The publication of Count Fathom was the indirect means of involving Smollett in an unpleasant affair, from which he was not extricated without some trouble. Warmth of temper again! A countryman, Peter Gordon, had got into difficulties and was brought to the verge of ruin, when Smollett came to his rescue, and, with more humanity than worldly wisdom, became security for him. Presently Gordon took sanctuary within the King’s Bench Prison, and sent defiant and insolent messages to Smollett when the latter appealed to his sense of honour to repay him his losses. This conduct so provoked the choleric Smollett, that on meeting the rascal he soundly caned him. Thereupon the latter raised an action against him in the Court of the King’s Bench, exaggerating the assault into attempted murder. Gordon’s counsel was a lawyer afterwards infamous in many senses, the Hon. Alexander Hume–Campbell, twin brother of Pope’s Earl of Marchmont. He opened the case for his client with a speech full of disgraceful and unwarranted abuse of Smollett. The jury, however, acquitted the latter from any blame in the matter beyond common assault, probably considering in their hearts that Gordon only received what he richly deserved. But Smollett felt keenly the innuendoes cast upon his character by Campbell. He therefore sent to his friend Daniel Mackercher—already familiar to us as the Mr. M—— of Peregrine Pickle—a long letter addressed to Campbell, expostulating with him upon his conduct, demanding an apology, and in the event of it not being forthcoming, threatening a challenge. The whole action was foolish. Probably Mackercher acted as a wise friend in the matter, by advising him not to send the epistle. At any rate, we hear no more of the matter, and Smollett had relieved his feelings by abusing his enemy—behind his back. Long years afterwards, the letter appeared in the European Magazine. But both the principals were dead!
CHAPTER VII
VISIT TO SCOTLAND—THE CRITICAL REVIEW—THE REPRISAL. 1755–1759.
Smollett was from this time forward plunged into a sea of pecuniary troubles, wherein, with little mitigation, he remained as long as life lasted. The year 1754, wherein he had to meet the costs of the action for assault brought against him by Gordon, seems to have been the one wherein his distresses culminated. For some time he was in danger of arrest. He skulked about London like ‘a thief at large,’ ever afraid of feeling a hand on his shoulder, and of beholding a bailiff ready to conduct him to the ‘sponging–house.’ For some years his monetary difficulties, like a snowball, had been always increasing. In his Life of Smollett, Dr. Robert Chambers has drawn a painful picture of the great genius fretting like some noble steed condemned to pack–horse duty, at the unworthy tasks he was obliged to undertake. Yet five out of every six of his embarrassments were the result of his own folly and extravagance. A man has to cut his coat according to his cloth. Smollett would never consent to exercise present economy to avoid future embarrassment. In a letter dated 1752 he complains of lack of money through failure of his West India revenue. The income from his wife’s property was now greatly decreased, while what remained was frittered away on vexatious lawsuits. ‘Curse the law!’ he cried impatiently on one occasion, ‘it has damned more honest men to lifelong drudgery than anything else.’ In another letter, in May 1753, addressed to his friend Dr. Macaulay, he acknowledges having received a previous loan of £15, but begs for the favour of another £50 to save him from serious difficulty. He promises payment from the proceeds of some work he then had in hand, probably Don Quixote. By a bankruptcy he had lost £180, and was obliged to immediately discount a note of hand of Provost Drummond’s, at a sacrifice of sixty per cent., in place of waiting for the due–date. In December 1754 he again laments the failure of remittances from Jamaica and of actual extremities. So far down was he, that he was compelled to write to his brother–in–law, Mr. Telfer, begging the favour of a loan, which after some delay he received. All these accumulated distresses weighed upon his spirits. ‘My life is sheer slavery,’ he wrote to one of his friends; ‘my pen is at work from nine o’ the clock the one morning until one or two the next. I might as well be in Grub Street.’ Still he toiled on, though he realised that the work he was doing was far from being worthy of him. As Anderson says: ‘The booksellers were his principal resource for employment and subsistence; for them he held the pen of a ready writer in the walk of general literature, and towards him they were as liberal as the patronage of the public enabled them to be. They were almost his only patrons; and, indeed, a more generous set of men can hardly be pointed out in the trading world. By their liberality, wit and learning have perhaps received more ample and more substantial encouragement than from all their princely and noble patrons.’
