The great English novelists of the eighteenth century turned the course of English Literature out of its older channel. Her streams had descended from the double peaks of Parnassus to irrigate the enamelled fields and elegant parterres of poetry and the drama, as the critics of the period might have said. But Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne, diverted the waters, from poetry and plays, into the region of the novel, whither they have brought down a copious alluvial deposit. Modern authors do little but till this fertile Delta: the drama is now in the desert, poetry is a drug, and fiction is literature. Among the writers who made this revolution, Smollett is, personally, the least well known to the world, despite the great part which autobiography and confessions play in his work. He is always talking about himself, and introducing his own experiences. But there is little evidence from without; his extant correspondence is scanty; he was not in Dr. Johnson’s circle, much less was he in that of Horace Walpole. He was not a popular man, and probably he has long ceased to be a popular author. About 1780 the vendors of children’s books issued abridgments of “Tom Jones” and “Pamela,” “Clarissa” and “Joseph Andrews,” adapted to the needs of infant minds. It was a curious enterprise, certainly, but the booksellers do not seem to have produced “Every Boy’s Roderick Random,” or “Peregrine Pickle for the Young.” Smollett, in short, is less known than Fielding and Sterne, even Thackeray says but a word about him, in the “English Humorists,” and he has no place in the series of “English Men of Letters.”
What we know of Smollett reveals a thoroughly typical Scot of his period; a Scot of the species absolutely opposed to Sir Pertinax Macsycophant, and rather akin to the species of Robert Burns. “Rather akin,” we may say, for Smollett, like Burns, was a humorist, and in his humour far from dainty; he was a personal satirist, and a satirist far from chivalrous. Like Burns, too, he was a poet of independence; like Burns, and even more than Burns, in a time of patronage he was recalcitrant against patrons. But, unlike Burns, he was farouche to an extreme degree; and, unlike Burns, he carried very far his prejudices about his “gentrice,” his gentle birth. Herein he is at the opposite pole from the great peasant poet.
Two potent characteristics of his country were at war within him. There was, first, the belief in “gentrice,” in a natural difference of kind between men of coat armour and men without it. Thus Roderick Random, the starving cadet of a line of small lairds, accepts the almost incredible self-denial and devotion of Strap as merely his due. Prince Charles could not have taken the devotion of Henry Goring, or of Neil MacEachain, more entirely as a matter of course, involving no consideration in return, than Roderick took the unparalleled self-sacrifice of his barber friend and school-mate. Scott has remarked on this contemptuous and ungrateful selfishness, and has contrasted it with the relations of Tom Jones and Partridge. Of course, it is not to be assumed that Smollett would have behaved like Roderick, when, “finding the fire in my apartment almost extinguished, I vented my fury upon poor Strap, whose ear I pinched with such violence that he roared hideously with pain . . . ” To be sure Roderick presently “felt unspeakable remorse . . . foamed at the mouth, and kicked the chairs about the room.” Now Strap had rescued Roderick from starvation, had bestowed on him hundreds of pounds, and had carried his baggage, and dined on his leavings. But Strap was not gently born! Smollett would not, probably, have acted thus, but he did not consider such conduct a thing out of nature.
On the other side was Smollett’s Scottish spirit of independence. As early as 1515, James Ingles, chaplain of Margaret Tudor, wrote to Adam Williamson, “You know the use of this country. . . . The man hath more words than the master, and will not be content except he know the master’s counsel. There is no order among us.” Strap had the instinct of feudal loyalty to a descendant of a laird. But Smollett boasts that, being at the time about twenty, and having burdened a nobleman with his impossible play, “The Regicide,” “resolved to punish his barbarous indifference, and actually discarded my Patron.” He was not given to “booing” (in the sense of bowing), but had, of all known Scots, the most “canty conceit o’ himsel’.” These qualities, with a violence of temper which took the form of beating people when on his travels, cannot have made Smollett a popular character. He knew his faults, as he shows in the dedication of “Ferdinand, Count Fathom,” to himself. “I have known you trifling, superficial, and obstinate in dispute; meanly jealous and awkwardly reserved; rash and haughty in your resentment; and coarse and lowly in your connections.”
