VISIT TO SCOTLAND—_THE CRITICAL REVIEW_—_THE REPRISAL_. 1755–1759.
Smollett was from this time forward plunged into a sea of pecuniary
troubles, wherein, with little mitigation, he remained as long as life
lasted. The year 1754, wherein he had to meet the costs of the action
for assault brought against him by Gordon, seems to have been the one
wherein his distresses culminated. For some time he was in danger of
arrest. He skulked about London like ‘a thief at large,’ ever afraid
of feeling a hand on his shoulder, and of beholding a bailiff ready
to conduct him to the ‘sponging–house.’ For some years his monetary
difficulties, like a snowball, had been always increasing. In his Life
of Smollett, Dr. Robert Chambers has drawn a painful picture of the
great genius fretting like some noble steed condemned to pack–horse
duty, at the unworthy tasks he was obliged to undertake. Yet five out
of every six of his embarrassments were the result of his own folly
and extravagance. A man has to cut his coat according to his cloth.
Smollett would never consent to exercise present economy to avoid
future embarrassment. In a letter dated 1752 he complains of lack
of money through failure of his West India revenue. The income from
his wife’s property was now greatly decreased, while what remained
was frittered away on vexatious lawsuits. ‘Curse the law!’ he cried
impatiently on one occasion, ‘it has damned more honest men to
lifelong drudgery than anything else.’ In another letter, in May 1753,
addressed to his friend Dr. Macaulay, he acknowledges having received
a previous loan of £15, but begs for the favour of another £50 to save
him from serious difficulty. He promises payment from the proceeds of
some work he then had in hand, probably _Don Quixote_. By a bankruptcy
he had lost £180, and was obliged to immediately discount a note of
hand of Provost Drummond’s, at a sacrifice of sixty per cent., in
place of waiting for the due–date. In December 1754 he again laments
the failure of remittances from Jamaica and of actual extremities. So
far down was he, that he was compelled to write to his brother–in–law,
Mr. Telfer, begging the favour of a loan, which after some delay he
received. All these accumulated distresses weighed upon his spirits.
‘My life is sheer slavery,’ he wrote to one of his friends; ‘my pen is
at work from nine o’ the clock the one morning until one or two the
next. I might as well be in Grub Street.’ Still he toiled on, though
he realised that the work he was doing was far from being worthy of
him. As Anderson says: ‘The booksellers were his principal resource for
employment and subsistence; for them he held the pen of a ready writer
in the walk of general literature, and towards him they were as liberal
as the patronage of the public enabled them to be. They were almost his
only patrons; and, indeed, a more generous set of men can hardly be
pointed out in the trading world. By their liberality, wit and learning
have perhaps received more ample and more substantial encouragement
than from all their princely and noble patrons.’
Darker and ever darker grows the picture. Whether or not Mrs. Smollett
was a poor housewife, or whether Smollett’s own extravagances were
wholly to blame, certain it is that from the period we have now reached
until his not unwelcome release from life came in 1771, there was no
ease for the toiling hand, no rest for the weary brow of the great
novelist. His daily ‘darg’ had to be accomplished whether in sickness
or in health; his daily tale of bricks to be handed in, if the rod of
poverty’s stern task–mistress was to be averted from his shoulders,
or the wolf of want driven from the door. But, alas, at what an
expenditure of brain tissue was it achieved! He knew he was unable to
take time to produce his best work, and the saddening consciousness
weighed ever more heavily upon him. In March 1755, accordingly, there
appeared his translation of the _History of the Renowned Don Quixote;
from the Spanish of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, with some Account
of the Author’s life, illustrated with 28 new copperplates, designed
by Hayman and engraved by the best Artists_. The volumes, which were
in quarto, were two in number, and were issued by Rivington, being
dedicated by permission to Don Ricardo Wall, Principal Secretary of
State to His Most Catholic Majesty, who, while he was resident in
London as Spanish Ambassador, had exhibited much interest in the work.
