and otherwise contemptible. Smollett went further: Strap, a
model of benevolence, is ludicrous and a coward; even Bowling has the
stage eccentricities of the sailor. Mankind was certain, in the long
run, to demand heroes more amiable and worthy of respect. Our
inclinations, as Scott says, are with "the open-hearted, good-humoured,
and noble-minded Tom Jones, whose libertinism (one particular omitted) is
perhaps rendered but too amiable by his good qualities." To be sure
Roderick does befriend "a reclaimed street-walker" in her worst need, but
why make her the _confidante_ of the virginal Narcissa? Why reward Strap
with her hand? Fielding decidedly, as Scott insists, "places before us
heroes, and especially heroines, of a much higher as well as more
pleasing character, than Smollett was able to present."

"But the deep and fertile genius of Smollett afforded resources
sufficient to make up for these deficiencies . . . If Fielding had
superior taste, the palm of more brilliancy of genius, more inexhaustible
richness of invention, must in justice be awarded to Smollett. In
comparison with his sphere, that in which Fielding walked was limited . . ."
The second part of Scott's parallel between the men whom he
considered the greatest of our novelists, qualifies the first. Smollett's
invention was not richer than Fielding's, but the sphere in which he
walked, the circle of his experience, was much wider. One division of
life they knew about equally well, the category of rakes, adventurers,
card-sharpers, unhappy authors, people of the stage, and ladies without
reputations, in every degree. There were conditions of higher society,
of English rural society, and of clerical society, which Fielding, by
birth and education, knew much better than Smollett. But Smollett had
the advantage of his early years in Scotland, then as little known as
Japan; with the "nautical multitude," from captain to loblolly boy, he
was intimately familiar; with the West Indies he was acquainted; and he
later resided in Paris, and travelled in Flanders, so that he had more
experience, certainly, if not more invention, than Fielding.

In "Roderick Random" he used Scottish "local colour" very little, but his
life had furnished him with a surprising wealth of "strange experiences."
Inns were, we must believe, the favourite home of adventures, and
Smollett could ring endless changes on mistakes about bedrooms. None of
them is so innocently diverting as the affair of Mr. Pickwick and the
lady in yellow curl-papers; but the absence of that innocence which
heightens Mr. Pickwick's distresses was welcome to admirers of what Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu calls "gay reading."

She wrote from abroad, in 1752, "There is something humorous in R.
Random, that makes me believe that the author is H. Fielding"--her
kinsman. Her ladyship did her cousin little justice. She did not
complain of the morals of "R. Random," but thought "Pamela" and
"Clarissa" "likely to do more general mischief than the works of Lord
Rochester." Probably "R. Random" did little harm. His career is too
obviously ideal. Too many ups and downs occur to him, and few orphans of
merit could set before themselves the ideal of bilking their tailors,
gambling by way of a profession, dealing in the slave trade, and
wheedling heiresses.

The variety of character in the book is vast; in Morgan we have an
excellent, fiery, Welshman, of the stage type; the different minor
miscreants are all vividly designed; the eccentric lady author may have
had a real original; Miss Snapper has much vivacity as a wit; the French
adventures in the army are, in their rude barbaric way, a forecast of
Barry Lyndon's; and, generally, both Scott and Thackeray owe a good deal
to Smollett in the way of suggestions. Smollett's extraordinary love of
dilating on noisome smells and noisome sights, that intense affection for
the physically nauseous, which he shared with Swift, is rather less
marked in "Roderick" than in "Humphrey Clinker," and "The Adventures of
an Atom." The scenes in the Marshalsea must have been familiar to
Dickens. The terrible history of Miss Williams is Hogarth's Harlot's
Progress done into unsparing prose. Smollett guides us at a brisk pace
through the shady and brutal side of the eighteenth century; his vivacity
is as unflagging as that of his disagreeable rattle of a hero. The
passion usually understood as love is, to be sure, one of which he seems
to have no conception; he regards a woman much as a greedy person might
regard a sirloin of beef, or, at least, a plate of ortolans. At her
marriage a bride is "dished up;" that is all.

