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.’

With Dr. ‘Jupiter’ Carlyle of Inveresk he renewed that acquaintance begun some years before, when neither of them had attained the fame that came to them in the course of time. Carlyle introduced him to many of his influential friends, and, in consequence, Smollett’s visit to Edinburgh proved an exceedingly happy one. ‘It was also in one of these days that Smollett visited Scotland for the first time,’ says Carlyle, ‘after having left Glasgow immediately after his education was finished, and his engaging as a surgeon’s mate on board a man–of–war, which gave him an opportunity of witnessing the siege of Carthagena, which he has so minutely described in his Roderick Random. He came out to Musselburgh and passed a day and a night with me, and went to church and heard me preach. I introduced him to Cardonnel the Commissioner (of Customs), with whom he supped, and they were much pleased with each other. Smollett has reversed this in his Humphrey Clinker, where he makes the Commissioner his old acquaintance. He went next to Glasgow and that neighbourhood to visit his friends, and returned again to Edinburgh in October, when I had frequent meetings with him, one in particular in a tavern, where there supped with him and Commissioner Cardonnel, Mr. Hepburn of Keith, John Home, and one or two more.... Cardonnel and I went with Smollett to Sir David Kinloch’s and passed the day, when John Home and Logan and I conducted him to Dunbar, where we stayed together all night.’

Smollett’s picture of the Edinburgh of his time in Humphrey Clinker is exceedingly graphic. ‘In the evening we arrived,’ writes Melford, ‘at this metropolis, of which I can say but very little. It is very romantic from its situation on the declivity of a hill, having a fortified castle at the top and a royal palace at the bottom. The first thing that strikes the nose of a stranger shall be nameless; but what first strikes the eye is the unconscionable height of the houses, which generally rise to five, six, seven, and eight storeys, and in some cases, as I am assured, to twelve. This manner of building, attended by numberless inconveniences, must have been originally owing to want of room. Certain it is the town seems to be full of people.’ In the next letter Matthew Bramble adds: ‘Every storey is a complete house occupied by a separate family, and the stair being common to them all is generally left in a very filthy condition; a man must tread with great circumspection to get safe housed with unpolluted shoes. Nothing, however, can form a stronger contrast between the outside and inside of the door, for the good women of this metropolis are very nice in the ornaments and propriety of their apartments, as if they were resolved to transfer the imputation from the individual to the public. You are no stranger to their method of discharging all their impurities from their windows at a certain hour of the night, as the custom is in Spain, Portugal, and other parts of France and Italy; a practice to which I can by no means be reconciled, for, notwithstanding all the care that is taken by their scavengers to remove this nuisance every morning by break of day, enough still remains to offend the eyes as well as the other organs of those whom use has not hardened against all delicacy of sensation.’ Nor can we omit what the inimitable Winnifred Jenkins—the prototype and model of all future soubrettes in fiction—says on the subject: ‘And now, dere Mary, we have got to Haddingborough (Edinburgh) among the Scots, who are cevel enuff for our money, thof I don’t speak their lingo. But they should not go for to impose on foreigners, for the bills on their houses say they have different easements to let; but behold there is nurra geaks in the whole kingdom, nor anything for pore sarvants, but a barril with a pair of tongs thrown across, and all the chairs in the family are emptied into this here barril once a day, and at ten o’clock at night the whole cargo is flung out of a back windore that looks into some street or lane, and the Made cries “Gardyloo” to the passengers, which signerfies, “Lord have mercy upon you,” and this is done every night in every house in Haddingborough, so you may guess, Mary Jones, what a sweet savour comes from such a number of profuming pans. But they say it is wholesome; and truly I believe it is; for being in the vapours and thinking of Issabel (Jezabel) and Mr. Clinker, I was going into a fit of astericks when this fiff, saving your presence, took me by the nose so powerfully that I sneezed three times and found myself wonderfully refreshed; this, to be sure, is the raisin why there are no fits in Haddingborough.’

From Edinburgh, Smollett, as we have seen, proceeded to Dumbartonshire, and then to Glasgow. His cousin was still laird of Bonhill, and welcomed him with much warmth back to the scene of his early years. In Glasgow he renewed his acquaintance with Dr. Moore, who had succeeded him as apprentice with Mr. Gordon, and was now a physician of repute in the western metropolis. With the latter he remained two days, renewing old associations both at the College and elsewhere. Unfortunately, very little information can be gleaned regarding this visit of Smollett’s to Glasgow. Moore dismisses it in two or three lines, and every succeeding biographer, Anderson, Walter Scott, Chambers, Herbert, and Hannay, although mayhap spinning out a few more sentences, really do not add a tittle to our facts.