Though accomplished Spanish scholars, according to Moore, have accused
Smollett of not having had a sufficient knowledge of the language
when he undertook the task, for to perform it perfectly it would be
requisite that the translator had lived some years in Spain, that he
had obtained not only a knowledge of the Court and of polite society,
but an acquaintance also with the vulgar idioms, the proverbs in use
among the populace, and the various customs of the country to which
allusions are made; still the fact remains that Smollett’s translation
has never been superseded, and that it at once threw into the shade
the previous renderings of Motteux and Jervis. Lord Woodhouselee, in
his _Essay on the Principles of Translation_, has endeavoured, with
a strange perversity of taste, to depreciate Smollett’s version in
favour of that of Motteux. But the verdict of time has proved how
egregiously he was in the wrong. Smollett’s short ‘Advertisement’ to
the work manifests the principles according to which he prosecuted
his translation. He states that his ‘aim in this undertaking was to
maintain that ludicrous solemnity and self–importance by which the
inimitable Cervantes has distinguished the character of Don Quixote,
without raising him to the insipid rank of a dry philosopher or
debasing him to the melancholy circumstances and unentertaining caprice
of an ordinary madman; to preserve the native humour of Sancho Panza
from degenerating into mere proverbial phlegm or affected buffoonery;
that the author has endeavoured to retain the spirit and ideas without
servilely adhering to the literal expressions of the original,
from which, however, he has not so far deviated as to destroy that
formality of idiom so peculiar to the Spaniards, and so essential to
the character of the work.’ It is not often that genius is brought to
the service of translation. When it is, however, as in the case of
Lord Berners’ _Froissart_ and Smollett’s _Don Quixote_, the result
is memorable. Smollett, alas! reaped little immediate benefit from
its publication. The work had been contracted and paid for five years
before!
No sooner did he get this portion of his stipulated labour off his
hands, than he determined to visit his relatives in Scotland. His
heart yearned to see his mother. Fifteen years had passed since the
raw lad, with his tragedy in his pocket, had set out for London, as
he fondly hoped, conquering and to conquer. He now returned to his
native country the pale, weary, toil–worn man, older–looking than his
years by at least a decade. Dr. Moore relates the pathetic scene of the
recognition of her celebrated son by the aged mother, then living with
her daughter, Mrs. Telfer, at Scotston. Let us quote Dr. Moore’s words:
‘With the connivance of Mrs. Telfer, on his arrival, he was introduced
to his mother as a gentleman from the West Indies who had been
intimately acquainted with her son. The better to support his assumed
character, he endeavoured to preserve a very serious countenance,
approaching a frown; but while the old lady’s eyes were riveted with a
kind of wild and eager stare on his countenance, he could not refrain
from smiling. She immediately sprang from her chair, and, throwing her
arms around his neck, exclaimed, “Ah, my son, my son, I have found
you at last.” She afterwards told him that if he had kept his austere
look, and continued to _gloom_, as she called it, he might have escaped
detection some time longer; “but your old roguish smile,” added she,
“betrayed you at once.”’
Smollett returned to his native country under very different
circumstances from those under which he left it. Then, his family
connections were anxious to get rid of him, rejoiced, in fact, to see
him launched upon any profession that would remove him from their
midst. He left, a poor, lonely, depressed, yet at the same time
high–spirited lad, eating his heart out owing to the necessity for
showing respect to those who lacked the one claim to it acknowledged by
him—intellectual eminence. Now he returned, the most popular, perhaps,
for the time being, of any of the three great masters of British
fiction—a ‘lion,’ with whom to hold intercourse was an honour indeed.
That Smollett was not wholly without feelings of this nature, his
letters evince. ‘I have returned a little better than when I set out,’
he is reported to have said to John Home as they walked together down
the Canongate of Edinburgh.
