SMOLLETT AS A NOVELIST

Smollett, although gaining distinction in other branches of literature, was primarily and essentially a novelist. He wrote history, and wrote it well; drama, and wrote it only passably; travels but little better, and poetry decidedly mechanically, save in the ‘Ode to Independence.’ In the novel alone did he by prescriptive right take his place in the front rank of British writers of fiction. Wherein then lay his strength, and in what respects did he differ from Richardson and Fielding? To institute any comparative estimate between the three is foolish in the last degree. The grounds for such a comparison do not exist, save in the initial fact that all three wrote novels!

Smollett was, like Scott, an unequalled observer. Nothing missed his ‘inevitable eye,’ either in a situation, an incident, or a landscape. If he had not Fielding’s keen power of vision into the mental and moral characteristics of his fellow–men, he had twice his aptness of objective photography. The ludicrous aspects of a circumstance or of a saying impressed him deeply. He never seemed to forget the humorous bearings of any experience through which he had passed, or of which he had learned. The affaire de coeur with Melinda in Roderick Random, the challenge and arrest through the affection of Strap, also the inimitable ‘banquet after the manner of the ancients’ in Peregrine Pickle, were described from incidents occurring in Smollett’s own history. To few writers has the faculty been given in measure so rich of projecting objectively the scenes he was describing upon some outward, yet imaginary canvas, whence he transferred them to his pages. The naturalness of setting in the case of all the incidents is so marked, and stands out in such glaring contrast to those recorded in the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality (published in Peregrine Pickle), that one scarcely knows which to admire most—the originality of the genius or the wonderful fidelity and impressiveness of the painter’s reproduction.

Smollett’s strength lay in his great power of self–restraint. He knew what he could do, and with rare wisdom he kept himself within the limits of his imaginative ability. He could very easily have made either Roderick Random or Peregrine Pickle a sentimental amorist, sighing after his mistress, and suffering all the delicious hopes and fears and ups and downs of the knights–errant of love. But therein he would have trenched upon Richardson’s province, and placed himself in a decidedly unfavourable comparison with the author of Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe. He might have developed a splendid character–study out of the colossal Borgia–like wickedness of Ferdinand Count Fathom, who can alone claim kindred, in the pitiless thirst for crime which possesses him, with that repulsively brutal creation of Shakespeare’s early days, Aaron in Titus Andronicus, who, when dying, curses the world with the words—

‘If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul.’

But had he done so, he would have entered into direct competition with Fielding; a competition he knew he was unfitted to support. But in his own department he was supreme. In fertility of invention and apt adaptation of means to end he had no rival. His novels present one bewildering succession of accidents, entanglements, escapes, imprisonments, love–makings, and what not, until the mind positively becomes cloyed with the banquet of incident provided for it. A less profound genius than Smollett would in all probability have worn itself out in a vain attempt to rival his great contemporaries, on the principle ‘never venture, never win.’ Smollett was a surer critic, on this point at least, than many of his friends, who were continually urging him to attempt something in the mode of Fielding. ‘There is but one husbandman can reap that field,’ he replied. He knew what he could do and what he could not do, and therein, as has been said, lay his strength.

