We reach now the most important period of Smollett’s life. That he had fully realised, long before, the splendid nature of the talents wherewith he was endowed, is more than probable, though he possibly was in doubt as to the precise outlet his genius would make for itself. He had tried tragedy, but had been roughly disillusionised as to his El Dorado being found on the stage. He had neither the power of compression nor the faculty of seizing upon one central idea and making all the others subservient and subordinate thereto, so necessary a qualification in the dramatist. His satire also was a little too ferocious and vitriolic to entirely please the taste of the English–reading public, that was gradually looking askance at the knockdown, sledge–hammer blows of Butler and Swift, and veering round to the more delicate but none the less effective style of Goldsmith, Gay, and Johnson. His poetry, moreover, was not sufficiently generous, either in quantity or quality, to secure for him even a low place in the Temple of Poesie. His genius, therefore, must find some other outlet. What was it to be?
In 1740, Samuel Richardson, the father of the English novel, had produced Pamela, a work which at once achieved a lasting success. Not that novel–writing was unknown previous to that date, as many writers suppose. The Italian novelli and the Spanish tales were known in Britain, and had inspired many imitators. While carefully dissociating the pastoral romances like Sidney’s Arcadia or those ‘romances’ proper, or fiction dealing with feudal customs and illustrative of the ‘virtues’ of chivalry, from ‘novels,’ which, in the early signification of the word at least, implied stories descriptive of domestic or everyday life in the period of the writer’s own immediate epoch, many of the stories written by Robert Greene, the dramatist, Thomas Nashe, and Nicolas Breton are novels of English life pure and simple, albeit foreign names may be used. So in Shakespeare all his plays are distinctively English in atmosphere and sympathies, to say nothing of sentiments, although Coriolanus, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra, and the like, are selected as the nominal heroes and heroines of the piece. The English novel had long been in existence. The only difference was that the writers did not specialise any period as that wherein the incidents occurred. They preferred to leave themselves free, and to people with the creatures of their fancy that mysteriously delightful era vaguely shadowed forth by ‘long ago’ or ‘once upon a time.’
The surpassing virtue of Richardson and his successor Fielding was that they boldly seized upon the time wherein they lived as that which was to form the background of their stories. Their ‘to–day’ was to be painted as faithfully and as fondly as those earlier writers had depicted imaginary epochs. We can scarcely form any idea now of the overwhelming enthusiasm that greeted Richardson’s Pamela. For the first time readers saw their own age delineated with a fidelity and withal a fearlessness that had the effect of a supreme moral lesson. Of course, to our ideas of to–day, many of the descriptions in the novels of last century are simply revolting, and would be condemned amongst us as an outrage on good taste. ‘The morals of the young person’ are our nineteenth–century bogey, which ever and anon rises up to scare any luckless novelist who dares to paint life as it really is. Thackeray used to lament that he dared not paint Becky Sharp as she really was, because all the mammas in the British Islands would taboo his work. But midway the eighteenth century they were not so queasy–stomached. They called a spade a spade. If a man went to the devil with wine and women, they took a delight in chronicling the whole process—as a warning to others, be it noted, not like the leprous–minded, neurotic school in our own days, look you, because they wanted to rake in guineas by chronicling a brother’s or a sister’s shame.
Pamela, however, effected a higher purpose than merely affording pleasure to eager readers. Its exotic morality and exaggerated sentimentality stirred up into vigorous life the spirit of ridicule latent in the big, manly, kindly, but coarse–fibred nature of Henry Fielding. As a caricature of Pamela he produced his novel, Joseph Andrews, the hero of which was the brother of Pamela, and was made to exhibit the same exaggerated virtues as had characterised the latter. Fielding’s “skit” became the first great character–novel in the English language, and announced to the world the fact that the greatest master of contemporary literary portraiture that prose literature has yet seen, had appeared.
The publication of Clarissa Harlowe, by Richardson, towards the end of 1747, and the announcement made of the appearance of Fielding’s Tom Jones, in parts, seem to have raised the question in Smollett’s mind whether he also might not be able to create a gallery of fiction every whit as notable as ‘Pamela,’ or ‘Mr. B——,’ or ‘Parson Adams,’ or ‘Lovelace,’ or ‘Sophia Western.’ The flattering results of success in the improvement of the material prospects of both Richardson and Fielding could not but exercise a certain amount of influence on him. In the month of June 1747, as he tells us, he began the composition of a novel of his own time, very diffidently, and with the resolve firmly kept in view, that if the work did not come up to his own expectations, he would remorselessly burn it.
