In the meantime let us look a little more closely into the special and
somewhat exceptional conditions under which the Travel Letters of
Smollett were produced. Smollett, as we have seen, was one of the first
professional men of all work in letters upon a considerable scale who
subsisted entirely upon the earnings of his own pen. He had no
extraneous means of support. He had neither patron, pension, property,
nor endowment, inherited or acquired. Yet he took upon himself the
burden of a large establishment, he spent money freely, and he prided
himself upon the fact that he, Tobias Smollett, who came up to London
without a stiver in his pocket, was in ten years' time in a position to
enact the part of patron upon a considerable scale to the crowd of
inferior denizens of Grub Street. Like most people whose social
ambitions are in advance of their time, Smollett suffered considerably
on account of these novel aspirations of his. In the present day he
would have had his motor car and his house on Hindhead, a seat in
Parliament and a brief from the Nation to boot as a Member for
Humanity. Voltaire was the only figure in the eighteenth century even
to approach such a flattering position, and he was for many years a
refugee from his own land. Smollett was energetic and ambitious enough
to start in rather a grand way, with a large house, a carriage,
menservants, and the rest. His wife was a fine lady, a "Creole" beauty
who had a small dot of her own; but, on the other hand, her income was
very precarious, and she herself somewhat of a silly and an incapable
in the eyes of Smollett's old Scotch friends. But to maintain such a
position--to keep the bailiffs from the door from year's end to year's
end--was a truly Herculean task in days when a newspaper "rate" of
remuneration or a well-wearing copyright did not so much as exist, and
when Reviews sweated their writers at the rate of a guinea per sheet of
thirty-two pages. Smollett was continually having recourse to loans. He
produced the eight (or six or seven) hundred a year he required by
sheer hard writing, turning out his History of England, his Voltaire,
and his Universal History by means of long spells of almost incessant
labour at ruinous cost to his health. On the top of all this cruel
compiling he undertook to run a Review (The Critical), a magazine (The
British), and a weekly political organ (The Briton). A charge of
defamation for a paragraph in the nature of what would now be
considered a very mild and pertinent piece of public criticism against
a faineant admiral led to imprisonment in the King's Bench Prison, plus
a fine of £100. Then came a quarrel with an old friend, Wilkes--not the
least vexatious result of that forlorn championship of Bute's
government in The Briton. And finally, in part, obviously, as a
consequence of all this nervous breakdown, a succession of severe
catarrhs, premonitory in his case of consumption, the serious illness
of the wife he adored, and the death of his darling, the "little Boss"
of former years, now on the verge of womanhood. To a man of his
extraordinarily strong affections such a series of ills was too
overwhelming. He resolved to break up his establishment at Chelsea, and
to seek a remedy in flight from present evils to a foreign residence.
Dickens went to hibernate on the Riviera upon a somewhat similar
pretext, though fortunately without the same cause, as far as his
health was concerned.
Now note another very characteristic feature of these Travel Letters.
Smollett went abroad not for pleasure, but virtually of necessity. Not
only were circumstances at home proving rather too much for him, but
also, like Stevenson, he was specifically "ordered South" by his
physicians, and he went with the deliberate intention of making as much
money as possible out of his Travel papers. In his case he wrote long
letters on the spot to his medical and other friends at home. When he
got back in the summer of 1765 one of his first cares was to put the
Letters together. It had always been his intention carefully to revise
them for the press. But when he got back to London he found so many
other tasks awaiting him that were so far more pressing, that this part
of his purpose was but very imperfectly carried out. The Letters
appeared pretty much as he wrote them. Their social and documentary
value is thereby considerably enhanced, for they were nearly all
written close down to the facts. The original intention had been to go
to Montpellier, which was still, I suppose, the most popular health
resort in Southern Europe. The peace of 1763 opened the way. And this
brings us to another feature of distinction in regard to Smollett's
Travels. Typical Briton, perfervid Protestant of Britain's most
Protestant period, and insular enrage though he doubtless was, Smollett
had knocked about the world a good deal and had also seen something of
the continent of Europe. He was not prepared to see everything couleur
de rose now. His was quite unlike the frame of mind of the ordinary
holiday-seeker, who, partly from a voluntary optimism, and partly from
the change of food and habit, the exhilaration caused by novel
surroundings, and timidity at the unaccustomed sounds he hears in his
ears, is determined to be pleased with everything. Very temperamental
was Smollett, and his frame of mind at the time was that of one
determined to be pleased with nothing. We know little enough about
Smollett intime. Only the other day I learned that the majority of
so-called Smollett portraits are not presentments of the novelist at
all, but ingeniously altered plates of George Washington. An
interesting confirmation of this is to be found in the recently
published Letters of Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe to Robert Chambers.