His reception in the Scots metropolis, from which Scotston is distant
only some twenty–three miles, was gratifying in the extreme. Smollett
had the advantage of seeing the town in all its antiquity before the
migration of the better classes took place to George Square and to
‘the New Town’ across the Nor’ Loch. In 1756 it was still the quaint,
formal, interesting, self–assertive place it had been before the Union
in 1707. Here is a description of it by Gilbert Elliot, one of the
Lords of the Admiralty, and one of the few friends Smollett had who
were connected with the Government. ‘I love the town tolerably well;
there is one fine street, and the houses are extremely high. The gentry
are a very sensible set of people, and some of them in their youth
seem to have known the world; but by being too long in a place their
notions are contracted and their faces are become solemn. The Faculty
of Advocates is a very learned and a very worthy body. As for the
ladies, they are unexceptionable, innocent, beautiful, and of an easy
conversation. The staple vices of the place are censoriousness and
hypocrisy. There is here no allowance for levity, none for dissipation.
I am not a bit surprised I do not find here that unconstrained noble
way of thinking and talking which one every day meets with among young
fellows of plentiful fortunes and good spirits, who are constantly
moving in a more enlarged circle of company.’
With Dr. ‘Jupiter’ Carlyle of Inveresk he renewed that acquaintance
begun some years before, when neither of them had attained the fame
that came to them in the course of time. Carlyle introduced him to
many of his influential friends, and, in consequence, Smollett’s visit
to Edinburgh proved an exceedingly happy one. ‘It was also in one of
these days that Smollett visited Scotland for the first time,’ says
Carlyle, ‘after having left Glasgow immediately after his education was
finished, and his engaging as a surgeon’s mate on board a man–of–war,
which gave him an opportunity of witnessing the siege of Carthagena,
which he has so minutely described in his _Roderick Random_. He came
out to Musselburgh and passed a day and a night with me, and went
to church and heard me preach. I introduced him to Cardonnel the
Commissioner (of Customs), with whom he supped, and they were much
pleased with each other. Smollett has reversed this in his _Humphrey
Clinker_, where he makes the Commissioner his old acquaintance. He
went next to Glasgow and that neighbourhood to visit his friends, and
returned again to Edinburgh in October, when I had frequent meetings
with him, one in particular in a tavern, where there supped with him
and Commissioner Cardonnel, Mr. Hepburn of Keith, John Home, and one or
two more.... Cardonnel and I went with Smollett to Sir David Kinloch’s
and passed the day, when John Home and Logan and I conducted him to
Dunbar, where we stayed together all night.’
Smollett’s picture of the Edinburgh of his time in _Humphrey Clinker_
is exceedingly graphic. ‘In the evening we arrived,’ writes Melford,
‘at this metropolis, of which I can say but very little. It is very
romantic from its situation on the declivity of a hill, having a
fortified castle at the top and a royal palace at the bottom. The first
thing that strikes the nose of a stranger shall be nameless; but what
first strikes the eye is the unconscionable height of the houses, which
generally rise to five, six, seven, and eight storeys, and in some
cases, as I am assured, to twelve. This manner of building, attended
by numberless inconveniences, must have been originally owing to want
of room. Certain it is the town seems to be full of people.’ In the
next letter Matthew Bramble adds: ‘Every storey is a complete house
occupied by a separate family, and the stair being common to them
all is generally left in a very filthy condition; a man must tread
with great circumspection to get safe housed with unpolluted shoes.