Thus this "gay writing" no longer makes us gay. In reading "Peregrine
Pickle" and "Humphrey Clinker," a man may find himself laughing aloud,
but hardly in reading "Roderick Random." The fun is of the cruel
primitive sort, arising merely from the contemplation of somebody's
painful discomfiture. Bowling and Rattlin may be regarded with
affectionate respect; but Roderick has only physical courage and vivacity
to recommend him. Whether Smollett, in Flaubert's deliberate way,
purposely abstained from moralising on the many scenes of physical
distress which he painted; or whether he merely regarded them without
emotion, has been debated. It seems more probable that he thought they
carried their own moral. It is the most sympathetic touch in Roderick's
character, that he writes thus of his miserable crew of slaves: "Our ship
being freed from the disagreeable lading of negroes, _to whom indeed I
had been a miserable slave since our leaving the coast of Guinea_, I
began to enjoy myself." Smollett was a physician, and had the
pitifulness of his profession; though we see how casually he makes Random
touch on his own unwonted benevolence.

People had not begun to know the extent of their own brutality in the
slave trade, but Smollett probably did know it. If a curious prophetic
letter attributed to him, and published more than twenty years after his
death, be genuine; he had the strongest opinions about this form of
commercial enterprise. But he did not wear his heart on his sleeve,
where he wore his irritable nervous system. It is probable enough that
he felt for the victims of poverty, neglect, and oppression (despite his
remarks on hospitals) as keenly as Dickens. We might regard his
offensively ungrateful Roderick as a purely dramatic exhibition of a
young man, if his other heroes were not as bad, or worse; if their few
redeeming qualities were not stuck on in patches; and if he had omitted
his remark about Roderick's "modest merit." On the other hand, the good
side of Matthew Bramble seems to be drawn from Smollett's own character,
and, if that be the case, he can have had little sympathy with his own
humorous Barry Lyndons. Scott and Thackeray leaned to the favourable
view: Smollett, his nervous system apart, was manly and kindly.

As regards plot, "Roderick Random" is a mere string of picturesque
adventures. It is at the opposite pole from "Tom Jones" in the matter of
construction. There is no reason why it should ever stop except the
convenience of printers and binders. Perhaps we lay too much stress on
the somewhat mechanical art of plot-building. Fielding was then setting
the first and best English example of a craft in which the very greatest
authors have been weak, or of which they were careless. Smollett was
always rather more incapable, or rather more indifferent, in
plot-weaving, than greater men.

In our day of royalties, and gossip about the gains of authors, it would
be interesting to know what manner and size of a cheque Smollett received
from his publisher, the celebrated Mr. Osborne. We do not know, but
Smollett published his next novel "on commission," "printed for the
Author"; so probably he was not well satisfied with the pecuniary result
of "Roderick Random." Thereby, says Dr. Moore, he "acquired much more
reputation than money." So he now published "The Regicide" "by
subscription, that method of publication being then more reputable than
it has been thought since" (1797). Of "The Regicide," and its unlucky
preface, enough, or more, has been said. The public sided with the
managers, not with the meritorious orphan.

For the sake of pleasure, or of new experiences, or of economy, Smollett
went to Paris in 1750, where he met Dr. Moore, later his biographer, the
poetical Dr. Akenside, and an affected painter. He introduced the poet
and painter into "Peregrine Pickle"; and makes slight use of a group of
exiled Jacobites, including Mr. Hunter of Burnside. In 1750, there were
Jacobites enough in the French capital, all wondering very much where
Prince Charles might be, and quite unconscious that he was their
neighbour in a convent in the Rue St. Dominique. Though Moore does not
say so (he is provokingly economical of detail), we may presume that
Smollett went wandering in Flanders, as does Peregrine Pickle. It is
curious that he should introduce a Capucin, a Jew, and a black-eyed
damsel, all in the Ghent diligence, when we know that Prince Charles did
live in Ghent, with the black-eyed Miss Walkenshaw, did go about
disguised as a Capucin, and was tracked by a Jewish spy, while the other
spy, Young Glengarry, styled himself "Pickle." But all those events
occurred about a year after the novel was published in 1751.

