CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XISMOLLETT AS HISTORIAN AND CRITICA hundred and thirty years ago, if one had been asked to name the six great historians then alive, Smollett with marked unanimity would have been mentioned amongst the first. In fact, Hume, Robertson, and he were then reckoned as the illustrious triumvirate of Scots whose genius, in default of others native born, had been consecrated to the task of lauding for bread and fame the annals of the land whose glories were supposed to be to them so distasteful. The Union of the countries was not yet sufficiently remote to have borne as its fruit that harvest of commercial, political, and agricultural benefits that have accrued to both lands as its result. The jealousy wherewith Scotsmen were regarded in England was a legacy from the days when the subjugation of the territory north of Tweed was a standing item in English foreign policy, from the reign of that greatly misjudged monarch, EdwardI.(Longshanks), to the days of the fourth of his name, who recognised the younger brother of Jamesiii., the exiled Duke of Albany, as King of Scots under the title of Alexanderiv., on condition that he acknowledged Edward as lord paramount and feudal superior.The school of historians represented by Rapin, Oldmixon, Tindal, Carte, and Hooke, honest, hard–working investigators, but without any sense of method or proportion inclassifying or arranging materials, and vigorous anti–Scots, was alarmed by the success attending the publication of Hume’sHistory of Englandin 1754–61, Principal Robertson’sHistory of Scotlandin 1758–59, and Smollett’sHistory of Englandin 1758. When the Continuation by the last–named appeared in 1762, it was exposed, as we have seen, to a perfect broadside of misrepresentation and unjust reflections, prompted by the historians above–named and their booksellers, whose literary property seemed to them to be endangered. That some of the criticisms were just, and founded upon the discovery of genuine errors and blemishes in the history, cannot be denied. But, on the other hand, three–fourths of the allegations were baseless, because proceeding from spleen, and not from genuine enthusiasm in the cause of historic truth.For example, the objections urged by the friends and supporters of Rapin’s History were that Smollett was too hurried in his survey, that he took too many facts on trust, that he was unfair in his critical estimates of eminent personages, and finally, that his style was one better adapted for the novel than for historical compositions. To these allegations the friends of Oldmixon added that he permitted party prejudice to colour all his judgments. In replying to such charges we virtually analyse Smollett’s merits as a historian. A double duty is therefore discharged by so doing.Smollett as a historian might say with Horace, and assuredly with truth, ‘Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri—a slavish disciple of the tenets of no master am I.’ Though unstinted in his praise of Hume’s calm, lucid survey, of his careful generalisations and eminently comprehensive method, though likewise a generous admirer of Robertson’s brilliant word–pictures and glowingly eloquentnarrative, wherein the long dead seemed to live again, he had his own ideal of the writing of history, and it savoured rather of Tacitus than of Thucydides. His method consisted in presenting a series of great outstanding events covering the entire period under notice, and round these to group the subordinate occurrences either resulting from or happening contemporaneously with them. He was a firm believer in the doctrine that political freedom and commercial honesty are the two great bulwarks of any State. Though a Tory in name, he was in reality more of a philosophical Whig, rather a champion of the rights of the people than a lover and defender of aristocracies, oligarchies, and monopolies. ‘That country only is truly prosperous that is in the highest sense free, and that country alone is free where a hierarchy of knowledge governs, uninfluenced by faction and undisturbed by prejudice,’ he wrote in theCritical Review. The sentiments are somewhat vague and indefinite, but they show that he was striving to emancipate himself from the leading–strings of party prejudice.Although the fact is beyond doubt that Smollett’s historical works were written exceedingly rapidly, on the other hand, we must remember that the rapidity of production merely applied to the mechanical work of transcribing what had been already carefully thought out. Like Dr. Johnson, Smollett was possessed of a most retentive memory. He rarely committed any of his works to paper until he had thoroughly thought them out in his mind, and had tested them over and over again in that searching alembic. In neither case, therefore, was thecompositionhurried. All that was done was to expedite its transcription. Smollett’s historical judgments, in place of being hastily formed, were the result of patient study and thought. On this point we have the evidence of Wilkes, who, in one ofhis epigrams, more forcible than delicate, remarked that Smollett travailed over the birth of his historical judgments so much that he (Wilkes) had often to play the part of the critical midwife.The next charge, that Smollett was too prone to take his information at second hand, cannot be altogether controverted, though it was not yet the custom of historians to betake themselves to the MS. repositories of the country for their materials. More mutual reliance was placed by historians on each other’sbonâ fidesand faculty of critical selection than seems to be the case now. But we have it on his own assurance that he consulted over three hundred authorities for his facts. That number may be small compared with those eight hundred names which Buckle prints at the commencement of his noble and imperishableHistory of Civilisation in England, but in Smollett’s day the number of his references was considered phenomenal. He greatly surpassed Hume in the range and appropriateness of his references, and rather prided himself on the collateral evidences of facts which he was able to adduce from his miscellaneous reading. That Smollett was consciously unfair in his judgment of any character in his historical works cannot be credited. He was too warm a friend of truth to be seduced into wilfully distorting the plain and straightforward deductions from ascertained facts. That he may have been misled I do not deny, that his political predilections may have led him insensibly to colour his judgments at times with the jaundice of partisanship, is quite possible, yet that such was done deliberately, no student of Smollett’s character for a moment will credit. Many of his political opponents were castigated, it is true, so were many of his political friends; but, on the other hand, the fact is to be taken into account that many of hisbitterest enemies obtained a just and impartial criticism from Smollett when such was denied to them by many of the writers numbered among their own friends. Finally, that his style was more adapted to the treatment of imaginative themes than of sober historical narrative, was a charge that might have some weight in the middle decades of last century. It can have none now. No special style is distinctively to be employed in historical composition. It affords scope for all. True it is that Echard and his school, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, contended that history should be written in a style of sober commonplace altogether divested of ornament, as thereby the judgment was not likely to be led astray. But such nonsensical reservations have long since been relegated to the limbo of exploded theories, and in historical composition the brilliancy of a Macaulay and of an Alison finds a place as well as the sober sense of a Hallam or a Stubbs; the picturesqueness of a Froude, as well as the earnest vigour and tireless industry of a Freeman. Smollett’s style, so nervous, pointed, and epigrammatic, so full of strength and beauty as well as of scintillating sparkle, was somewhat of a surprise in his day. Hume’s easy, flowing, pithy Saxon, and Robertson’s stately splendour, had both carried the honours in historical composition to the grey metropolis of the North. The fact that another Scot, albeit resident in London, should repeat the success, and in some respects excel both, was the most crushing blow the elder school of history had received. Thenceforward we hear nothing of them. Rapin and Oldmixon slumbered with the spiders on the remotest shelves of the great libraries. Their day was past. A new school of British historians had arisen.Smollett’s historical works, hisHistory of England, hisContinuation of the History of England, hisHistories ofFrance, Italy, and Germany, are characterised by the following sterling qualities:—a felicity of method whereby the narrative flows on easily and consecutively from beginning to end, and whereby, through its division into chapters, representing definite epochs, one is able to discover with ease any specific point that may be desired; an exhibition of the principles whereon just and equitable government should proceed, namely, that of a limited monarchy; a judicious subordination of the less to the more important events in the narrative; short, pithy, but eminently fair and appreciative criticisms of all the more outstanding personages in the country under treatment, and a convincing testimony borne to the axiom that only by national virtue and the conservation of national honour can any nation either reach greatness or retain it. If Smollett did not possess Hume’s power of reaching back to first principles in tracing the evolution of a country’s greatness, or Robertson’s stimulating eloquence that fired the heart with noble sentiments, he had the virtue, scarcely less valuable, of keeping more closely to his theme than either of them, and of producing works that read like a romance. If Hume were the superior in what may be styled the philosophy of history, if Robertson in picturesqueness and eloquence, Smollett was the better narrator of the circumstances and facts as they actually occurred. In many respects he resembles Diderot, and the analogy is not lessened when we compare the private lives of the two men. To Smollett history was only of value insomuch as we are able to read the present by the key of the past, and to influence the future by avoiding the mistakes of the past and present. Smollett was a patriot in the broad catholic signification of the word. He had no sympathy with the patriotism that is synonymous with national or racial selfishness. Morecrimes have stained the annals of humanity under the guise of patriotism than can be atoned for by cycles of penitence. To Smollett the soul of patriotism was summed up in sinking the name of Scot in the generic one of Briton, and in endeavouring to stamp out that pitiful provincialism that considered one’s love of country to be best manifested in perpetuating quarrels whereon the mildew of centuries had settled. Smollett in his historical works showed himself a truer patriot than that. Though a leal–hearted Scot, he was likewise a magnanimous–spirited Briton, ready to judge as he would wish to be judged. Writing of the Union of 1707, he remarks in his Continuation: ‘The majority of both nations believed that the treaty would produce violent convulsions, or, at best, prove ineffectual. But we now see it has been attended with none of the calamities that were prognosticated, that it quietly took effect, and answered all the purposes for which it was intended. Hence we may learn that many great difficulties are surmounted because they are not seen by those who direct the execution of any great project; and that many great schemes which theory deems impracticable will yet succeed in the experiment.’Some critics have urged that Smollett might have taken a broader view of the sources and progress of national expansion and development. Minto rather off–handedly designates his style as ‘fluent and loose, possessing a careless vigour where the subject is naturally exciting,’ and concluding with the words, ‘the historyis saidto be full of errors and inconsistencies.’[11]Now, this last clause is taken word for word from Chambers’sCyclopedia of English Literature, who took it from Angus’sEnglish Literature, who borrowed it from Macaulay, who annexed it from theEdinburgh Review, which journal had originallyadopted it with alterations from Smollett’s own prefatory remarks in the first edition of the book. How many of these authors had read the history for themselves, to see if it really contained such errors and inconsistencies? Criticism conducted on that mutual–trust principle is very convenient for the critic; is it quite fair to the author? Now, anyone who faithfully reads Smollett’sHistory of Englandand itsContinuationwill not discover a larger percentage of either errors or inconsistencies than appear in the works of his contemporary historians, Tytler, Hume, and Robertson. Smollett is as distinguishingly fair and impartial as it was possible for one to be, influenced so profoundly by his environment as were all the historians of the eighteenth century. The mind of literary Europe was already tinged by that spiritual unrest and moral callousness that was to induce the new birth of the French Revolution.As a literary critic, during his tenure of the editorial chair of theCritical Review, Smollett’s judgments were frequently called in question, especially in the case of Dr. Grainger, the translator ofTibullusand of the Greek dramatists, and author of theOde to Solitude; Shebbeare, a well–known political writer of the period, whose seditious utterances had been chastised; Home, the author ofDouglas, and Wilkie of theEpigoniad. Now, in nearly all the cases wherein exception was taken to the articles, these were not written by Smollett. But even as regards those of his own composition that have been complained of, careful perusal alike of the volume criticised and of the critique evince Smollett to have been as just and fair in the circumstances as he could well be. For example, the opinion he formed of Churchill’s Poems was that in which the British public within thirty years was to acquiesce,—nay, is that which to–day is the prevailingliterary verdict upon these once popular works. Smollett unfortunately left his contributors a perfectly free hand. Many of them were men of no principle, who permitted private grudges to colour their critical estimate of literary works produced by those with whom they had some quarrel or disagreement. Smollett was to blame for not exercising his editorial scissors more freely on the verdicts of hiscollaborateurs. His own opinions of current literature were expressed with a fairness leaving little to be desired. Though not a Sainte Beuve in critical appreciation of the work of others, though his verdicts never possessed the keen spiritual and emotional insight of the famousCauseries du Lundiin the ParisConstitutional, still they are the fair, honest, outspoken opinions of a man who, as Morton said of Knox, ‘never feared the face of man,’ and therefore would not be biassed by favour or fear. Dr. Johnson was at the same time criticising literature in his newLiterary Magazine. Interesting it is to compare the two opinions on the books they dealt with. Smollett’s style is well–nigh as distinguishable as Johnson’s among his fellow–contributors. If the decrees of ‘the Great Cham of Literature’[12]are more authoritative, they are but little more incisive and searching than those of the author ofRoderick Random. The former had a more extensive vocabulary, the latter was the more consummate literary critic. Wit, humour, pathos, and epigram were all at the service of Smollett, and though, in depth of thought and soaring sublimity of reasoning powers, the author of theRamblerexcelled his contemporary, in the lighter graces of style Smollett was the better of the two. Though he had notJohnson’s Jove–like power of driving home a truth, he frequently persuaded, by his calm and lucid logic, where the thunder of the Great Cham only repelled. If blame be his, then, with regard to the exercise of his critical authority, it was due more to sins of omission than of commission, more to believing that others were actuated by the same high ideals in criticism as himself. In reading some of the numbers of theCritical Reviewfor the purposes of this biography, nothing struck me more in those papers that were plainly from the pen of Smollett, than the power he possessed of placing himself at the point of view assumed by the writer of the work under criticism, so that he might be thoroughlyen rapportwith the author’s sympathies. How few critics have either the inclination or the ability to do likewise!CHAPTER XIISMOLLETT AS POET AND DRAMATISTTradition states that Smollett, on being asked on one occasion why he did not write more poetry, replied that he had ‘no time to be a poet.’ The answer can be read in a dual sense—either that poetry demanded an absorption so complete in its pursuit that all other interests were as naught; or, on the other hand, that his time was so fully occupied that he could not devote attention to poetical composition without neglecting other things at that time of more value. As weighed against his fiction, little regret can be felt by any admirer of Smollett, that he did not pursue poetry more diligently. The specimens we possess of these fruits of his genius are not of such value as to awaken any desire to peruse more of his metrical essays. Small in bulk though his poetical works are, even these, as well as his dramatic compositions, we would gladly have spared in exchange for such another novel asHumphrey Clinker.Smollett’s genius was by no means of that purely imaginative, highly spiritual type from which great poetical compositions are to be expected. He was rather an unsurpassed observer, who, having noted special characteristics of mind as being produced by the fortuitous concourse of certain incidents, straightway proceeded to expand and idealise them; than a mighty original genius, like Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Shelley, or Keats, that from the depths ofhis spiritual consciousness evolved original creations that are representative not of any age, but of all time. Smollett had none of the isolating power of the true poet, whereby for the time he raises his theme into the pure ether of imagination, dissociated from the world and all its concerns. Smollett loved the world too well to seek to sever himself from it. His workshop, his studio, his school, and observatory, it was in one. Like Balzac, he was more taken up with what men did than with what they thought. From the outward evidence of action he worked back to the predisposing thought, not predictingà priorifrom the thought what the action must necessarily be. Therefore, as Smollett’s genius was more practical than imaginative, dealing more with the reproduction of facts than the creation of fancies, his poetry rose little above the dead level of commonplace. Only in two poems does he rise into a distinctively higher altitude of poetic inspiration—these are ‘The Tears of Scotland’ and ‘The Ode to Independence.’ In both cases, however, the influence of patriotism and that keen sympathy with the oppressed which he always entertained, contributed to impart to the compositions in question loftier sentiments and more impassioned feelings than would otherwise have been the case. We have already seen that the horrors wrought in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 by the Duke of Cumberland were on his mind when he wrote ‘The Tears of Scotland’; while the heroism of the noble Corsican Paschal Paoli was the stimulating motive in the composition of the latter.There is a great difference between the two. The former was written in 1746, while the ‘Ode to Independence’ was not produced until the last years of his life, and was not published until 1773, when the Messrs. Foulis of Glasgow, printers to the University of Glasgow, put it out, with ashort Preface and Notes by Professor Richardson. In both, the language is spirited and striking, the thoughts elevated and just. In the ‘Ode’ he takes as his models Collins and Gray. The first and last stanzas of it—or, more properly, the opening strophe and the concluding antistrophe—are the finest in the poem, and are well worthy of quotation—‘Thy spirit, Independence, let me share,Lord of the lion–heart and eagle eye:Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare,Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.Deep in the frozen regions of the North,A goddess violated brought thee forth,Immortal Liberty, whose look sublimeHath bleached the tyrant’s cheek in ever–varying clime.What time the iron–hearted Gaul,With frantic Superstition for his guide,Armed with the dagger and the pall,The Sons of Woden to the field defied;The ruthless hag by Weser’s floodIn Heaven’s name urged the infernal blow,And red the stream began to flow,The vanquished were baptised with blood.Antistrophe.Nature I’ll court in her sequestered hauntsBy mountain, meadow, streamlet, grove or cell,Where the poised lark his evening ditty chants,And Health and Peace and Contemplation dwell.There Study shall with Solitude recline,And Friendship pledge me to his fellow–swains;And Toil and Temperance sedately twineThe slender cord that fluttering life sustains:And fearless Poverty shall guard the door,And Taste unspoiled the frugal table spread,And Industry supply the frugal store,And Sleep unbribed his dews refreshing shed;White–mantled Innocence, ethereal sprite,Shall chase afar the goblins of the night,And Independence o’er the day preside:Propitious power! my patron and my pride.’His two satires,AdviceandReproof, evince on the part of their author the qualities we have already noted—keen power of observation, a felicitous deftness in wedding sound to sense, considerable force of satiric presentation, with humour and wit in rich measure. But there is no such elevation as we discover in Johnson’sLondonorThe Vanity of Human Wishes, or in the satiric pieces of Pope or Dryden. The moment the poems rise from the consideration of facts to principles, Smollett becomes tedious and prosy. As a song–writer, however, he has made some eminently successful essays, the well–known lyric—‘To fix her: ‘twere a task as vainTo combat April drops of rain,’which has been so often set to music, having been written by him soon after the publication ofRoderick Random. It possesses grace, point, and rhythmic harmony—the three great desiderata in a good lyric. The following verse has a faint echo of the subtle beauty of Wither, Lovelace, Herrick, and the Cavalier poets:—‘She’s such a miser eke in love,Its joys she’ll neither share nor prove,Though crowds of gallants gay awaitFrom her victorious eyes their fate.’Of his remaining poems there are only one or two that really merit notice. Smollett was too apt to run into the opposite extreme from sacrificing sense to sound, and prefer a repelling roughness both in metre and assonance to altering the sequence of thought in a poem that would not have been injured by the change. His Odes to Mirthand to Sleep are marred by being too didactic. His images are frequently so recondite as to awaken no corresponding ideas in the mind of the reader. His ‘Love Elegy’ is in imitation of those of Tibullus, and there are several lines that are well–nigh as tenderly pathetic as those of its great original, while the verses ‘On a Young Lady playing on the Harpsichord,’ so much admired by Sir Walter Scott, are undoubtedly amongst his finest efforts for happy union of glowing thought and graceful expression—‘When Sappho struck the quivering wire,The throbbing breast was all on fire;And when she raised the vocal lay,The captive soul was charmed away:But had the nymph possessed with theseThy softer, chaster power to please,Thy beauteous air of sprightly youth,Thy native smiles of artless truth,The worm of grief had never preyedOn the forsaken, love–sick maid;Nor had she mourned an hapless flame,Nor dashed on rocks her tender frame.’Had Smollett cultivated the art of metrical expression more persistently and enthusiastically, there are sufficient indications to show that he might have produced work which, if not in the very highest grade of excellence in the school presided over by Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith, would have attained a standard sufficiently worthy to be ranked among the minor products of that decidedly prosaic epoch. We need not regret his abstention.Finally, in the drama Smollett’s restless genius sought expression at two periods of his life when his hopes were at their highest. In his nineteenth year, we have seen that the fruit of his historical studies, and his wanderings in theglorious Elizabethan drama, had been given to the world inThe Regicide—a drama founded on the murder of JamesI.of Scotland. Written at that point in a youth’s life when the Will o’ the Wisp of literary fame seemed an angel of light, when the prizes incident on intellectual eminence had only recently attracted his gaze, and when his judgment, therefore, was dazzled by the expectation of reaching such a reputation as his countrymen Thomson, Mallet, and Arbuthnot had already won, it had all the faults though but few of the merits of a youthful production. The other piece,The Reprisal; or, The Tars of Old England, was executed when his fame was assured, when he was no longer the tyro in composition, but the editor of theCritical Reviewand a critic of the works of others. It is widely different from theRegicide, both in style, method, motive, and execution. Yet a beginner in the work of criticism could detect that both were written by the same hand.The Regicide, as a drama, is, as we have already said, a very mediocre production. Dealing with a period of Scottish history where there was scope for the aids of a brilliant historic background and of the customs and costumes of the time, Smollett has availed himself of none of these. The characters of the drama are men and women of the eighteenth century, masquerading in anomalous forms of speech and mysterious lines of action, which no one out of Bedlam would have ever considered befitting a king or his nobility. For example, in the play, in place of thedramatis personæbeing designated as ‘Jamesi., King of Scotland,’ and ‘Joanna Beaufort, Queen of Scotland,’ we have simply ‘King’ and ‘Queen,’ while the nobles and conspirators bear such utterly inappropriate and unhistoric names as Angus, Dunbar, Ramsay, Stuart, Grime, and Cattan. The action is spasmodic and jerky, altogether lacking in artisticdramatic dovetailing of incidents into each other and of symmetrical consecutiveness of circumstance. James lacks heroism, dignity, and power; Grime—probably meant for Sir Robert Graham—and Athol are very declamatory villains, who, if they put off as much time in firing off expletives at the real scene of the murder, must inevitably have permitted their victim to escape. We seem to be reading a play of Dekker’s or Greene’s, so very elementary is the stagecraft displayed in contriving exits and entrances for the personages. The characters are all more or less wooden. They talk in stilted, high–flown language, such as a boy of nineteen would suppose the courtiers of a monarch like James I. to employ. They never for a moment descend from their stilts; and even in dying, Dunbar and Eleonora declaim to the audience in rounded and rhetorical periods. Eleonora philosophises as follows within a second or two of her death:—‘Life has its various seasons as the year;And after clustering autumn—but I faint,Support me nearer—in rich harvest’s rearBleak winter must have lagged. Oh! now I feelThe leaden hand of death lie heavy on me—Thine image swims before my straining eye,And now it disappears. Speak—bid adieuTo the lost Eleonora. Not a word?Not one farewell? Alas, that dismal groanIs eloquent distress! Celestial powers,Protect my father; show’r upon his—Oh! [Dies.]’Whereupon Dunbar also replies in similar heroics as death approaches—‘There fled the purest soul that ever dweltIn mortal clay! I come, my love, I come.Where now the rosy tincture of these lips!The smile that grace ineffable diffused!The glance that smote the soul with silent wonder!The voice that soothed the anguish of disease’—After which he also cries ‘Oh!’ and dies. Now, it is very easy to laugh at all this, and to make fun of the inappropriate ‘hifalutin.’ But, dangerously near bombast though it is, the scene has a pathetic power in it, which, after discounting all its demerits, brings out the balance on the right side of the ledger of praise and blame. Boyish and immature, full of weak and silly passages as the drama is, there are, nevertheless, portions of it which give presage of the genius lying latent beneath the rant and fustian. Mediocre though the piece be, viewed as a whole, isolated passages and lines could be selected from it of the pure imaginative and intellectual ore,—lines and passages, in fine, that lovers of Smollett’s genius treasure in their hearts as worthy of the master. Such a passage as the following, being one of the speeches addressed by Dunbar to Eleonora, is aflame with the fiery glow of supreme passion—‘O thy wordsWould fire the hoary hermit’s languid soulWith ecstasies of pride! How then shall I,Elate with every vainer hope that warmsThe aspiring thought of youth, thy praise sustainWith moderation? Cruelly benign,Thou hast adorned the victim; but alas!Thou likewise giv’st the blow! Though Nature’s handWith so much art has blended every graceIn thy enchanting form, that every eyeWith transport views thee, and conveys unseenThe soft infection to the vanquished soul,Yet wilt thou not the gentle passion ownThat vindicates thy sway!’And this, one of Eleonora’s replies to Dunbar, is pervaded by an exquisite pathos, as tender as it is true—‘O wondrous powerOf love beneficent! O generous youth,What recompense (thus bankrupt as I am)Shall speak my grateful soul? A poor returnCold friendship renders to the fervid hopeOf fond desire!’The Reprisal, on the other hand, is little more than a comedietta. It has all the merits of a light, farcical, after–dinner piece, all the faults of a composition that savours more of froth and folly than aught else. The characters of the lovers, Heartly and Harriet, are lightly etched in; but those of Oclabber, an Irish lieutenant, and Maclaymore, a Scots captain, both in the French service, are drawn with great humour and power. Haulyard the midshipman, Lyon the lieutenant, and Block the sailor, all in the English navy, are spirited creations, designed to represent the seamen of Old England at their best. The incidents of the drama are full of life and movement, and the characters are well contrasted as differentiated types. The language, however, is still somewhat stilted and pedantic, so that one can easily detect, amidst all the fun and frolic ofThe Reprisal, the same hand that executed the dark and gloomyRegicide.And now, with the great body of his work before us, looking back also upon all he did, and thought, and said for the good of his brethren of mankind, what is the ultimate verdict which Time has passed on his life and labours? Secure of his niche in the very front rank of the great fathers of English fiction, Smollett’s name and literary legacy are precious possessions in the treasure–house of British fiction. Though he is not a ‘Scots novelist’ inthe restricted sense of the term as applied to the writers of these latter days, he has done much to make Scotsmen proud that their country had produced such a son. The works he has executed are assuredly an imperishable memorial. But even more than they do we cherish the example he has set of stern, unflinching devotion to duty, of an honesty that has never been impugned, and of a mighty love for the welfare and the improvement of his brethren of mankind. Every line he wrote was permeated by this intense love of his fellows, and for the amelioration of the lot of the downtrodden he was ready to face both obloquy and danger. A Scot, in the narrow sense of the word, he cannot be considered. As a Briton he will be loved and cherished by a larger family of readers than would be the case did he only appeal to the sympathies of Scotland and the Scots. But though this is so, it does not lessen the regard wherewith his countrymen regard him. After the inspired singer of ‘Auld Langsyne,’—after the mighty magician who created such diverse types as Baron Bradwardine, Vich Ian Vohr, Dominie Sampson, Di Vernon, Halbert Glendinning, Jeannie Deans, Rob Roy, and Dugald Dalgetty,—comes he whose children three—Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Matthew Bramble—will find readers while our language lasts. Proud though we be as Britons to own such a genius as of our tongue, prouder still are we, as Scots, to hail him as akin to us in blood; and so in a double sense rejoicing in his greatness and his glory, we once more bid him farewell!FOOTNOTES:[1]At this school the celebrated George Buchanan had been educated, as Mr. Hume Brown indicates in his life of the Scots Scaliger.[2]SeeSir James Y. Simpson, by Eve Blantyre Simpson—‘Famous Scots’ Series.[3]This wasThe Regicide. It was originally named ‘James i.,’ but afterwards changed.[4]Provost Stewart of Edinburgh was a warm Jacobite, and was suspected of assisting the Prince to capture the town.[5]Works of John Home, now first collected, with a Life of the Author by Henry Mackenzie.London, Cadell, 1810.[6]SeeMinutes Select Society, Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh.[7]See John Rae’sAdam Smith.[8]The Dawn of Radicalism.[9]Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk.[10]Works of T. G. Smollett, edited by George Saintsbury. London: Gibbings & Co.[11]Manual of English Prose Literature.[12]The title Smollett gave to Johnson when requesting the aid of Wilkes to free Francis Barber, Johnson’s black servant, from service on board theStag. It is the older form ofKhan.TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.—The title page has been retained as an illustration.