Darker and ever darker grows the picture. Whether or not Mrs. Smollett was a poor housewife, or whether Smollett’s own extravagances were wholly to blame, certain it is that from the period we have now reached until his not unwelcome release from life came in 1771, there was no ease for the toiling hand, no rest for the weary brow of the great novelist. His daily ‘darg’ had to be accomplished whether in sickness or in health; his daily tale of bricks to be handed in, if the rod of poverty’s stern task–mistress was to be averted from his shoulders, or the wolf of want driven from the door. But, alas, at what an expenditure of brain tissue was it achieved! He knew he was unable to take time to produce his best work, and the saddening consciousness weighed ever more heavily upon him. In March 1755, accordingly, there appeared his translation of the History of the Renowned Don Quixote; from the Spanish of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, with some Account of the Author’s life, illustrated with 28 new copperplates, designed by Hayman and engraved by the best Artists. The volumes, which were in quarto, were two in number, and were issued by Rivington, being dedicated by permission to Don Ricardo Wall, Principal Secretary of State to His Most Catholic Majesty, who, while he was resident in London as Spanish Ambassador, had exhibited much interest in the work. Though accomplished Spanish scholars, according to Moore, have accused Smollett of not having had a sufficient knowledge of the language when he undertook the task, for to perform it perfectly it would be requisite that the translator had lived some years in Spain, that he had obtained not only a knowledge of the Court and of polite society, but an acquaintance also with the vulgar idioms, the proverbs in use among the populace, and the various customs of the country to which allusions are made; still the fact remains that Smollett’s translation has never been superseded, and that it at once threw into the shade the previous renderings of Motteux and Jervis. Lord Woodhouselee, in his Essay on the Principles of Translation, has endeavoured, with a strange perversity of taste, to depreciate Smollett’s version in favour of that of Motteux. But the verdict of time has proved how egregiously he was in the wrong. Smollett’s short ‘Advertisement’ to the work manifests the principles according to which he prosecuted his translation. He states that his ‘aim in this undertaking was to maintain that ludicrous solemnity and self–importance by which the inimitable Cervantes has distinguished the character of Don Quixote, without raising him to the insipid rank of a dry philosopher or debasing him to the melancholy circumstances and unentertaining caprice of an ordinary madman; to preserve the native humour of Sancho Panza from degenerating into mere proverbial phlegm or affected buffoonery; that the author has endeavoured to retain the spirit and ideas without servilely adhering to the literal expressions of the original, from which, however, he has not so far deviated as to destroy that formality of idiom so peculiar to the Spaniards, and so essential to the character of the work.’ It is not often that genius is brought to the service of translation. When it is, however, as in the case of Lord Berners’ Froissart and Smollett’s Don Quixote, the result is memorable. Smollett, alas! reaped little immediate benefit from its publication. The work had been contracted and paid for five years before!
No sooner did he get this portion of his stipulated labour off his hands, than he determined to visit his relatives in Scotland. His heart yearned to see his mother. Fifteen years had passed since the raw lad, with his tragedy in his pocket, had set out for London, as he fondly hoped, conquering and to conquer. He now returned to his native country the pale, weary, toil–worn man, older–looking than his years by at least a decade. Dr. Moore relates the pathetic scene of the recognition of her celebrated son by the aged mother, then living with her daughter, Mrs. Telfer, at Scotston. Let us quote Dr. Moore’s words: ‘With the connivance of Mrs. Telfer, on his arrival, he was introduced to his mother as a gentleman from the West Indies who had been intimately acquainted with her son. The better to support his assumed character, he endeavoured to preserve a very serious countenance, approaching a frown; but while the old lady’s eyes were riveted with a kind of wild and eager stare on his countenance, he could not refrain from smiling. She immediately sprang from her chair, and, throwing her arms around his neck, exclaimed, “Ah, my son, my son, I have found you at last.” She afterwards told him that if he had kept his austere look, and continued to gloom, as she called it, he might have escaped detection some time longer; “but your old roguish smile,” added she, “betrayed you at once.”’
Smollett returned to his native country under very different circumstances from those under which he left it. Then, his family connections were anxious to get rid of him, rejoiced, in fact, to see him launched upon any profession that would remove him from their midst. He left, a poor, lonely, depressed, yet at the same time high–spirited lad, eating his heart out owing to the necessity for showing respect to those who lacked the one claim to it acknowledged by him—intellectual eminence. Now he returned, the most popular, perhaps, for the time being, of any of the three great masters of British fiction—a ‘lion,’ with whom to hold intercourse was an honour indeed. That Smollett was not wholly without feelings of this nature, his letters evince. ‘I have returned a little better than when I set out,’ he is reported to have said to John Home as they walked together down the Canongate of Edinburgh.
His reception in the Scots metropolis, from which Scotston is distant only some twenty–three miles, was gratifying in the extreme. Smollett had the advantage of seeing the town in all its antiquity before the migration of the better classes took place to George Square and to ‘the New Town’ across the Nor’ Loch. In 1756 it was still the quaint, formal, interesting, self–assertive place it had been before the Union in 1707. Here is a description of it by Gilbert Elliot, one of the Lords of the Admiralty, and one of the few friends Smollett had who were connected with the Government. ‘I love the town tolerably well; there is one fine street, and the houses are extremely high. The gentry are a very sensible set of people, and some of them in their youth seem to have known the world; but by being too long in a place their notions are contracted and their faces are become solemn. The Faculty of Advocates is a very learned and a very worthy body. As for the ladies, they are unexceptionable, innocent, beautiful, and of an easy conversation. The staple vices of the place are censoriousness and hypocrisy. There is here no allowance for levity, none for dissipation. I am not a bit surprised I do not find here that unconstrained noble way of thinking and talking which one every day meets with among young fellows of plentiful fortunes and good spirits, who are constantly moving in a more enlarged circle of company.’