For the sake of pleasure, or of new experiences, or of economy, Smollett went to Paris in 1750, where he met Dr. Moore, later his biographer, the poetical Dr. Akenside, and an affected painter. He introduced the poet and painter into “Peregrine Pickle”; and makes slight use of a group of exiled Jacobites, including Mr. Hunter of Burnside. In 1750, there were Jacobites enough in the French capital, all wondering very much where Prince Charles might be, and quite unconscious that he was their neighbour in a convent in the Rue St. Dominique. Though Moore does not say so (he is provokingly economical of detail), we may presume that Smollett went wandering in Flanders, as does Peregrine Pickle. It is curious that he should introduce a Capucin, a Jew, and a black-eyed damsel, all in the Ghent diligence, when we know that Prince Charles did live in Ghent, with the black-eyed Miss Walkenshaw, did go about disguised as a Capucin, and was tracked by a Jewish spy, while the other spy, Young Glengarry, styled himself “Pickle.” But all those events occurred about a year after the novel was published in 1751.
Before that date Smollett had got an M.D. degree from Aberdeen University, and, after returning from France, he practised for a year or two at Bath. But he could not expect to be successful among fashionable invalids, and, in “Humphrey Clinker,” he make Matthew Bramble give such an account of the Bath waters as M. Zola might envy. He was still trying to gain ground in his profession, when, in March 1751, Mr. D. Wilson published the first edition of “Peregrine Pickle” “for the Author,” unnamed. I have never seen this first edition, which was “very curious and disgusting.” Smollett, in his preface to the second edition, talks of “the art and industry that were used to stifle him in the birth, by certain booksellers and others.” He now “reformed the manners, and corrected the expressions,” removed or modified some passages of personal satire, and held himself exempt from “the numerous shafts of envy, rancour, and revenge, that have lately, both in private and public, been levelled at his reputation.” Who were these base and pitiless dastards? Probably every one who did not write favourably about the book. Perhaps Smollett suspected Fielding, whom he attacks in several parts of his works, treating him as a kind of Jonathan Wild, a thief-taker, and an associate with thieves. Why Smollett thus misconducted himself is a problem, unless he was either “meanly jealous,” or had taken offence at some remarks in Fielding’s newspaper. Smollett certainly began the war, in the first edition of “Peregrine Pickle.” He made a kind of palinode to the “trading justice” later, as other people of his kind have done.
A point in “Peregrine Pickle” easily assailed was the long episode about a Lady of Quality: the beautiful Lady Vane, whose memoirs Smollett introduced into his tale. Horace Walpole found that she had omitted the only feature in her career of which she had just reason to be proud: the number of her lovers. Nobody doubted that Smollett was paid for casting his mantle over Lady Vane: moreover, he might expect a success of scandal. The roman à clef is always popular with scandal-mongers, but its authors can hardly hope to escape rebuke.
It was not till 1752 that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in Italy, received “Peregrine,” with other fashionable romances—“Pompey the Little,” “The Parish Girl,” “Eleanora’s Adventures,” “The Life of Mrs. Theresa Constantia Phipps,” “The Adventures of Mrs. Loveil,” and so on. Most of them contained portraits of real people, and, no doubt, most of them were therefore successful. But where are they now? Lady Mary thought Lady Vane’s part of “Peregrine” “more instructive to young women than any sermon that I know.” She regarded Fielding as with Congreve, the only “original” of her age, but Fielding had to write for bread, and that is “the most contemptible way of getting bread.” She did not, at this time, even know Smollett’s name, but she admired him, and, later, calls him “my dear Smollett.” This lady thought that Fielding did not know what sorry fellows his Tom Jones and Captain Booth were. Not near so sorry as Peregine Pickle were they, for this gentleman is a far more atrocious ruffian than Roderick Random.
None the less “Peregrine” is Smollett’s greatest work. Nothing is so rich in variety of character, scene, and adventure. We are carried along by the swift and copious volume of the current, carried into very queer places, and into the oddest miscellaneous company, but we cannot escape from Smollett’s vigorous grasp. Sir Walter thought that “Roderick” excelled its successor in “ease and simplicity,” and that Smollett’s sailors, in “Pickle,” “border on caricature.” No doubt they do: the eccentricities of Hawser Trunnion, Esq., are exaggerated, and Pipes is less subdued than Rattlin, though always delightful. But Trunnion absolutely makes one laugh out aloud: whether he is criticising the sister of Mr. Gamaliel Pickle in that gentleman’s presence, at a pot-house; or riding to the altar with his squadron of sailors, tacking in an unfavourable gale; or being run away into a pack of hounds, and clearing a hollow road over a waggoner, who views him with “unspeakable terror and amazement.” Mr. Winkle as an equestrian is not more entirely acceptable to the mind than Trunnion. We may speak of “caricature,” but if an author can make us sob with laughter, to criticise him solemnly is ungrateful.