CHAPTER XISMOLLETT AS HISTORIAN AND CRITICA hundred and thirty years ago, if one had been asked to name the six great historians then alive, Smollett with marked unanimity would have been mentioned amongst the first. In fact, Hume, Robertson, and he were then reckoned as the illustrious triumvirate of Scots whose genius, in default of others native born, had been consecrated to the task of lauding for bread and fame the annals of the land whose glories were supposed to be to them so distasteful. The Union of the countries was not yet sufficiently remote to have borne as its fruit that harvest of commercial, political, and agricultural benefits that have accrued to both lands as its result. The jealousy wherewith Scotsmen were regarded in England was a legacy from the days when the subjugation of the territory north of Tweed was a standing item in English foreign policy, from the reign of that greatly misjudged monarch, EdwardI.(Longshanks), to the days of the fourth of his name, who recognised the younger brother of Jamesiii., the exiled Duke of Albany, as King of Scots under the title of Alexanderiv., on condition that he acknowledged Edward as lord paramount and feudal superior.The school of historians represented by Rapin, Oldmixon, Tindal, Carte, and Hooke, honest, hard–working investigators, but without any sense of method or proportion inclassifying or arranging materials, and vigorous anti–Scots, was alarmed by the success attending the publication of Hume’sHistory of Englandin 1754–61, Principal Robertson’sHistory of Scotlandin 1758–59, and Smollett’sHistory of Englandin 1758. When the Continuation by the last–named appeared in 1762, it was exposed, as we have seen, to a perfect broadside of misrepresentation and unjust reflections, prompted by the historians above–named and their booksellers, whose literary property seemed to them to be endangered. That some of the criticisms were just, and founded upon the discovery of genuine errors and blemishes in the history, cannot be denied. But, on the other hand, three–fourths of the allegations were baseless, because proceeding from spleen, and not from genuine enthusiasm in the cause of historic truth.For example, the objections urged by the friends and supporters of Rapin’s History were that Smollett was too hurried in his survey, that he took too many facts on trust, that he was unfair in his critical estimates of eminent personages, and finally, that his style was one better adapted for the novel than for historical compositions. To these allegations the friends of Oldmixon added that he permitted party prejudice to colour all his judgments. In replying to such charges we virtually analyse Smollett’s merits as a historian. A double duty is therefore discharged by so doing.Smollett as a historian might say with Horace, and assuredly with truth, ‘Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri—a slavish disciple of the tenets of no master am I.’ Though unstinted in his praise of Hume’s calm, lucid survey, of his careful generalisations and eminently comprehensive method, though likewise a generous admirer of Robertson’s brilliant word–pictures and glowingly eloquentnarrative, wherein the long dead seemed to live again, he had his own ideal of the writing of history, and it savoured rather of Tacitus than of Thucydides. His method consisted in presenting a series of great outstanding events covering the entire period under notice, and round these to group the subordinate occurrences either resulting from or happening contemporaneously with them. He was a firm believer in the doctrine that political freedom and commercial honesty are the two great bulwarks of any State. Though a Tory in name, he was in reality more of a philosophical Whig, rather a champion of the rights of the people than a lover and defender of aristocracies, oligarchies, and monopolies. ‘That country only is truly prosperous that is in the highest sense free, and that country alone is free where a hierarchy of knowledge governs, uninfluenced by faction and undisturbed by prejudice,’ he wrote in theCritical Review. The sentiments are somewhat vague and indefinite, but they show that he was striving to emancipate himself from the leading–strings of party prejudice.Although the fact is beyond doubt that Smollett’s historical works were written exceedingly rapidly, on the other hand, we must remember that the rapidity of production merely applied to the mechanical work of transcribing what had been already carefully thought out. Like Dr. Johnson, Smollett was possessed of a most retentive memory. He rarely committed any of his works to paper until he had thoroughly thought them out in his mind, and had tested them over and over again in that searching alembic. In neither case, therefore, was thecompositionhurried. All that was done was to expedite its transcription. Smollett’s historical judgments, in place of being hastily formed, were the result of patient study and thought. On this point we have the evidence of Wilkes, who, in one ofhis epigrams, more forcible than delicate, remarked that Smollett travailed over the birth of his historical judgments so much that he (Wilkes) had often to play the part of the critical midwife.The next charge, that Smollett was too prone to take his information at second hand, cannot be altogether controverted, though it was not yet the custom of historians to betake themselves to the MS. repositories of the country for their materials. More mutual reliance was placed by historians on each other’sbonâ fidesand faculty of critical selection than seems to be the case now. But we have it on his own assurance that he consulted over three hundred authorities for his facts. That number may be small compared with those eight hundred names which Buckle prints at the commencement of his noble and imperishableHistory of Civilisation in England, but in Smollett’s day the number of his references was considered phenomenal. He greatly surpassed Hume in the range and appropriateness of his references, and rather prided himself on the collateral evidences of facts which he was able to adduce from his miscellaneous reading. That Smollett was consciously unfair in his judgment of any character in his historical works cannot be credited. He was too warm a friend of truth to be seduced into wilfully distorting the plain and straightforward deductions from ascertained facts. That he may have been misled I do not deny, that his political predilections may have led him insensibly to colour his judgments at times with the jaundice of partisanship, is quite possible, yet that such was done deliberately, no student of Smollett’s character for a moment will credit. Many of his political opponents were castigated, it is true, so were many of his political friends; but, on the other hand, the fact is to be taken into account that many of hisbitterest enemies obtained a just and impartial criticism from Smollett when such was denied to them by many of the writers numbered among their own friends. Finally, that his style was more adapted to the treatment of imaginative themes than of sober historical narrative, was a charge that might have some weight in the middle decades of last century. It can have none now. No special style is distinctively to be employed in historical composition. It affords scope for all. True it is that Echard and his school, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, contended that history should be written in a style of sober commonplace altogether divested of ornament, as thereby the judgment was not likely to be led astray. But such nonsensical reservations have long since been relegated to the limbo of exploded theories, and in historical composition the brilliancy of a Macaulay and of an Alison finds a place as well as the sober sense of a Hallam or a Stubbs; the picturesqueness of a Froude, as well as the earnest vigour and tireless industry of a Freeman. Smollett’s style, so nervous, pointed, and epigrammatic, so full of strength and beauty as well as of scintillating sparkle, was somewhat of a surprise in his day. Hume’s easy, flowing, pithy Saxon, and Robertson’s stately splendour, had both carried the honours in historical composition to the grey metropolis of the North. The fact that another Scot, albeit resident in London, should repeat the success, and in some respects excel both, was the most crushing blow the elder school of history had received. Thenceforward we hear nothing of them. Rapin and Oldmixon slumbered with the spiders on the remotest shelves of the great libraries. Their day was past. A new school of British historians had arisen.Smollett’s historical works, hisHistory of England, hisContinuation of the History of England, hisHistories ofFrance, Italy, and Germany, are characterised by the following sterling qualities:—a felicity of method whereby the narrative flows on easily and consecutively from beginning to end, and whereby, through its division into chapters, representing definite epochs, one is able to discover with ease any specific point that may be desired; an exhibition of the principles whereon just and equitable government should proceed, namely, that of a limited monarchy; a judicious subordination of the less to the more important events in the narrative; short, pithy, but eminently fair and appreciative criticisms of all the more outstanding personages in the country under treatment, and a convincing testimony borne to the axiom that only by national virtue and the conservation of national honour can any nation either reach greatness or retain it. If Smollett did not possess Hume’s power of reaching back to first principles in tracing the evolution of a country’s greatness, or Robertson’s stimulating eloquence that fired the heart with noble sentiments, he had the virtue, scarcely less valuable, of keeping more closely to his theme than either of them, and of producing works that read like a romance. If Hume were the superior in what may be styled the philosophy of history, if Robertson in picturesqueness and eloquence, Smollett was the better narrator of the circumstances and facts as they actually occurred. In many respects he resembles Diderot, and the analogy is not lessened when we compare the private lives of the two men. To Smollett history was only of value insomuch as we are able to read the present by the key of the past, and to influence the future by avoiding the mistakes of the past and present. Smollett was a patriot in the broad catholic signification of the word. He had no sympathy with the patriotism that is synonymous with national or racial selfishness. Morecrimes have stained the annals of humanity under the guise of patriotism than can be atoned for by cycles of penitence. To Smollett the soul of patriotism was summed up in sinking the name of Scot in the generic one of Briton, and in endeavouring to stamp out that pitiful provincialism that considered one’s love of country to be best manifested in perpetuating quarrels whereon the mildew of centuries had settled. Smollett in his historical works showed himself a truer patriot than that. Though a leal–hearted Scot, he was likewise a magnanimous–spirited Briton, ready to judge as he would wish to be judged. Writing of the Union of 1707, he remarks in his Continuation: ‘The majority of both nations believed that the treaty would produce violent convulsions, or, at best, prove ineffectual. But we now see it has been attended with none of the calamities that were prognosticated, that it quietly took effect, and answered all the purposes for which it was intended. Hence we may learn that many great difficulties are surmounted because they are not seen by those who direct the execution of any great project; and that many great schemes which theory deems impracticable will yet succeed in the experiment.’Some critics have urged that Smollett might have taken a broader view of the sources and progress of national expansion and development. Minto rather off–handedly designates his style as ‘fluent and loose, possessing a careless vigour where the subject is naturally exciting,’ and concluding with the words, ‘the historyis saidto be full of errors and inconsistencies.’[11]Now, this last clause is taken word for word from Chambers’sCyclopedia of English Literature, who took it from Angus’sEnglish Literature, who borrowed it from Macaulay, who annexed it from theEdinburgh Review, which journal had originallyadopted it with alterations from Smollett’s own prefatory remarks in the first edition of the book. How many of these authors had read the history for themselves, to see if it really contained such errors and inconsistencies? Criticism conducted on that mutual–trust principle is very convenient for the critic; is it quite fair to the author? Now, anyone who faithfully reads Smollett’sHistory of Englandand itsContinuationwill not discover a larger percentage of either errors or inconsistencies than appear in the works of his contemporary historians, Tytler, Hume, and Robertson. Smollett is as distinguishingly fair and impartial as it was possible for one to be, influenced so profoundly by his environment as were all the historians of the eighteenth century. The mind of literary Europe was already tinged by that spiritual unrest and moral callousness that was to induce the new birth of the French Revolution.As a literary critic, during his tenure of the editorial chair of theCritical Review, Smollett’s judgments were frequently called in question, especially in the case of Dr. Grainger, the translator ofTibullusand of the Greek dramatists, and author of theOde to Solitude; Shebbeare, a well–known political writer of the period, whose seditious utterances had been chastised; Home, the author ofDouglas, and Wilkie of theEpigoniad. Now, in nearly all the cases wherein exception was taken to the articles, these were not written by Smollett. But even as regards those of his own composition that have been complained of, careful perusal alike of the volume criticised and of the critique evince Smollett to have been as just and fair in the circumstances as he could well be. For example, the opinion he formed of Churchill’s Poems was that in which the British public within thirty years was to acquiesce,—nay, is that which to–day is the prevailingliterary verdict upon these once popular works. Smollett unfortunately left his contributors a perfectly free hand. Many of them were men of no principle, who permitted private grudges to colour their critical estimate of literary works produced by those with whom they had some quarrel or disagreement. Smollett was to blame for not exercising his editorial scissors more freely on the verdicts of hiscollaborateurs. His own opinions of current literature were expressed with a fairness leaving little to be desired. Though not a Sainte Beuve in critical appreciation of the work of others, though his verdicts never possessed the keen spiritual and emotional insight of the famousCauseries du Lundiin the ParisConstitutional, still they are the fair, honest, outspoken opinions of a man who, as Morton said of Knox, ‘never feared the face of man,’ and therefore would not be biassed by favour or fear. Dr. Johnson was at the same time criticising literature in his newLiterary Magazine. Interesting it is to compare the two opinions on the books they dealt with. Smollett’s style is well–nigh as distinguishable as Johnson’s among his fellow–contributors. If the decrees of ‘the Great Cham of Literature’[12]are more authoritative, they are but little more incisive and searching than those of the author ofRoderick Random. The former had a more extensive vocabulary, the latter was the more consummate literary critic. Wit, humour, pathos, and epigram were all at the service of Smollett, and though, in depth of thought and soaring sublimity of reasoning powers, the author of theRamblerexcelled his contemporary, in the lighter graces of style Smollett was the better of the two. Though he had notJohnson’s Jove–like power of driving home a truth, he frequently persuaded, by his calm and lucid logic, where the thunder of the Great Cham only repelled. If blame be his, then, with regard to the exercise of his critical authority, it was due more to sins of omission than of commission, more to believing that others were actuated by the same high ideals in criticism as himself. In reading some of the numbers of theCritical Reviewfor the purposes of this biography, nothing struck me more in those papers that were plainly from the pen of Smollett, than the power he possessed of placing himself at the point of view assumed by the writer of the work under criticism, so that he might be thoroughlyen rapportwith the author’s sympathies. How few critics have either the inclination or the ability to do likewise!