Before that date Smollett had got an M.D. degree from Aberdeen
University, and, after returning from France, he practised for a year or
two at Bath. But he could not expect to be successful among fashionable
invalids, and, in "Humphrey Clinker," he make Matthew Bramble give such
an account of the Bath waters as M. Zola might envy. He was still trying
to gain ground in his profession, when, in March 1751, Mr. D. Wilson
published the first edition of "Peregrine Pickle" "for the Author,"
unnamed. I have never seen this first edition, which was "very curious
and disgusting." Smollett, in his preface to the second edition, talks
of "the art and industry that were used to stifle him in the birth, by
certain booksellers and others." He now "reformed the manners, and
corrected the expressions," removed or modified some passages of personal
satire, and held himself exempt from "the numerous shafts of envy,
rancour, and revenge, that have lately, both in private and public, been
levelled at his reputation." Who were these base and pitiless dastards?
Probably every one who did not write favourably about the book. Perhaps
Smollett suspected Fielding, whom he attacks in several parts of his
works, treating him as a kind of Jonathan Wild, a thief-taker, and an
associate with thieves. Why Smollett thus misconducted himself is a
problem, unless he was either "meanly jealous," or had taken offence at
some remarks in Fielding's newspaper. Smollett certainly began the war,
in the first edition of "Peregrine Pickle." He made a kind of palinode
to the "trading justice" later, as other people of his kind have done.

A point in "Peregrine Pickle" easily assailed was the long episode about
a Lady of Quality: the beautiful Lady Vane, whose memoirs Smollett
introduced into his tale. Horace Walpole found that she had omitted the
only feature in her career of which she had just reason to be proud: the
number of her lovers. Nobody doubted that Smollett was paid for casting
his mantle over Lady Vane: moreover, he might expect a success of
scandal. The _roman a clef_ is always popular with scandal-mongers, but
its authors can hardly hope to escape rebuke.

It was not till 1752 that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in Italy, received
"Peregrine," with other fashionable romances--"Pompey the Little," "The
Parish Girl," "Eleanora's Adventures," "The Life of Mrs. Theresa
Constantia Phipps," "The Adventures of Mrs. Loveil," and so on. Most of
them contained portraits of real people, and, no doubt, most of them were
therefore successful. But where are they now? Lady Mary thought Lady
Vane's part of "Peregrine" "more instructive to young women than any
sermon that I know." She regarded Fielding as with Congreve, the only
"original" of her age, but Fielding had to write for bread, and that is
"the most contemptible way of getting bread." She did not, at this time,
even know Smollett's name, but she admired him, and, later, calls him "my
dear Smollett." This lady thought that Fielding did not know what sorry
fellows his Tom Jones and Captain Booth were. Not near so sorry as
Peregine Pickle were they, for this gentleman is a far more atrocious
ruffian than Roderick Random.

None the less "Peregrine" is Smollett's greatest work. Nothing is so
rich in variety of character, scene, and adventure. We are carried along
by the swift and copious volume of the current, carried into very queer
places, and into the oddest miscellaneous company, but we cannot escape
from Smollett's vigorous grasp. Sir Walter thought that "Roderick"
excelled its successor in "ease and simplicity," and that Smollett's
sailors, in "Pickle," "border on caricature." No doubt they do: the
eccentricities of Hawser Trunnion, Esq., are exaggerated, and Pipes is
less subdued than Rattlin, though always delightful. But Trunnion
absolutely makes one laugh out aloud: whether he is criticising the
sister of Mr. Gamaliel Pickle in that gentleman's presence, at a
pot-house; or riding to the altar with his squadron of sailors, tacking
in an unfavourable gale; or being run away into a pack of hounds, and
clearing a hollow road over a waggoner, who views him with "unspeakable
terror and amazement." Mr. Winkle as an equestrian is not more entirely
acceptable to the mind than Trunnion. We may speak of "caricature," but
if an author can make us sob with laughter, to criticise him solemnly is
ungrateful.