Viewing his novels as a whole,—Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom, Launcelot Greaves, The Adventures of an Atom, and Humphrey Clinker,—the first quality which strikes a critical reader is the family likeness existing between all the leading characters. Dissimilar though Roderick Random and Ferdinand Count Fathom may be in their impulses toward evil, distinct though Peregrine Pickle is from Launcelot Greaves, Matthew Bramble, and Lismahago in what may be termed his nobler qualities, there is nevertheless in all that happy–go–lucky carelessness, that supreme indifference to consequences, that courage that never flinches from the penalties of its own misdeeds, but accepts them without a murmur—in a word, a bonhomie diversified by egotism, that appears in equal measure in no other novelist of his time. Richardson displays that sentimental, melodramatic, watery ‘gush’ which the taste of last century denominated pathos—the sort of thing Dickens long after described in the phrase ‘drawing tears from his eyes and a handkerchief from his pocket’; but of that quality there is not the faintest trace in Smollett. If anything, his characters are too callous, too fond of the rough–and–tumble Tom–and–Jerry life in which their creator so perceptibly revelled. Fielding, on the other hand, patiently elaborates his characters, adding here a line and there a curve, heightening the light in one place, deepening the shading in another, never picturing an incident or a trait without some definite end to be served in perfecting the final portrait. Smollett never takes time for such microscopic character studies. He is a veritable pen–and–ink draughtsman. With bold, rapid, vigorous strokes, he sketches, through the agency of incident, the outlines of his characters, filling in these outlines with but few subsidiary details regarding the feelings and moral impulses of his creations. For such he has neither the time nor the space. Let any reader lift the conceptions of Roderick Random, or Peregrine Pickle, or Matthew Bramble out of the setting of the story and study them apart, paying no heed to anything affecting the other personages, and he will see at once how completely Smollett relied on incident to do the work of explaining and analysing the feelings of his heroes. Fielding was the greater artist, Smollett the better story–teller; Fielding was the greater moral teacher, Smollett the more vigorous painter of contemporary manners. Further, let the reader carefully study Lovelace in Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe, Blifil in Fielding’s novel of Tom Jones, and Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom, and he will perceive in even a stronger degree the diverse method of the three great novelists. Richardson builds up what might be called the ‘architectonic’ of the creation by a series of great scenes wherein dialogue plays the greatest part. Lovelace has all the light–hearted villainy of a man to whom virtue is a myth, who has no conscience, and whose standard of right is his gross animal devilishness. Richardson does everything by square and rule. He expends at the outset a wealth of ingenuity in portraying the most insignificant qualities of Lovelace’s nature. And so fully does he make us acquainted with his nature, that at the end of the novel we know in reality very little more of him than we did at the outset. Fielding, on the other hand, winds his way into the very heart of a character, ‘like a serpent round its prey,’ as Goldsmith said of Burke’s treatment of a subject in conversation. Every chapter gives us some addition to the creation, even to the very close of the novel. But when that is reached, the great synthesis is complete. Not a trait is lacking, and Master Blifil stands pilloried to all time as the type of everything that is contemptible and deceitful. Not so Smollett. In the case of Ferdinand Count Fathom the initial description of the character is reduced to a minimum. Everything is left to the effect produced by incident. All Fathom’s pitilessness, his absolute love of vice for its own sake, his colossal selfishness, are in reality merely suggested to the reader’s own mind, by the thread of rapidly succeeding incident, not formally labelled as such. In the case of both Richardson and Fielding the author is constantly present in his creation. So with Smollett, he is ever in evidence. None of them attain that superb art of Walter Scott, who simply effaces himself in his creations, or, as Hazlitt says: ‘He sits like a magician in his cell and conjures up all shapes and sights to the view; but in the midst of all this phantasmagoria the author himself never appears to take part with his characters. It is the perfection of art to conceal art, and this is here done so completely, that, while it adds to our pleasure in the work, it seems to take away from the merit of the author. As he does not thrust himself into the foreground, he loses the credit of the performance.’

By the critical student closely attentive to the development of Smollett’s genius, the fact will assuredly be noted that in the gallery of his characters, chronologically considered, there is a definitely progressive growth or increase in the power wherewith he limned character. Bearing in mind our initial position, that in Smollett’s art incident was the prime element, and the delineation of character subordinate to the artistic arrangement of the links in the chain of circumstance, I would invite attention to the following analysis, as being, in my opinion, the conclusion to be deduced from a patient, faithful, and impartial study of the personages named. My contention is that in the character sequence we have a series of ascending psychologic gradations, each one presenting features of greater complexity and philosophic force, as the author realised more clearly the value of a system in that concatenation of event which influenced so intimately his personages.

