TOBIAS
SMOLLETT
[Illustration: PAGE DECORATIONS]
TOBIAS
SMOLLETT
BY
OLIPHANT
SMEATON
FAMOUS
SCOTS
SERIES
PUBLISHED BY:
CHARLES
SCRIBNER’S SONS
NEW YORK
FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES
_The following Volumes are now ready—_
THOMAS CARLYLE. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON
ALLAN RAMSAY. By OLIPHANT SMEATON
HUGH MILLER. By W. KEITH LEASK
JOHN KNOX. By A. TAYLOR INNES
ROBERT BURNS. By GABRIEL SETOUN
THE BALLADISTS. By JOHN GEDDIE
RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor HERKLESS
SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON
THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. GARDEN BLAIKIE
JAMES BOSWELL. By W. KEITH LEASK
TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By OLIPHANT SMEATON
CONTENTS
PAGE
CHAPTER I
BIRTH—PARENTAGE—EARLY YEARS 9
CHAPTER II
YEARS OF EDUCATION 19
CHAPTER III
WANDERJAHRE, OR YEARS OF WANDERING 32
CHAPTER IV
THE WEARY TRAGEDY—SHIFTS TO LIVE 44
CHAPTER V
RODERICK RANDOM 57
CHAPTER VI
PEREGRINE PICKLE—FERDINAND COUNT FATHOM—DOCTOR OF PHYSIC 69
CHAPTER VII
VISIT TO SCOTLAND—THE CRITICAL REVIEW—THE REPRISAL 80
CHAPTER VIII
HISTORY OF ENGLAND—SIR LAUNCELOT GREAVES—THE NORTH
BRITON—HACK HISTORICAL WORK—THE BEGINNING OF THE END 95
CHAPTER IX
SMOLLETT A ‘SWEATER’—TRAVELS ABROAD—ADVENTURES OF AN
ATOM—HUMPHREY CLINKER—LAST DAYS 109
CHAPTER X
SMOLLETT AS A NOVELIST 122
CHAPTER XI
SMOLLETT AS HISTORIAN AND CRITIC 137
CHAPTER XII
SMOLLETT AS POET AND DRAMATIST 147
TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT
CHAPTER I
BIRTH—PARENTAGE—EARLY YEARS
‘Every successful novelist must be more or less a poet, even though he
may never have written a line of verse. The quality of imagination is
absolutely indispensable to him.... Smollett was a poet of distinction!’
Such was the estimate formed by Sir Walter Scott—one of the most
incisive and sympathetic critics that ever pronounced judgment—of the
element of inspiration in every great writer of fiction. Experimentally
conscious of what was of value in his own case,—himself the great
Wizard of Fiction,—he would reason by analogy what would be of power
to inspire other men. If the poetic faculty were indispensable for the
production of _The Heart of Midlothian_ and _Ivanhoe_, equally would it
be needed in _Peregrine Pickle_ and _Humphrey Clinker_. That the poetic
stimulus is the most powerful of all, is a truth that has been remarked
times and oft. That it forms the true key to unlock the otherwise
elusive and self–centred character of Tobias George Smollett, has not,
I think, previously been noted.
To write Smollett’s life with absolute impartiality is more than
ordinarily difficult. The creator of _Roderick Random_ was one for whom
a generous charity would require to make more allowances than man is
commonly called upon to make for man. Actions and utterances that might
be and were mistaken for irritation and shortness of temper, were in
reality due to the impatience of genius, chafing under the restrictions
laid upon it by the mental torpor or intellectual sluggishness of
others. The eagle eye of his genius perceived intuitively what other
men generally attain only as the result of ratiocinative process.
Smollett has unjustly been characterised as bad–tempered, choleric,
supercilious, and the like, simply because the key was lacking to his
character. Far indeed from being any of these was he. Impatient without
doubt he was, but by no means in larger measure than Carlyle, Tennyson,
Dickens, Goethe, or Schiller, and the feeling is wrongly defined as
impatience. It is rather the desire to give less intellectually nimble
companions a fillip up in the mental race, that they may not lag so far
behind as to make intercourse a martyrdom.
