As was the case with Fielding many years earlier, Smollett was almost
broken down with sedentary toil, when early in June 1763 with his wife,
two young ladies ("the two girls") to whom she acted as chaperon, and a
faithful servant of twelve years' standing, who in the spirit of a
Scots retainer of the olden time refused to leave his master (a good
testimonial this, by the way, to a temper usually accredited with such
a splenetic sourness), he crossed the straits of Dover to see what a
change of climate and surroundings could do for him.
On other grounds than those of health he was glad to shake the dust of
Britain from his feet. He speaks himself of being traduced by malice,
persecuted by faction, abandoned by false patrons, complaints which
will remind the reader, perhaps, of George Borrow's "Jeremiad," to the
effect that he had been beslavered by the venomous foam of every
sycophantic lacquey and unscrupulous renegade in the three kingdoms.
But Smollett's griefs were more serious than what an unkind reviewer
could inflict. He had been fined and imprisoned for defamation. He had
been grossly caricatured as a creature of Bute, the North British
favourite of George III., whose tenure of the premiership occasioned
riots and almost excited a revolution in the metropolis. Yet after
incurring all this unpopularity at a time when the populace of London
was more inflamed against Scotsmen than it has ever been before or
since, and having laboured severely at a paper in the ministerial
interest and thereby aroused the enmity of his old friend John Wilkes,
Smollett had been unceremoniously thrown over by his own chief, Lord
Bute, on the ground that his paper did more to invite attack than to
repel it. Lastly, he and his wife had suffered a cruel bereavement in
the loss of their only child, and it was partly to supply a change from
the scene of this abiding sorrow, that the present journey was
undertaken.
The first stages and incidents of the expedition were not exactly
propitious. The Dover Road was a byword for its charges; the Via Alba
might have been paved with the silver wrung from reluctant and
indignant passengers. Smollett characterized the chambers as cold and
comfortless, the beds as "paultry" (with "frowsy," a favourite word),
the cookery as execrable, wine poison, attendance bad, publicans
insolent, and bills extortion, concluding with the grand climax that
there was not a drop of tolerable malt liquor to be had from London to
Dover. Smollett finds a good deal to be said for the designation of "a
den of thieves" as applied to that famous port (where, as a German lady
of much later date once complained, they "boot ze Bible in ze bedroom,
but ze devil in ze bill"), and he grizzles lamentably over the seven
guineas, apart from extras, which he had to pay for transport in a
Folkestone cutter to Boulogne Mouth.
Having once arrived at Boulogne, Smollett settled down regularly to his
work as descriptive reporter, and the letters that he wrote to his
friendly circle at home fall naturally into four groups. The first
Letters from II. to V. describe with Hogarthian point, prejudice and
pungency, the town and people of Boulogne. The second group, Letters
VI.-XII., deal with the journey from Boulogne to Nice by way of Paris,
Lyon, Nimes, and Montpellier. The third group, Letters XIII.-XXIV., is
devoted to a more detailed and particular delineation of Nice and the
Nicois. The fourth, Letters XXV.-XLI., describes the Italian expedition
and the return journey to Boulogne en route for England, where the
party arrive safe home in July 1765.
Smollett's account of Boulogne is excellent reading, it forms an apt
introduction to the narrative of his journey, it familiarises us with
the milieu, and reveals to us in Smollett a man of experience who is
both resolute and capable of getting below the surface of things. An
English possession for a short period in the reign of the Great Harry,
Boulogne has rarely been less in touch with England than it was at the
time of Smollett's visit. Even then, however, there were three small
colonies, respectively, of English nuns, English Jesuits, and English
Jacobites. Apart from these and the English girls in French seminaries
it was estimated ten years after Smollett's sojourn there that there
were twenty-four English families in residence. The locality has of
course always been a haunting place for the wandering tribes of
English. Many well-known men have lived or died here both native and
English. Adam Smith must have been there very soon after Smollett. So
must Dr. John Moore and Charles Churchill, one of the enemies provoked
by the Briton, who went to Boulogne to meet his friend Wilkes and died
there in 1764. Philip Thicknesse the traveller and friend of
Gainsborough died there in 1770. After long search for a place to end
his days in Thomas Campbell bought a house in Boulogne and died there,
a few months later, in 1844. The house is still to be seen, Rue St.
Jean, within the old walls; it has undergone no change, and in 1900 a
marble tablet was put up to record the fact that Campbell lived and
died there. The other founder of the University of London, Brougham, by
a singular coincidence was also closely associated with Boulogne.