On returning to Edinburgh in October, he was welcomed by all the literati of the capital, and was specially invited to a meeting of the famous Select Society,[6] first mooted by Allan Ramsay the painter, as Mr. John Rae tells us in his Life of Adam Smith; but the fifteen original members of which had increased well–nigh to a hundred, comprising all the best–known names in literature, philosophy, science, and the arts. There he met or saw Kames and Monboddo (not yet ‘paper lords’ or lords of Session), Robertson and Ferguson and Hume, Carlyle and John Home, Dr. Blair, Wilkie of the Epigoniad, Wallace the statistician, Islay Campbell and Thomas Miller of the Court of Session, the Earls of Sutherland, Hopetoun, Marchmont, Morton, Rosebery, Errol, Aboyne, Cassilis, Selkirk, Glasgow, and Lauderdale; Lords Elibank, Gray, Garlies, Auchinleck, and Hailes; John Adam the architect, Dr. Cullen, John Coutts the banker, and many others.[7] The Society met every Friday evening from six to nine, at first in a room in the Advocates’ Library, but when that became too small for the numbers that began to attend its meetings, in a room hired from the Masonic Lodge above the Laigh Council House; and its debates, in which the younger advocates and ministers, men like Wedderburn and Robertson, took the chief part, became speedily famous over all Scotland, as intellectual displays to which neither the General Assembly of the Kirk nor the Imperial Parliament could show anything to rival.

On returning to London, Smollett at once threw himself into the feverish excitement and worry of a journalistic life. In other words, he assumed the editorship of the new Critical Review, representative of High Church and Tory principles. This periodical, with its older rival, the Monthly Review (started by Griffiths in 1749 as the Whig organ), may be considered the prototypes of that plentiful crop of monthly magazines wherewith we are furnished to–day. The Critical Review was the property of a man named Hamilton, a Scotsman, whose enlightenment and liberality, remarks Herbert, had been proved by his listening to Chatterton’s request for a little money, by sending it to him and telling him he should have more if he wanted it. The Critical Review for its age was really a very creditable production, though there was little to choose between the rivals as to merit, for the Monthly, at the date of the founding of its antagonist, was edited by a young man of surpassing ability, who won for himself a name in English literature even more distinguished than Smollett’s—Oliver Goldsmith. Thus the authors of the Vicar of Wakefield and of Peregrine Pickle—compositions wide as the poles apart in character—were thrown into rivalry with each other. That it was a rivalry embittered by any of the rancour and acrimony distinguishing Smollett’s future journalistic relations with John Wilkes, cannot be supposed, inasmuch as Goldsmith contributed several articles to the Critical Review, and as a return compliment Smollett four, at least, to the Monthly. The proprietors of the opposing periodicals may have had their squabbles and bespattered each other with foul names, but the editors seem to have been on the most amicable of terms and to have united in anathematising both parties.

Much of Smollett’s time was frittered away on work for the Review which would have been more remuneratively employed in other fields. But the pot had to be kept boiling, and there was but little fuel in reserve wherewith to feed the fire. He was far from making an ideal editor,—indeed, to tell the plain truth, he made an exceedingly bad one. He never kept his staff of contributors in hand. They were permitted to air their own grievances and to revenge their own quarrels in the Review. His criticisms, also, are very one–sided. The remarks on John Home’s Douglas, though true so far, are much too sweeping in their generalisations. The play has many merits, but the Critical Review would fain persuade one it had next to none. The same remarks are true of Wilkie’s Epigoniad, by no means a work of great genius, but deserving better things said of it than the Critical meted out. With respect to the criticism on Dr. Grainger, the writer simply displayed the grossest and most culpable ignorance and impertinence towards the productions of a learned and refined Englishman. In a word, the injustice, the intemperance of language, and the inexcusable blunders which characterised Smollett’s occupancy of the editorial chair of the Critical Review, caused it to be deservedly reprobated by those who admired justice and fair play, to say nothing of cultured criticism.

