SMOLLETT AS POET AND DRAMATIST

Tradition states that Smollett, on being asked on one occasion why he did not write more poetry, replied that he had ‘no time to be a poet.’ The answer can be read in a dual sense—either that poetry demanded an absorption so complete in its pursuit that all other interests were as naught; or, on the other hand, that his time was so fully occupied that he could not devote attention to poetical composition without neglecting other things at that time of more value. As weighed against his fiction, little regret can be felt by any admirer of Smollett, that he did not pursue poetry more diligently. The specimens we possess of these fruits of his genius are not of such value as to awaken any desire to peruse more of his metrical essays. Small in bulk though his poetical works are, even these, as well as his dramatic compositions, we would gladly have spared in exchange for such another novel as Humphrey Clinker.

Smollett’s genius was by no means of that purely imaginative, highly spiritual type from which great poetical compositions are to be expected. He was rather an unsurpassed observer, who, having noted special characteristics of mind as being produced by the fortuitous concourse of certain incidents, straightway proceeded to expand and idealise them; than a mighty original genius, like Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Shelley, or Keats, that from the depths of his spiritual consciousness evolved original creations that are representative not of any age, but of all time. Smollett had none of the isolating power of the true poet, whereby for the time he raises his theme into the pure ether of imagination, dissociated from the world and all its concerns. Smollett loved the world too well to seek to sever himself from it. His workshop, his studio, his school, and observatory, it was in one. Like Balzac, he was more taken up with what men did than with what they thought. From the outward evidence of action he worked back to the predisposing thought, not predicting À priori from the thought what the action must necessarily be. Therefore, as Smollett’s genius was more practical than imaginative, dealing more with the reproduction of facts than the creation of fancies, his poetry rose little above the dead level of commonplace. Only in two poems does he rise into a distinctively higher altitude of poetic inspiration—these are ‘The Tears of Scotland’ and ‘The Ode to Independence.’ In both cases, however, the influence of patriotism and that keen sympathy with the oppressed which he always entertained, contributed to impart to the compositions in question loftier sentiments and more impassioned feelings than would otherwise have been the case. We have already seen that the horrors wrought in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 by the Duke of Cumberland were on his mind when he wrote ‘The Tears of Scotland’; while the heroism of the noble Corsican Paschal Paoli was the stimulating motive in the composition of the latter.

There is a great difference between the two. The former was written in 1746, while the ‘Ode to Independence’ was not produced until the last years of his life, and was not published until 1773, when the Messrs. Foulis of Glasgow, printers to the University of Glasgow, put it out, with a short Preface and Notes by Professor Richardson. In both, the language is spirited and striking, the thoughts elevated and just. In the ‘Ode’ he takes as his models Collins and Gray. The first and last stanzas of it—or, more properly, the opening strophe and the concluding antistrophe—are the finest in the poem, and are well worthy of quotation—

‘Thy spirit, Independence, let me share,
Lord of the lion–heart and eagle eye:
Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare,
Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.
Deep in the frozen regions of the North,
A goddess violated brought thee forth,
Immortal Liberty, whose look sublime
Hath bleached the tyrant’s cheek in ever–varying clime.
What time the iron–hearted Gaul,
With frantic Superstition for his guide,
Armed with the dagger and the pall,
The Sons of Woden to the field defied;
The ruthless hag by Weser’s flood
In Heaven’s name urged the infernal blow,
And red the stream began to flow,
The vanquished were baptised with blood.

Antistrophe.

Nature I’ll court in her sequestered haunts
By mountain, meadow, streamlet, grove or cell,
Where the poised lark his evening ditty chants,
And Health and Peace and Contemplation dwell.
There Study shall with Solitude recline,
And Friendship pledge me to his fellow–swains;
And Toil and Temperance sedately twine
The slender cord that fluttering life sustains:
And fearless Poverty shall guard the door,
And Taste unspoiled the frugal table spread,
And Industry supply the frugal store,
And Sleep unbribed his dews refreshing shed;
White–mantled Innocence, ethereal sprite,
Shall chase afar the goblins of the night,
And Independence o’er the day preside:
Propitious power! my patron and my pride.’

His two satires, Advice and Reproof, evince on the part of their author the qualities we have already noted—keen power of observation, a felicitous deftness in wedding sound to sense, considerable force of satiric presentation, with humour and wit in rich measure. But there is no such elevation as we discover in Johnson’s London or The Vanity of Human Wishes, or in the satiric pieces of Pope or Dryden. The moment the poems rise from the consideration of facts to principles, Smollett becomes tedious and prosy. As a song–writer, however, he has made some eminently successful essays, the well–known lyric—

‘To fix her: ‘twere a task as vain
To combat April drops of rain,’

which has been so often set to music, having been written by him soon after the publication of Roderick Random. It possesses grace, point, and rhythmic harmony—the three great desiderata in a good lyric. The following verse has a faint echo of the subtle beauty of Wither, Lovelace, Herrick, and the Cavalier poets:—

‘She’s such a miser eke in love,
Its joys she’ll neither share nor prove,
Though crowds of gallants gay await
From her victorious eyes their fate.’