"Smollett wore black cloaths--a tall man--and extreamly handsome. No
picture of him is known to be extant--all that have been foisted on the
public as such his relations disclaim--this I know from my aunt Mrs.
Smollett, who was the wife of his nephew, and resided with him at
Bath." But one thing we do know, and in these same letters, if
confirmation had been needed, we observe the statement repeated,
namely, that Smollett was very peevish. A sardonic, satirical, and
indeed decidedly gloomy mood or temper had become so habitual in him as
to transform the man. Originally gay and debonnair, his native
character had been so overlaid that when he first returned to Scotland
in 1755 his own mother could not recognise him until he "gave over
glooming" and put on his old bright smile. [A pleasant story of the
Doctor's mother is given in the same Letters to R. Chambers (1904). She
is described as an ill-natured-looking woman with a high nose, but not
a bad temper, and very fond of the cards. One evening an Edinburgh
bailie (who was a tallow chandler) paid her a visit. "Come awa',
bailie," said she, "and tak' a trick at the cards." "Troth madam, I hae
nae siller!" "Then let us play for a pound of candles."] His was
certainly a nervous, irritable, and rather censorious temper. Like Mr.
Brattle, in The Vicar of Bulhampton, he was thinking always of the evil
things that had been done to him. With the pawky and philosophic Scots
of his own day (Robertson, Hume, Adam Smith, and "Jupiter" Carlyle) he
had little in common, but with the sour and mistrustful James Mill or
the cross and querulous Carlyle of a later date he had, it seems to me,
a good deal. What, however, we attribute in their case to bile or
liver, a consecrated usage prescribes that we must, in the case of
Smollett, accredit more particularly to the spleen. Whether dyspeptic
or "splenetic," this was not the sort of man to see things through a
veil of pleasant self-generated illusion. He felt under no obligation
whatever to regard the Grand Tour as a privilege of social distinction,
or its discomforts as things to be discreetly ignored in relating his
experience to the stay-at-home public. He was not the sort of man that
the Tourist Agencies of to-day would select to frame their
advertisements. As an advocatus diaboli on the subject of Travel he
would have done well enough. And yet we must not infer that the magic
of travel is altogether eliminated from his pages. This is by no means
the case: witness his intense enthusiasm at Nimes, on sight of the
Maison Carree or the Pont du Gard; the passage describing his entry
into the Eternal City; [Ours "was the road by which so many heroes
returned with conquest to their country, by which so many kings were
led captive to Rome, and by which the ambassadors of so many kingdoms
and States approached the seat of Empire, to deprecate the wrath, to
sollicit the friendship, or sue for the protection of the Roman
people."] or the enviable account of the alfresco meals which the party
discussed in their coach as described in Letter VIII.
As to whether Smollett and his party of five were exceptionally
unfortunate in their road-faring experiences must be left an open
question at the tribunal of public opinion. In cold blood, in one of
his later letters, he summarised his Continental experience after this
wise: inns, cold, damp, dark, dismal, dirty; landlords equally
disobliging and rapacious; servants awkward, sluttish, and slothful;
postillions lazy, lounging, greedy, and impertinent. With this last
class of delinquents after much experience he was bound to admit the
following dilemma:--If you chide them for lingering, they will contrive
to delay you the longer. If you chastise them with sword, cane, cudgel,
or horsewhip (he defines the correctives, you may perceive, but leaves
the expletives to our imagination) they will either disappear entirely,
and leave you without resource, or they will find means to take
vengeance by overturning your carriage. The only course remaining would
be to allow oneself to become the dupe of imposition by tipping the
postillions an amount slightly in excess of the authorized
gratification. He admits that in England once, between the Devizes and
Bristol, he found this plan productive of the happiest results. It was
unfortunate that, upon this occasion, the lack of means or slenderness
of margin for incidental expenses should have debarred him from having
recourse to a similar expedient. For threepence a post more, as
Smollett himself avows, he would probably have performed the journey
with much greater pleasure and satisfaction. But the situation is
instructive. It reveals to us the disadvantage under which the novelist
was continually labouring, that of appearing to travel as an English
Milord, en grand seigneur, and yet having at every point to do it "on
the cheap." He avoided the common conveyance or diligence, and insisted
on travelling post and in a berline; but he could not bring himself to
exceed the five-sou pourboire for the postillions. He would have meat
upon maigre days, yet objected to paying double for it. He held aloof
from the thirty-sou table d'hote, and would have been content to pay
