BIRTH—PARENTAGE—EARLY YEARS

‘Every successful novelist must be more or less a poet, even though he may never have written a line of verse. The quality of imagination is absolutely indispensable to him.... Smollett was a poet of distinction!’

Such was the estimate formed by Sir Walter Scott—one of the most incisive and sympathetic critics that ever pronounced judgment—of the element of inspiration in every great writer of fiction. Experimentally conscious of what was of value in his own case,—himself the great Wizard of Fiction,—he would reason by analogy what would be of power to inspire other men. If the poetic faculty were indispensable for the production of The Heart of Midlothian and Ivanhoe, equally would it be needed in Peregrine Pickle and Humphrey Clinker. That the poetic stimulus is the most powerful of all, is a truth that has been remarked times and oft. That it forms the true key to unlock the otherwise elusive and self–centred character of Tobias George Smollett, has not, I think, previously been noted.

To write Smollett’s life with absolute impartiality is more than ordinarily difficult. The creator of Roderick Random was one for whom a generous charity would require to make more allowances than man is commonly called upon to make for man. Actions and utterances that might be and were mistaken for irritation and shortness of temper, were in reality due to the impatience of genius, chafing under the restrictions laid upon it by the mental torpor or intellectual sluggishness of others. The eagle eye of his genius perceived intuitively what other men generally attain only as the result of ratiocinative process. Smollett has unjustly been characterised as bad–tempered, choleric, supercilious, and the like, simply because the key was lacking to his character. Far indeed from being any of these was he. Impatient without doubt he was, but by no means in larger measure than Carlyle, Tennyson, Dickens, Goethe, or Schiller, and the feeling is wrongly defined as impatience. It is rather the desire to give less intellectually nimble companions a fillip up in the mental race, that they may not lag so far behind as to make intercourse a martyrdom.

Smollett’s distinguishing characteristic in the great gallery of eighteenth–century novelists was his exhaustless fertility. In his four great novels, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom, and Humphrey Clinker, he has employed as many incidents, developed as many striking situations, and utilised as many happily conceived accidents of time and place, as Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, and Mrs. Radcliffe put together. His invention is marvellously fertile, and as felicitous as fertile. He makes no attempt to excel in what may be termed the ‘architectonic’ faculty, or the symmetrical evolution and interweaving of plot. Incident succeeds incident, fact follows fact, and scene, scene, in the most bewildering profusion. There is a prodigality visible, nay, an intellectual waste, indicative of an imaginative wealth almost unique since the days of Homer. By some critics, following in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott, a curious vagary has been rendered fashionable of introducing the method of comparative analysis into every literary judgment. In place of declaring in plain, straightforward terms the reason why they either admire or censure the works of a man of genius, they must now drag in somebody else, with whom he is supposed to present points of affinity or contrast, and they glibly descant on the attributes wherein the author under consideration surpasses or falls short of his rival, what elements and qualities of style the one possesses which the other lacks, until in the end the reader is thoroughly befogged to know which is which and who is who. The higher criticism has its place in literary judgments as well as in theological, and the change is not for the better.

Tobias George Smollett resembled William Shakespeare in one respect if in no other—that a doubt exists as to the precise date of his birth. The first mention made of the future novelist occurs in no birth register that is known to exist, but in the parish record of baptisms in connection with the parochial district of Cardross. Therein, under the date 19th March 1721, we read: ‘Tobias George, son to Mr. Archd. Smollett and Barbara Cunningham, was baptised.’ The day in question was a Sunday, and, as Robert Chambers very properly remarks, ‘it may be inferred that the baptism took place, according to old Scottish fashion, in the parish kirk.’ This tentative inference may be changed into certainty when we recall the strict Presbyterianism of his grandfather’s household, in whose eyes such an injunction as the following, taken from The Directory for the Public Worship of God, established by Act of General Assembly and Act of Parliament in 1645, would be as sacredly binding as the laws of the Medes and Persians:—‘Baptism, as it is not unnecessarily to be delayed, so it is not to be administered in any case by any private person, ... nor is it to be administered in private places or privately, but in the place of public worship and in the face of the congregation.’