In one case, however, he was clearly in the right. A certain Admiral Knowles, who had so disgracefully failed in conducting to a successful issue the secret expedition to Rochelle in 1757, along with Sir John Mordaunt, wrote a pamphlet to justify his actions in the face of the storm of condemnation raised against him after a court–martial had acquitted Mordaunt. This pamphlet fell into Smollett’s hands, who characterised the writer as ‘an admiral without conduct, an engineer without knowledge, an officer without resolution, and a man without veracity.’ Knowles entered an action against the printer, giving as his reason ‘his desire to find out the writer, in order to obtain the satisfaction of a gentleman, if the writer’s character would admit of it.’ On Smollett learning this, he at once came forward, acknowledged himself as the writer, and declared his willingness to meet the admiral with any weapons he chose. But the latter was a poltroon and a coward. He had obtained a judgment of the Court, and he sheltered himself under it. Smollett was mulcted in £100, and in 1759 sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. Knowles seems to have merited Sir Walter Scott’s severe terms of reprobation: ‘How the admiral reconciled his conduct to the rules usually observed by gentlemen we are not informed, but the proceedings seem to justify even Smollett’s strength of expressions.’

But we have suffered our account of his relations to the Critical Review to run ahead of the narrative of his life. For several years the works he published were mostly hack–compilations for the booksellers. The most notable among these was A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages, exhibiting a clear view of the Customs, Manners, Religion, Government, Commerce, and Natural History of most nations of the world, illustrated with a variety of Maps, Charts, etc., in 7 vols. 12mo. To this day Smollett’s collection is read with appreciation, and only two years ago another edition (abridged) was published of this most interesting and instructive work.

Immense as was the reading and investigation required for such a compilation, Smollett cheerfully gave it, and really there are extraordinarily few errors in it notwithstanding the rapidity wherewith it had been produced. The publisher was Dodsley, and among the voyages recorded are those of Vasco da Gama, Pedro de Cabral, Magellan, Drake, Raleigh, Rowe, Monk, James, Nieuhoff, Wafer, Dampier, Gemelli, Rogers, Anson, etc., with the histories of the Conquest of Mexico and Peru. Also included therein was his own account of the expedition to Carthagena.

Some time before this Smollett had inserted in the Critical Review the following panegyric on Garrick, evidently intended to compensate for his bitter reflections on him in Roderick Random and The Regicide. Smollett’s eyes were being opened to the more correct estimate of his own powers. Accordingly he wrote: ‘We often see this inimitable actor labouring through five tedious acts to support a lifeless piece, with a mixture of pity and indignation, and cannot help wishing there were in his age good poets to write for one who so well deserves them. He has the art, like the Lydian king, of turning all he touches into gold, and can ensure applause to every fortunate bard.’ Was the wish father to the deed? Be this as it may, within a short time Garrick accepted Smollett’s comedy of The Reprisal, or The Tars of Old England, an afterpiece in two acts. The year 1757–58 had been a period of national disaster. Smollett, indignant at the timorous policy of the Government of the day, wrote the comedy in question to rouse the warlike spirit of the nation. The prologue begins—

‘What eye will fail to glow, what eye to brighten,
When Britain’s wrath aroused begins to lighten,
Her thunders roll—her fearless sons advance,
And her red ensigns wave o’er the pale flowers of France;
Her ancient splendour England shall maintain,
O’er distant realms extend her genial reign,
And rise the unrivall’d empress of the main.’

The Reprisal was performed at Drury Lane with great success, and Garrick’s conduct on the occasion was generous in the extreme. It laid the foundations of a lifelong friendship between the two. The piece was afterwards published, and for some time held the stage as a ‘curtain–raiser’ or ‘curtain–dropper,’ but is now entirely forgotten.

At this period Smollet was on terms of intimate friendship with the famous John Wilkes, who has been often called ‘the first Radical.’ With Samuel Johnson also he had some friendly intercourse, though they were too alike to desire a great deal of intimate association with each other. Smollett, however, through his influence with Wilkes, was able to obtain the release of Dr. Johnson’s black servant, Francis Barber, who had been impressed and put on board the Stag frigate. On the occasion Smollett wrote to Wilkes in the following terms:—

‘Chelsea, March 16, 1759.

‘I am again your petitioner in behalf of that Great Cham of literature, Samuel Johnson. His black servant, whose name is Francis Barber, has been pressed on board the Stag frigate, Captain Angel, and our lexicographer is in great distress. He says the boy is a sickly lad of a delicate frame, and particularly subject to a malady in the throat, which renders him very unfit for His Majesty’s service. You know what manner of animosity the said Johnson has against you, and I daresay you desire no other opportunity of resenting it than that of laying him under an obligation.’

The application was successful, and Francis Barber returned to the lexicographer’s service. Dr. Johnson always spoke of Dr. Smollett thereafter with great respect:—‘A scholarly man, sir, although a Scot.’