SMOLLETT AS HISTORIAN AND CRITIC

A hundred and thirty years ago, if one had been asked to name the six great historians then alive, Smollett with marked unanimity would have been mentioned amongst the first. In fact, Hume, Robertson, and he were then reckoned as the illustrious triumvirate of Scots whose genius, in default of others native born, had been consecrated to the task of lauding for bread and fame the annals of the land whose glories were supposed to be to them so distasteful. The Union of the countries was not yet sufficiently remote to have borne as its fruit that harvest of commercial, political, and agricultural benefits that have accrued to both lands as its result. The jealousy wherewith Scotsmen were regarded in England was a legacy from the days when the subjugation of the territory north of Tweed was a standing item in English foreign policy, from the reign of that greatly misjudged monarch, EdwardI.(Longshanks), to the days of the fourth of his name, who recognised the younger brother of Jamesiii., the exiled Duke of Albany, as King of Scots under the title of Alexanderiv., on condition that he acknowledged Edward as lord paramount and feudal superior.

The school of historians represented by Rapin, Oldmixon, Tindal, Carte, and Hooke, honest, hard–working investigators, but without any sense of method or proportion inclassifying or arranging materials, and vigorous anti–Scots, was alarmed by the success attending the publication of Hume’sHistory of Englandin 1754–61, Principal Robertson’sHistory of Scotlandin 1758–59, and Smollett’sHistory of Englandin 1758. When the Continuation by the last–named appeared in 1762, it was exposed, as we have seen, to a perfect broadside of misrepresentation and unjust reflections, prompted by the historians above–named and their booksellers, whose literary property seemed to them to be endangered. That some of the criticisms were just, and founded upon the discovery of genuine errors and blemishes in the history, cannot be denied. But, on the other hand, three–fourths of the allegations were baseless, because proceeding from spleen, and not from genuine enthusiasm in the cause of historic truth.