So much for the baptism. Now for the date of birth. Here only second–hand evidence is forthcoming. In one of the unpublished letters of John Home, author of Douglas, which it was recently my fortune to see, he mentions a walk which Smollett and he had taken together during the visit of the latter to London, when trying to get his first play, Agis, accepted by the theatrical managers. During the course of the walk Smollett mentioned the fact that his birthday had been celebrated two days before. The date of their meeting was the 18th March 1750. If reliance can be placed on this roundabout means of arriving at a fact, Smollett’s birth took place on the 16th March 1721.

Genealogies are wearisome. Readers who desire to trace the family of the Smolletts back to the sixteenth century can do so with advantage in the Lives of Moore, Herbert, and Chambers. Our purpose is with the novelist himself, not with his ancestors to the fourth and fifth generations. Suffice it to say that Tobias George Smollett was the son of Archibald, fourth son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, a Dumbartonshire estate situated amidst the romantic scenery of the Vale of Leven, and in the vicinity of the queen of Scottish lakes, Loch Lomond.

Sir James Smollett, a stern old Whig of the Revolution type, to whom ‘Prelacy was only less tolerable than Popery, and the adherents of both deserve hanging,’ had risked property, prospects, and life at the time when James VII. staked his dynasty against a mass—and lost. So prominent was the part Sir James Smollett took in influencing public sentiment in favour of William and Mary, even while one of the Commissaries or Consistorial Judges of Edinburgh, that the grateful monarch knighted him, and the Earl of Argyll appointed him deputy–lieutenant of Dumbartonshire.

A very different character was the novelist’s father. Archibald Smollett seems to have been, in Scots parlance, ‘as feckless as his father was fitty.’ The characteristic of the rolling stone was pre–eminently his. Consequently, as regards moss, in the shape of worldly gear, he gathered not a stiver unto him. But that did not trouble him. Like Charles Surface, his distresses were so many that the only thing he could not afford to part with was his good spirits, which, by the same token, chanced to be the only good thing he had about him. His health was bad, his morals were bad, his prospects were bad,—for he never had been brought up to any profession, not having the steadiness of application to make labour a pleasure; in a word, he was one of those interesting individuals whose idleness enables his Mephistophelic Majesty to make a strong bid for the fee–simple of their soul.

Archibald Smollett, like most youths of good family, with whom, for lack of employment, time hangs heavy on their hands, was not above falling in love to lend a zest to the deadly ennui of life. Whether or no he obeyed Celia’s maxim on the matter, and did so ‘only to make sport withal,’ is immaterial. The fact remains that, young though he was, the love–making ended in matrimony. He had been sent to Leyden to prosecute his studies—Leyden, whose University, from about 1680 to 1730, was the great finishing school of Europe, with the lustre about it conferred by such professors as Arminius, Gomarus, Grotius, Salmasius, Scaliger, and Boerhaave. From this seat of learning young Archibald Smollett returned in ill health, but strong in his conviction that it is not good for man to be alone. Principles are as empty air if not reduced to practice. Archibald, therefore, electrified both the old Commissary and his two celibate brothers by announcing, not his intention to marry Barbara, the daughter of Mr. George Cunningham of Gilbertfield, in the county of Lanark, but the fact of its already having taken place. Probably, had the event been still in prospect, the stern old judge would have found means to check the course of true love on the score of his son’s feeble health. Sir James had read his Utopia to some purpose, and was a stickler for legal penalties being attached to the union of persons of weak constitution. But there are limits to the intervention of even a choleric Commissary, and not all his indignation could put asunder what the Church had joined.

Passing wroth was the old man, doubtless, and tradition reports that he considered carefully the alternatives—whether to cut off his amorously inclined son with the proverbial shilling, and thereby set all the gossips’ tongues in the district a–wagging over man’s inhumanity to man, and that man a son, or to give him his blessing, along with a small allowance, and thus keep the name of Smollett from becoming a byword of reproach.

To induce him to adopt the latter alternative there were such reasons as these: That Miss Barbara was a young lady of great beauty and accomplishments—the Commissary had a weakness for a pretty face; that her family was as old as the Smolletts, though, having fallen upon evil days, it was not so influential; and finally, that the two families had already intermarried about a century before, when the Cunninghams, by the way, had been the more powerful of the two. The old Commissary, therefore, gave the newly–wedded pair his blessing, probably considering it better policy to bless than to ban what had already been done. On the young pair he settled an annual allowance, amounting, according to the present–day purchasing powers, to £250, as well as the liferent of the farmhouse and lands of Dalquharn, on the banks of the Leven, immediately adjoining the Bonhill estate. Well done, old Commissary, thou wast wise in thy generation. To this day the district speaks of ‘Good Sir James.’

