SMOLLETT AS HISTORIAN AND CRITIC

A hundred and thirty years ago, if one had been asked to name the six great historians then alive, Smollett with marked unanimity would have been mentioned amongst the first. In fact, Hume, Robertson, and he were then reckoned as the illustrious triumvirate of Scots whose genius, in default of others native born, had been consecrated to the task of lauding for bread and fame the annals of the land whose glories were supposed to be to them so distasteful. The Union of the countries was not yet sufficiently remote to have borne as its fruit that harvest of commercial, political, and agricultural benefits that have accrued to both lands as its result. The jealousy wherewith Scotsmen were regarded in England was a legacy from the days when the subjugation of the territory north of Tweed was a standing item in English foreign policy, from the reign of that greatly misjudged monarch, Edward I. (Longshanks), to the days of the fourth of his name, who recognised the younger brother of James iii., the exiled Duke of Albany, as King of Scots under the title of Alexander iv., on condition that he acknowledged Edward as lord paramount and feudal superior.

The school of historians represented by Rapin, Oldmixon, Tindal, Carte, and Hooke, honest, hard–working investigators, but without any sense of method or proportion in classifying or arranging materials, and vigorous anti–Scots, was alarmed by the success attending the publication of Hume’s History of England in 1754–61, Principal Robertson’s History of Scotland in 1758–59, and Smollett’s History of England in 1758. When the Continuation by the last–named appeared in 1762, it was exposed, as we have seen, to a perfect broadside of misrepresentation and unjust reflections, prompted by the historians above–named and their booksellers, whose literary property seemed to them to be endangered. That some of the criticisms were just, and founded upon the discovery of genuine errors and blemishes in the history, cannot be denied. But, on the other hand, three–fourths of the allegations were baseless, because proceeding from spleen, and not from genuine enthusiasm in the cause of historic truth.

For example, the objections urged by the friends and supporters of Rapin’s History were that Smollett was too hurried in his survey, that he took too many facts on trust, that he was unfair in his critical estimates of eminent personages, and finally, that his style was one better adapted for the novel than for historical compositions. To these allegations the friends of Oldmixon added that he permitted party prejudice to colour all his judgments. In replying to such charges we virtually analyse Smollett’s merits as a historian. A double duty is therefore discharged by so doing.

Smollett as a historian might say with Horace, and assuredly with truth, ‘Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri—a slavish disciple of the tenets of no master am I.’ Though unstinted in his praise of Hume’s calm, lucid survey, of his careful generalisations and eminently comprehensive method, though likewise a generous admirer of Robertson’s brilliant word–pictures and glowingly eloquent narrative, wherein the long dead seemed to live again, he had his own ideal of the writing of history, and it savoured rather of Tacitus than of Thucydides. His method consisted in presenting a series of great outstanding events covering the entire period under notice, and round these to group the subordinate occurrences either resulting from or happening contemporaneously with them. He was a firm believer in the doctrine that political freedom and commercial honesty are the two great bulwarks of any State. Though a Tory in name, he was in reality more of a philosophical Whig, rather a champion of the rights of the people than a lover and defender of aristocracies, oligarchies, and monopolies. ‘That country only is truly prosperous that is in the highest sense free, and that country alone is free where a hierarchy of knowledge governs, uninfluenced by faction and undisturbed by prejudice,’ he wrote in the Critical Review. The sentiments are somewhat vague and indefinite, but they show that he was striving to emancipate himself from the leading–strings of party prejudice.

Although the fact is beyond doubt that Smollett’s historical works were written exceedingly rapidly, on the other hand, we must remember that the rapidity of production merely applied to the mechanical work of transcribing what had been already carefully thought out. Like Dr. Johnson, Smollett was possessed of a most retentive memory. He rarely committed any of his works to paper until he had thoroughly thought them out in his mind, and had tested them over and over again in that searching alembic. In neither case, therefore, was the composition hurried. All that was done was to expedite its transcription. Smollett’s historical judgments, in place of being hastily formed, were the result of patient study and thought. On this point we have the evidence of Wilkes, who, in one of his epigrams, more forcible than delicate, remarked that Smollett travailed over the birth of his historical judgments so much that he (Wilkes) had often to play the part of the critical midwife.