For example, the objections urged by the friends and supporters of Rapin’s History were that Smollett was too hurried in his survey, that he took too many facts on trust, that he was unfair in his critical estimates of eminent personages, and finally, that his style was one better adapted for the novel than for historical compositions. To these allegations the friends of Oldmixon added that he permitted party prejudice to colour all his judgments. In replying to such charges we virtually analyse Smollett’s merits as a historian. A double duty is therefore discharged by so doing.

Smollett as a historian might say with Horace, and assuredly with truth, ‘Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri—a slavish disciple of the tenets of no master am I.’ Though unstinted in his praise of Hume’s calm, lucid survey, of his careful generalisations and eminently comprehensive method, though likewise a generous admirer of Robertson’s brilliant word–pictures and glowingly eloquentnarrative, wherein the long dead seemed to live again, he had his own ideal of the writing of history, and it savoured rather of Tacitus than of Thucydides. His method consisted in presenting a series of great outstanding events covering the entire period under notice, and round these to group the subordinate occurrences either resulting from or happening contemporaneously with them. He was a firm believer in the doctrine that political freedom and commercial honesty are the two great bulwarks of any State. Though a Tory in name, he was in reality more of a philosophical Whig, rather a champion of the rights of the people than a lover and defender of aristocracies, oligarchies, and monopolies. ‘That country only is truly prosperous that is in the highest sense free, and that country alone is free where a hierarchy of knowledge governs, uninfluenced by faction and undisturbed by prejudice,’ he wrote in theCritical Review. The sentiments are somewhat vague and indefinite, but they show that he was striving to emancipate himself from the leading–strings of party prejudice.

Although the fact is beyond doubt that Smollett’s historical works were written exceedingly rapidly, on the other hand, we must remember that the rapidity of production merely applied to the mechanical work of transcribing what had been already carefully thought out. Like Dr. Johnson, Smollett was possessed of a most retentive memory. He rarely committed any of his works to paper until he had thoroughly thought them out in his mind, and had tested them over and over again in that searching alembic. In neither case, therefore, was thecompositionhurried. All that was done was to expedite its transcription. Smollett’s historical judgments, in place of being hastily formed, were the result of patient study and thought. On this point we have the evidence of Wilkes, who, in one ofhis epigrams, more forcible than delicate, remarked that Smollett travailed over the birth of his historical judgments so much that he (Wilkes) had often to play the part of the critical midwife.

The next charge, that Smollett was too prone to take his information at second hand, cannot be altogether controverted, though it was not yet the custom of historians to betake themselves to the MS. repositories of the country for their materials. More mutual reliance was placed by historians on each other’sbonâ fidesand faculty of critical selection than seems to be the case now. But we have it on his own assurance that he consulted over three hundred authorities for his facts. That number may be small compared with those eight hundred names which Buckle prints at the commencement of his noble and imperishableHistory of Civilisation in England, but in Smollett’s day the number of his references was considered phenomenal. He greatly surpassed Hume in the range and appropriateness of his references, and rather prided himself on the collateral evidences of facts which he was able to adduce from his miscellaneous reading. That Smollett was consciously unfair in his judgment of any character in his historical works cannot be credited. He was too warm a friend of truth to be seduced into wilfully distorting the plain and straightforward deductions from ascertained facts. That he may have been misled I do not deny, that his political predilections may have led him insensibly to colour his judgments at times with the jaundice of partisanship, is quite possible, yet that such was done deliberately, no student of Smollett’s character for a moment will credit. Many of his political opponents were castigated, it is true, so were many of his political friends; but, on the other hand, the fact is to be taken into account that many of hisbitterest enemies obtained a just and impartial criticism from Smollett when such was denied to them by many of the writers numbered among their own friends. Finally, that his style was more adapted to the treatment of imaginative themes than of sober historical narrative, was a charge that might have some weight in the middle decades of last century. It can have none now. No special style is distinctively to be employed in historical composition. It affords scope for all. True it is that Echard and his school, in the early decades of the eighteenth century, contended that history should be written in a style of sober commonplace altogether divested of ornament, as thereby the judgment was not likely to be led astray. But such nonsensical reservations have long since been relegated to the limbo of exploded theories, and in historical composition the brilliancy of a Macaulay and of an Alison finds a place as well as the sober sense of a Hallam or a Stubbs; the picturesqueness of a Froude, as well as the earnest vigour and tireless industry of a Freeman. Smollett’s style, so nervous, pointed, and epigrammatic, so full of strength and beauty as well as of scintillating sparkle, was somewhat of a surprise in his day. Hume’s easy, flowing, pithy Saxon, and Robertson’s stately splendour, had both carried the honours in historical composition to the grey metropolis of the North. The fact that another Scot, albeit resident in London, should repeat the success, and in some respects excel both, was the most crushing blow the elder school of history had received. Thenceforward we hear nothing of them. Rapin and Oldmixon slumbered with the spiders on the remotest shelves of the great libraries. Their day was past. A new school of British historians had arisen.

Smollett’s historical works, hisHistory of England, hisContinuation of the History of England, hisHistories ofFrance, Italy, and Germany, are characterised by the following sterling qualities:—a felicity of method whereby the narrative flows on easily and consecutively from beginning to end, and whereby, through its division into chapters, representing definite epochs, one is able to discover with ease any specific point that may be desired; an exhibition of the principles whereon just and equitable government should proceed, namely, that of a limited monarchy; a judicious subordination of the less to the more important events in the narrative; short, pithy, but eminently fair and appreciative criticisms of all the more outstanding personages in the country under treatment, and a convincing testimony borne to the axiom that only by national virtue and the conservation of national honour can any nation either reach greatness or retain it. If Smollett did not possess Hume’s power of reaching back to first principles in tracing the evolution of a country’s greatness, or Robertson’s stimulating eloquence that fired the heart with noble sentiments, he had the virtue, scarcely less valuable, of keeping more closely to his theme than either of them, and of producing works that read like a romance. If Hume were the superior in what may be styled the philosophy of history, if Robertson in picturesqueness and eloquence, Smollett was the better narrator of the circumstances and facts as they actually occurred. In many respects he resembles Diderot, and the analogy is not lessened when we compare the private lives of the two men. To Smollett history was only of value insomuch as we are able to read the present by the key of the past, and to influence the future by avoiding the mistakes of the past and present. Smollett was a patriot in the broad catholic signification of the word. He had no sympathy with the patriotism that is synonymous with national or racial selfishness. Morecrimes have stained the annals of humanity under the guise of patriotism than can be atoned for by cycles of penitence. To Smollett the soul of patriotism was summed up in sinking the name of Scot in the generic one of Briton, and in endeavouring to stamp out that pitiful provincialism that considered one’s love of country to be best manifested in perpetuating quarrels whereon the mildew of centuries had settled. Smollett in his historical works showed himself a truer patriot than that. Though a leal–hearted Scot, he was likewise a magnanimous–spirited Briton, ready to judge as he would wish to be judged. Writing of the Union of 1707, he remarks in his Continuation: ‘The majority of both nations believed that the treaty would produce violent convulsions, or, at best, prove ineffectual. But we now see it has been attended with none of the calamities that were prognosticated, that it quietly took effect, and answered all the purposes for which it was intended. Hence we may learn that many great difficulties are surmounted because they are not seen by those who direct the execution of any great project; and that many great schemes which theory deems impracticable will yet succeed in the experiment.’

Some critics have urged that Smollett might have taken a broader view of the sources and progress of national expansion and development. Minto rather off–handedly designates his style as ‘fluent and loose, possessing a careless vigour where the subject is naturally exciting,’ and concluding with the words, ‘the historyis saidto be full of errors and inconsistencies.’[11]Now, this last clause is taken word for word from Chambers’sCyclopedia of English Literature, who took it from Angus’sEnglish Literature, who borrowed it from Macaulay, who annexed it from theEdinburgh Review, which journal had originallyadopted it with alterations from Smollett’s own prefatory remarks in the first edition of the book. How many of these authors had read the history for themselves, to see if it really contained such errors and inconsistencies? Criticism conducted on that mutual–trust principle is very convenient for the critic; is it quite fair to the author? Now, anyone who faithfully reads Smollett’sHistory of Englandand itsContinuationwill not discover a larger percentage of either errors or inconsistencies than appear in the works of his contemporary historians, Tytler, Hume, and Robertson. Smollett is as distinguishingly fair and impartial as it was possible for one to be, influenced so profoundly by his environment as were all the historians of the eighteenth century. The mind of literary Europe was already tinged by that spiritual unrest and moral callousness that was to induce the new birth of the French Revolution.

As a literary critic, during his tenure of the editorial chair of theCritical Review, Smollett’s judgments were frequently called in question, especially in the case of Dr. Grainger, the translator ofTibullusand of the Greek dramatists, and author of theOde to Solitude; Shebbeare, a well–known political writer of the period, whose seditious utterances had been chastised; Home, the author ofDouglas, and Wilkie of theEpigoniad. Now, in nearly all the cases wherein exception was taken to the articles, these were not written by Smollett. But even as regards those of his own composition that have been complained of, careful perusal alike of the volume criticised and of the critique evince Smollett to have been as just and fair in the circumstances as he could well be. For example, the opinion he formed of Churchill’s Poems was that in which the British public within thirty years was to acquiesce,—nay, is that which to–day is the prevailingliterary verdict upon these once popular works. Smollett unfortunately left his contributors a perfectly free hand. Many of them were men of no principle, who permitted private grudges to colour their critical estimate of literary works produced by those with whom they had some quarrel or disagreement. Smollett was to blame for not exercising his editorial scissors more freely on the verdicts of hiscollaborateurs. His own opinions of current literature were expressed with a fairness leaving little to be desired. Though not a Sainte Beuve in critical appreciation of the work of others, though his verdicts never possessed the keen spiritual and emotional insight of the famousCauseries du Lundiin the ParisConstitutional, still they are the fair, honest, outspoken opinions of a man who, as Morton said of Knox, ‘never feared the face of man,’ and therefore would not be biassed by favour or fear. Dr. Johnson was at the same time criticising literature in his newLiterary Magazine. Interesting it is to compare the two opinions on the books they dealt with. Smollett’s style is well–nigh as distinguishable as Johnson’s among his fellow–contributors. If the decrees of ‘the Great Cham of Literature’[12]are more authoritative, they are but little more incisive and searching than those of the author ofRoderick Random. The former had a more extensive vocabulary, the latter was the more consummate literary critic. Wit, humour, pathos, and epigram were all at the service of Smollett, and though, in depth of thought and soaring sublimity of reasoning powers, the author of theRamblerexcelled his contemporary, in the lighter graces of style Smollett was the better of the two. Though he had not

Johnson’s Jove–like power of driving home a truth, he frequently persuaded, by his calm and lucid logic, where the thunder of the Great Cham only repelled. If blame be his, then, with regard to the exercise of his critical authority, it was due more to sins of omission than of commission, more to believing that others were actuated by the same high ideals in criticism as himself. In reading some of the numbers of theCritical Reviewfor the purposes of this biography, nothing struck me more in those papers that were plainly from the pen of Smollett, than the power he possessed of placing himself at the point of view assumed by the writer of the work under criticism, so that he might be thoroughlyen rapportwith the author’s sympathies. How few critics have either the inclination or the ability to do likewise!

