In his pamphlet on Elizabeth's affair, which excited and divided London for more than a year, Fielding speaks of his illness and overtaxed strength. He spent what was left of it in his public duties; was advised to voyage to Portugal, and his "Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon," written with a dying hand, is the record of his sufferings and reflections. He sailed in the "Queen of Portugal" (Captain Veal), had intervals of enjoyment, and sketched, with his usual humour, the events and incidents of the expedition. He died at Lisbon on 8 October, 1754.
Tobias Smollett.
The name of Smollett is coupled as familiarly with that of Fielding as the name of Thackeray with that of Dickens. Smollett and Fielding were contemporaries: both came of ancient families: each had a profession;—Smollett was a physician while Fielding was a barrister,—but each lived mainly by journalism, literature and fiction. If opinions as to their relative merits were divided in their day, posterity has awarded the crown to Fielding. The reason is obvious: Fielding is full of good humour; in him there is no rancour; he admires good women almost to adoration, and paints them as only the very greatest poets have done. Again, his tales are well constructed, especially "Tom Jones". On the other hand Smollett allows his story to wander in the roads and haunt the inns, and encounter grotesque adventures; he has bitter grudges against all and sundry, especially against his patrons and his kinsfolk. His heroines are regarded by his heroes rather as luxuries than as ladies; his heroes, to be plain, are not merely libertines, but often behave like selfish ruffians; and his relish for odious images and thoughts is hardly surpassed by that of Swift. These faults in temper and taste have made Smollett unpopular, despite his wide knowledge of life; his irresistible power of compelling laughter, his swaggering vein. But, if he drew Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle from himself, he gave them bad qualities far in excess of his own, and did not endow them with many of his own better attributes. Smollett would never have used the loyal Strap as Roderick Random often does; and was incapable of what may be styled the dastardly plot in which Peregrine was fain to have imitated Richardson's Lovelace.
Smollett was born in 1721, a younger son of a younger son of the ancient house of Smollett of Bonhill, on the Leven near Loch Lomond. An ancestor of his, he says, blew up a galleon of the Spanish Armada in Tobermory Bay. He did indeed, by an act of suborned treachery. Like Burns, Tobias celebrated in verse his native stream; like Burns in boyhood he devoured the truculent romance of "Wallace" by Blind Harry. He was poor, and believed himself to be badly treated by his kinsfolk; after studying at Glasgow University he was apprenticed to a surgeon. In 1739 he went to London to push his fortunes, carrying with him a foolish tragedy on the murder of James I, which was the apple of his eye. No manager would accept it, wherefore Smollett raged against Garrick and Lord Lyttelton: he puts the story of his woes into "Roderick Random," where Mr. Melopoyn, unhappy poet, is the sufferer. He got what Chatterton and Goldsmith failed to obtain, the post of surgeon's mate in a ship of war; lived through the distresses of the siege of Carthagena (1741), and obtained that knowledge of naval squalor and brutality, and of the good qualities of sea-men, which he used in "Roderick Random" and in the characters of Bowling and Trunnion. Leaving the navy, he married in Jamaica, came to town, practised as a physician, and certainly lived in most fashionable quarters. He speaks of Bob Sawyer's method of advertisement by being hastily called out of church as an old trick; perhaps Dickens, a reader of Smollett from his childhood, borrowed here from "Count Fathom". His patriotism was stirred by the fatal disaster of Culloden, and he boldly published his "Tears of Scotland" (1746).
In 1748 he published "Roderick Random," the history of a meritorious orphan who lives on his servant, cheats his tailor, is a gambler, and enriches himself in the slave trade; but all is to be forgiven to Roderick's ebullient vigour and occasional sentimentalism. There are countless changes of scene and varieties of character, from the ocean to the Marshalsea Prison, to adventures in French service, from Strap and Bowling to the literary Miss Snapper and the unfortunate Miss Williams. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu supposed her cousin, Fielding, to be the author, which showed little discrimination, though her ladyship's letters are among the wittiest and most brilliantly amusing of her century. Smollett had a bitter feud with Fielding; we do not know, or care, for what cause. The briskness of the book, and the novelty of the nautical horrors, made Smollett's reputation.
Going to Paris in 1750, Smollett found some of the characters who appear in the crowd of "Peregrine Pickle" (1751), of which the first edition aroused censures on passages later pruned by the author. It is a work of amazingly careless vigour and humour: the irrepressible Peregrine is even a less desirable hero than Roderick; and an infamous Jacobite spy was not ill-advised in choosing Pickle for his pseudonym. Emilia is more than too good for the rascal to whom she descends in marriage, after escaping plots of his which might have disgusted Pamela's Mr. B. But Cadwallader Crabtree, Hatchway and Pipes, and Commander Hawser Trunnion are immortal characters; it is cruel to call Trunnion caricatured; he is a comic masterpiece.
The "Ferdinand, Count Fathom" (1753), the adventurous son of a suttler and murderess, is not a much worse man than Peregrine, but, in place of Trunnion and Pipes, we are entertained with a queer attempt at romance in the loves of Rinaldo and Monimia, who meets her lover as he weeps over her empty tomb. "Sir Lancelot Greaves," a modern Don Quixote, armour and all, was preferred by Scott to "Jonathan Wild," and, despite the patent absurdity of the armed knight, is really a much more agreeable story. In 1763 Smollett visited Italy, and his grumbling hypochondriacal narrative of his tour was ridiculed by that more sentimental traveller, Sterne. His "Adventures of an Atom" (1769) is a scurrilous political satire. On the other hand his "Humphry Clinker" (1771), a narrative, in letters, of a journey by English travellers in Scotland, is both more good-humoured and more amusing than any of his other stories—Matthew Bramble is a favourable study of his later self; Lieutenant Lismahago is a kind of Dugald Dalgetty, born more than a century later than the laird of Drumthwacket, and the spelling and innocent good-hearted absurdity of Winifred Jenkins endear her to every reader, as a contrast to Tabitha Bramble, a bad kind of old maid. Here we meet Ferdinand, Count Fathom, as a sincerely converted character!
Smollett is not only remarkable for variety, humour, vigour, as a social observer: he strongly influenced both Fanny Burney and Dickens. His History of England has been justly described by Sir Pitt Crawley as less interesting but less dangerous than that by Hume. Smollett, revisiting Italy, died at Monte Nero, near Leghorn, in the early autumn of 1771.