Nothing could be more remote from the truth, or more unjustly cruel. Smollett had not here even the excuse of patriotism. Sir John Cope was no Butcher Cumberland. In fact the poet’s friend is not wrong, when, in “Reproof,” he calls Smollett “a flagrant misanthrope.” The world was out of joint for the cadet of Bonhill: both before and after his very trying experiences as a ship surgeon the managers would not accept “The Regicide.” This was reason good why Smollett should try to make a little money and notoriety by penning satires. They are fierce, foul-mouthed, and pointless. But Smollett was poor, and he was angry; he had the examples of Pope and Swift before him; which, as far as truculence went, he could imitate. Above all, it was then the fixed belief of men of letters that some peer or other ought to aid and support them; and, as no peer did support Smollett, obviously they were “varnished ruffians.” He erred as he would not err now, for times, and ways of going wrong, are changed. But, at best, how different are his angry couplets from the lofty melancholy of Johnson’s satires!
Smollett’s “small sum of money” did not permit him long to push the fortunes of his tragedy, in 1739; and as for his “very large assortment of letters of recommendation,” they only procured for him the post of surgeon’s mate in the Cumberland of the line. Here he saw enough of the horrors of naval life, enough of misery, brutality, and mismanagement, at Carthagena (1741), to supply materials for the salutary and sickening pages on that theme in “Roderick Random.” He also saw and appreciated the sterling qualities of courage, simplicity, and generosity, which he has made immortal in his Bowlings and Trunnions.
It is part of a novelist’s business to make one half of the world know how the other half lives; and in this province Smollett anticipated Dickens. He left the service as soon as he could, when the beaten fleet was refitting at Jamaica. In that isle he seems to have practised as a doctor; and he married, or was betrothed to, a Miss Lascelles, who had a small and far from valuable property. The real date of his marriage is obscure: more obscure are Smollett’s resources on his return to London, in 1744. Houses in Downing Street can never have been cheap, but we find “Mr. Smollett, surgeon in Downing Street, Westminster,” and, in 1746, he was living in May Fair, not a region for slender purses. His tragedy was now bringing in nothing but trouble, to himself and others. His satires cannot have been lucrative. As a dweller in May Fair he could not support himself, like his Mr. Melopoyn, by writing ballads for street singers. Probably he practised in his profession. In “Count Fathom” he makes his adventurer “purchase an old chariot, which was new painted for the occasion, and likewise hire a footman . . . This equipage, though much more expensive than his finances could bear, he found absolutely necessary to give him a chance of employment . . . A walking physician was considered as an obscure pedlar.” A chariot, Smollett insists, was necessary to “every raw surgeon”; while Bob Sawyer’s expedient of “being called from church” was already vieux jeu, in the way of advertisement. Such things had been “injudiciously hackneyed.” In this passage of Fathom’s adventures, Smollett proclaims his insight into methods of getting practice. A physician must ingratiate himself with apothecaries and ladies’ maids, or “acquire interest enough” to have an infirmary erected “by the voluntary subscriptions of his friends.” Here Smollett denounces hospitals, which “encourage the vulgar to be idle and dissolute, by opening an asylum to them and their families, from the diseases of poverty and intemperance.” This is odd morality for one who suffered from “the base indifference of mankind.” He ought to have known that poverty is not a vice for which the poor are to be blamed; and that intemperance is not the only other cause of their diseases. Perhaps the unfeeling passage is a mere paradox in the style of his own Lismahago.
With or without a chariot, it is probable that Tobias had not an insinuating style, or “a good bedside manner”; friends to support a hospital for his renown he had none; but, somehow, he could live in May Fair, and, in 1746, could meet Dr. Carlyle and Stewart, son of the Provost of Edinburgh, and other Scots, at the Golden Ball in Cockspur Street. There they were enjoying “a frugal supper and a little punch,” when the news of Culloden arrived. Carlyle had been a Whig volunteer: he, probably, was happy enough; but Stewart, whose father was in prison, grew pale, and left the room. Smollett and Carlyle then walked home through secluded streets, and were silent, lest their speech should bewray them for Scots. “John Bull,” quoth Smollett, “is as haughty and valiant to-day, as he was abject and cowardly on the Black Wednesday when the Highlanders were at Derby.”