CHAPTER XIISMOLLETT AS POET AND DRAMATISTTradition states that Smollett, on being asked on one occasion why he did not write more poetry, replied that he had ‘no time to be a poet.’ The answer can be read in a dual sense—either that poetry demanded an absorption so complete in its pursuit that all other interests were as naught; or, on the other hand, that his time was so fully occupied that he could not devote attention to poetical composition without neglecting other things at that time of more value. As weighed against his fiction, little regret can be felt by any admirer of Smollett, that he did not pursue poetry more diligently. The specimens we possess of these fruits of his genius are not of such value as to awaken any desire to peruse more of his metrical essays. Small in bulk though his poetical works are, even these, as well as his dramatic compositions, we would gladly have spared in exchange for such another novel asHumphrey Clinker.Smollett’s genius was by no means of that purely imaginative, highly spiritual type from which great poetical compositions are to be expected. He was rather an unsurpassed observer, who, having noted special characteristics of mind as being produced by the fortuitous concourse of certain incidents, straightway proceeded to expand and idealise them; than a mighty original genius, like Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Shelley, or Keats, that from the depths ofhis spiritual consciousness evolved original creations that are representative not of any age, but of all time. Smollett had none of the isolating power of the true poet, whereby for the time he raises his theme into the pure ether of imagination, dissociated from the world and all its concerns. Smollett loved the world too well to seek to sever himself from it. His workshop, his studio, his school, and observatory, it was in one. Like Balzac, he was more taken up with what men did than with what they thought. From the outward evidence of action he worked back to the predisposing thought, not predictingà priorifrom the thought what the action must necessarily be. Therefore, as Smollett’s genius was more practical than imaginative, dealing more with the reproduction of facts than the creation of fancies, his poetry rose little above the dead level of commonplace. Only in two poems does he rise into a distinctively higher altitude of poetic inspiration—these are ‘The Tears of Scotland’ and ‘The Ode to Independence.’ In both cases, however, the influence of patriotism and that keen sympathy with the oppressed which he always entertained, contributed to impart to the compositions in question loftier sentiments and more impassioned feelings than would otherwise have been the case. We have already seen that the horrors wrought in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 by the Duke of Cumberland were on his mind when he wrote ‘The Tears of Scotland’; while the heroism of the noble Corsican Paschal Paoli was the stimulating motive in the composition of the latter.There is a great difference between the two. The former was written in 1746, while the ‘Ode to Independence’ was not produced until the last years of his life, and was not published until 1773, when the Messrs. Foulis of Glasgow, printers to the University of Glasgow, put it out, with ashort Preface and Notes by Professor Richardson. In both, the language is spirited and striking, the thoughts elevated and just. In the ‘Ode’ he takes as his models Collins and Gray. The first and last stanzas of it—or, more properly, the opening strophe and the concluding antistrophe—are the finest in the poem, and are well worthy of quotation—‘Thy spirit, Independence, let me share,Lord of the lion–heart and eagle eye:Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare,Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.Deep in the frozen regions of the North,A goddess violated brought thee forth,Immortal Liberty, whose look sublimeHath bleached the tyrant’s cheek in ever–varying clime.What time the iron–hearted Gaul,With frantic Superstition for his guide,Armed with the dagger and the pall,The Sons of Woden to the field defied;The ruthless hag by Weser’s floodIn Heaven’s name urged the infernal blow,And red the stream began to flow,The vanquished were baptised with blood.Antistrophe.Nature I’ll court in her sequestered hauntsBy mountain, meadow, streamlet, grove or cell,Where the poised lark his evening ditty chants,And Health and Peace and Contemplation dwell.There Study shall with Solitude recline,And Friendship pledge me to his fellow–swains;And Toil and Temperance sedately twineThe slender cord that fluttering life sustains:And fearless Poverty shall guard the door,And Taste unspoiled the frugal table spread,And Industry supply the frugal store,And Sleep unbribed his dews refreshing shed;White–mantled Innocence, ethereal sprite,Shall chase afar the goblins of the night,And Independence o’er the day preside:Propitious power! my patron and my pride.’His two satires,AdviceandReproof, evince on the part of their author the qualities we have already noted—keen power of observation, a felicitous deftness in wedding sound to sense, considerable force of satiric presentation, with humour and wit in rich measure. But there is no such elevation as we discover in Johnson’sLondonorThe Vanity of Human Wishes, or in the satiric pieces of Pope or Dryden. The moment the poems rise from the consideration of facts to principles, Smollett becomes tedious and prosy. As a song–writer, however, he has made some eminently successful essays, the well–known lyric—‘To fix her: ‘twere a task as vainTo combat April drops of rain,’which has been so often set to music, having been written by him soon after the publication ofRoderick Random. It possesses grace, point, and rhythmic harmony—the three great desiderata in a good lyric. The following verse has a faint echo of the subtle beauty of Wither, Lovelace, Herrick, and the Cavalier poets:—‘She’s such a miser eke in love,Its joys she’ll neither share nor prove,Though crowds of gallants gay awaitFrom her victorious eyes their fate.’Of his remaining poems there are only one or two that really merit notice. Smollett was too apt to run into the opposite extreme from sacrificing sense to sound, and prefer a repelling roughness both in metre and assonance to altering the sequence of thought in a poem that would not have been injured by the change. His Odes to Mirthand to Sleep are marred by being too didactic. His images are frequently so recondite as to awaken no corresponding ideas in the mind of the reader. His ‘Love Elegy’ is in imitation of those of Tibullus, and there are several lines that are well–nigh as tenderly pathetic as those of its great original, while the verses ‘On a Young Lady playing on the Harpsichord,’ so much admired by Sir Walter Scott, are undoubtedly amongst his finest efforts for happy union of glowing thought and graceful expression—‘When Sappho struck the quivering wire,The throbbing breast was all on fire;And when she raised the vocal lay,The captive soul was charmed away:But had the nymph possessed with theseThy softer, chaster power to please,Thy beauteous air of sprightly youth,Thy native smiles of artless truth,The worm of grief had never preyedOn the forsaken, love–sick maid;Nor had she mourned an hapless flame,Nor dashed on rocks her tender frame.’Had Smollett cultivated the art of metrical expression more persistently and enthusiastically, there are sufficient indications to show that he might have produced work which, if not in the very highest grade of excellence in the school presided over by Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith, would have attained a standard sufficiently worthy to be ranked among the minor products of that decidedly prosaic epoch. We need not regret his abstention.Finally, in the drama Smollett’s restless genius sought expression at two periods of his life when his hopes were at their highest. In his nineteenth year, we have seen that the fruit of his historical studies, and his wanderings in theglorious Elizabethan drama, had been given to the world inThe Regicide—a drama founded on the murder of JamesI.of Scotland. Written at that point in a youth’s life when the Will o’ the Wisp of literary fame seemed an angel of light, when the prizes incident on intellectual eminence had only recently attracted his gaze, and when his judgment, therefore, was dazzled by the expectation of reaching such a reputation as his countrymen Thomson, Mallet, and Arbuthnot had already won, it had all the faults though but few of the merits of a youthful production. The other piece,The Reprisal; or, The Tars of Old England, was executed when his fame was assured, when he was no longer the tyro in composition, but the editor of theCritical Reviewand a critic of the works of others. It is widely different from theRegicide, both in style, method, motive, and execution. Yet a beginner in the work of criticism could detect that both were written by the same hand.The Regicide, as a drama, is, as we have already said, a very mediocre production. Dealing with a period of Scottish history where there was scope for the aids of a brilliant historic background and of the customs and costumes of the time, Smollett has availed himself of none of these. The characters of the drama are men and women of the eighteenth century, masquerading in anomalous forms of speech and mysterious lines of action, which no one out of Bedlam would have ever considered befitting a king or his nobility. For example, in the play, in place of thedramatis personæbeing designated as ‘Jamesi., King of Scotland,’ and ‘Joanna Beaufort, Queen of Scotland,’ we have simply ‘King’ and ‘Queen,’ while the nobles and conspirators bear such utterly inappropriate and unhistoric names as Angus, Dunbar, Ramsay, Stuart, Grime, and Cattan. The action is spasmodic and jerky, altogether lacking in artisticdramatic dovetailing of incidents into each other and of symmetrical consecutiveness of circumstance. James lacks heroism, dignity, and power; Grime—probably meant for Sir Robert Graham—and Athol are very declamatory villains, who, if they put off as much time in firing off expletives at the real scene of the murder, must inevitably have permitted their victim to escape. We seem to be reading a play of Dekker’s or Greene’s, so very elementary is the stagecraft displayed in contriving exits and entrances for the personages. The characters are all more or less wooden. They talk in stilted, high–flown language, such as a boy of nineteen would suppose the courtiers of a monarch like James I. to employ. They never for a moment descend from their stilts; and even in dying, Dunbar and Eleonora declaim to the audience in rounded and rhetorical periods. Eleonora philosophises as follows within a second or two of her death:—‘Life has its various seasons as the year;And after clustering autumn—but I faint,Support me nearer—in rich harvest’s rearBleak winter must have lagged. Oh! now I feelThe leaden hand of death lie heavy on me—Thine image swims before my straining eye,And now it disappears. Speak—bid adieuTo the lost Eleonora. Not a word?Not one farewell? Alas, that dismal groanIs eloquent distress! Celestial powers,Protect my father; show’r upon his—Oh! [Dies.]’Whereupon Dunbar also replies in similar heroics as death approaches—‘There fled the purest soul that ever dweltIn mortal clay! I come, my love, I come.Where now the rosy tincture of these lips!The smile that grace ineffable diffused!The glance that smote the soul with silent wonder!The voice that soothed the anguish of disease’—After which he also cries ‘Oh!’ and dies. Now, it is very easy to laugh at all this, and to make fun of the inappropriate ‘hifalutin.’ But, dangerously near bombast though it is, the scene has a pathetic power in it, which, after discounting all its demerits, brings out the balance on the right side of the ledger of praise and blame. Boyish and immature, full of weak and silly passages as the drama is, there are, nevertheless, portions of it which give presage of the genius lying latent beneath the rant and fustian. Mediocre though the piece be, viewed as a whole, isolated passages and lines could be selected from it of the pure imaginative and intellectual ore,—lines and passages, in fine, that lovers of Smollett’s genius treasure in their hearts as worthy of the master. Such a passage as the following, being one of the speeches addressed by Dunbar to Eleonora, is aflame with the fiery glow of supreme passion—‘O thy wordsWould fire the hoary hermit’s languid soulWith ecstasies of pride! How then shall I,Elate with every vainer hope that warmsThe aspiring thought of youth, thy praise sustainWith moderation? Cruelly benign,Thou hast adorned the victim; but alas!Thou likewise giv’st the blow! Though Nature’s handWith so much art has blended every graceIn thy enchanting form, that every eyeWith transport views thee, and conveys unseenThe soft infection to the vanquished soul,Yet wilt thou not the gentle passion ownThat vindicates thy sway!’And this, one of Eleonora’s replies to Dunbar, is pervaded by an exquisite pathos, as tender as it is true—‘O wondrous powerOf love beneficent! O generous youth,What recompense (thus bankrupt as I am)Shall speak my grateful soul? A poor returnCold friendship renders to the fervid hopeOf fond desire!’The Reprisal, on the other hand, is little more than a comedietta. It has all the merits of a light, farcical, after–dinner piece, all the faults of a composition that savours more of froth and folly than aught else. The characters of the lovers, Heartly and Harriet, are lightly etched in; but those of Oclabber, an Irish lieutenant, and Maclaymore, a Scots captain, both in the French service, are drawn with great humour and power. Haulyard the midshipman, Lyon the lieutenant, and Block the sailor, all in the English navy, are spirited creations, designed to represent the seamen of Old England at their best. The incidents of the drama are full of life and movement, and the characters are well contrasted as differentiated types. The language, however, is still somewhat stilted and pedantic, so that one can easily detect, amidst all the fun and frolic ofThe Reprisal, the same hand that executed the dark and gloomyRegicide.And now, with the great body of his work before us, looking back also upon all he did, and thought, and said for the good of his brethren of mankind, what is the ultimate verdict which Time has passed on his life and labours? Secure of his niche in the very front rank of the great fathers of English fiction, Smollett’s name and literary legacy are precious possessions in the treasure–house of British fiction. Though he is not a ‘Scots novelist’ inthe restricted sense of the term as applied to the writers of these latter days, he has done much to make Scotsmen proud that their country had produced such a son. The works he has executed are assuredly an imperishable memorial. But even more than they do we cherish the example he has set of stern, unflinching devotion to duty, of an honesty that has never been impugned, and of a mighty love for the welfare and the improvement of his brethren of mankind. Every line he wrote was permeated by this intense love of his fellows, and for the amelioration of the lot of the downtrodden he was ready to face both obloquy and danger. A Scot, in the narrow sense of the word, he cannot be considered. As a Briton he will be loved and cherished by a larger family of readers than would be the case did he only appeal to the sympathies of Scotland and the Scots. But though this is so, it does not lessen the regard wherewith his countrymen regard him. After the inspired singer of ‘Auld Langsyne,’—after the mighty magician who created such diverse types as Baron Bradwardine, Vich Ian Vohr, Dominie Sampson, Di Vernon, Halbert Glendinning, Jeannie Deans, Rob Roy, and Dugald Dalgetty,—comes he whose children three—Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Matthew Bramble—will find readers while our language lasts. Proud though we be as Britons to own such a genius as of our tongue, prouder still are we, as Scots, to hail him as akin to us in blood; and so in a double sense rejoicing in his greatness and his glory, we once more bid him farewell!