The next charge, that Smollett was too prone to take his information at second hand, cannot be altogether controverted, though it was not yet the custom of historians to betake themselves to the MS. repositories of the country for their materials. More mutual reliance was placed by historians on each other’s bon fides and faculty of critical selection than seems to be the case now. But we have it on his own assurance that he consulted over three hundred authorities for his facts. That number may be small compared with those eight hundred names which Buckle prints at the commencement of his noble and imperishable History of Civilisation in England, but in Smollett’s day the number of his references was considered phenomenal. He greatly surpassed Hume in the range and appropriateness of his references, and rather prided himself on the collateral evidences of facts which he was able to adduce from his miscellaneous reading. That Smollett was consciously unfair in his judgment of any character in his historical works cannot be credited. He was too warm a friend of truth to be seduced into wilfully distorting the plain and straightforward deductions from ascertained facts. That he may have been misled I do not deny, that his political predilections may have led him insensibly to colour his judgments at times with the jaundice of partisanship, is quite possible, yet that such was done deliberately, no student of Smollett’s character for a moment will credit. Many of his political opponents were castigated, it is true, so were many of his political friends; but, on the other hand, the fact is to be taken into account that many of his bitterest enemies obtained a just and impartial criticism from Smollett when such was denied to them by many of the writers numbered among their own friends. Finally, that his style was more adapted to the treatment of imaginative themes than of sober historical narrative, was a charge that might have some weight in the middle decades of last century. It can have none now. No special style is distinctively to be employed in historical composition. It affords scope for all. True it is that Echard and his school, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, contended that history should be written in a style of sober commonplace altogether divested of ornament, as thereby the judgment was not likely to be led astray. But such nonsensical reservations have long since been relegated to the limbo of exploded theories, and in historical composition the brilliancy of a Macaulay and of an Alison finds a place as well as the sober sense of a Hallam or a Stubbs; the picturesqueness of a Froude, as well as the earnest vigour and tireless industry of a Freeman. Smollett’s style, so nervous, pointed, and epigrammatic, so full of strength and beauty as well as of scintillating sparkle, was somewhat of a surprise in his day. Hume’s easy, flowing, pithy Saxon, and Robertson’s stately splendour, had both carried the honours in historical composition to the grey metropolis of the North. The fact that another Scot, albeit resident in London, should repeat the success, and in some respects excel both, was the most crushing blow the elder school of history had received. Thenceforward we hear nothing of them. Rapin and Oldmixon slumbered with the spiders on the remotest shelves of the great libraries. Their day was past. A new school of British historians had arisen.

Smollett’s historical works, his History of England, his Continuation of the History of England, his Histories of France, Italy, and Germany, are characterised by the following sterling qualities:—a felicity of method whereby the narrative flows on easily and consecutively from beginning to end, and whereby, through its division into chapters, representing definite epochs, one is able to discover with ease any specific point that may be desired; an exhibition of the principles whereon just and equitable government should proceed, namely, that of a limited monarchy; a judicious subordination of the less to the more important events in the narrative; short, pithy, but eminently fair and appreciative criticisms of all the more outstanding personages in the country under treatment, and a convincing testimony borne to the axiom that only by national virtue and the conservation of national honour can any nation either reach greatness or retain it. If Smollett did not possess Hume’s power of reaching back to first principles in tracing the evolution of a country’s greatness, or Robertson’s stimulating eloquence that fired the heart with noble sentiments, he had the virtue, scarcely less valuable, of keeping more closely to his theme than either of them, and of producing works that read like a romance. If Hume were the superior in what may be styled the philosophy of history, if Robertson in picturesqueness and eloquence, Smollett was the better narrator of the circumstances and facts as they actually occurred. In many respects he resembles Diderot, and the analogy is not lessened when we compare the private lives of the two men. To Smollett history was only of value insomuch as we are able to read the present by the key of the past, and to influence the future by avoiding the mistakes of the past and present. Smollett was a patriot in the broad catholic signification of the word. He had no sympathy with the patriotism that is synonymous with national or racial selfishness. More crimes have stained the annals of humanity under the guise of patriotism than can be atoned for by cycles of penitence. To Smollett the soul of patriotism was summed up in sinking the name of Scot in the generic one of Briton, and in endeavouring to stamp out that pitiful provincialism that considered one’s love of country to be best manifested in perpetuating quarrels whereon the mildew of centuries had settled. Smollett in his historical works showed himself a truer patriot than that. Though a leal–hearted Scot, he was likewise a magnanimous–spirited Briton, ready to judge as he would wish to be judged. Writing of the Union of 1707, he remarks in his Continuation: ‘The majority of both nations believed that the treaty would produce violent convulsions, or, at best, prove ineffectual. But we now see it has been attended with none of the calamities that were prognosticated, that it quietly took effect, and answered all the purposes for which it was intended. Hence we may learn that many great difficulties are surmounted because they are not seen by those who direct the execution of any great project; and that many great schemes which theory deems impracticable will yet succeed in the experiment.’