He could, it is true, on occasion, forgive (even where he had not been wronged), and could compensate, in milder moods, for the fierce attacks made in hours when he was “meanly jealous.” Yet, in early life at least, he regarded his own Roderick Random as “modest and meritorious,” struggling nobly with the difficulties which beset a “friendless orphan,” especially from the “selfishness, envy, malice, and base indifference of mankind.” Roderick himself is, in fact, the incarnation of the basest selfishness. In one of his adventures he is guilty of that extreme infamy which the d’Artagnan of “The Three Musketeers” and of the “Memoirs” committed, and for which the d’Artagnan of Le Vicomte de Bragelonne took shame to himself. While engaged in a virtuous passion, Roderick not only behaves like a vulgar debauchee, but pursues the meanest arts of the fortune-hunter who is ready to marry any woman for her money. Such is the modest and meritorious orphan, and mankind now carries its “base indifference” so far, that Smollett’s biographer, Mr. Hannay, says, “if Roderick had been hanged, I, for my part, should have heard the tidings unmoved . . . Smollett obviously died without realising how nearly the hero, who was in some sort a portrait of himself, came to being a ruffian.”
Dr. Carlyle, in 1758, being in London, found Smollett “much of a humorist, and not to be put out of his way.” A “humorist,” here, means an overbearingly eccentric person, such as Smollett, who lived much in a society of literary dependants, was apt to become. But Dr. Carlyle also found that, though Smollett “described so well the characters of ruffians and profligates,” he did not resemble them. Dr. Robertson, the historian, “expressed great surprise at his polished and agreeable manners, and the great urbanity of his conversation.” He was handsome in person, as his portrait shows, but his “nervous system was exceedingly irritable and subject to passion,” as he says in the Latin account of his health which, in 1763, he drew up for the physician at Montpellier. Though, when he chose, he could behave like a man of breeding, and though he undeniably had a warm heart for his wife and daughter, he did not always choose to behave well. Except Dr. Moore, his biographer, he seems to have had few real friends during most of his career.
As to persons whom he chose to regard as his enemies, he was beyond measure rancorous and dangerous. From his first patron, Lord Lyttelton, to his last, he pursued them with unscrupulous animosity. If he did not mean actually to draw portraits of his grandfather, his cousins, his school-master, and the apothecary whose gallipots he attended—in “Roderick Random,”—yet he left the originals who suggested his characters in a very awkward situation. For assuredly he did entertain a spite against his grandfather: and as many of the incidents in “Roderick Random” were autobiographical, the public readily inferred that others were founded on fact.
The outlines of Smollett’s career are familiar, though gaps in our knowledge occur. Perhaps they may partly be filled up by the aid of passages in his novels, plays, and poems: in these, at all events, he describes conditions and situations through which he himself may, or must, have passed.
Born in 1721, he was a younger son of Archibald, a younger son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, a house on the now polluted Leven, between Loch Lomond and the estuary of the Clyde. Smollett’s father made an imprudent marriage: the grandfather provided a small, but competent provision for him and his family, during his own life. The father, Archibald, died; the grandfather left nothing to the mother of Tobias and her children, but they were assisted with scrimp decency by the heirs. Hence the attacks on the grandfather and cousins of Roderick Random: but, later, Smollett returned to kinder feelings.
In some ways Tobias resembled his old grandsire. About 1710 that gentleman wrote a Memoir of his own life. Hence we learn that he, in childhood, like Roderick Random, was regarded as “a clog and burden,” and was neglected by his father, ill-used by his step-mother. Thus Tobias had not only his own early poverty to resent, but had a hereditary grudge against fortune, and “the base indifference of mankind.” The old gentleman was lodged “with very hard and penurious people,” at Glasgow University. He rose in the world, and was a good Presbyterian Whig, but “had no liberty” to help to forfeit James II. “The puir child, his son” (James III. and VIII.), “if he was really such, was innocent, and it were hard to do anything that would touch the son for the father’s fault.” The old gentleman, therefore, though a Member of Parliament, evaded attending the first Parliament after the Union: “I had no freedom to do it, because I understood that the great business to be agitated therein was to make laws for abjuring the Pretender . . . which I could not go in with, being always of opinion that it was hard to impose oaths on people who had not freedom to take them.”