Smollett did not interpret the ground-plan of the history of Nice
particularly well. Its colonisation from Massilia, its long connection
with Provence, its occupation by Saracens, its stormy connection with
the house of Anjou, and its close fidelity to the house of Savoy made
no appeal to his admiration. The most important event in its recent
history, no doubt, was the capture of the city by the French under
Catinat in 1706 (Louis XIV. being especially exasperated against what
he regarded as the treachery of Victor Amadeus), and the razing to the
ground of its famous citadel. The city henceforth lost a good deal of
its civic dignity, and its morale was conspicuously impaired. In the
war of the Austrian succession an English fleet under Admiral Matthews
was told off to defend the territory of the Nicois against the
attentions of Toulon. This was the first close contact experienced
between England and Nice, but the impressions formed were mutually
favourable. The inhabitants were enthusiastic about the unaccustomed
English plan of paying in full for all supplies demanded. The British
officers were no less delighted with the climate of Nice, the fame of
which they carried to their northern homes. It was both directly and
indirectly through one of these officers that the claims of Nice as a
sanatorium came to be put so plainly before Smollett. [Losing its
prestige as a ville forte, Nice was henceforth rapidly to gain the new
character of a ville de plaisir. In 1763, says one of the city's
historians, Smollett, the famous historian and novelist, visited Nice.
"Arriving here shattered in health and depressed in spirits, under the
genial influence of the climate he soon found himself a new man. His
notes on the country, its gardens, its orange groves, its climate
without a winter, are pleasant and just and would seem to have been
written yesterday instead of more than a hundred years ago. . . . His
memory is preserved in the street nomenclature of the place; one of the
thoroughfares still bears the appellation of Rue Smollett." (James
Nash, The Guide to Nice, 1884, p. 110.)]
Among other celebrated residents at Nice during the period of
Smollett's visit were Edward Augustus, Duke of York, the brother of
George III., who died at Monaco a few years later, and Andre Massena, a
native of the city, then a lad of six.
Before he left Montpellier Smollett indulged in two more seemingly
irresistible tirades against French folly: one against their persistent
hero-worship of such a stuffed doll as Louis le Grand, and the second
in ridicule of the immemorial French panacea, a bouillon. Now he gets
to Nice he feels a return of the craving to take a hand's turn at
depreciatory satire upon the nation of which a contemporary hand was
just tracing the deservedly better-known delineation, commencing
Gay sprightly land of mirth and social ease,
Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please. . . .
Such inveteracy (like Dr. Johnson's against Swift) was not unnaturally
suspected by friends in England of having some personal motive. In his
fifteenth letter home, therefore, Smollett is assiduous in disclaiming
anything of the kind. He begins by attempting an amende honorable, but
before he has got well away from his exordium he insensibly and most
characteristically diverges into the more congenial path of censure,
and expands indeed into one of his most eloquent passages--a
disquisition upon the French punctilio (conceived upon lines somewhat
similar to Mercutio's address to Benvolio), to which is appended a
satire on the duello as practised in France, which glows and burns with
a radiation of good sense, racy of Smollett at his best.
To eighteenth century lovers the discussion on duelling will recall
similar talks between Boswell and Johnson, or that between the
lieutenant and Tom in the Seventh Book of Tom Jones, but, more
particularly, the sermon delivered by Johnson on this subject a propos
of General Oglethorpe's story of how he avoided a duel with Prince
Eugene in 1716. "We were sitting in company at table, whence the Prince
took up a glass of wine and by a fillip made some of it fly in
Oglethorpe's face. Here was a nice dilemma. To have challenged him
instantly might have fixed a quarrelsome character upon the young
soldier: to have taken no notice of it might have been counted as
cowardice. Oglethorpe, therefore, keeping his eye on the Prince, and
smiling all the time, as if he took what His Highness had done in jest,
said, "Mon Prince" (I forget the French words he used), "that's a good
joke; but we do it much better in England," and threw a whole glass of
wine in the Prince's face. An old general who sat by said, "Il a bien
fait, mon Prince, vous l'avez commence," and thus all ended in good
humour."
In Letter XIII. Smollett settles down to give his correspondents a
detailed description of the territory and people of Nice. At one time
it was his intention to essay yet another branch of authorship and to
produce a monograph on the natural history, antiquities, and topography
of the town as the capital of this still unfamiliar littoral; with the
late-born modesty of experience, however, he recoils from a task to
which he does not feel his opportunities altogether adequate. [See p.
152.] A quarter of Smollett's original material would embarrass a
"Guide"-builder of more recent pattern.