Roderick Random is little else than the Gil Blas of Le Sage Anglified, with some hints borrowed from the excellent Lazarillo de Tormes of Hurtado de Mendoza. In his Preface to the novel Smollett acknowledges his indebtedness to French and Spanish fiction, and announces his conviction of the superiority of the novel of circumstance over all others. Roderick Random, therefore, as a novel consists of a succession of incidents, some startling, some improbable, some foolish, and some highly effective, but all loosely strung together without much artistic arrangement or relative affinity to each other. The book is a record of the ‘adventures’ of the hero from his cradle to his marriage. As in the case of all such books, the peg whereon the incidents are hung is very slender. All is loose and disjointed, happy–go–lucky in narration, rapid, swift, and evanescent in the mental pictures produced. Roderick is only a big schoolboy, full of animal spirits and animal passions, far, very far from being a saint, yet as far from being an irreclaimable sinner. He is the plaything of his passions, carried like a straw on the stream of circumstance. He takes everything as it comes, be it weal be it woe, be it good fortune or evil, with supreme nonchalance. He shows little regard or gratitude to his uncle, Lieutenant Bowling. He treats his poor friend Strap, whose only fault was his fidelity, worse than indifferently. He is not by any means faithful, and certainly not very respectful, to his lady–love, Narcissa; nay, he even takes the discovery of his long–lost father—a circumstance materially altering his social station—quite as a matter of course. Roderick Random was the spirit incarnate of the cold–blooded, coarse–fibred, religionless eighteenth century—a century wherein virtue was perpetually on the lips, and vice as perpetually in the hearts of its men, a century wherein its women were colourless puppets, without true individuality or definite aims, but oscillating aimlessly between Deism and Methodism to escape from the ennui that resulted from the lack of true culture. Roderick Random as a creation was a purely adventitious one, resulting from the fortuitous concourse of incidents. How the character was to shape itself, morally or mentally, seemed to trouble the creator little, provided the events were sufficiently lively and brisk, and the interest in the story was maintained unflaggingly. Incidents were piled up, whether tending to heighten the effect of the dramatis personÆ, or not. There was no conservation of material, no wise economy, no evidence of careful selection. Prodigality and profusion were everywhere present, with the signs of youth and inexperience writ large over all. In fact, the character of Roderick Random, critically estimated as a work of art, is little better than Lobeyra’s Amadis de Gaul, a portrait limned wholly out of incident, flung on the canvas without premeditation, and frequently presenting inconsistencies and conflicting traits. There is no gradual development of character contemporaneously with the evolution of event. The character has gathered no wisdom during its course. It is represented to us in quite as immature a state at the end of the story as at the beginning. There is a heartlessness, a moral callousness about Roderick which all his experiences never seemed to remove. Excessively repulsive is this phase of the hero’s character; nay, the novel is only saved from being as darkly shaded and as morally repellent as Count Fathom, by the pathetic doglike fidelity of poor Strap, who exhibits more true nobility of nature in a chapter, than Roderick Random in the whole book.

From the criticisms on Roderick Random, Smollett learned many lessons. He noted that, though his free and easy method of letting character shape itself through the medium of incident had its advantages, these were liable to be counterbalanced unless the chain of incident was so forged that each link would be related to the leading characters of the novel, so as to promote their development and tend to fill in the bare black and white outlines by some distinguishing trait, mannerism, or eccentricity. In Peregrine Pickle, therefore, the characters are seen to be more vertebrate. They are no longer the stalking lay figures of the first novel. Albeit Peregrine is only Roderick under another name, and endowed with a year or two more of experience and sense,—the subtle differentiation of personages visible in Humphrey Clinker having yet to be learned,—there is a marked improvement in the technique of the novel. The chain of incident is every whit as varied, the events as events are more stirring and startling than in the first novel, but there is now the attempt—though as yet but an attempt—to subject the unflagging flow of incident to an artistic adaptation towards definite ends. Incident is no longer piled on incident regardless of the fact whether it tend to advance the development of the characters or not. Then Smollett has learned the value of contrast in character–painting. Peregrine is contrasted with such humorous creations as Godfrey Gauntlet, Commodore Hawser Trunnion, Lieutenant Hatchway, and Bo’sun Tom Pipes. The virtue of relative proportion among his characters according to their ratio of importance in influencing the story, though still faulty, has been carefully studied. Peregrine therefore is supreme as hero. There is no Strap to dispute the honours with him, and as a portrait he is more consistent than in the case of Roderick. Though the same callous indifference to morality is manifest, though the likeness to Lazarillo de Tormes is even more patent in this latter creation than in the former, though the same polite villainy passes current under the name of gallantry, the same cheap appreciation of female honour,—witness that degrading scene so reprobated by Sir Walter Scott, where Peregrine assails Emilia Gauntlet’s chastity,—the hero is not so glaring a moral imbecile as Roderick. He has gleams of better things. But, as in the former novel so in the latter, the noblest character of the book is the foil or contrast to Peregrine—Godfrey Gauntlet, on whom Smollett seems to lavish all his powers.