Except Fielding occasionally, and Smollett, and Swift, and Sheridan, and the authors of “The Rovers,” one does not remember any writers of the eighteenth century who quite upset the gravity of the reader. The scene of the pedant’s dinner after the manner of the ancients, does not seem to myself so comic as the adventures of Trunnion, while the bride is at the altar, and the bridegroom is tacking and veering with his convoy about the fields. One sees how the dinner is done: with a knowledge of Athenæus, Juvenal, Petronius, and Horace, many men could have written this set piece. But Trunnion is quite inimitable: he is a child of humour and of the highest spirits, like Mr. Weller the elder. Till Scott created Mause Headrig, no Caledonian had ever produced anything except “Tam o’ Shanter,” that could be a pendant to Trunnion. His pathos is possibly just a trifle overdone, though that is not my own opinion. Dear Trunnion! he makes me overlook the gambols of his detestable protégé, the hero.
That scoundrel is not an impossible caricature of an obstinate, vain, cruel libertine. Peregrine was precisely the man to fall in love with Emilia pour le bon motif, and then attempt to ruin her, though she was the sister of his friend, by devices worthy of Lovelace at his last and lowest stage. Peregrine’s overwhelming vanity, swollen by facile conquests, would inevitably have degraded him to this abyss. The intrigue was only the worst of those infamous practical jokes of his, in which Smollett takes a cruel and unholy delight. Peregrine, in fact, is a hero of naturalisme, except that his fits of generosity are mere patches daubed on, and that his reformation is a farce, in which a modern naturaliste would have disdained to indulge. Emilia, in her scene with Peregrine in the bouge to which he has carried her, rises much above Smollett’s heroines, and we could like her, if she had never forgiven behaviour which was beneath pardon.
Peregrine’s education at Winchester bears out Lord Elcho’s description of that academy in his lately published Memoirs. It was apt to develop Peregrines; and Lord Elcho himself might have furnished Smollett with suitable adventures. There can be no doubt that Cadwallader Crabtree suggested Sir Malachi Malagrowther to Scott, and that Hatchway and Pipes, taking up their abode with Peregrine in the Fleet, gave a hint to Dickens for Sam Weller and Mr. Pickwick in the same abode. That “Peregrine” “does far excel ‘Joseph Andrews’ and ‘Amelia’,” as Scott declares, few modern readers will admit. The world could do much better without “Peregrine” than without “Joseph”; while Amelia herself alone is a study greatly preferable to the whole works of Smollett: such, at least, is the opinion of a declared worshipper of that peerless lady. Yet “Peregrine” is a kind of Odyssey of the eighteenth century: an epic of humour and of adventure.
In February 1753, Smollett “obliged the town” with his “Adventures of Ferdinand, Count Fathom,” a cosmopolitan swindler and adventurer. The book is Smollett’s “Barry Lyndon,” yet as his hero does not tell his own story, but is perpetually held up as a “dreadful example,” there is none of Thackeray’s irony, none of his subtlety. “Here is a really bad man, a foreigner too,” Smollett seems to say, “do not be misled, oh maidens, by the wiles of such a Count! Impetuous youth, play not with him at billiards, basset, or gleek. Fathers, on such a rogue shut your doors: collectors, handle not his nefarious antiques. Let all avoid the path and shun the example of Ferdinand, Count Fathom!”
Such is Smollett’s sermon, but, after all, Ferdinand is hardly worse than Roderick or Peregrine. The son of a terrible old sutler and camp-follower, a robber and slayer of wounded men, Ferdinand had to live by his wits, and he was hardly less scrupulous, after all, than Peregrine and Roderick. The daubs of casual generosity were not laid on, and that is all the difference. As Sophia Western was mistaken for Miss Jenny Cameron, so Ferdinand was arrested as Prince Charles, who, in fact, caused much inconvenience to harmless travellers. People were often arrested as “The Pretender’s son” abroad as well as in England.