CHAPTER II
YEARS OF EDUCATION
But after the youthful Tobias had passed those momentous years when the science of suction and the art of following his nose constituted the principal ends of existence, the Scots pride in giving children a good education wherewith to begin the world, led his mother to send him early to school. As usual in such cases, during the first two years of his intellectual seedtime he was committed to the care of a worthy dame in the neighbourhood, who fulfilled the duties so admirably described by Shenstone in his School–mistress—the only poem of a worthy poet that has lived—
‘In every village marked with little spire
Embowered in trees and hardly known to fame,
There dwells in lowly shed and mean attire
A matron old whom we schoolmistress name.’
But from the hornbook and the mysteries of ‘a b, ab,’ and ‘t o, to,’ he was presently called to proceed to the scholastic establishment of one of the most famous Scots pedagogues of the eighteenth century. John Love had the reputation of having turned out more celebrated men from his various seminaries than any other teacher of his age. In addition to Smollett, Principal Robertson, Dr. Blair, Wilkie, author of the Epigoniad, and many other notable scholars and literary men, were his pupils. He was successively head teacher of Dumbarton Grammar School,[1] classical master in the High School of Edinburgh, and finally rector of the Dalkeith Grammar School,—a position which, as Robert Chambers says, would not now be considered the equivalent of the one he resigned to accept it. Love was first the correspondent and defender against sundry attacks on his Latin Grammar, afterwards the antagonistic critic of the great Ruddiman,—one of the last of the mighty Scots polymaths, before the days of specialists and the extension of the boundaries of learning rendered omniscience, in a humanist sense, an impossibility.
From Love the youthful Smollett received a thorough grounding in the classics, particularly in Latin. The days had not dawned when that human instrument of youthful torture known as ‘the crammer’ had come on the scene. Education, if conducted on wrong principles in many cases, was, at least, rational in the end it proposed to accomplish. Boys in the eighteenth century were not treated like prize turkeys, and stuffed to repletion with all and sundry items of knowledge, whereof about one per cent. is found useful in after life. Love did not believe in taking passing sips from the cup of every classic author, and then relegating their works to the dust and the spiders. His was not the system to make a sort of fox–hunt scamper over Latin literature, from Nepos to Statius, or in Greek, from Homer to Lucian, clearing difficulties at a bound, and cutting the Gordian knot of vexed passages by the rough and ready method of omission. His pupils were the ‘homines unius libri’—the men of the single book, who are always to be feared. The consequence was that to the end of life Smollett acknowledged his indebtedness to Love. He took an interest in the lad’s progress, and, knowing the circumstances of his lot, and how much depended on his proficiency in the subjects of study, he paid every attention to him, and spared no pains to make him a thoroughly sound if not a very profound classical scholar. All through the long and laborious life of Smollett, the lessons of Love bore fruit.
Here, however, I must once more enter a protest against the ready credulity of several previous biographers, in believing the foul slander,—manufactured by some one utterly unacquainted with the true facts of the case,—that the portrait of the pedagogue in Roderick Random could possibly be intended to represent Love. Disproof the most convincing is to be found in the fact that the distinguishing characteristic of the pedagogue in the novel was his resemblance to Horace’s plagosus Orbilius—the flogging Orbilius. But of Love’s system the glory—and glory it certainly was—consisted in the total abolition of the degrading corporal punishment, in his successive schools, at the time when the sparing of the rod by any pedagogue was esteemed to be unquestionably equivalent to spoiling the child.
As to the estimation in which the youthful Smollett was held by his companions, there is but scant evidence. He seems, like many another youth, whom the stirrings of great imaginings within were beginning to puzzle and in some degree to annoy, as being unlike anything his companions experienced, to have been masterful, irritable, and proud. He even appears, with a lad’s lack of judgment, to have exhibited the snobbery of family pride, that most ignoble form of vulgarity. All through life Smollett betrayed a smack of this failing—a trait of character which, long years after, led him to surround himself with his poor and needy brethren in literature, to whom he played the part of ‘the Great Cham’ of the press.