Of his remaining poems there are only one or two that really merit notice. Smollett was too apt to run into the opposite extreme from sacrificing sense to sound, and prefer a repelling roughness both in metre and assonance to altering the sequence of thought in a poem that would not have been injured by the change. His Odes to Mirth and to Sleep are marred by being too didactic. His images are frequently so recondite as to awaken no corresponding ideas in the mind of the reader. His ‘Love Elegy’ is in imitation of those of Tibullus, and there are several lines that are well–nigh as tenderly pathetic as those of its great original, while the verses ‘On a Young Lady playing on the Harpsichord,’ so much admired by Sir Walter Scott, are undoubtedly amongst his finest efforts for happy union of glowing thought and graceful expression—

‘When Sappho struck the quivering wire,
The throbbing breast was all on fire;
And when she raised the vocal lay,
The captive soul was charmed away:
But had the nymph possessed with these
Thy softer, chaster power to please,
Thy beauteous air of sprightly youth,
Thy native smiles of artless truth,
The worm of grief had never preyed
On the forsaken, love–sick maid;
Nor had she mourned an hapless flame,
Nor dashed on rocks her tender frame.’

Had Smollett cultivated the art of metrical expression more persistently and enthusiastically, there are sufficient indications to show that he might have produced work which, if not in the very highest grade of excellence in the school presided over by Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith, would have attained a standard sufficiently worthy to be ranked among the minor products of that decidedly prosaic epoch. We need not regret his abstention.

Finally, in the drama Smollett’s restless genius sought expression at two periods of his life when his hopes were at their highest. In his nineteenth year, we have seen that the fruit of his historical studies, and his wanderings in the glorious Elizabethan drama, had been given to the world in The Regicide—a drama founded on the murder of James I. of Scotland. Written at that point in a youth’s life when the Will o’ the Wisp of literary fame seemed an angel of light, when the prizes incident on intellectual eminence had only recently attracted his gaze, and when his judgment, therefore, was dazzled by the expectation of reaching such a reputation as his countrymen Thomson, Mallet, and Arbuthnot had already won, it had all the faults though but few of the merits of a youthful production. The other piece, The Reprisal; or, The Tars of Old England, was executed when his fame was assured, when he was no longer the tyro in composition, but the editor of the Critical Review and a critic of the works of others. It is widely different from the Regicide, both in style, method, motive, and execution. Yet a beginner in the work of criticism could detect that both were written by the same hand. The Regicide, as a drama, is, as we have already said, a very mediocre production. Dealing with a period of Scottish history where there was scope for the aids of a brilliant historic background and of the customs and costumes of the time, Smollett has availed himself of none of these. The characters of the drama are men and women of the eighteenth century, masquerading in anomalous forms of speech and mysterious lines of action, which no one out of Bedlam would have ever considered befitting a king or his nobility. For example, in the play, in place of the dramatis personÆ being designated as ‘James i., King of Scotland,’ and ‘Joanna Beaufort, Queen of Scotland,’ we have simply ‘King’ and ‘Queen,’ while the nobles and conspirators bear such utterly inappropriate and unhistoric names as Angus, Dunbar, Ramsay, Stuart, Grime, and Cattan. The action is spasmodic and jerky, altogether lacking in artistic dramatic dovetailing of incidents into each other and of symmetrical consecutiveness of circumstance. James lacks heroism, dignity, and power; Grime—probably meant for Sir Robert Graham—and Athol are very declamatory villains, who, if they put off as much time in firing off expletives at the real scene of the murder, must inevitably have permitted their victim to escape. We seem to be reading a play of Dekker’s or Greene’s, so very elementary is the stagecraft displayed in contriving exits and entrances for the personages. The characters are all more or less wooden. They talk in stilted, high–flown language, such as a boy of nineteen would suppose the courtiers of a monarch like James I. to employ. They never for a moment descend from their stilts; and even in dying, Dunbar and Eleonora declaim to the audience in rounded and rhetorical periods. Eleonora philosophises as follows within a second or two of her death:—

‘Life has its various seasons as the year;
And after clustering autumn—but I faint,
Support me nearer—in rich harvest’s rear
Bleak winter must have lagged. Oh! now I feel
The leaden hand of death lie heavy on me—
Thine image swims before my straining eye,
And now it disappears. Speak—bid adieu
To the lost Eleonora. Not a word?
Not one farewell? Alas, that dismal groan
Is eloquent distress! Celestial powers,
Protect my father; show’r upon his—Oh! [Dies.]’