But Sir James Smollett, if he imagined he had fulfilled all the duties incumbent on him in the circumstances, and might thereafter forget the existence of the inconvenient rolling stone, received a rude awakening. The stone in question accomplished its last revolution by rolling out of existence; in other words, Archibald Smollett died in 1721, having only survived his marriage five years. He left a widow with three young children, James, Jane, and Tobias, wholly dependent on their grandfather’s bounty.

Of the cant of Puritanic Presbyterianism, of its gloomy severity, of the frowns it casts on all harmless pursuits, we hear a great deal in these days of cheap criticism and a ubiquitous press. That may be all very true. There is, however, one thing in which the type never fails. Once convince it of the binding nature of any social obligations, and not all the desires of self, or the weaknesses of human nature, will be allowed to stand in the way of its fulfilment. In such crucifixion of self–interest there is conspicuous moral heroism. Of a type of nature such as this was Sir James Smollett. With a sort of cynical sneer, that if he were in for a penny he might as well be in for a pound, the old gentleman continued the allowance to the young widow’s household, though on a slightly reduced scale. Dalquharn, however, was still to be the widow’s home, with liberty to make as much as she could out of the farm. As she was a shrewd, capable woman, who knew the full value of a shilling, and to whom the gospel of hard work was a living creed more than a century before Thomas Carlyle preached it, the chances were all in favour of her doing well. Nay, as the sequel proved, she did better without her husband than with him, and speedily became, comparatively speaking, a ‘well–to–do woman,’ as the Scots phrase has it.

It was this unquestioning obedience to those provisions of the Mosaic law, ‘Ye shall not afflict any widow or fatherless child: if thou afflict them in any wise, and they cry at all unto Me, I will surely hear their cry,’ in which the old Commissary was a firm believer, that rendered the position of the widow and her fatherless children as secure as though they had been protected by as many deeds and settlements as would have filled a muniment room. The consequence was that, until she was no longer able to look after the farm, that is, up to the time when Smollett was preparing to go to London, Mrs. Archibald Smollett retained undisturbed possession of Dalquharn. She then went to live with her daughter, who had married Mr. Telfer, a lessee of some of the mines at Wanlockhead, and also proprietor of the estates of Scotston in Peeblesshire and Symington in Lanarkshire. The old Commissary, Sir James, was succeeded by his own son James, and then by his son George’s eldest child, also called James, neither of whom left any issue. Singularly enough, the present holders of the estates are the descendants of Archibald Smollett and Barbara Cunningham; the other branches of the house having become extinct. But by neither Sir James’s son nor by his grandson was Mrs. Archibald’s allowance reduced.

Into this matter I have gone rather more fully than is warranted by the space at my command. But I was anxious to clear the memory of Sir James Smollett from an undeserved slur that has been cast on it by some biographers, who have been smitten with the mania for reading the facts of a man’s life into his works. In Smollett’s case, the opening chapters of Roderick Random, and the character of ‘The Judge’ in particular, have been assumed, on evidence the most slender, as conveying a true picture of the novelist’s early relations to his grandfather and uncles. But the statement, as express as it is explicit, by Smollett himself shortly before his death, that the scenes were written under a mistaken sense of wrong, and purposely over–coloured from motives of pique and resentment that had no foundation in fact, proves that young Smollett cherished mistaken ideas of his own importance, a failing from which he suffered all his life, in imagining slights where none were intended.

The childhood and early boyhood of the youthful Tobias would not, therefore, be unhappy. Youth always looks at the sunny side of things. If his fare were plain and coarse, it was at least plentiful; if his attire were of the humblest, it was at least sufficient to keep out the cold. At this age hope is the dearest possession, and what Allan Ramsay said of his own youth may, mutatis mutandis, be applied to Smollett’s—

‘Aft hae I wade thro’ glens wi’ chorking feet,
When neither plaid nor kilt could fend the weet
Yet blythely would I bang oot owre the brae,
And stend owre burns as light as ony rae,
Hoping the morn might prove a better day.’