Nothing, however, can form a stronger contrast between the outside and
inside of the door, for the good women of this metropolis are very
nice in the ornaments and propriety of their apartments, as if they
were resolved to transfer the imputation from the individual to the
public. You are no stranger to their method of discharging all their
impurities from their windows at a certain hour of the night, as the
custom is in Spain, Portugal, and other parts of France and Italy; a
practice to which I can by no means be reconciled, for, notwithstanding
all the care that is taken by their scavengers to remove this nuisance
every morning by break of day, enough still remains to offend the
eyes as well as the other organs of those whom use has not hardened
against all delicacy of sensation.’ Nor can we omit what the inimitable
Winnifred Jenkins—the prototype and model of all future _soubrettes_
in fiction—says on the subject: ‘And now, dere Mary, we have got to
Haddingborough (Edinburgh) among the Scots, who are cevel enuff for
our money, thof I don’t speak their lingo. But they should not go
for to impose on foreigners, for the bills on their houses say they
have different _easements_ to let; but behold there is nurra geaks in
the whole kingdom, nor anything for pore sarvants, but a barril with
a pair of tongs thrown across, and all the chairs in the family are
emptied into this here barril once a day, and at ten o’clock at night
the whole cargo is flung out of a back windore that looks into some
street or lane, and the Made cries “Gardyloo” to the passengers, which
signerfies, “Lord have mercy upon you,” and this is done every night
in every house in Haddingborough, so you may guess, Mary Jones, what a
sweet savour comes from such a number of profuming pans. But they say
it is wholesome; and truly I believe it is; for being in the vapours
and thinking of Issabel (Jezabel) and Mr. Clinker, I was going into
a fit of astericks when this fiff, saving your presence, took me by
the nose so powerfully that I sneezed three times and found myself
wonderfully refreshed; this, to be sure, is the raisin why there are no
fits in Haddingborough.’
From Edinburgh, Smollett, as we have seen, proceeded to Dumbartonshire,
and then to Glasgow. His cousin was still laird of Bonhill, and
welcomed him with much warmth back to the scene of his early years. In
Glasgow he renewed his acquaintance with Dr. Moore, who had succeeded
him as apprentice with Mr. Gordon, and was now a physician of repute in
the western metropolis. With the latter he remained two days, renewing
old associations both at the College and elsewhere. Unfortunately, very
little information can be gleaned regarding this visit of Smollett’s to
Glasgow. Moore dismisses it in two or three lines, and every succeeding
biographer, Anderson, Walter Scott, Chambers, Herbert, and Hannay,
although mayhap spinning out a few more sentences, really do not add a
tittle to our facts.
On returning to Edinburgh in October, he was welcomed by all the
_literati_ of the capital, and was specially invited to a meeting
of the famous _Select Society_,[6] first mooted by Allan Ramsay the
painter, as Mr. John Rae tells us in his _Life of Adam Smith_; but
the fifteen original members of which had increased well–nigh to a
hundred, comprising all the best–known names in literature, philosophy,
science, and the arts. There he met or saw Kames and Monboddo (not
yet ‘paper lords’ or lords of Session), Robertson and Ferguson and
Hume, Carlyle and John Home, Dr. Blair, Wilkie of the _Epigoniad_,
Wallace the statistician, Islay Campbell and Thomas Miller of the Court
of Session, the Earls of Sutherland, Hopetoun, Marchmont, Morton,
Rosebery, Errol, Aboyne, Cassilis, Selkirk, Glasgow, and Lauderdale;
Lords Elibank, Gray, Garlies, Auchinleck, and Hailes; John Adam the
architect, Dr. Cullen, John Coutts the banker, and many others.[7]
The Society met every Friday evening from six to nine, at first in a
room in the Advocates’ Library, but when that became too small for the
numbers that began to attend its meetings, in a room hired from the
Masonic Lodge above the Laigh Council House; and its debates, in which
the younger advocates and ministers, men like Wedderburn and Robertson,
took the chief part, became speedily famous over all Scotland, as
intellectual displays to which neither the General Assembly of the Kirk
nor the Imperial Parliament could show anything to rival.