Then comes Ferdinand Count Fathom, indicating a still further advance in the technique of novel–writing. In this work the stage is not so crowded as in Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle. The whole interest centres in the career of crime of this archfiend, this pitiless Nero, Iago, and CÆsar Borgia in one. A more terrible picture of human depravity has never been drawn unless in Othello and Titus Andronicus. But Smollett had now learned the lesson of the conservation of imaginative power. There are no needless incidents in this novel. Everyone reveals the character of the hero in a new light. Relative proportion, differentiation, and contrast have all been carefully studied. Notwithstanding our loathing of crimes so unspeakable, notwithstanding our hatred of animalism so unbridled as would sacrifice the trustful Monimia to his base passions, a sort of sneaking sympathy with Fathom begins to find entrance into the breast. As in Paradise Lost one feels a sorrow for Satan’s position after his magnificent resistance to the Almighty, so here the same sentiment finds place. One hopes Fathom may have time given him wherein to repent. But Smollett was now too consummate an artist for that concession to sentimentalism. In Roderick Random he might have committed such an artistic mistake. Not now. Fathom receives retributive justice, and only repents when he has expiated to the uttermost his sins and wrong–doings.

Passing by Sir Launcelot Greaves and The History of an Atom as outside the pale of our criticism, inasmuch as they were written when he was worried and distracted with other matters, besides being in wretched health, so that they are unworthy of his genius, we come to the consideration of Matthew Bramble and Lieutenant Lismahago in Humphrey Clinker. They are undoubtedly the two greatest characters in the Smollett gallery of imaginative portraits. They must be viewed together. To separate them is to lose the reflected lustre they cast by contrast on each other. Likenesses many and important they have. Both are sufferers from the world’s fickle changes. Both are weary and irritated with society’s meannesses and petty falsehoods. Both are testy, tetchy, and prickly–tempered. But how truly men! Smollett had now reached the meridian of his powers. He realised now that in a great novel incident and the delineation of character must occupy co–ordinate positions. To assign excessive predominance to either, is to mar the ultimate effect. Therefore in Humphrey Clinker, while still revelling in inexhaustible variety of incident, Smollett assigns to the synthesis of character its proper place. In place of portraying the characters himself, he adopted the course, so favoured by his great rival Richardson, and long years after to be employed with such rare effect by Walter Scott and William Makepeace Thackeray, of achieving the evolution of character through the medium of letters, a mutual analysis as well as a distinctive synthesis. Risky though the expedient was, for it demanded a man of the highest genius to make the letters popular, in Smollett’s hands it proved eminently successful. We accordingly have Matthew Bramble alternately described by himself and Jerry Melford, each giving varying phases of the same kindly, dogmatic, generously obstinate, and wholly noble–hearted fellow. Lismahago’s character, besides being drawn by the two above–named fellow–travellers in that expedition to Scotland wherein Humphrey Clinker was the footman and hero, has the blanks in the portrait filled in by Miss Tabitha Bramble, the bitter–sweet spinster whom he afterwards married, and the inimitably delightful lady’s–maid, Winnifred Jenkins. More highly finished pictures could scarcely be desired. Side by side with Scott’s Dugald Dalgetty and Thackeray’s Esmond, Lismahago may assuredly be placed, while Matthew Bramble falls little short, in completeness of details, of Jonathan Oldbuck in the Antiquary. Yet Bramble is still Roderick Random and Peregrine Pickle purged of their faults and follies, and with the experience of years upon them. We realise that Bramble possesses all their shortcomings, albeit held in check by his strong good sense, while they potentially had all his virtues, though the fever of youth i’ the blood obscured them for the nonce. A noble gallery do these five characters compose. If Fathom be the Cain or the Esau of the company, he has many of the family features to show to what race he belongs.

In one imaginative type Smollett has never been approached as a creator, to wit, in his delineation of British seamen. Captain Marryat exhibits a greater knowledge of nautical affairs than Smollett, but nothing in the younger novelist quite touches the racy humour of Commodore Hawser Trunnion, Lieutenant Bowling, Hatchway, and Pipes. David Hannay, in his introduction to Japhet in Search of a Father, says: ‘Captain Savage of the Diomede, Captain M—— of the King’s Own, Captain Hector Maclean in Jacob Faithful, Terence O’Brien, the mate Martin, the midshipman Gascoigne, Thomas Saunders the boatswain’s mate, and Swinburne the quartermaster, are beyond all question not less lifelike portraits of the officers and men of the navy than Trunnion and Bowling, Pipes and Hatchway. In one respect Marryat had an inevitable advantage over his predecessor. Smollett never shows us the seaman at his work. He could not, because he did not know it sufficiently well to understand it himself.’ That is perfectly true. But, on the other hand, Marryat’s intimate knowledge was often a hindrance to his art. It led him to inflict the minutiÆ of the service on his readers more than was needful. Hence the reason why some parts of Marryat’s books are decidedly tiresome. Smollett’s are never so. His sense of artistic proportion was finer than Marryat’s, and he avoided the pitfall whereinto the other fell. As a delineator of the nautical character, Mr. Clark Russell is the greatest we have had since Smollett, and in him the latter finds his most dangerous rival. Yet, if Mr. Russell has equalled his master in many other respects, it is doubtful if he has quite reached the high–water mark of Commodore Trunnion and Lismahago.