SMOLLETT AS POET AND DRAMATIST

Tradition states that Smollett, on being asked on one occasion why he did not write more poetry, replied that he had ‘no time to be a poet.’ The answer can be read in a dual sense—either that poetry demanded an absorption so complete in its pursuit that all other interests were as naught; or, on the other hand, that his time was so fully occupied that he could not devote attention to poetical composition without neglecting other things at that time of more value. As weighed against his fiction, little regret can be felt by any admirer of Smollett, that he did not pursue poetry more diligently. The specimens we possess of these fruits of his genius are not of such value as to awaken any desire to peruse more of his metrical essays. Small in bulk though his poetical works are, even these, as well as his dramatic compositions, we would gladly have spared in exchange for such another novel asHumphrey Clinker.

Smollett’s genius was by no means of that purely imaginative, highly spiritual type from which great poetical compositions are to be expected. He was rather an unsurpassed observer, who, having noted special characteristics of mind as being produced by the fortuitous concourse of certain incidents, straightway proceeded to expand and idealise them; than a mighty original genius, like Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Shelley, or Keats, that from the depths ofhis spiritual consciousness evolved original creations that are representative not of any age, but of all time. Smollett had none of the isolating power of the true poet, whereby for the time he raises his theme into the pure ether of imagination, dissociated from the world and all its concerns. Smollett loved the world too well to seek to sever himself from it. His workshop, his studio, his school, and observatory, it was in one. Like Balzac, he was more taken up with what men did than with what they thought. From the outward evidence of action he worked back to the predisposing thought, not predictingà priorifrom the thought what the action must necessarily be. Therefore, as Smollett’s genius was more practical than imaginative, dealing more with the reproduction of facts than the creation of fancies, his poetry rose little above the dead level of commonplace. Only in two poems does he rise into a distinctively higher altitude of poetic inspiration—these are ‘The Tears of Scotland’ and ‘The Ode to Independence.’ In both cases, however, the influence of patriotism and that keen sympathy with the oppressed which he always entertained, contributed to impart to the compositions in question loftier sentiments and more impassioned feelings than would otherwise have been the case. We have already seen that the horrors wrought in the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 by the Duke of Cumberland were on his mind when he wrote ‘The Tears of Scotland’; while the heroism of the noble Corsican Paschal Paoli was the stimulating motive in the composition of the latter.

There is a great difference between the two. The former was written in 1746, while the ‘Ode to Independence’ was not produced until the last years of his life, and was not published until 1773, when the Messrs. Foulis of Glasgow, printers to the University of Glasgow, put it out, with ashort Preface and Notes by Professor Richardson. In both, the language is spirited and striking, the thoughts elevated and just. In the ‘Ode’ he takes as his models Collins and Gray. The first and last stanzas of it—or, more properly, the opening strophe and the concluding antistrophe—are the finest in the poem, and are well worthy of quotation—

‘Thy spirit, Independence, let me share,Lord of the lion–heart and eagle eye:Thy steps I follow with my bosom bare,Nor heed the storm that howls along the sky.Deep in the frozen regions of the North,A goddess violated brought thee forth,Immortal Liberty, whose look sublimeHath bleached the tyrant’s cheek in ever–varying clime.What time the iron–hearted Gaul,With frantic Superstition for his guide,Armed with the dagger and the pall,The Sons of Woden to the field defied;The ruthless hag by Weser’s floodIn Heaven’s name urged the infernal blow,And red the stream began to flow,The vanquished were baptised with blood.

Antistrophe.

Nature I’ll court in her sequestered hauntsBy mountain, meadow, streamlet, grove or cell,Where the poised lark his evening ditty chants,And Health and Peace and Contemplation dwell.There Study shall with Solitude recline,And Friendship pledge me to his fellow–swains;And Toil and Temperance sedately twineThe slender cord that fluttering life sustains:And fearless Poverty shall guard the door,And Taste unspoiled the frugal table spread,And Industry supply the frugal store,And Sleep unbribed his dews refreshing shed;White–mantled Innocence, ethereal sprite,Shall chase afar the goblins of the night,And Independence o’er the day preside:Propitious power! my patron and my pride.’

His two satires,AdviceandReproof, evince on the part of their author the qualities we have already noted—keen power of observation, a felicitous deftness in wedding sound to sense, considerable force of satiric presentation, with humour and wit in rich measure. But there is no such elevation as we discover in Johnson’sLondonorThe Vanity of Human Wishes, or in the satiric pieces of Pope or Dryden. The moment the poems rise from the consideration of facts to principles, Smollett becomes tedious and prosy. As a song–writer, however, he has made some eminently successful essays, the well–known lyric—

‘To fix her: ‘twere a task as vainTo combat April drops of rain,’

which has been so often set to music, having been written by him soon after the publication ofRoderick Random. It possesses grace, point, and rhythmic harmony—the three great desiderata in a good lyric. The following verse has a faint echo of the subtle beauty of Wither, Lovelace, Herrick, and the Cavalier poets:—

‘She’s such a miser eke in love,Its joys she’ll neither share nor prove,Though crowds of gallants gay awaitFrom her victorious eyes their fate.’

Of his remaining poems there are only one or two that really merit notice. Smollett was too apt to run into the opposite extreme from sacrificing sense to sound, and prefer a repelling roughness both in metre and assonance to altering the sequence of thought in a poem that would not have been injured by the change. His Odes to Mirthand to Sleep are marred by being too didactic. His images are frequently so recondite as to awaken no corresponding ideas in the mind of the reader. His ‘Love Elegy’ is in imitation of those of Tibullus, and there are several lines that are well–nigh as tenderly pathetic as those of its great original, while the verses ‘On a Young Lady playing on the Harpsichord,’ so much admired by Sir Walter Scott, are undoubtedly amongst his finest efforts for happy union of glowing thought and graceful expression—

‘When Sappho struck the quivering wire,The throbbing breast was all on fire;And when she raised the vocal lay,The captive soul was charmed away:But had the nymph possessed with theseThy softer, chaster power to please,Thy beauteous air of sprightly youth,Thy native smiles of artless truth,The worm of grief had never preyedOn the forsaken, love–sick maid;Nor had she mourned an hapless flame,Nor dashed on rocks her tender frame.’

Had Smollett cultivated the art of metrical expression more persistently and enthusiastically, there are sufficient indications to show that he might have produced work which, if not in the very highest grade of excellence in the school presided over by Collins, Gray, and Goldsmith, would have attained a standard sufficiently worthy to be ranked among the minor products of that decidedly prosaic epoch. We need not regret his abstention.

