The
Rubs, The Rods, The Crosses Of The Road Could, In Fact, Hardly Be
Presented To Us More Graphically Or Magisterially Than They Are
In Some Of These Chapters.
Like Prior, Fielding, Shenstone, and
Dickens, Smollett was a connoisseur in inns and innkeepers.
He
knew good food and he knew good value, and he had a mighty keen
eye for a rogue. There may, it is true, have been something in
his manner which provoked them to exhibit their worst side to
him. It is a common fate with angry men. The trials to which he
was subjected were momentarily very severe, but, as we shall see
in the event, they proved a highly salutary discipline to him.
To sum up, then, Smollett's Travels were written hastily and
vigorously by an expert man of letters. They were written ad
vivum, as it were, not from worked-up notes or embellished
recollections. They were written expressly for money down. They
were written rather en noir than couleur de rose by an
experienced, and, we might almost perhaps say, a disillusioned
traveller, and not by a naif or a niais. The statement that they
were to a certain extent the work of an invalid is, of course,
true, and explains much. The majority of his correspondents were
of the medical profession, all of them were members of a group
with whom he was very intimate, and the letters were by his
special direction to be passed round among them. [We do not
know precisely who all these correspondents of Smollett were, but
most of them were evidently doctors and among them, without a
doubt, John Armstrong, William Hunter, George Macaulay, and above
all John Moore, himself an authority on European travel, Governor
on the Grand Tour of the Duke of Hamilton (Son of "the beautiful
Duchess"), author of Zeluco, and father of the famous soldier.
Smollett's old chum, Dr. W. Smellie, died 5th March 1763.] In the
circumstances (bearing in mind that it was his original intention
to prune the letters considerably before publication) it was only
natural that he should say a good deal about the state of his
health. His letters would have been unsatisfying to these good
people had he not referred frequently and at some length to his
spirits and to his symptoms, an improvement in which was the
primary object of his journey and his two years' sojourn in the
South. Readers who linger over the diary of Fielding's dropsy and
Mrs. Fielding's toothache are inconsistent in denouncing the
luxury of detail with which Smollett discusses the matter of his
imposthume.
What I claim for the present work is that, in the first
place, to any one interested in Smollett's personality it
supplies an unrivalled key. It is, moreover, the work of a
scholar, an observer of human nature, and, by election, a
satirist of no mean order. It gives us some characteristic social
vignettes, some portraits of the road of an unsurpassed freshness
and clearness. It contains some historical and geographical
observations worthy of one of the shrewdest and most sagacious
publicists of the day. It is interesting to the etymologist for
the important share it has taken in naturalising useful foreign
words into our speech. It includes (as we shall have occasion to
observe) a respectable quantum of wisdom fit to become
proverbial, and several passages of admirable literary quality.
In point of date (1763-65) it is fortunate, for the writer just
escaped being one of a crowd. On the whole, I maintain that it is
more than equal in interest to the Journey to the Hebrides, and
that it deserves a very considerable proportion of the praise
that has hitherto been lavished too indiscriminately upon the
Voyage to Lisbon. On the force of this claim the reader is
invited to constitute himself judge after a fair perusal of the
following pages. I shall attempt only to point the way to a
satisfactory verdict, no longer in the spirit of an advocate, but
by means of a few illustrations and, more occasionally,
amplifications of what Smollett has to tell us.
III
As was the case with Fielding many years earlier, Smollett was
almost broken down with sedentary toil, when early in June 1763
with his wife, two young ladies ("the two girls") to whom she
acted as chaperon, and a faithful servant of twelve years'
standing, who in the spirit of a Scots retainer of the olden time
refused to leave his master (a good testimonial this, by the way,
to a temper usually accredited with such a splenetic sourness),
he crossed the straits of Dover to see what a change of climate
and surroundings could do for him.
On other grounds than those of health he was glad to shake the
dust of Britain from his feet. He speaks himself of being
traduced by malice, persecuted by faction, abandoned by false
patrons, complaints which will remind the reader, perhaps, of
George Borrow's "Jeremiad," to the effect that he had been
beslavered by the venomous foam of every sycophantic lacquey and
unscrupulous renegade in the three kingdoms. But Smollett's
griefs were more serious than what an unkind reviewer could
inflict. He had been fined and imprisoned for defamation. He had
been grossly caricatured as a creature of Bute, the North British
favourite of George III., whose tenure of the premiership
occasioned riots and almost excited a revolution in the
metropolis. Yet after incurring all this unpopularity at a time
when the populace of London was more inflamed against Scotsmen
than it has ever been before or since, and having laboured
severely at a paper in the ministerial interest and thereby
aroused the enmity of his old friend John Wilkes, Smollett had
been unceremoniously thrown over by his own chief, Lord Bute, on
the ground that his paper did more to invite attack than to repel
it. Lastly, he and his wife had suffered a cruel bereavement in
the loss of their only child, and it was partly to supply a
change from the scene of this abiding sorrow, that the present
journey was undertaken.
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