[Among the occupants of the English cemetery will be found the names of
Sir Harris Nicolas, Basil Montagu, Smithson Pennant, Sir William
Ouseley, Sir William Hamilton, and Sir C. M. Carmichael. And among
other literary celebrities connected with the place, apart from Dickens
(who gave his impressions of the place in Household Words, November
1854) we should include in a brief list, Charles Lever, Horace Smith,
Wilkie Collins, Mrs. Henry Wood, Professor York Powell, the Marquis of
Steyne (Lord Seymour), Mrs. Jordan, Clark Russell, and Sir Conan Doyle.
There are also memorable associations with Lola Montes, Heinrich Heine,
Becky Sharpe, and above all Colonel Newcome. My first care in the place
was to discover the rampart where the Colonel used to parade with
little Clive. Among the native luminaries are Daunou, Duchenne de
Boulogne, one of the foremost physiologists of the last century, an
immediate predecessor of Charcot in knowledge of the nervous system,
Aug. Mariette, the Egyptologist, Aug. Angellier, the biographer of
Burns, Sainte-Beuve, Prof. Morel, and "credibly," Godfrey de Bouillon,
of whom Charles Lamb wrote "poor old Godfrey, he must be getting very
old now." The great Lesage died here in 1747.] The antiquaries still
dispute about Gessoriacum, Godfrey de Bouillon, and Charlemagne's Tour.
Smollett is only fair in justifying for the town, the older portions of
which have a strong medieval suggestion, a standard of comparison
slightly more distinguished than Wapping. He never lets us forget that
he is a scholar of antiquity, a man of education and a speculative
philosopher. Hence his references to Celsus and Hippocrates and his
ingenious etymologies of wheatear and samphire, more ingenious in the
second case than sound. Smollett's field of observation had been wide
and his fund of exact information was unusually large. At Edinburgh he
had studied medicine under Monro and John Gordon, in company with such
able and distinguished men as William Hunter, Cullen, Pitcairn,
Gregory, and Armstrong--and the two last mentioned were among his
present correspondents. As naval surgeon at Carthagena he had undergone
experience such as few literary men can claim, and subsequently as
compiler, reviewer, party journalist, historian, translator,
statistician, and lexicographer, he had gained an amount of
miscellaneous information such as falls to the lot of very few minds of
his order of intelligence. He had recently directed the compilation of
a large Universal Geography or Gazetteer, the Carton or Vivien de St.
Martin if those days--hence his glib references to the manners and
customs of Laplanders, Caffres, Kamskatchans, and other recondite types
of breeding. His imaginative faculty was under the control of an
exceptionally strong and retentive memory. One may venture to say,
indeed, without danger of exaggeration that his testimonials as regards
habitual accuracy of statement have seldom been exceeded. Despite the
doctor's unflattering portraits of Frenchmen, M. Babeau admits that his
book is one written by an observer of facts, and a man whose
statements, whenever they can be tested, are for the most part
"singularly exact." Mr. W. J. Prouse, whose knowledge of the Riviera
district is perhaps almost unequalled out of France, makes this very
remarkable statement. "After reading all that has been written by very
clever people about Nice in modern times, one would probably find that
for exact precision of statement, Smollett was still the most
trustworthy guide," a view which is strikingly borne out by Mr. E.
Schuyler, who further points out Smollett's shrewd foresight in regard
to the possibilities of the Cornice road, and of Cannes and San Remo as
sanatoria." Frankly there is nothing to be seen which he does not
recognise." And even higher testimonies have been paid to Smollett's
topographical accuracy by recent historians of Nice and its
neighbourhood.
The value which Smollett put upon accuracy in the smallest matters of
detail is evinced by the corrections which he made in the margin of a
copy of the 1766 edition of the Travels. These corrections, which are
all in Smollett's own and unmistakably neat handwriting, may be divided
into four categories. In the first place come a number of verbal
emendations. Phrases are turned, inverted and improved by the skilful
"twist of the pen" which becomes a second nature to the trained
corrector of proofs; there are moreover a few topographical corrigenda,
suggested by an improved knowledge of the localities, mostly in the
neighbourhood of Pisa and Leghorn, where there is no doubt that these
corrections were made upon the occasion of Smollett's second visit to
Italy in 1770. [Some not unimportant errata were overlooked. Thus
Smollett's representation of the droit d'aubaine as a monstrous and
intolerable grievance is of course an exaggeration. (See Sentimental
Journey; J. Hill Burton, The Scot Abroad, 1881, p. 135; and Luchaire,
Instit. de France.) On his homeward journey he indicates that he
travelled from Beaune to Chalons and so by way of Auxerre to Dijon. The
right order is Chalons, Beaune, Dijon, Auxerre. As further examples of
the zeal with which Smollett regarded exactitude in the record of facts
we have his diurnal register of weather during his stay at Nice and the
picture of him scrupulously measuring the ruins at Cimiez with
packthread.] In the second place come a number of English renderings of
the citations from Latin, French, and Italian authors. Most of these
from the Latin are examples of Smollett's own skill in English verse
making. Thirdly come one or two significant admissions of overboldness
in matters of criticism, as where he retracts his censure of Raphael's
Parnassus in Letter XXXIII. Fourthly, and these are of the greatest
importance, come some very interesting additional notes upon the
buildings of Pisa, upon Sir John Hawkwood's tomb at Florence, and upon
the congenial though recondite subject of antique Roman hygiene. [Cf.
the Dinner in the manner of the Ancients in Peregrine Pickle, (xliv.)
and Letters IX. to XL in Humphry Clinker.]