Finally, in the drama Smollett’s restless genius sought expression at two periods of his life when his hopes were at their highest. In his nineteenth year, we have seen that the fruit of his historical studies, and his wanderings in theglorious Elizabethan drama, had been given to the world inThe Regicide—a drama founded on the murder of JamesI.of Scotland. Written at that point in a youth’s life when the Will o’ the Wisp of literary fame seemed an angel of light, when the prizes incident on intellectual eminence had only recently attracted his gaze, and when his judgment, therefore, was dazzled by the expectation of reaching such a reputation as his countrymen Thomson, Mallet, and Arbuthnot had already won, it had all the faults though but few of the merits of a youthful production. The other piece,The Reprisal; or, The Tars of Old England, was executed when his fame was assured, when he was no longer the tyro in composition, but the editor of theCritical Reviewand a critic of the works of others. It is widely different from theRegicide, both in style, method, motive, and execution. Yet a beginner in the work of criticism could detect that both were written by the same hand.The Regicide, as a drama, is, as we have already said, a very mediocre production. Dealing with a period of Scottish history where there was scope for the aids of a brilliant historic background and of the customs and costumes of the time, Smollett has availed himself of none of these. The characters of the drama are men and women of the eighteenth century, masquerading in anomalous forms of speech and mysterious lines of action, which no one out of Bedlam would have ever considered befitting a king or his nobility. For example, in the play, in place of thedramatis personæbeing designated as ‘Jamesi., King of Scotland,’ and ‘Joanna Beaufort, Queen of Scotland,’ we have simply ‘King’ and ‘Queen,’ while the nobles and conspirators bear such utterly inappropriate and unhistoric names as Angus, Dunbar, Ramsay, Stuart, Grime, and Cattan. The action is spasmodic and jerky, altogether lacking in artisticdramatic dovetailing of incidents into each other and of symmetrical consecutiveness of circumstance. James lacks heroism, dignity, and power; Grime—probably meant for Sir Robert Graham—and Athol are very declamatory villains, who, if they put off as much time in firing off expletives at the real scene of the murder, must inevitably have permitted their victim to escape. We seem to be reading a play of Dekker’s or Greene’s, so very elementary is the stagecraft displayed in contriving exits and entrances for the personages. The characters are all more or less wooden. They talk in stilted, high–flown language, such as a boy of nineteen would suppose the courtiers of a monarch like James I. to employ. They never for a moment descend from their stilts; and even in dying, Dunbar and Eleonora declaim to the audience in rounded and rhetorical periods. Eleonora philosophises as follows within a second or two of her death:—

‘Life has its various seasons as the year;And after clustering autumn—but I faint,Support me nearer—in rich harvest’s rearBleak winter must have lagged. Oh! now I feelThe leaden hand of death lie heavy on me—Thine image swims before my straining eye,And now it disappears. Speak—bid adieuTo the lost Eleonora. Not a word?Not one farewell? Alas, that dismal groanIs eloquent distress! Celestial powers,Protect my father; show’r upon his—Oh! [Dies.]’

Whereupon Dunbar also replies in similar heroics as death approaches—

‘There fled the purest soul that ever dweltIn mortal clay! I come, my love, I come.Where now the rosy tincture of these lips!The smile that grace ineffable diffused!The glance that smote the soul with silent wonder!The voice that soothed the anguish of disease’—

After which he also cries ‘Oh!’ and dies. Now, it is very easy to laugh at all this, and to make fun of the inappropriate ‘hifalutin.’ But, dangerously near bombast though it is, the scene has a pathetic power in it, which, after discounting all its demerits, brings out the balance on the right side of the ledger of praise and blame. Boyish and immature, full of weak and silly passages as the drama is, there are, nevertheless, portions of it which give presage of the genius lying latent beneath the rant and fustian. Mediocre though the piece be, viewed as a whole, isolated passages and lines could be selected from it of the pure imaginative and intellectual ore,—lines and passages, in fine, that lovers of Smollett’s genius treasure in their hearts as worthy of the master. Such a passage as the following, being one of the speeches addressed by Dunbar to Eleonora, is aflame with the fiery glow of supreme passion—

‘O thy words

Would fire the hoary hermit’s languid soulWith ecstasies of pride! How then shall I,Elate with every vainer hope that warmsThe aspiring thought of youth, thy praise sustainWith moderation? Cruelly benign,Thou hast adorned the victim; but alas!Thou likewise giv’st the blow! Though Nature’s handWith so much art has blended every graceIn thy enchanting form, that every eyeWith transport views thee, and conveys unseenThe soft infection to the vanquished soul,Yet wilt thou not the gentle passion ownThat vindicates thy sway!’

And this, one of Eleonora’s replies to Dunbar, is pervaded by an exquisite pathos, as tender as it is true—

‘O wondrous power

Of love beneficent! O generous youth,What recompense (thus bankrupt as I am)Shall speak my grateful soul? A poor returnCold friendship renders to the fervid hopeOf fond desire!’

The Reprisal, on the other hand, is little more than a comedietta. It has all the merits of a light, farcical, after–dinner piece, all the faults of a composition that savours more of froth and folly than aught else. The characters of the lovers, Heartly and Harriet, are lightly etched in; but those of Oclabber, an Irish lieutenant, and Maclaymore, a Scots captain, both in the French service, are drawn with great humour and power. Haulyard the midshipman, Lyon the lieutenant, and Block the sailor, all in the English navy, are spirited creations, designed to represent the seamen of Old England at their best. The incidents of the drama are full of life and movement, and the characters are well contrasted as differentiated types. The language, however, is still somewhat stilted and pedantic, so that one can easily detect, amidst all the fun and frolic ofThe Reprisal, the same hand that executed the dark and gloomyRegicide.

And now, with the great body of his work before us, looking back also upon all he did, and thought, and said for the good of his brethren of mankind, what is the ultimate verdict which Time has passed on his life and labours? Secure of his niche in the very front rank of the great fathers of English fiction, Smollett’s name and literary legacy are precious possessions in the treasure–house of British fiction. Though he is not a ‘Scots novelist’ inthe restricted sense of the term as applied to the writers of these latter days, he has done much to make Scotsmen proud that their country had produced such a son. The works he has executed are assuredly an imperishable memorial. But even more than they do we cherish the example he has set of stern, unflinching devotion to duty, of an honesty that has never been impugned, and of a mighty love for the welfare and the improvement of his brethren of mankind. Every line he wrote was permeated by this intense love of his fellows, and for the amelioration of the lot of the downtrodden he was ready to face both obloquy and danger. A Scot, in the narrow sense of the word, he cannot be considered. As a Briton he will be loved and cherished by a larger family of readers than would be the case did he only appeal to the sympathies of Scotland and the Scots. But though this is so, it does not lessen the regard wherewith his countrymen regard him. After the inspired singer of ‘Auld Langsyne,’—after the mighty magician who created such diverse types as Baron Bradwardine, Vich Ian Vohr, Dominie Sampson, Di Vernon, Halbert Glendinning, Jeannie Deans, Rob Roy, and Dugald Dalgetty,—comes he whose children three—Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Matthew Bramble—will find readers while our language lasts. Proud though we be as Britons to own such a genius as of our tongue, prouder still are we, as Scots, to hail him as akin to us in blood; and so in a double sense rejoicing in his greatness and his glory, we once more bid him farewell!

FOOTNOTES:[1]At this school the celebrated George Buchanan had been educated, as Mr. Hume Brown indicates in his life of the Scots Scaliger.[2]SeeSir James Y. Simpson, by Eve Blantyre Simpson—‘Famous Scots’ Series.[3]This wasThe Regicide. It was originally named ‘James i.,’ but afterwards changed.[4]Provost Stewart of Edinburgh was a warm Jacobite, and was suspected of assisting the Prince to capture the town.[5]Works of John Home, now first collected, with a Life of the Author by Henry Mackenzie.London, Cadell, 1810.[6]SeeMinutes Select Society, Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh.[7]See John Rae’sAdam Smith.[8]The Dawn of Radicalism.[9]Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk.[10]Works of T. G. Smollett, edited by George Saintsbury. London: Gibbings & Co.[11]Manual of English Prose Literature.[12]The title Smollett gave to Johnson when requesting the aid of Wilkes to free Francis Barber, Johnson’s black servant, from service on board theStag. It is the older form ofKhan.

[1]At this school the celebrated George Buchanan had been educated, as Mr. Hume Brown indicates in his life of the Scots Scaliger.[2]SeeSir James Y. Simpson, by Eve Blantyre Simpson—‘Famous Scots’ Series.[3]This wasThe Regicide. It was originally named ‘James i.,’ but afterwards changed.[4]Provost Stewart of Edinburgh was a warm Jacobite, and was suspected of assisting the Prince to capture the town.[5]Works of John Home, now first collected, with a Life of the Author by Henry Mackenzie.London, Cadell, 1810.[6]SeeMinutes Select Society, Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh.[7]See John Rae’sAdam Smith.[8]The Dawn of Radicalism.[9]Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk.[10]Works of T. G. Smollett, edited by George Saintsbury. London: Gibbings & Co.[11]Manual of English Prose Literature.[12]The title Smollett gave to Johnson when requesting the aid of Wilkes to free Francis Barber, Johnson’s black servant, from service on board theStag. It is the older form ofKhan.

[1]At this school the celebrated George Buchanan had been educated, as Mr. Hume Brown indicates in his life of the Scots Scaliger.

[2]SeeSir James Y. Simpson, by Eve Blantyre Simpson—‘Famous Scots’ Series.

[3]This wasThe Regicide. It was originally named ‘James i.,’ but afterwards changed.

[4]Provost Stewart of Edinburgh was a warm Jacobite, and was suspected of assisting the Prince to capture the town.

[5]Works of John Home, now first collected, with a Life of the Author by Henry Mackenzie.London, Cadell, 1810.

[6]SeeMinutes Select Society, Advocates’ Library, Edinburgh.

[7]See John Rae’sAdam Smith.

[8]The Dawn of Radicalism.

[9]Autobiography of the Rev. Dr. Alexander Carlyle, Minister of Inveresk.

[10]Works of T. G. Smollett, edited by George Saintsbury. London: Gibbings & Co.

[11]Manual of English Prose Literature.

[12]The title Smollett gave to Johnson when requesting the aid of Wilkes to free Francis Barber, Johnson’s black servant, from service on board theStag. It is the older form ofKhan.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.—The title page has been retained as an illustration.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.—The title page has been retained as an illustration.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

—Obvious print and punctuation errors were corrected.

—The title page has been retained as an illustration.

Back to IndexNext