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. 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.
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