Nature I’ll court in her sequestered haunts
By mountain, meadow, streamlet, grove or cell,
Where the poised lark his evening ditty chants,
And Health and Peace and Contemplation dwell.
There Study shall with Solitude recline,
And Friendship pledge me to his fellow–swains;
And Toil and Temperance sedately twine
The slender cord that fluttering life sustains:
And fearless Poverty shall guard the door,
And Taste unspoiled the frugal table spread,
And Industry supply the frugal store,
And Sleep unbribed his dews refreshing shed;
White–mantled Innocence, ethereal sprite,
Shall chase afar the goblins of the night,
And Independence o’er the day preside:
Propitious power! my patron and my pride.’
His two satires, Advice and Reproof, evince on the part of their author the qualities we have already noted—keen power of observation, a felicitous deftness in wedding sound to sense, considerable force of satiric presentation, with humour and wit in rich measure. But there is no such elevation as we discover in Johnson’s London or The Vanity of Human Wishes, or in the satiric pieces of Pope or Dryden. The moment the poems rise from the consideration of facts to principles, Smollett becomes tedious and prosy. As a song–writer, however, he has made some eminently successful essays, the well–known lyric—
‘To fix her: ‘twere a task as vain
To combat April drops of rain,’
which has been so often set to music, having been written by him soon after the publication of Roderick Random. It possesses grace, point, and rhythmic harmony—the three great desiderata in a good lyric. The following verse has a faint echo of the subtle beauty of Wither, Lovelace, Herrick, and the Cavalier poets:—
‘She’s such a miser eke in love,
Its joys she’ll neither share nor prove,
Though crowds of gallants gay await
From her victorious eyes their fate.’
Of his remaining poems there are only one or two that really merit notice. Smollett was too apt to run into the opposite extreme from sacrificing sense to sound, and prefer a repelling roughness both in metre and assonance to altering the sequence of thought in a poem that would not have been injured by the change. His Odes to Mirth and to Sleep are marred by being too didactic. His images are frequently so recondite as to awaken no corresponding ideas in the mind of the reader. His ‘Love Elegy’ is in imitation of those of Tibullus, and there are several lines that are well–nigh as tenderly pathetic as those of its great original, while the verses ‘On a Young Lady playing on the Harpsichord,’ so much admired by Sir Walter Scott, are undoubtedly amongst his finest efforts for happy union of glowing thought and graceful expression—
‘When Sappho struck the quivering wire,
The throbbing breast was all on fire;
And when she raised the vocal lay,
The captive soul was charmed away:
But had the nymph possessed with these
Thy softer, chaster power to please,
Thy beauteous air of sprightly youth,
Thy native smiles of artless truth,
The worm of grief had never preyed
On the forsaken, love–sick maid;
Nor had she mourned an hapless flame,
Nor dashed on rocks her tender frame.’
Had Smollett cultivated the art of metrical expression more persistently and enthusiastically, there are sufficient indications to show that he might have produced work which, if not in the very highest grade of excellence in the school presided over by Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith, would have attained a standard sufficiently worthy to be ranked among the minor products of that decidedly prosaic epoch. We need not regret his abstention.
Finally, in the drama Smollett’s restless genius sought expression at two periods of his life when his hopes were at their highest. In his nineteenth year, we have seen that the fruit of his historical studies, and his wanderings in the glorious Elizabethan drama, had been given to the world in The Regicide—a drama founded on the murder of James I. of Scotland. Written at that point in a youth’s life when the Will o’ the Wisp of literary fame seemed an angel of light, when the prizes incident on intellectual eminence had only recently attracted his gaze, and when his judgment, therefore, was dazzled by the expectation of reaching such a reputation as his countrymen Thomson, Mallet, and Arbuthnot had already won, it had all the faults though but few of the merits of a youthful production. The other piece, The Reprisal; or, The Tars of Old England, was executed when his fame was assured, when he was no longer the tyro in composition, but the editor of the Critical Review and a critic of the works of others. It is widely different from the Regicide, both in style, method, motive, and execution. Yet a beginner in the work of criticism could detect that both were written by the same hand. The Regicide, as a drama, is, as we have already said, a very mediocre production. Dealing with a period of Scottish history where there was scope for the aids of a brilliant historic background and of the customs and costumes of the time, Smollett has availed himself of none of these. The characters of the drama are men and women of the eighteenth century, masquerading in anomalous forms of speech and mysterious lines of action, which no one out of Bedlam would have ever considered befitting a king or his nobility. For example, in the play, in place of the dramatis personæ being designated as ‘James i., King of Scotland,’ and ‘Joanna Beaufort, Queen of Scotland,’ we have simply ‘King’ and ‘Queen,’ while the nobles and conspirators bear such utterly inappropriate and unhistoric names as Angus, Dunbar, Ramsay, Stuart, Grime, and Cattan. The action is spasmodic and jerky, altogether lacking in artistic dramatic dovetailing of incidents into each other and of symmetrical consecutiveness of circumstance. James lacks heroism, dignity, and power; Grime—probably meant for Sir Robert Graham—and Athol are very declamatory villains, who, if they put off as much time in firing off expletives at the real scene of the murder, must inevitably have permitted their victim to escape. We seem to be reading a play of Dekker’s or Greene’s, so very elementary is the stagecraft displayed in contriving exits and entrances for the personages. The characters are all more or less wooden. They talk in stilted, high–flown language, such as a boy of nineteen would suppose the courtiers of a monarch like James I. to employ. They never for a moment descend from their stilts; and even in dying, Dunbar and Eleonora declaim to the audience in rounded and rhetorical periods. Eleonora philosophises as follows within a second or two of her death:—
‘Life has its various seasons as the year;
And after clustering autumn—but I faint,
Support me nearer—in rich harvest’s rear
Bleak winter must have lagged. Oh! now I feel
The leaden hand of death lie heavy on me—
Thine image swims before my straining eye,
And now it disappears. Speak—bid adieu
To the lost Eleonora. Not a word?
Not one farewell? Alas, that dismal groan
Is eloquent distress! Celestial powers,
Protect my father; show’r upon his—Oh! [Dies.]’