Smollett’s distinguishing characteristic in the great gallery of
eighteenth–century novelists was his exhaustless fertility. In his four
great novels, _Roderick Random_, _Peregrine Pickle_, _Ferdinand Count
Fathom_, and _Humphrey Clinker_, he has employed as many incidents,
developed as many striking situations, and utilised as many happily
conceived accidents of time and place, as Richardson, Fielding, Sterne,
Henry Mackenzie, and Mrs. Radcliffe put together. His invention is
marvellously fertile, and as felicitous as fertile. He makes no attempt
to excel in what may be termed the ‘architectonic’ faculty, or the
symmetrical evolution and interweaving of plot. Incident succeeds
incident, fact follows fact, and scene, scene, in the most bewildering
profusion. There is a prodigality visible, nay, an intellectual waste,
indicative of an imaginative wealth almost unique since the days of
Homer. By some critics, following in the footsteps of Sir Walter
Scott, a curious vagary has been rendered fashionable of introducing
the method of comparative analysis into every literary judgment. In
place of declaring in plain, straightforward terms the reason why they
either admire or censure the works of a man of genius, they must now
drag in somebody else, with whom he is supposed to present points of
affinity or contrast, and they glibly descant on the attributes wherein
the author under consideration surpasses or falls short of his rival,
what elements and qualities of style the one possesses which the other
lacks, until in the end the reader is thoroughly befogged to know which
is which and who is who. The higher criticism has its place in literary
judgments as well as in theological, and the change is not for the
better.
Tobias George Smollett resembled William Shakespeare in one respect
if in no other—that a doubt exists as to the precise date of his
birth. The first mention made of the future novelist occurs in no birth
register that is known to exist, but in the parish record of baptisms
in connection with the parochial district of Cardross. Therein,
under the date 19th March 1721, we read: ‘Tobias George, son to Mr.
Archd. Smollett and Barbara Cunningham, was baptised.’ The day in
question was a Sunday, and, as Robert Chambers very properly remarks,
‘it may be inferred that the baptism took place, according to old
Scottish fashion, in the parish kirk.’ This tentative inference may
be changed into certainty when we recall the strict Presbyterianism
of his grandfather’s household, in whose eyes such an injunction as
the following, taken from _The Directory for the Public Worship of
God_, established by Act of General Assembly and Act of Parliament
in 1645, would be as sacredly binding as the laws of the Medes and
Persians:—‘Baptism, as it is not unnecessarily to be delayed, so it is
not to be administered in any case by any private person, ... nor is it
to be administered in private places or privately, but in the place of
public worship and in the face of the congregation.’
So much for the baptism. Now for the date of birth. Here only
second–hand evidence is forthcoming. In one of the unpublished letters
of John Home, author of _Douglas_, which it was recently my fortune to
see, he mentions a walk which Smollett and he had taken together during
the visit of the latter to London, when trying to get his first play,
_Agis_, accepted by the theatrical managers. During the course of the
walk Smollett mentioned the fact that his birthday had been celebrated
two days before. The date of their meeting was the 18th March 1750. If
reliance can be placed on this roundabout means of arriving at a fact,
Smollett’s birth took place on the 16th March 1721.
Genealogies are wearisome. Readers who desire to trace the family of
the Smolletts back to the sixteenth century can do so with advantage
in the Lives of Moore, Herbert, and Chambers. Our purpose is with
the novelist himself, not with his ancestors to the fourth and fifth
generations. Suffice it to say that Tobias George Smollett was the
son of Archibald, fourth son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, a
Dumbartonshire estate situated amidst the romantic scenery of the Vale
of Leven, and in the vicinity of the queen of Scottish lakes, Loch
Lomond.
