Our Real Knowledge Is Still Limited To The
Country We Have Walked Over, And We Must Not Approach The Country
We Would Appreciate Faster Than A Man May Drive A Horse Or Propel
A Bicycle; Or We Shall Lose The All-Important Sense Of Artistic
Approach.
Even to cross the channel by time-table is fatal to
that romantic spirit (indispensable to the true magic of travel)
which a slow adjustment of the mind to a new social atmosphere
and a new historical environment alone can induce.
Ruskin, the
last exponent of the Grand Tour, said truly that the benefit of
travel varies inversely in proportion to its speed. The cheap
rapidity which has made our villes de plaisir and cotes d'azur
what they are, has made unwieldy boroughs of suburban villages,
and what the rail has done for a radius of a dozen miles, the
motor is rapidly doing for one of a score. So are we sped! But we
are to discuss not the psychology of travel, but the immediate
causes and circumstances of Smollett's arrival upon the territory
of Nice.
VI
Smollett did not interpret the ground-plan of the history of Nice
particularly well. Its colonisation from Massilia, its long
connection with Provence, its occupation by Saracens, its stormy
connection with the house of Anjou, and its close fidelity to the
house of Savoy made no appeal to his admiration. The most
important event in its recent history, no doubt, was the capture
of the city by the French under Catinat in 1706 (Louis XIV. being
especially exasperated against what he regarded as the treachery
of Victor Amadeus), and the razing to the ground of its famous
citadel. The city henceforth lost a good deal of its civic
dignity, and its morale was conspicuously impaired. In the war of
the Austrian succession an English fleet under Admiral Matthews
was told off to defend the territory of the Nicois against the
attentions of Toulon. This was the first close contact
experienced between England and Nice, but the impressions formed
were mutually favourable. The inhabitants were enthusiastic about
the unaccustomed English plan of paying in full for all supplies
demanded. The British officers were no less delighted with the
climate of Nice, the fame of which they carried to their northern
homes. It was both directly and indirectly through one of these
officers that the claims of Nice as a sanatorium came to be put
so plainly before Smollett. [Losing its prestige as a ville
forte, Nice was henceforth rapidly to gain the new character of a
ville de plaisir. In 1763, says one of the city's historians,
Smollett, the famous historian and novelist, visited Nice.
"Arriving here shattered in health and depressed in spirits,
under the genial influence of the climate he soon found himself a
new man. His notes on the country, its gardens, its orange
groves, its climate without a winter, are pleasant and just and
would seem to have been written yesterday instead of more than a
hundred years ago. . . . His memory is preserved in the street
nomenclature of the place; one of the thoroughfares still bears
the appellation of Rue Smollett." (James Nash, The Guide to Nice,
1884, p. 110.)]
Among other celebrated residents at Nice during the period of
Smollett's visit were Edward Augustus, Duke of York, the brother
of George III., who died at Monaco a few years later, and Andre
Massena, a native of the city, then a lad of six.
Before he left Montpellier Smollett indulged in two more
seemingly irresistible tirades against French folly: one against
their persistent hero-worship of such a stuffed doll as Louis le
Grand, and the second in ridicule of the immemorial French
panacea, a bouillon. Now he gets to Nice he feels a return of the
craving to take a hand's turn at depreciatory satire upon the
nation of which a contemporary hand was just tracing the
deservedly better-known delineation, commencing
Gay sprightly land of mirth and social ease,
Pleas'd with thyself, whom all the world can please. . . .
Such inveteracy (like Dr. Johnson's against Swift) was not
unnaturally suspected by friends in England of having some
personal motive. In his fifteenth letter home, therefore,
Smollett is assiduous in disclaiming anything of the kind. He
begins by attempting an amende honorable, but before he has got
well away from his exordium he insensibly and most
characteristically diverges into the more congenial path of
censure, and expands indeed into one of his most eloquent
passages - a disquisition upon the French punctilio (conceived upon
lines somewhat similar to Mercutio's address to Benvolio), to
which is appended a satire on the duello as practised in France,
which glows and burns with a radiation of good sense, racy of
Smollett at his best.
To eighteenth century lovers the discussion on duelling will
recall similar talks between Boswell and Johnson, or that between
the lieutenant and Tom in the Seventh Book of Tom Jones, but,
more particularly, the sermon delivered by Johnson on this
subject a propos of General Oglethorpe's story of how he avoided
a duel with Prince Eugene in 1716. "We were sitting in company at
table, whence the Prince took up a glass of wine and by a fillip
made some of it fly in Oglethorpe's face. Here was a nice
dilemma. To have challenged him instantly might have fixed a
quarrelsome character upon the young soldier: to have taken no
notice of it might have been counted as cowardice. Oglethorpe,
therefore, keeping his eye on the Prince, and smiling all the
time, as if he took what His Highness had done in jest, said,
"Mon Prince" (I forget the French words he used), "that's a good
joke; but we do it much better in England," and threw a whole
glass of wine in the Prince's face. An old general who sat by
said, "Il a bien fait, mon Prince, vous l'avez commence," and
thus all ended in good humour."
In Letter XIII. Smollett settles down to give his correspondents
a detailed description of the territory and people of Nice.
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