Whereupon Dunbar also replies in similar heroics as death approaches—

‘There fled the purest soul that ever dwelt
In mortal clay! I come, my love, I come.
Where now the rosy tincture of these lips!
The smile that grace ineffable diffused!
The glance that smote the soul with silent wonder!
The voice that soothed the anguish of disease’—

After which he also cries ‘Oh!’ and dies. Now, it is very easy to laugh at all this, and to make fun of the inappropriate ‘hifalutin.’ But, dangerously near bombast though it is, the scene has a pathetic power in it, which, after discounting all its demerits, brings out the balance on the right side of the ledger of praise and blame. Boyish and immature, full of weak and silly passages as the drama is, there are, nevertheless, portions of it which give presage of the genius lying latent beneath the rant and fustian. Mediocre though the piece be, viewed as a whole, isolated passages and lines could be selected from it of the pure imaginative and intellectual ore,—lines and passages, in fine, that lovers of Smollett’s genius treasure in their hearts as worthy of the master. Such a passage as the following, being one of the speeches addressed by Dunbar to Eleonora, is aflame with the fiery glow of supreme passion—

‘O thy words

Would fire the hoary hermit’s languid soul
With ecstasies of pride! How then shall I,
Elate with every vainer hope that warms
The aspiring thought of youth, thy praise sustain
With moderation? Cruelly benign,
Thou hast adorned the victim; but alas!
Thou likewise giv’st the blow! Though Nature’s hand
With so much art has blended every grace
In thy enchanting form, that every eye
With transport views thee, and conveys unseen
The soft infection to the vanquished soul,
Yet wilt thou not the gentle passion own
That vindicates thy sway!’

And this, one of Eleonora’s replies to Dunbar, is pervaded by an exquisite pathos, as tender as it is true—

‘O wondrous power

Of love beneficent! O generous youth,
What recompense (thus bankrupt as I am)
Shall speak my grateful soul? A poor return
Cold friendship renders to the fervid hope
Of fond desire!’

The Reprisal, on the other hand, is little more than a comedietta. It has all the merits of a light, farcical, after–dinner piece, all the faults of a composition that savours more of froth and folly than aught else. The characters of the lovers, Heartly and Harriet, are lightly etched in; but those of Oclabber, an Irish lieutenant, and Maclaymore, a Scots captain, both in the French service, are drawn with great humour and power. Haulyard the midshipman, Lyon the lieutenant, and Block the sailor, all in the English navy, are spirited creations, designed to represent the seamen of Old England at their best. The incidents of the drama are full of life and movement, and the characters are well contrasted as differentiated types. The language, however, is still somewhat stilted and pedantic, so that one can easily detect, amidst all the fun and frolic of The Reprisal, the same hand that executed the dark and gloomy Regicide.

And now, with the great body of his work before us, looking back also upon all he did, and thought, and said for the good of his brethren of mankind, what is the ultimate verdict which Time has passed on his life and labours? Secure of his niche in the very front rank of the great fathers of English fiction, Smollett’s name and literary legacy are precious possessions in the treasure–house of British fiction. Though he is not a ‘Scots novelist’ in the restricted sense of the term as applied to the writers of these latter days, he has done much to make Scotsmen proud that their country had produced such a son. The works he has executed are assuredly an imperishable memorial. But even more than they do we cherish the example he has set of stern, unflinching devotion to duty, of an honesty that has never been impugned, and of a mighty love for the welfare and the improvement of his brethren of mankind. Every line he wrote was permeated by this intense love of his fellows, and for the amelioration of the lot of the downtrodden he was ready to face both obloquy and danger. A Scot, in the narrow sense of the word, he cannot be considered. As a Briton he will be loved and cherished by a larger family of readers than would be the case did he only appeal to the sympathies of Scotland and the Scots. But though this is so, it does not lessen the regard wherewith his countrymen regard him. After the inspired singer of ‘Auld Langsyne,’—after the mighty magician who created such diverse types as Baron Bradwardine, Vich Ian Vohr, Dominie Sampson, Di Vernon, Halbert Glendinning, Jeannie Deans, Rob Roy, and Dugald Dalgetty,—comes he whose children three—Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Matthew Bramble—will find readers while our language lasts. Proud though we be as Britons to own such a genius as of our tongue, prouder still are we, as Scots, to hail him as akin to us in blood; and so in a double sense rejoicing in his greatness and his glory, we once more bid him farewell!