Finally, Smollett’s women are deserving of a word. Sainte Beuve said he judged a novelist’s powers by the manner in which he drew his female characters. If so, Smollett would not have excited much sympathy in the mind of the brilliant author of the Causeries du Lundi. His women are of varying excellence. Narcissa in Roderick Random and Emilia in Peregrine Pickle are only sweet dolls. Until his closing years he could not differentiate between puling sentimentality and piquancy. Into the charming perversity, the delightful contradictoriness, that often make up for us one–half the attractiveness of the female character, he could not enter. To rise to the height of spiritual insight that was requisite to conceive and execute a Di Vernon, an Ethel Newcome, or a Rose Vincy, was for him impossible, simply because he could not realise in his earlier years of authorship that women are the equals, not the inferiors of man. The hapless Miss Williams in Roderick Random exhibits this feeling on the part of Smollett. She was nobility itself in character, yet she was made over to Strap. One of the finest of his creations is the hapless Monimia in Count Fathom. Tenderness, purity, grace, and beauty are all united in her. She falls, it is true, but her fall left her virtue unimpugned, seeing that her betrayer resorted to means as cruel as they were irresistible to accomplish his diabolic purpose. Monimia occupies a pedestal apart, but, she excepted, the two most delightful creations in all his works are those in Humphrey Clinker, Tabitha Bramble and Winnifred Jenkins. Lydia Melford is too milk–and–waterish, but the two first–named are drawn with masterly precision and force. Tabitha Bramble is a capital portrait of the soured, disappointed old maid, whose lover had died long before, but to whose memory she had been ever faithful—a woman whose nature is only encrusted with prejudice, not inter–penetrated by it, so that we may justly hope that, under the loving care of Lieutenant Lismahago, her frigidity may thaw, and that in matrimony she may discover the world not to be so very bad after all. Winnifred Jenkins is the prototype of Mrs. Malaprop in Sheridan’s Rivals, and is infinitely more amusing. All the vanity, self–assertiveness, and jealousy of a small mind, conjointly with the love of appearing to move in a higher circle of society than she really does, are admirably sketched, while her misappropriate use of the language of that circle is most felicitously rendered. The portrait is Smollett’s best, and no touch is finer than Winnifred’s conduct in the menagerie. Let her speak for herself. ‘Last week I went with mistress to the Tower to see the crowns and wild beastis. There was a monstracious lion with teeth half a quarter long, and a gentleman bid me not go near him if I wasn’t a maid, being as how he would roar, and tear, and play the dickens. Now I had no mind to go near him, for I cannot abide such dangerous honeymils, not I—but mistress would go, and the beast kept such a roaring and bouncing that I tho’t he would have broke his cage and devoured us all; and the gentleman tittered forsooth; but I’ll go death upon it, I will, that my lady is as good a firgkin as the child unborn; and therefore either the gentleman told a phib, or the lion ought to be set in the stocks for bearing false witness against his neighbour.’ Tabitha Bramble and Win Jenkins are those two in Smollett’s gallery of fiction which the world will not willingly let die.

Such, then, is Smollett as a novelist—the great master of incident and humorous narration, the painter of the faults, foibles, and eccentricities of his fellow–men. In his own sphere he was unrivalled, and he in nothing showed more saliently his good sense than by refusing to attempt works for which he knew he was both by temperament and training unfitted. I cannot quite agree with Professor Saintsbury’s view in his charming and sympathetic Life of Smollett, prefixed to what bids fair to be the standard edition of his works.[10] ‘The only one of the deeper and higher passions which seems to have stirred Smollett was patriotism, in which a Scot rarely fails, unless he is an utter gaby or an utter scoundrel.’ Does not the worthy Professor, following the popular definition, fail to differentiate between an emotion and a passion. In depicting the passions, Smollett, I grant, was singularly deficient; in such emotions as patriotism, sympathy with the oppressed, and a pure devotion to the cause of truth, he showed himself a man whose heart was permeated with the warmest and deepest enthusiasm.