Whenever he got near a coast line Smollett could not refrain from
expressing decided views. If he had lived at the present day he would
infallibly have been a naval expert, better informed than most and more
trenchant than all; but recognizably one of the species, artist in
words and amateur of ocean-strategy. [Smollett had, of course, been
surgeon's mate on H.M.S. Cumberland, 1740-41.] His first curiosity at
Nice was raised concerning the port, the harbour, the galleys moored
within the mole, and the naval policy of his Sardinian Majesty. His
advice to Victor Amadeus was no doubt as excellent and as unregarded as
the advice of naval experts generally is. Of more interest to us is his
account of the slave-galleys. Among the miserable slaves whom "a
British subject cannot behold without horror and compassion," he
observes a Piedmontese count in Turkish attire, reminding the reader of
one of Dumas' stories of a count among the forcats. To learn that there
were always volunteer oarsmen among these poor outcasts is to reflect
bitterly upon the average happiness of mankind. As to whether they wore
much worse off than common seamen in the British navy of the period
(who were only in name volunteers and had often no hope of discharge
until they were worn out) under such commanders as Oakum or Whiffle [In
Roderick Random.] is another question. For confirmation of Smollett's
account in matters of detail the reader may turn to Aleman's Guzman
d'Afarache, which contains a first-hand description of the life on
board a Mediterranean slave galley, to Archenholtz's Tableau d'Italie
of 1788, to Stirling Maxwell's Don John of Austria (1883, i. 95), and
more pertinently to passages in the Life of a Galley Slave by Jean
Marteilhe (edited by Miss Betham-Edwards in 1895). After serving in the
docks at Dunkirk, Marteilhe, as a confirmed protestant, makes the
journey in the chain-gang to Marseilles, and is only released after
many delays in consequence of the personal interest and intervention of
Queen Anne. If at the peace of Utrecht in 1713 we had only been as
tender about the case of our poor Catalan allies! Nice at that juncture
had just been returned by France to the safe-keeping of Savoy, so that
in order to escape from French territory, Marteilhe sailed for Nice in
a tartane, and not feeling too safe even there, hurried thence by
Smollett's subsequent route across the Col di Tende. Many Europeans
were serving at this time in the Turkish or Algerine galleys. But the
most pitiable of all the galley slaves were those of the knights of St.
John of Malta. "Figure to yourself," wrote Jacob Houblon [The Houblon
Family, 1907 ii. 78. The accounts in Evelyn and Goldsmith are probably
familiar to the reader.] about this year, "six or seven hundred dirty
half-naked Turks in a small vessel chained to the oars, from which they
are not allowed to stir, fed upon nothing but bad biscuit and water,
and beat about on the most trifling occasion by their most inhuman
masters, who are certainly more Turks than their slaves."
After several digressions, one touching the ancient Cemenelion, a
subject upon which the Jonathan Oldbucks of Provence without exception
are unconscionably tedious, Smollett settles down to a capable
historical summary preparatory to setting his palette for a picture of
the Nissards "as they are." He was, as we are aware, no court painter,
and the cheerful colours certainly do not predominate. The noblesse for
all their exclusiveness cannot escape his censure. He can see that they
are poor (they are unable to boast more than two coaches among their
whole number), and he feels sure that they are depraved. He attributes
both vices unhesitatingly to their idleness and to their religion. In
their singularly unemotional and coolly comparative outlook upon
religion, how infinitely nearer were Fielding and Smollett than their
greatest successors, Dickens and Thackeray, to the modern critic who
observes that there is "at present not a single credible established
religion in existence." To Smollett Catholicism conjures up nothing so
vividly as the mask of comedy, while his native Calvinism stands for
the corresponding mask of tragedy. [Walpole's dictum that Life was a
comedy to those who think, a tragedy for those who feel, was of later
date than this excellent mot of Smollett's.] Religion in the sunny
spaces of the South is a "never-failing fund of pastime." The mass (of
which he tells a story that reminds us of Lever's Micky Free) is just a
mechanism invented by clever rogues for an elaborate system of petty
larceny. And what a ferocious vein of cynicism underlies his strictures
upon the perverted gallantry of the Mariolaters at Florence, or those
on the two old Catholics rubbing their ancient gums against St. Peter's
toe for toothache at Rome. The recurring emblems of crosses and gibbets
simply shock him as mementoes of the Bagne.
At Rome he compares a presentment of St. Laurence to "a barbecued pig."
"What a pity it is," he complains, "that the labours of painting should
have been employed on such shocking objects of the martyrology,"
floggings, nailings, and unnailings... "Peter writhing on the cross,
Stephen battered with stones, Sebastian stuck full of arrows,
Bartholomew flayed alive," and so on. His remarks upon the famous Pieta
of Michael Angelo are frank to the point of brutality. The right of
sanctuary and its "infamous prerogative," unheard of in England since
the days of Henry VII., were still capable of affording a lesson to the
Scot abroad. "I saw a fellow who had three days before murdered his
wife in the last month of pregnancy, taking the air with great
composure and serenity, on the steps of a church in Florence."
Smollett, it is clear, for all his philosophy, was no degenerate
representative of the blind, unreasoning seventeenth-century
detestation of "Popery and wooden shoes."
