Smollett's Esprit Chagrin Was Nonplussed At First To
Find Material For Complaint Against A Climate In Which He Admits
That There Was Less Rain And Less Wind Than In Any Other Part Of
The World That He Knew.
In these unwonted circumstances he is
constrained to fall back on the hard water and the plague of
cousins or gnats as affording him the legitimate grievance, in
whose absence the warrior soul of the author of the Ode to
Independence could never be content.
VII
For his autumn holiday in 1764 Smollett decided on a jaunt to
Florence and Rome, returning to Nice for the winter; and he
decided to travel as far as Leghorn by sea. There was choice
between several kinds of small craft which plied along the coast,
and their names recur with cheerful frequency in the pages of
Marryat and other depictors of the Mediterranean. There was the
felucca, an open boat with a tilt over the stern large enough to
freight a post-chaise, and propelled by ten to twelve stout
mariners. To commission such a boat to Genoa, a distance of a
hundred miles, cost four louis. As alternative, there was the
tartane, a sailing vessel with a lateen sail. Addison sailed from
Marseilles to Genoa in a tartane in December 1699: a storm arose,
and the patron alarmed the passengers by confessing his sins (and
such sins!) loudly to a Capuchin friar who happened to be aboard.
Smollett finally decided on a gondola, with four rowers and a
steersman, for which he had to pay nine sequins (4 1/2 louis).
After adventures off Monaco, San Remo, Noli, and elsewhere, the
party are glad to make the famous phones on the Torre della
Lanterna, of which banker Rogers sings in his mediocre verse:
Thy pharos Genoa first displayed itself
Burning in stillness on its rocky seat;
That guiding star so oft the only one,
When those now glowing in the azure vault
Are dark and silent
Smollett's description of Genoa is decidedly more interesting. He
arrived at a moment specially propitious to so sardonic an
observer, for the Republic had fallen on evil times, having
escaped from the clutches of Austria in 1746 by means of a
popular riot, during which the aristocracy considerately looked
the other way, only to fall into an even more embarrassed and
unheroic position vis-a-vis of so diminutive an opponent as
Corsica. The whole story is a curious prototype of the nineteenth
century imbroglio between Spain and Cuba. Of commonplaces about
the palaces fruitful of verbiage in Addison and Gray, who says
with perfect truth, "I should make you sick of marble were I to
tell you how it is lavished here," Smollett is sparing enough,
though he evidently regards the inherited inclination of Genoese
noblemen to build beyond their means as an amiable weakness. His
description of the proud old Genoese nobleman, who lives in
marble and feeds on scraps, is not unsympathetic, and suggests
that the "deceipt of the Ligurians," which Virgil censures in the
line
Haud Ligurum extremus, dum fallere fata sinebant
may possibly have been of this Balderstonian variety. But
Smollett had little room in his economy for such vapouring
speculations. He was as unsentimental a critic as Sydney Smith or
Sir Leslie Stephen. He wants to know the assets of a place more
than its associations. Facts, figures, trade and revenue returns
are the data his shrewd mind requires to feed on. He has a keen
eye for harbours suitable for an English frigate to lie up in,
and can hardly rest until his sagacity has collected material for
a political horoscope.
Smollett's remarks upon the mysterious dispensations of
Providence in regard to Genoa and the retreat of the Austrians
are charged to the full with his saturnine spirit. His suspicions
were probably well founded. Ever since 1685 Genoa had been the
more or less humiliated satellite of France, and her once famous
Bank had been bled pretty extensively by both belligerents. The
Senate was helpless before the Austrian engineers in 1745, and
the emancipation of the city was due wholly to a popular emeute.
She had relapsed again into a completely enervated condition.
Smollett thought she would have been happier under British
protection. But it is a vicious alternative for a nation to
choose a big protector. It was characteristic of the Republic
that from 1790 to 1798 its "policy" was to remain neutral. The
crisis in regard to Corsica came immediately after Smollett's
visit, when in 1765, under their 154th doge Francesco Maria
Rovere, the Genoese offered to abandon the island to the patriots
under Paoli, reserving only the possession of the two loyal
coast-towns of Bonifazio and Calvi. [See Boswell's Corsica, 1766-8.]
At Paoli's instance these conciliatory terms were refused.
Genoa, in desperation and next door to bankruptcy, resolved to
sell her rights as suzerain to France, and the compact was
concluded by a treaty signed at Versailles in 1768. Paoli was
finally defeated at Ponte Novo on 9th May 1769, and fled to
England. On 15th August the edict of "Reunion" between France and
Corsica was promulgated. On the same day Napoleon Buonaparte was
born at Ajaccio.
After a week at Genoa Smollett proceeded along the coast to
Lerici. There, being tired of the sea, the party disembarked, and
proceeded by chaise from Sarzano to Cercio in Modenese territory,
and so into Tuscany, then under the suzerainty of Austria. His
description of Pisa is of an almost sunny gaiety and good humour.
Italy, through this portal, was capable of casting a spell even
upon a traveller so case-hardened as Smollett. The very churches
at Pisa are "tolerably ornamented." The Campo Santo and Tower
fall in no way short of their reputation, while the brass gates
so far excel theirs that Smollett could have stood a whole day to
examine and admire them. These agremens may be attributable in
some measure to "a very good inn." In stating that galleys were
built in the town, Smollett seems to have fallen a victim, for
once, to guide-book information.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 15 of 141
Words from 14229 to 15250
of 143308
