I Imagine
Salvator Rosa Would Have Made A Different Disposition On The Same
Subject - That Amidst The Darkness Of A Tempest He Would Have
Illuminated The Blasphemer With The Flash Of Lightning By Which
He Was Destroyed.
This would have thrown a dismal gleam upon his
countenance, distorted by the horror of his situation as well as
by the effects of the fire, and rendered the whole scene
dreadfully picturesque."
Smollett confuses historical and aesthetic grandeur. What appeals
to him most is a monument of a whole past civilization, such as
the Pont du Gard. His views of art, too, as well as his views of
life, are profoundly influenced by his early training as a
surgeon. He is not inclined by temperament to be sanguine. His
gaze is often fixed, like that of a doctor, upon the end of life;
and of art, as of nature, he takes a decidedly pathological view.
Yet, upon the whole, far from deriding his artistic impressions,
I think we shall be inclined rather to applaud them, as well for
their sanity as for their undoubted sincerity.
For the return journey to Florence Smollett selected the
alternative route by Narni, Terni, Spoleto, Foligno, Perugia, and
Arezzo, and, by his own account, no traveller ever suffered quite
so much as he did from "dirt," "vermin," "poison," and imposture.
At Foligno, where Goethe also, in his travels a score of years or
so later, had an amusing adventure, Smollett was put into a room
recently occupied by a wild beast (bestia), but the bestia turned
out on investigation to be no more or no less than an "English
heretic." The food was so filthy that it might have turned the
stomach of a muleteer; their coach was nearly shattered to
pieces; frozen with cold and nearly devoured by rats. Mrs.
Smollett wept in silence with horror and fatigue; and the bugs
gave the Doctor a whooping-cough. If Smollett anticipated a
violent death from exhaustion and chagrin in consequence of these
tortures he was completely disappointed. His health was never
better, - so much so that he felt constrained in fairness to drink
to the health of the Roman banker who had recommended this
nefarious route. [See the Doctor's remarks at the end of Letter
XXXV.] By Florence and Lerici he retraced his steps to Nice early
in 1765, and then after a brief jaunt to Turin (where he met
Sterne) and back by the Col di Tende, he turned his face
definitely homewards. The journey home confirmed his liking for
Pisa, and gives an opening for an amusing description of the
Britisher abroad (Letter XXXV). We can almost overhear Thackeray,
or the author of Eothen, touching this same topic in Letter XLI.
"When two natives of any other country chance to meet abroad,
they run into each other's embrace like old friends, even though
they have never heard of one another till that moment; whereas
two Englishmen in the same situation maintain a mutual reserve
and diffidence, and keep without the sphere of each other's
attraction, like two bodies endowed with a repulsive power."
Letter XXXVI gives opportunity for some discerning remarks on
French taxation.
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