Smollett is one of the first to describe a "conversazione," and in
illustration of the decadence of Italian manners, it is natural that he
should have a good deal to tell us about the Cicisbeatura. His account
of the cicisbeo and his duties, whether in Nice, Florence, or Rome, is
certainly one of the most interesting that we have. Before Smollett and
his almost contemporary travel correspondent, Samuel Sharp, it would
probably be hard to find any mention of the cicisbeo in England, though
the word was consecrated by Sheridan a few years later. Most of the
"classic" accounts of the usage such as those by Mme. de Stael,
Stendhal, Parini, Byron and his biographers date from very much later,
when the institution was long past its prime if not actually moribund.
Now Smollett saw it at the very height of its perfection and at a time
when our decorous protestant curiosity on such themes was as lively as
Lady Mary Montagu had found it in the case of fair Circassians and
Turkish harems just thirty years previously. [A cicisbeo was a dangler.
Hence the word came to be applied punningly to the bow depending from a
clouded cane or ornamental crook. In sixteenth-century Spain, home of
the sedan and the caballero galante, the original term was bracciere.
In Venice the form was cavaliere servente. For a good note on the
subject, see Sismondi's Italian Republics, ed. William Boulting, 1907,
p. 793.] Like so much in the shapes and customs of Italy the
cicisbeatura was in its origin partly Gothic and partly Oriental. It
combined the chivalry of northern friendship with the refined passion
of the South for the seclusion of women. As an experiment in protest
against the insipidity which is too often an accompaniment of conjugal
intercourse the institution might well seem to deserve a more tolerant
and impartial investigation than it has yet received at the hands of
our sociologists. A survival so picturesque could hardly be expected to
outlive the bracing air of the nineteenth century. The north wind blew
and by 1840 the cicisbeatura was a thing of the past.
Freed from the necessity of a systematic delineation Smollett rambles
about Nice, its length and breadth, with a stone in his pouch, and
wherever a cockshy is available he takes full advantage of it. He
describes the ghetto (p. 171), the police arrangements of the place
which he finds in the main highly efficient, and the cruel punishment
of the strappado. The garrucha or strappado and the garrotes, combined
with the water-torture and the rack, represented the survival of the
fittest in the natural selection of torments concerning which the Holy
Office in Italy and Spain had such a vast experience. The strappado as
described by Smollett, however, is a more severe form of torture even
than that practised by the Inquisition, and we can only hope that his
description of its brutality is highly coloured. [See the extremely
learned disquisition on the whole subject in Dr. H. C. Lea's History of
the Inquisition in Spain, 1907, vol. iii. book vi chap. vii.] Smollett
must have enjoyed himself vastly in the market at Nice. He gives an
elaborate and epicurean account of his commissariat during the
successive seasons of his sojourn in the neighbourhood. He was not one
of these who live solely "below the diaphragm"; but he understood food
well and writes about it with a catholic gusto and relish (156-165). He
laments the rarity of small birds on the Riviera, and gives a highly
comic account of the chasse of this species of gibier. He has a good
deal to say about the sardine and tunny fishery, about the fruit and
scent traffic, and about the wine industry; and he gives us a graphic
sketch of the silkworm culture, which it is interesting to compare with
that given by Locke in 1677. He has something to say upon the general
agriculture, and more especially upon the olive and oil industry. Some
remarks upon the numerous "mummeries" and festas of the inhabitants
lead him into a long digression upon the feriae of the Romans. It is
evident from this that the box of books which he shipped by way of
Bordeaux must have been plentifully supplied with classical literature,
for, as he remarks with unaffected horror, such a thing as a bookseller
had not been so much as heard of in Nice. Well may he have expatiated
upon the total lack of taste among the inhabitants! In dealing with the
trade, revenue, and other administrative details Smollett shows himself
the expert compiler and statistician a London journalist in large
practice credits himself with becoming by the mere exercise of his
vocation. In dealing with the patois of the country he reveals the
curiosity of the trained scholar and linguist. Climate had always been
one of his hobbies, and on learning that none of the local
practitioners was in a position to exact a larger fee than sixpence
from his patients (quantum mutatus the Nice physician of 1907!) he felt
that he owed it to himself to make this the subject of an independent
investigation. He kept a register of the weather during the whole of
his stay, and his remarks upon the subject are still of historical
interest, although with Teysseire's minutely exact Monograph on the
Climatology of Nice (1881) at his disposal and innumerable commentaries
thereon by specialists, the inquirer of to-day would hardly go to
Smollett for his data. Then, as now, it is curious to find the rumour
current that the climate of Nice was sadly deteriorating. "Nothing to
what it was before the war!" as the grumbler from the South was once
betrayed into saying of the August moon. Smollett's esprit chagrin was
nonplussed at first to find material for complaint against a climate in
which he admits that there was less rain and less wind than in any
other part of the world that he knew. In these unwonted circumstances
he is constrained to fall back on the hard water and the plague of
cousins or gnats as affording him the legitimate grievance, in whose
absence the warrior soul of the author of the Ode to Independence could
never be content.