On returning to London, Smollett at once threw himself into the
feverish excitement and worry of a journalistic life. In other words,
he assumed the editorship of the new _Critical Review_, representative
of High Church and Tory principles. This periodical, with its older
rival, the _Monthly Review_ (started by Griffiths in 1749 as the Whig
organ), may be considered the prototypes of that plentiful crop of
monthly magazines wherewith we are furnished to–day. The _Critical
Review_ was the property of a man named Hamilton, a Scotsman, whose
enlightenment and liberality, remarks Herbert, had been proved by his
listening to Chatterton’s request for a little money, by sending it to
him and telling him he should have more if he wanted it. The _Critical
Review_ for its age was really a very creditable production, though
there was little to choose between the rivals as to merit, for the
_Monthly_, at the date of the founding of its antagonist, was edited
by a young man of surpassing ability, who won for himself a name in
English literature even more distinguished than Smollett’s—Oliver
Goldsmith. Thus the authors of the _Vicar of Wakefield_ and of
_Peregrine Pickle_—compositions wide as the poles apart in
character—were thrown into rivalry with each other. That it was a
rivalry embittered by any of the rancour and acrimony distinguishing
Smollett’s future journalistic relations with John Wilkes, cannot be
supposed, inasmuch as Goldsmith contributed several articles to the
_Critical Review_, and as a return compliment Smollett four, at least,
to the _Monthly_. The proprietors of the opposing periodicals may have
had their squabbles and bespattered each other with foul names, but the
editors seem to have been on the most amicable of terms and to have
united in anathematising both parties.
Much of Smollett’s time was frittered away on work for the _Review_
which would have been more remuneratively employed in other fields.
But the pot had to be kept boiling, and there was but little fuel in
reserve wherewith to feed the fire. He was far from making an ideal
editor,—indeed, to tell the plain truth, he made an exceedingly
bad one. He never kept his staff of contributors in hand. They were
permitted to air their own grievances and to revenge their own quarrels
in the _Review_. His criticisms, also, are very one–sided. The remarks
on John Home’s _Douglas_, though true so far, are much too sweeping
in their generalisations. The play has many merits, but the _Critical
Review_ would fain persuade one it had next to none. The same remarks
are true of Wilkie’s _Epigoniad_, by no means a work of great genius,
but deserving better things said of it than the _Critical_ meted out.
With respect to the criticism on Dr. Grainger, the writer simply
displayed the grossest and most culpable ignorance and impertinence
towards the productions of a learned and refined Englishman. In a
word, the injustice, the intemperance of language, and the inexcusable
blunders which characterised Smollett’s occupancy of the editorial
chair of the _Critical Review_, caused it to be deservedly reprobated
by those who admired justice and fair play, to say nothing of cultured
criticism.
In one case, however, he was clearly in the right. A certain Admiral
Knowles, who had so disgracefully failed in conducting to a successful
issue the secret expedition to Rochelle in 1757, along with Sir John
Mordaunt, wrote a pamphlet to justify his actions in the face of the
storm of condemnation raised against him after a court–martial had
acquitted Mordaunt. This pamphlet fell into Smollett’s hands, who
characterised the writer as ‘an admiral without conduct, an engineer
without knowledge, an officer without resolution, and a man without
veracity.’ Knowles entered an action against the printer, giving as
his reason ‘his desire to find out the writer, in order to obtain the
satisfaction of a gentleman, if the writer’s character would admit of
it.’ On Smollett learning this, he at once came forward, acknowledged
himself as the writer, and declared his willingness to meet the admiral
with any weapons he chose. But the latter was a poltroon and a coward.
He had obtained a judgment of the Court, and he sheltered himself under
it. Smollett was mulcted in £100, and in 1759 sentenced to three
months’ imprisonment. Knowles seems to have merited Sir Walter Scott’s
severe terms of reprobation: ‘How the admiral reconciled his conduct to
the rules usually observed by gentlemen we are not informed, but the
proceedings seem to justify even Smollett’s strength of expressions.’
