A
Sardonic, Satirical, And Indeed Decidedly Gloomy Mood Or Temper
Had Become So Habitual In Him As To Transform The Man.
Originally
gay and debonnair, his native character had been so overlaid that
when he first returned to Scotland in 1755 his own mother could
not recognise him until he "gave over glooming" and put on his
old bright smile.
[A pleasant story of the Doctor's mother is
given in the same Letters to R. Chambers (1904). She is described
as an ill-natured-looking woman with a high nose, but not a bad
temper, and very fond of the cards. One evening an Edinburgh
bailie (who was a tallow chandler) paid her a visit. "Come awa',
bailie," said she, "and tak' a trick at the cards." "Troth madam,
I hae nae siller!" "Then let us play for a pound of candles."]
His was certainly a nervous, irritable, and rather censorious
temper. Like Mr. Brattle, in The Vicar of Bulhampton, he was
thinking always of the evil things that had been done to him.
With the pawky and philosophic Scots of his own day (Robertson,
Hume, Adam Smith, and "Jupiter" Carlyle) he had little in common,
but with the sour and mistrustful James Mill or the cross and
querulous Carlyle of a later date he had, it seems to me, a good
deal. What, however, we attribute in their case to bile or liver,
a consecrated usage prescribes that we must, in the case of
Smollett, accredit more particularly to the spleen. Whether
dyspeptic or "splenetic," this was not the sort of man to see
things through a veil of pleasant self-generated illusion. He
felt under no obligation whatever to regard the Grand Tour as a
privilege of social distinction, or its discomforts as things to
be discreetly ignored in relating his experience to the stay-at-home
public. He was not the sort of man that the Tourist Agencies
of to-day would select to frame their advertisements. As an
advocatus diaboli on the subject of Travel he would have done
well enough. And yet we must not infer that the magic of travel
is altogether eliminated from his pages. This is by no means the
case: witness his intense enthusiasm at Nimes, on sight of the
Maison Carree or the Pont du Gard; the passage describing his
entry into the Eternal City; [Ours "was the road by which so many
heroes returned with conquest to their country, by which so many
kings were led captive to Rome, and by which the ambassadors of
so many kingdoms and States approached the seat of Empire, to
deprecate the wrath, to sollicit the friendship, or sue for the
protection of the Roman people."] or the enviable account of the
alfresco meals which the party discussed in their coach as
described in Letter VIII.
As to whether Smollett and his party of five were exceptionally
unfortunate in their road-faring experiences must be left an open
question at the tribunal of public opinion. In cold blood, in one
of his later letters, he summarised his Continental experience
after this wise: inns, cold, damp, dark, dismal, dirty; landlords
equally disobliging and rapacious; servants awkward, sluttish,
and slothful; postillions lazy, lounging, greedy, and
impertinent. With this last class of delinquents after much
experience he was bound to admit the following dilemma: - If you
chide them for lingering, they will contrive to delay you the
longer. If you chastise them with sword, cane, cudgel, or
horsewhip (he defines the correctives, you may perceive, but
leaves the expletives to our imagination) they will either
disappear entirely, and leave you without resource, or they will
find means to take vengeance by overturning your carriage. The
only course remaining would be to allow oneself to become the
dupe of imposition by tipping the postillions an amount slightly
in excess of the authorized gratification. He admits that in
England once, between the Devizes and Bristol, he found this plan
productive of the happiest results. It was unfortunate that, upon
this occasion, the lack of means or slenderness of margin for
incidental expenses should have debarred him from having recourse
to a similar expedient. For threepence a post more, as Smollett
himself avows, he would probably have performed the journey with
much greater pleasure and satisfaction. But the situation is
instructive. It reveals to us the disadvantage under which the
novelist was continually labouring, that of appearing to travel
as an English Milord, en grand seigneur, and yet having at every
point to do it "on the cheap." He avoided the common conveyance
or diligence, and insisted on travelling post and in a berline;
but he could not bring himself to exceed the five-sou pourboire
for the postillions. He would have meat upon maigre days, yet
objected to paying double for it. He held aloof from the thirty-sou
table d'hote, and would have been content to pay three francs
a head for a dinner a part, but his worst passions were roused
when he was asked to pay not three, but four. Now Smollett
himself was acutely conscious of the false position. He was by
nature anything but a curmudgeon. On the contrary, he was, if I
interpret him at all aright, a high-minded, open-hearted,
generous type of man. Like a majority, perhaps, of the really
open-handed he shared one trait with the closefisted and even
with the very mean rich. He would rather give away a crown than
be cheated of a farthing. Smollett himself had little of the
traditional Scottish thriftiness about him, but the people among
whom he was going - the Languedocians and Ligurians - were
notorious for their nearness in money matters. The result of all
this could hardly fail to exacerbate Smollett's mood and to
aggravate the testiness which was due primarily to the bitterness
of his struggle with the world, and, secondarily, to the
complaints which that struggle engendered. One capital
consequence, however, and one which specially concerns us, was
that we get this unrivalled picture of the seamy side of foreign
travel - a side rarely presented with anything like Smollett's
skill to the student of the grand siecle of the Grand Tour.
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