Except Fielding occasionally, and Smollett, and Swift, and Sheridan, and
the authors of "The Rovers," one does not remember any writers of the
eighteenth century who quite upset the gravity of the reader. The scene
of the pedant's dinner after the manner of the ancients, does not seem to
myself so comic as the adventures of Trunnion, while the bride is at the
altar, and the bridegroom is tacking and veering with his convoy about
the fields. One sees how the dinner is done: with a knowledge of
Athenaeus, Juvenal, Petronius, and Horace, many men could have written
this set piece. But Trunnion is quite inimitable: he is a child of
humour and of the highest spirits, like Mr. Weller the elder. Till Scott
created Mause Headrig, no Caledonian had ever produced anything except
"Tam o' Shanter," that could be a pendant to Trunnion. His pathos is
possibly just a trifle overdone, though that is not my own opinion. Dear
Trunnion! he makes me overlook the gambols of his detestable _protege_,
the hero.

That scoundrel is not an impossible caricature of an obstinate, vain,
cruel libertine. Peregrine was precisely the man to fall in love with
Emilia _pour le bon motif_, and then attempt to ruin her, though she was
the sister of his friend, by devices worthy of Lovelace at his last and
lowest stage. Peregrine's overwhelming vanity, swollen by facile
conquests, would inevitably have degraded him to this abyss. The
intrigue was only the worst of those infamous practical jokes of his, in
which Smollett takes a cruel and unholy delight. Peregrine, in fact, is
a hero of _naturalisme_, except that his fits of generosity are mere
patches daubed on, and that his reformation is a farce, in which a modern
_naturaliste_ would have disdained to indulge. Emilia, in her scene with
Peregrine in the _bouge_ to which he has carried her, rises much above
Smollett's heroines, and we could like her, if she had never forgiven
behaviour which was beneath pardon.

Peregrine's education at Winchester bears out Lord Elcho's description of
that academy in his lately published Memoirs. It was apt to develop
Peregrines; and Lord Elcho himself might have furnished Smollett with
suitable adventures. There can be no doubt that Cadwallader Crabtree
suggested Sir Malachi Malagrowther to Scott, and that Hatchway and Pipes,
taking up their abode with Peregrine in the Fleet, gave a hint to Dickens
for Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick in the same abode. That "Peregrine"
"does far excel 'Joseph Andrews' and 'Amelia'," as Scott declares, few
modern readers will admit. The world could do much better without
"Peregrine" than without "Joseph"; while Amelia herself alone is a study
greatly preferable to the whole works of Smollett: such, at least, is the
opinion of a declared worshipper of that peerless lady. Yet "Peregrine"
is a kind of Odyssey of the eighteenth century: an epic of humour and of
adventure.

In February 1753, Smollett "obliged the town" with his "Adventures of
Ferdinand, Count Fathom," a cosmopolitan swindler and adventurer. The
book is Smollett's "Barry Lyndon," yet as his hero does not tell his own
story, but is perpetually held up as a "dreadful example," there is none
of Thackeray's irony, none of his subtlety. "Here is a really bad man, a
foreigner too," Smollett seems to say, "do not be misled, oh maidens, by
the wiles of such a Count! Impetuous youth, play not with him at
billiards, basset, or gleek. Fathers, on such a rogue shut your doors:
collectors, handle not his nefarious antiques. Let all avoid the path
and shun the example of Ferdinand, Count Fathom!"

Such is Smollett's sermon, but, after all, Ferdinand is hardly worse than
Roderick or Peregrine. The son of a terrible old sutler and
camp-follower, a robber and slayer of wounded men, Ferdinand had to live
by his wits, and he was hardly less scrupulous, after all, than Peregrine
and Roderick. The daubs of casual generosity were not laid on, and that
is all the difference. As Sophia Western was mistaken for Miss Jenny
Cameron, so Ferdinand was arrested as Prince Charles, who, in fact,
caused much inconvenience to harmless travellers. People were often
arrested as "The Pretender's son" abroad as well as in England.

The life and death of Ferdinand's mother, shot by a wounded hussar in her
moment of victory, make perhaps the most original and interesting part of
this hero's adventures. The rest is much akin to his earlier novels, but
the history of Rinaldo and Monimia has a passage not quite alien to the
vein of Mrs. Radcliffe. Some remarks in the first chapter show that
Smollett felt the censures on his brutality and "lowness," and he
promises to seek "that goal of perfection where nature is castigated
almost even to still life . . . where decency, divested of all substance,
hovers about like a fantastic shadow."