Sir James Smollett, a stern old Whig of the Revolution type, to whom
‘Prelacy was only less tolerable than Popery, and the adherents of
both deserve hanging,’ had risked property, prospects, and life at
the time when James VII. staked his dynasty against a mass—and lost.
So prominent was the part Sir James Smollett took in influencing
public sentiment in favour of William and Mary, even while one of
the Commissaries or Consistorial Judges of Edinburgh, that the
grateful monarch knighted him, and the Earl of Argyll appointed him
deputy–lieutenant of Dumbartonshire.
A very different character was the novelist’s father. Archibald
Smollett seems to have been, in Scots parlance, ‘as _feckless_ as
his father was _fitty_.’ The characteristic of the rolling stone was
pre–eminently his. Consequently, as regards moss, in the shape of
worldly gear, he gathered not a stiver unto him. But that did not
trouble him. Like Charles Surface, his distresses were so many that
the only thing he could not afford to part with was his good spirits,
which, by the same token, chanced to be the only _good_ thing he had
about him. His health was bad, his morals were bad, his prospects were
bad,—for he never had been brought up to any profession, not having
the steadiness of application to make labour a pleasure; in a word, he
was one of those interesting individuals whose idleness enables his
Mephistophelic Majesty to make a strong bid for the fee–simple of their
soul.
Archibald Smollett, like most youths of good family, with whom, for
lack of employment, time hangs heavy on their hands, was not above
falling in love to lend a zest to the deadly _ennui_ of life. Whether
or no he obeyed Celia’s maxim on the matter, and did so ‘only to make
sport withal,’ is immaterial. The fact remains that, young though he
was, the love–making ended in matrimony. He had been sent to Leyden
to prosecute his studies—Leyden, whose University, from about 1680
to 1730, was the great finishing school of Europe, with the lustre
about it conferred by such professors as Arminius, Gomarus, Grotius,
Salmasius, Scaliger, and Boerhaave. From this seat of learning young
Archibald Smollett returned in ill health, but strong in his conviction
that it is not good for man to be alone. Principles are as empty air
if not reduced to practice. Archibald, therefore, electrified both
the old Commissary and his two celibate brothers by announcing, not
his intention to marry Barbara, the daughter of Mr. George Cunningham
of Gilbertfield, in the county of Lanark, but the fact of its already
having taken place. Probably, had the event been still in prospect,
the stern old judge would have found means to check the course of true
love on the score of his son’s feeble health. Sir James had read his
_Utopia_ to some purpose, and was a stickler for legal penalties being
attached to the union of persons of weak constitution. But there are
limits to the intervention of even a choleric Commissary, and not all
his indignation could put asunder what the Church had joined.
Passing wroth was the old man, doubtless, and tradition reports that he
considered carefully the alternatives—whether to cut off his amorously
inclined son with the proverbial shilling, and thereby set all the
gossips’ tongues in the district a–wagging over man’s inhumanity to
man, and that man a son, or to give him his blessing, along with a
small allowance, and thus keep the name of Smollett from becoming a
byword of reproach.
To induce him to adopt the latter alternative there were such reasons
as these: That Miss Barbara was a young lady of great beauty and
accomplishments—the Commissary had a weakness for a pretty face;
that her family was as old as the Smolletts, though, having fallen
upon evil days, it was not so influential; and finally, that the two
families had already intermarried about a century before, when the
Cunninghams, by the way, had been the more powerful of the two. The
old Commissary, therefore, gave the newly–wedded pair his blessing,
probably considering it better policy to bless than to ban what had
already been done. On the young pair he settled an annual allowance,
amounting, according to the present–day purchasing powers, to £250,
as well as the liferent of the farmhouse and lands of Dalquharn, on
the banks of the Leven, immediately adjoining the Bonhill estate. Well
done, old Commissary, thou wast wise in thy generation. To this day the
district speaks of ‘Good Sir James.’
But Sir James Smollett, if he imagined he had fulfilled all the duties
incumbent on him in the circumstances, and might thereafter forget the
existence of the inconvenient rolling stone, received a rude awakening.