But we have suffered our account of his relations to the _Critical
Review_ to run ahead of the narrative of his life. For several
years the works he published were mostly hack–compilations for the
booksellers. The most notable among these was _A Compendium of
Authentic and Entertaining Voyages_, exhibiting a clear view of the
Customs, Manners, Religion, Government, Commerce, and Natural History
of most nations of the world, illustrated with a variety of Maps,
Charts, etc., in 7 vols. 12mo. To this day Smollett’s collection
is read with appreciation, and only two years ago another edition
(abridged) was published of this most interesting and instructive work.
Immense as was the reading and investigation required for such a
compilation, Smollett cheerfully gave it, and really there are
extraordinarily few errors in it notwithstanding the rapidity wherewith
it had been produced. The publisher was Dodsley, and among the voyages
recorded are those of Vasco da Gama, Pedro de Cabral, Magellan,
Drake, Raleigh, Rowe, Monk, James, Nieuhoff, Wafer, Dampier, Gemelli,
Rogers, Anson, etc., with the histories of the Conquest of Mexico and
Peru. Also included therein was his own account of the expedition to
Carthagena.
Some time before this Smollett had inserted in the _Critical Review_
the following panegyric on Garrick, evidently intended to compensate
for his bitter reflections on him in _Roderick Random_ and _The
Regicide_. Smollett’s eyes were being opened to the more correct
estimate of his own powers. Accordingly he wrote: ‘We often see this
inimitable actor labouring through five tedious acts to support a
lifeless piece, with a mixture of pity and indignation, and cannot help
wishing there were in his age good poets to write for one who so well
deserves them. He has the art, like the Lydian king, of turning all he
touches into gold, and can ensure applause to every fortunate bard.’
Was the wish father to the deed? Be this as it may, within a short time
Garrick accepted Smollett’s comedy of _The Reprisal_, or _The Tars of
Old England_, an afterpiece in two acts. The year 1757–58 had been a
period of national disaster. Smollett, indignant at the timorous policy
of the Government of the day, wrote the comedy in question to rouse the
warlike spirit of the nation. The prologue begins—
‘What eye will fail to glow, what eye to brighten,
When Britain’s wrath aroused begins to lighten,
Her thunders roll—her fearless sons advance,
And her red ensigns wave o’er the pale flowers of France;
Her ancient splendour England shall maintain,
O’er distant realms extend her genial reign,
And rise the unrivall’d empress of the main.’
_The Reprisal_ was performed at Drury Lane with great success, and
Garrick’s conduct on the occasion was generous in the extreme. It
laid the foundations of a lifelong friendship between the two. The
piece was afterwards published, and for some time held the stage as a
‘curtain–raiser’ or ‘curtain–dropper,’ but is now entirely forgotten.
At this period Smollet was on terms of intimate friendship with the
famous John Wilkes, who has been often called ‘the first Radical.’ With
Samuel Johnson also he had some friendly intercourse, though they were
too alike to desire a great deal of intimate association with each
other. Smollett, however, through his influence with Wilkes, was able
to obtain the release of Dr. Johnson’s black servant, Francis Barber,
who had been impressed and put on board the _Stag_ frigate. On the
occasion Smollett wrote to Wilkes in the following terms:—
‘CHELSEA, _March 16, 1759_.
‘I am again your petitioner in behalf of that Great Cham of literature,
Samuel Johnson. His black servant, whose name is Francis Barber, has
been pressed on board the _Stag_ frigate, Captain Angel, and our
lexicographer is in great distress. He says the boy is a sickly lad of
a delicate frame, and particularly subject to a malady in the throat,
which renders him very unfit for His Majesty’s service. You know what
manner of animosity the said Johnson has against you, and I daresay you
desire no other opportunity of resenting it than that of laying him
under an obligation.’
The application was successful, and Francis Barber returned to the
lexicographer’s service. Dr. Johnson always spoke of Dr. Smollett
thereafter with great respect:—‘A scholarly man, sir, although a
Scot.’