“Weep, Caledonia, weep!” he had written in his tragedy. Now he wrote “Mourn, hapless Caledonia, mourn.” Scott has quoted, from Graham of Gartmore, the story of Smollett’s writing verses, while Gartmore and others were playing cards. He read them what he had written, “The Tears of Scotland,” and added the last verse on the spot, when warned that his opinions might give offence.
“Yes, spite of thine insulting foe,
My sympathising verse shall flow.”
The “Tears” are better than the “Ode to Blue-Eyed Ann,” probably Mrs. Smollett. But the courageous author of “The Tears of Scotland,” had manifestly broken with patrons. He also broke with Rich, the manager at Covent Garden, for whom he had written an opera libretto. He had failed as doctor, and as dramatist; nor, as satirist, had he succeeded. Yet he managed to wear wig and sword, and to be seen in good men’s company. Perhaps his wife’s little fortune supported him, till, in 1748, he produced “Roderick Random.” It is certain that we never find Smollett in the deep distresses of Dr. Johnson and Goldsmith. Novels were now in vogue; “Pamela” was recent, “Joseph Andrews” was yet more recent, “Clarissa Harlowe” had just appeared, and Fielding was publishing “Tom Jones.” Smollett, too, tried his hand, and, at last, he succeeded.
His ideas of the novel are offered in his preface. The Novel, for him, is a department of Satire; “the most entertaining and universally improving.” To Smollett, “Roderick Random” seemed an “improving” work! Où le didacticisme va t’il se nicher? Romance, he declares, “arose in ignorance, vanity, and superstition,” and declined into “the ludicrous and unnatural.” Then Cervantes “converted romance to purposes far more useful and entertaining, by making it assume the sock, and point out the follies of ordinary life.” Romance was to revive again some twenty years after its funeral oration was thus delivered. As for Smollett himself, he professedly “follows the plan” of Le Sage, in “Gil Blas” (a plan as old as Petronius Arbiter, and the “Golden Ass” of Apuleius); but he gives more place to “compassion,” so as not to interfere with “generous indignation, which ought to animate the reader against the sordid and vicious disposition of the world.” As a contrast to sordid vice, we are to admire “modest merit” in that exemplary orphan, Mr. Random. This gentleman is a North Briton, because only in North Britain can a poor orphan get such an education as Roderick’s “birth and character require,” and for other reasons. Now, as for Roderick, the schoolmaster “gave himself no concern about the progress I made,” but, “should endeavour, with God’s help, to prevent my future improvement.” It must have been at Glasgow University, then, that Roderick learned “Greek very well, and was pretty far advanced in the mathematics,” and here he must have used his genius for the belles lettres, in the interest of his “amorous complexion,” by “lampooning the rivals” of the young ladies who admired him.
Such are the happy beginnings, accompanied by practical jokes, of this interesting model. Smollett’s heroes, one conceives, were intended to be fine, though not faultless young fellows; men, not plaster images; brave, generous, free-living, but, as Roderick finds once, when examining his conscience, pure from serious stains on that important faculty. To us these heroes often appear no better than ruffians; Peregrine Pickle, for example, rather excels the infamy of Ferdinand, Count Fathom, in certain respects; though Ferdinand is professedly “often the object of our detestation and abhorrence,” and is left in a very bad, but, as “Humphrey Clinker” shows, in by no means a hopeless way. Yet, throughout, Smollett regarded himself as a moralist, a writer of improving tendencies; one who “lashed the vices of the age.” He was by no means wholly mistaken, but we should probably wrong the eighteenth century if we accepted all Smollett’s censures as entirely deserved. The vices which he lashed are those which he detected, or fancied that he detected, in people who regarded a modest and meritorious Scottish orphan with base indifference. Unluckily the greater part of mankind was guilty of this crime, and consequently was capable of everything.
Enough has probably been said about the utterly distasteful figure of Smollett’s hero. In Chapter LX. we find him living on the resources of Strap, then losing all Strap’s money at play, and then “I bilk my taylor.” That is, Roderick orders several suits of new clothes, and sells them for what they will fetch. Meanwhile Strap can live honestly anywhere, while he has his ten fingers. Roderick rescues himself from poverty by engaging, with his uncle, in the slave trade. We are apt to consider this commerce infamous. But, in 1763, the Evangelical director who helped to make Cowper “a castaway,” wrote, as to the slaver’s profession: “It is, indeed, accounted a genteel employment, and is usually very profitable, though to me it did not prove so, the Lord seeing that a large increase of wealth could not be good for me.” The reverend gentleman had, doubtless, often sung—