It was on the great northern road from York to London, about the
beginning of the month of October, and the hour of eight in the evening,
that four travellers were, by a violent shower of rain, driven for
shelter into a little public-house on the side of the highway,
distinguished by a sign which was said to exhibit the figure of a black
lion. The kitchen, in which they assembled, was the only room for
entertainment in the house, paved with red bricks, remarkably clean,
furnished with three or four Windsor chairs, adorned with shining plates
of pewter, and copper saucepans, nicely scoured, that even dazzled the
eyes of the beholder; while a cheerful fire of sea-coal blazed in the
chimney.
It would be hard to find a better beginning for a wholesome novel of
English life, than these first two sentences in The Adventures of Sir
Launcelot Greaves. They are full of comfort and promise. They promise
that we shall get rapidly into the story; and so we do. They give us the
hope, in which we are not to be disappointed, that we shall see a good
deal of those English inns which to this day are delightful in reality,
and which to generations of readers, have been delightful in fancy.
Truly, English fiction, without its inns, were as much poorer as the
English country, without these same hostelries, were less comfortable.
For few things in the world has the so-called “Anglo-Saxon” race more
reason to be grateful than for good old English inns. Finally there is a
third promise in these opening sentences of Sir Launcelot Greaves. “The
great northern road!” It was that over which the youthful Smollett made
his way to London in 1739; it was that over which, less than nine years
later, he sent us travelling in company with Random and Strap and the
queer people whom they met on their way. And so there is the promise
that Smollett, after his departure in Count Fathom from the field of
personal experience which erstwhile he cultivated so successfully, has
returned to see if the ground will yield him another rich harvest.
Though it must be admitted that in Sir Launcelot Greaves his labours were
but partially successful, yet the story possesses a good deal of the
lively verisimilitude which Fathom lacked. The very first page, as we
have seen, shows that its inns are going to be real. So, too, are most
of its highway adventures, and also its portion of those prison scenes of
which Smollett seems to have been so fond. As for the description of the
parliamentary election, it is by no means the least graphic of its kind
in the fiction of the last two centuries. The speech of Sir Valentine
Quickset, the fox-hunting Tory candidate, is excellent, both for its
brevity and for its simplicity. Any of his bumpkin audience could
understand perfectly his principal points: that he spends his estate of
“vive thousand clear” at home in old English hospitality; that he comes
of pure old English stock; that he hates all foreigners, not excepting
those from Hanover; and that if he is elected, he “will cross the
ministry in everything, as in duty bound.”
In the characters, likewise, though less than in the scenes just spoken
of, we recognise something of the old Smollett touch. True, it is not
high praise to say of Miss Aurelia Darnel that she is more alive, or
rather less lifeless, than Smollett’s heroines have been heretofore.
Nor can we give great praise to the characterisation of Sir Launcelot.
Yet if less substantial than Smollett’s roystering heroes, he is more
distinct than de Melvil in Fathom, the only one of our author’s earlier
young men, by the way, (with the possible exception of Godfrey Gauntlet)
who can stand beside Greaves in never failing to be a gentleman. It
is a pity, when Greaves’s character is so lovable, and save for his
knight-errantry, so well conceived, that the image is not more distinct.
Crowe is distinct enough, however, though not quite consistently drawn.
There is justice in Scott’s objection [Tobias Smollett in Biographical
and Critical Notices of Eminent Novelists] that nothing in the seaman’s
“life . . . renders it at all possible that he should have caught” the
baronet’s Quixotism. Otherwise, so far from finding fault with the old
sailor, we are pleased to see Smollett returning in him to a favourite
type. It might be thought that he would have exhausted the possibilities
of this type in Bowling and Trunnion and Pipes and Hatchway. In point
of fact, Crowe is by no means the equal of the first two of these. And
yet, with his heart in the right place, and his application of sea terms
to land objects, Captain Samuel Crowe has a good deal of the rough charm
of his prototypes. Still more distinct, and among Smollett’s personages
a more novel figure, is the Captain’s nephew, the dapper, verbose,
tender-hearted lawyer, Tom Clarke. Apart from the inevitable Smollett
exaggeration, a better portrait of a softish young attorney could hardly
be painted. Nor, in enumerating the characters of Sir Launcelot Greaves
who fix themselves in a reader’s memory, should Tom’s inamorata, Dolly,
be forgotten, or the malicious Ferret, or that precious pair, Justice and
Mrs. Gobble, or the Knight’s squire, Timothy Crabshaw, or that very
individual horse, Gilbert, whose lot is to be one moment caressed, and
the next, cursed for a “hard-hearted, unchristian tuoad.”