He was of too original a caste of genius to sink into the subordinate position of a mere imitator of either Richardson or Fielding. He noted carefully that the former had monopolised the novel of sentiment, as the latter had taken as his own the novel of character. But he also saw that the novel of incident was still unappropriated in English fiction. This department he determined to make his own. Taking the Gil Blas of Le Sage as his model, he endeavoured as far as possible to make his tale interesting by the number and variety of the events introduced, feeling assured that the portraiture of character would not be of an inferior type, if only he could draw on his past experiences for material. While by no means a slavish follower of Le Sage, the influence of the great French writer is very perceptible in Roderick Random. There is the same breathless succession of incidents, the same hairbreadth escapes, the same ready ingenuity on the part of the hero in extricating himself from awkward predicaments. In a word, Roderick is but a blood relation of Gil Blas, though his British parentage and rearing have modified some of the eccentricities and peccadilloes that would have scared even the purblind mammas and custodians of national virtue last century.
Roderick Random was published towards the end of January 1748, having occupied five months in its composition. Its success was instant and extraordinary. The British public recognised that a third had been added to the great masters of fiction—a third whose genius, though inferior in solidity and sublimity to that of either Richardson or Fielding, surpassed both in prodigality and wealth of invention. The first edition of the work did not bear the author’s name, but was published in two small duodecimo volumes by Osborn of Gray’s Inn Lane (the same individual knocked down by Dr. Johnson as a punishment for insolence), the price being six shillings. The interest excited by the book may be imagined when it was attributed by Lady Mary Wortley Montague to Fielding. In a letter to her daughter, the Countess of Bute, as recorded in her works, Lady Mary says: ‘Fielding has really a fund of true humour. I guessed Roderick Random to be his, though without his name.’ Later on she adds: ‘I cannot think Ferdinand Fathom wrote by the same hand, it is every way so much below it.’
The notices of the novel in any contemporary journals are but meagre. In the Gentleman’s Magazine and in the Intelligencer, short criticisms appear noting it as a work ‘full of ingenious descriptions and lively occurrences.’ Several of the other periodicals contented themselves with a mere intimation of its publication. Of puffing and pushing seemingly the work needed little. Its own merits carried it into all circles. Even Samuel Richardson, whose antipathy to Fielding may have inclined him to show favour to any possible rival of the man who had dared to caricature his pet creation, remarked of it in comparison with Tom Jones, published some months later, that Roderick Random was written by a good man to show the evils of vice, Tom Jones by a profligate to render vice more alluring. The infallible judgment of posterity will not confirm the criticism of the narrow–minded old bookseller, who abhorred anything that did not directly or indirectly reflect praise on himself. Edition after edition of this the latest success in literature was called for. Smollett’s name was placed on the title–page after the issue of the second edition, and the public then realised that the popular novel was the work of none of the elder writers, as was supposed, but of a young, impecunious surgeon, not yet thirty, who had exhibited a very pretty talent for satire, as the Dukes of Newcastle and Grafton, the Earls of Bath, Granville, and Cholmondeley, Sir William Yonge, Mr. Pitt, and Rich the theatrical manager, could testify to their cost.
Thereupon the town sought to take the young surgeon up and patronise him, only to discover that he was far from being a patronisable party—nay, was somewhat akin to the frozen snake which the countryman, pitying, took up and hid in his bosom to warm it, only to be stung when the reptile recovered vitality. Smollett all his life was too apt to mistake genuine kindness for patronage, and to flash out hasty darts of sarcasm in response to heartfelt wishes to win his friendship. Many of the leading personages of London now sought to benefit him and to show him that they desired to count him among their friends. But Tobias, as already said, was like the fretful porcupine. He had been so long a stranger to disinterested kindness, so long treated as little better than a superfluous atom on the world’s surface, that affability towards him was construed into condescension—a thought which made each particular hair of his sensitive nature to stand on end. Curious though the fact, nevertheless it is true that Smollett’s friendship was in most cases extended to those who differed from him rather than to those who agreed with him, though at the same time he might be bespattering the former with all the terms of reprobation in his somewhat extensive vocabulary of vituperation.