three francs a head for a dinner a part, but his worst passions were
roused when he was asked to pay not three, but four. Now Smollett
himself was acutely conscious of the false position. He was by nature
anything but a curmudgeon. On the contrary, he was, if I interpret him
at all aright, a high-minded, open-hearted, generous type of man. Like
a majority, perhaps, of the really open-handed he shared one trait with
the closefisted and even with the very mean rich. He would rather give
away a crown than be cheated of a farthing. Smollett himself had little
of the traditional Scottish thriftiness about him, but the people among
whom he was going--the Languedocians and Ligurians--were notorious for
their nearness in money matters. The result of all this could hardly
fail to exacerbate Smollett's mood and to aggravate the testiness which
was due primarily to the bitterness of his struggle with the world,
and, secondarily, to the complaints which that struggle engendered. One
capital consequence, however, and one which specially concerns us, was
that we get this unrivalled picture of the seamy side of foreign
travel--a side rarely presented with anything like Smollett's skill to
the student of the grand siecle of the Grand Tour. The rubs, the rods,
the crosses of the road could, in fact, hardly be presented to us more
graphically or magisterially than they are in some of these chapters.
Like Prior, Fielding, Shenstone, and Dickens, Smollett was a
connoisseur in inns and innkeepers. He knew good food and he knew good
value, and he had a mighty keen eye for a rogue. There may, it is true,
have been something in his manner which provoked them to exhibit their
worst side to him. It is a common fate with angry men. The trials to
which he was subjected were momentarily very severe, but, as we shall
see in the event, they proved a highly salutary discipline to him.
To sum up, then, Smollett's Travels were written hastily and vigorously
by an expert man of letters. They were written ad vivum, as it were,
not from worked-up notes or embellished recollections. They were
written expressly for money down. They were written rather en noir than
couleur de rose by an experienced, and, we might almost perhaps say, a
disillusioned traveller, and not by a naif or a niais. The statement
that they were to a certain extent the work of an invalid is, of
course, true, and explains much. The majority of his correspondents
were of the medical profession, all of them were members of a group
with whom he was very intimate, and the letters were by his special
direction to be passed round among them. [We do not know precisely who
all these correspondents of Smollett were, but most of them were
evidently doctors and among them, without a doubt, John Armstrong,
William Hunter, George Macaulay, and above all John Moore, himself an
authority on European travel, Governor on the Grand Tour of the Duke of
Hamilton (Son of "the beautiful Duchess"), author of Zeluco, and father
of the famous soldier. Smollett's old chum, Dr. W. Smellie, died 5th
March 1763.] In the circumstances (bearing in mind that it was his
original intention to prune the letters considerably before
publication) it was only natural that he should say a good deal about
the state of his health. His letters would have been unsatisfying to
these good people had he not referred frequently and at some length to
his spirits and to his symptoms, an improvement in which was the
primary object of his journey and his two years' sojourn in the South.
Readers who linger over the diary of Fielding's dropsy and Mrs.
Fielding's toothache are inconsistent in denouncing the luxury of
detail with which Smollett discusses the matter of his imposthume.
What I claim for the present work is that, in the first place, to any
one interested in Smollett's personality it supplies an unrivalled key.
It is, moreover, the work of a scholar, an observer of human nature,
and, by election, a satirist of no mean order. It gives us some
characteristic social vignettes, some portraits of the road of an
unsurpassed freshness and clearness. It contains some historical and
geographical observations worthy of one of the shrewdest and most
sagacious publicists of the day. It is interesting to the etymologist
for the important share it has taken in naturalising useful foreign
words into our speech. It includes (as we shall have occasion to
observe) a respectable quantum of wisdom fit to become proverbial, and
several passages of admirable literary quality. In point of date
(1763-65) it is fortunate, for the writer just escaped being one of a
crowd. On the whole, I maintain that it is more than equal in interest
to the Journey to the Hebrides, and that it deserves a very
considerable proportion of the praise that has hitherto been lavished
too indiscriminately upon the Voyage to Lisbon. On the force of this
claim the reader is invited to constitute himself judge after a fair
perusal of the following pages. I shall attempt only to point the way
to a satisfactory verdict, no longer in the spirit of an advocate, but
by means of a few illustrations and, more occasionally, amplifications
of what Smollett has to tell us.