Barring the Gobbles, all these characters are important in the book from
first to last. Sir Launcelot Greaves, then, is significant among
Smollett’s novels, as indicating a reliance upon the personages for
interest quite as much as upon the adventures. If the author failed in a
similar intention in Fathom, it was not through lack of clearly conceived
characters, but through failure to make them flesh and blood. In that
book, however, he put the adventures together more skilfully than in Sir
Launcelot Greaves, the plot of which is not only rather meagre but also
far-fetched. There seems to be no adequate reason for the baronet’s whim
of becoming an English Don Quixote of the eighteenth century, except the
chance it gave Smollett for imitating Cervantes. He was evidently
hampered from the start by the consciousness that at best the success of
such imitation would be doubtful. Probably he expresses his own
misgivings when he makes Ferret exclaim to the hero: “What! . . . you
set up for a modern Don Quixote? The scheme is rather too stale and
extravagant. What was a . . . well-timed satire in Spain near two
hundred years ago, will . . . appear . . . insipid and absurd
. . . at this time of day, in a country like England.” Whether from
the author’s half-heartedness or from some other cause, there is no
denying that the Quixotism in Sir Launcelot Greaves is flat. It is a
drawback to the book rather than an aid. The plot could have developed
itself just as well, the high-minded young baronet might have had just as
entertaining adventures, without his imitation of the fine old Spanish
Don.
I have remarked on the old Smollett touch in Sir Launcelot Greaves,--the
individual touch of which we are continually sensible in Roderick Random
and Peregrine Pickle, but seldom in Count Fathom. With it is a new
Smollett touch, indicative of a kindlier feeling towards the world. It
is commonly said that the only one of the writer’s novels which contains
a sufficient amount of charity and sweetness is Humphry Clinker. The
statement is not quite true. Greaves is not so strikingly amiable as
Smollett’s masterpiece only because it is not so striking in any of its
excellences; their lines are always a little blurred. Still, it shows
that ten years before Clinker, Smollett had learned to combine the
contradictory elements of life in something like their right proportions.
If obscenity and ferocity are found in his fourth novel, they are no
longer found in a disproportionate degree.
There is little more to say of Sir Launcelot Greaves, except in the way
of literary history. The given name of the hero may or may not be
significant. It is safe to say that if a Sir Launcelot had appeared in
fiction one or two generations earlier, had the fact been recognised
(which is not indubitable) that he bore the name of the most celebrated
knight of later Arthurian romance, he would have been nothing but a
burlesque figure. But in 1760, literary taste was changing. Romanticism
in literature had begun to come to the front again, as Smollett had
already shown by his romantic leanings in Count Fathom. With it there
came interest in the Middle Ages and in the most popular fiction of the
Middle Ages, the “greatest of all poetic subjects,” according to
Tennyson, the stories of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table,
which, for the better part of a century, had been deposed from their
old-time place of honour. These stories, however, were as yet so
imperfectly known--and only to a few--that the most to be said is that
some connection between their reviving popularity and the name of
Smollett’s knight-errant hero is not impossible.
Apart from this, Sir Launcelot Greaves is interesting historically as
ending Smollett’s comparatively long silence in novel-writing after the
publication of Fathom in 1753. His next work was the translation of Don
Quixote, which he completed in 1755, and which may first have suggested
the idea of an English knight, somewhat after the pattern of the Spanish.
Be that as it may, before developing the idea, Smollett busied himself
with his Complete History of England, and with the comedy, The Reprisal:
or the Tars of Old England, a successful play which at last brought about
a reconciliation with his old enemy, Garrick. Two years later, in 1759,
as editor of the Critical Review, Smollett was led into a criticism of
Admiral Knowles’s conduct that was judged libellous enough to give its
author three months in the King’s Bench prison, during which time, it has
been conjectured, he began to mature his plans for the English Quixote.
The result was that, in 1760 and 1761, Sir Launcelot Greaves came out in
various numbers of the British Magazine. Scott has given his authority
to the statement that Smollett wrote many of the instalments in great
haste, sometimes, during a visit in Berwickshire, dashing off the
necessary amount of manuscript in an hour or so just before the departure
of the post. If the story is true, it adds its testimony to that of his
works to the author’s extraordinarily facile pen. Finally, in 1762, the
novel thus hurried off in instalments appeared as a whole. This method
of its introduction to the public gives Sir Launcelot Greaves still
another claim to interest. It is one of the earliest English novels,
indeed the earliest from the pen of a great writer, published in serial
form.