The stone in question accomplished its last revolution by rolling out
of existence; in other words, Archibald Smollett died in 1721, having
only survived his marriage five years. He left a widow with three
young children, James, Jane, and Tobias, wholly dependent on their
grandfather’s bounty.
Of the cant of Puritanic Presbyterianism, of its gloomy severity, of
the frowns it casts on all harmless pursuits, we hear a great deal in
these days of cheap criticism and a ubiquitous press. That may be all
very true. There is, however, one thing in which the type never fails.
Once convince it of the binding nature of any social obligations, and
not all the desires of self, or the weaknesses of human nature, will be
allowed to stand in the way of its fulfilment. In such crucifixion of
self–interest there is conspicuous moral heroism. Of a type of nature
such as this was Sir James Smollett. With a sort of cynical sneer,
that if he were in for a penny he might as well be in for a pound, the
old gentleman continued the allowance to the young widow’s household,
though on a slightly reduced scale. Dalquharn, however, was still to be
the widow’s home, with liberty to make as much as she could out of the
farm. As she was a shrewd, capable woman, who knew the full value of a
shilling, and to whom the gospel of hard work was a living creed more
than a century before Thomas Carlyle preached it, the chances were all
in favour of her doing well. Nay, as the sequel proved, she did better
without her husband than with him, and speedily became, comparatively
speaking, a ‘well–to–do woman,’ as the Scots phrase has it.
It was this unquestioning obedience to those provisions of the Mosaic
law, ‘Ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child: if thou
afflict them in any wise, and they cry at all unto Me, I will surely
hear their cry,’ in which the old Commissary was a firm believer,
that rendered the position of the widow and her fatherless children
as secure as though they had been protected by as many deeds and
settlements as would have filled a muniment room. The consequence was
that, until she was no longer able to look after the farm, that is, up
to the time when Smollett was preparing to go to London, Mrs. Archibald
Smollett retained undisturbed possession of Dalquharn. She then went
to live with her daughter, who had married Mr. Telfer, a lessee of
some of the mines at Wanlockhead, and also proprietor of the estates
of Scotston in Peeblesshire and Symington in Lanarkshire. The old
Commissary, Sir James, was succeeded by his own son James, and then by
his son George’s eldest child, also called James, neither of whom left
any issue. Singularly enough, the present holders of the estates are
the descendants of Archibald Smollett and Barbara Cunningham; the other
branches of the house having become extinct. But by neither Sir James’s
son nor by his grandson was Mrs. Archibald’s allowance reduced.
Into this matter I have gone rather more fully than is warranted by
the space at my command. But I was anxious to clear the memory of Sir
James Smollett from an undeserved slur that has been cast on it by
some biographers, who have been smitten with the mania for reading
the facts of a man’s life into his works. In Smollett’s case, the
opening chapters of _Roderick Random_, and the character of ‘The
Judge’ in particular, have been assumed, on evidence the most slender,
as conveying a true picture of the novelist’s early relations to
his grandfather and uncles. But the statement, as express as it is
explicit, by Smollett himself shortly before his death, that the
scenes were written under a mistaken sense of wrong, and purposely
over–coloured from motives of pique and resentment that had no
foundation in fact, proves that young Smollett cherished mistaken ideas
of his own importance, a failing from which he suffered all his life,
in imagining slights where none were intended.
The childhood and early boyhood of the youthful Tobias would not,
therefore, be unhappy. Youth always looks at the sunny side of things.
If his fare were plain and coarse, it was at least plentiful; if his
attire were of the humblest, it was at least sufficient to keep out
the cold. At this age hope is the dearest possession, and what Allan
Ramsay said of his own youth may, _mutatis mutandis_, be applied to
Smollett’s—
‘Aft hae I wade thro’ glens wi’ chorking feet,
When neither plaid nor kilt could fend the weet
Yet blythely would I bang oot owre the brae,
And stend owre burns as light as ony rae,
Hoping the morn might prove a better day.’