After Smollett's death his books were for the most part sold for the
benefit of his widow. No use was made of his corrigenda. For twenty
years or so the Travels were esteemed and referred to, but as time went
on, owing to the sneers of the fine gentlemen of letters, such as
Walpole and Sterne, they were by degrees disparaged and fell more or
less into neglect. They were reprinted, it is true, either in
collective editions of Smollett or in various collections of travels;
[For instance in Baldwin's edition of 1778; in the 17th vol. of Mayor's
Collection of Voyages and Travels, published by Richard Phillips in
twenty-eight vols., 1809; and in an abbreviated form in John Hamilton
Moore's New and Complete Collection of Voyages and Travels (folio, Vol.
11. 938-970).] but they were not edited with any care, and as is
inevitable in such cases errors crept in, blunders were repeated, and
the text slightly but gradually deteriorated. In the last century
Smollett's own copy of the Travels bearing the manuscript corrections
that he had made in 1770, was discovered in the possession of the
Telfer family and eventually came into the British Museum. The second
volume, which affords admirable specimens of Smollett's neatly written
marginalia, has been exhibited in a show-case in the King's Library.
The corrections that Smollett purposed to make in the Travels are now
for the second time embodied in a printed edition of the text. At the
same time the text has been collated with the original edition of 1766,
and the whole has been carefully revised. The old spelling has been, as
far as possible, restored. Smollett was punctilious in such matters,
and what with his histories, his translations, his periodicals, and his
other compilations, he probably revised more proof-matter for press
than any other writer of his time. His practice as regards orthography
is, therefore, of some interest as representing what was in all
probability deemed to be the most enlightened convention of the day.
To return now to the Doctor's immediate contemplation of Boulogne, a
city described in the Itineraries as containing rien de remarquable.
The story of the Capuchin [On page 21. A Capuchin of the same stripe is
in Pickle, ch. Ill. sq.] is very racy of Smollett, while the vignette
of the shepherd at the beginning of Letter V. affords a first-rate
illustration of his terseness. Appreciate the keen and minute
observation concentrated into the pages that follow, [Especially on p.
34 to p. 40.] commencing with the shrewd and economic remarks upon
smuggling, and ending with the lively description of a Boulonnais
banquet, very amusing, very French, very life-like, and very
Smollettian. In Letter V. the Doctor again is very much himself. A
little provocation and he bristles and stabs all round. He mounts the
hygienic horse and proceeds from the lack of implements of cleanliness
to the lack of common decency, and "high flavoured instances, at which
even a native of Edinburgh would stop his nose." [This recalls
Johnson's first walk up the High Street, Edinburgh, on Bozzy's arm. "It
was a dusky night: I could not prevent his being assailed by the
evening effluvia of Edinburgh. . . . As we marched along he grumbled in
my ear, 'I smell you in the dark!'"] And then lest the southrons should
escape we have a reference to the "beastly habit of drinking from a
tankard in which perhaps a dozen filthy mouths have slabbered as is the
custom in England." With all his coarsenesses this blunt Scot was a
pioneer and fugleman of the niceties. Between times most nations are
gibbetted in this slashing epistle. The ingenious boasting of the
French is well hit off in the observation of the chevalier that the
English doubtless drank every day to the health of the Marquise de
Pompadour. The implication reminded Smollett of a narrow escape from a
duello (an institution he reprobates with the utmost trenchancy in this
book) at Ghent in 1749 with a Frenchman who affirmed that Marlborough's
battles were purposely lost by the French generals in order to mortify
Mme. de Maintenon. Two incidents of some importance to Smollett
occurred during the three months' sojourn at Boulogne. Through the
intervention of the English Ambassador at Paris (the Earl of Hertford)
he got back his books, which had been impounded by the Customs as
likely to contain matter prejudicial to the state or religion of
France, and had them sent south by shipboard to Bordeaux. Secondly, he
encountered General Paterson, a friendly Scot in the Sardinian service,
who confirmed what an English physician had told Smollett to the effect
that the climate of Nice was infinitely preferable to that of
Montpellier "with respect to disorders of the breast." Smollett now
hires a berline and four horses for fourteen louis, and sets out with
rather a heavy heart for Paris. It is problematic, he assures his good
friend Dr. Moore, whether he will ever return. "My health is very
precarious."