Some critics have urged that Smollett might have taken a broader view of the sources and progress of national expansion and development. Minto rather off–handedly designates his style as ‘fluent and loose, possessing a careless vigour where the subject is naturally exciting,’ and concluding with the words, ‘the history is said to be full of errors and inconsistencies.’[11] Now, this last clause is taken word for word from Chambers’s Cyclopedia of English Literature, who took it from Angus’s English Literature, who borrowed it from Macaulay, who annexed it from the Edinburgh Review, which journal had originally adopted it with alterations from Smollett’s own prefatory remarks in the first edition of the book. How many of these authors had read the history for themselves, to see if it really contained such errors and inconsistencies? Criticism conducted on that mutual–trust principle is very convenient for the critic; is it quite fair to the author? Now, anyone who faithfully reads Smollett’s History of England and its Continuation will not discover a larger percentage of either errors or inconsistencies than appear in the works of his contemporary historians, Tytler, Hume, and Robertson. Smollett is as distinguishingly fair and impartial as it was possible for one to be, influenced so profoundly by his environment as were all the historians of the eighteenth century. The mind of literary Europe was already tinged by that spiritual unrest and moral callousness that was to induce the new birth of the French Revolution.

As a literary critic, during his tenure of the editorial chair of the Critical Review, Smollett’s judgments were frequently called in question, especially in the case of Dr. Grainger, the translator of Tibullus and of the Greek dramatists, and author of the Ode to Solitude; Shebbeare, a well–known political writer of the period, whose seditious utterances had been chastised; Home, the author of Douglas, and Wilkie of the Epigoniad. Now, in nearly all the cases wherein exception was taken to the articles, these were not written by Smollett. But even as regards those of his own composition that have been complained of, careful perusal alike of the volume criticised and of the critique evince Smollett to have been as just and fair in the circumstances as he could well be. For example, the opinion he formed of Churchill’s Poems was that in which the British public within thirty years was to acquiesce,—nay, is that which to–day is the prevailing literary verdict upon these once popular works. Smollett unfortunately left his contributors a perfectly free hand. Many of them were men of no principle, who permitted private grudges to colour their critical estimate of literary works produced by those with whom they had some quarrel or disagreement. Smollett was to blame for not exercising his editorial scissors more freely on the verdicts of his collaborateurs. His own opinions of current literature were expressed with a fairness leaving little to be desired. Though not a Sainte Beuve in critical appreciation of the work of others, though his verdicts never possessed the keen spiritual and emotional insight of the famous Causeries du Lundi in the Paris Constitutional, still they are the fair, honest, outspoken opinions of a man who, as Morton said of Knox, ‘never feared the face of man,’ and therefore would not be biassed by favour or fear. Dr. Johnson was at the same time criticising literature in his new Literary Magazine. Interesting it is to compare the two opinions on the books they dealt with. Smollett’s style is well–nigh as distinguishable as Johnson’s among his fellow–contributors. If the decrees of ‘the Great Cham of Literature’[12] are more authoritative, they are but little more incisive and searching than those of the author of Roderick Random. The former had a more extensive vocabulary, the latter was the more consummate literary critic. Wit, humour, pathos, and epigram were all at the service of Smollett, and though, in depth of thought and soaring sublimity of reasoning powers, the author of the Rambler excelled his contemporary, in the lighter graces of style Smollett was the better of the two. Though he had not

Johnson’s Jove–like power of driving home a truth, he frequently persuaded, by his calm and lucid logic, where the thunder of the Great Cham only repelled. If blame be his, then, with regard to the exercise of his critical authority, it was due more to sins of omission than of commission, more to believing that others were actuated by the same high ideals in criticism as himself. In reading some of the numbers of the Critical Review for the purposes of this biography, nothing struck me more in those papers that were plainly from the pen of Smollett, than the power he possessed of placing himself at the point of view assumed by the writer of the work under criticism, so that he might be thoroughly en rapport with the author’s sympathies. How few critics have either the inclination or the ability to do likewise!