The Facts of Fiction

by Norman Collins

  But there was a difference. He came to town a very callow country calf, and within a few weeks there was blood on his horns. For Smollett had one of the worst tempers in the history of English literature. And it was an angry mind that chased his body through anxiety and anguish and antagonism to a grave abroad at the age of fifty-one.

  It was this angry mind of his that led him to publish The Regicide by private subscription as soon as he had become famous as the author of Roderick Random. It was this angry mind that led him to preface the work (which was still a failure) with the words:

  I was taken into the protection of one of those little fellows who are sometimes called great men, and, like other orphans, neglected accordingly. Stung with resentment, which I mistook for contempt, I resolved to punish this barbarous indifference, and actually discarded my patron, consoling myself with the barren praise of a few associates who, in the most indefatigable manner, employed their time and influence in collecting from all quarters observations on my piece which, in consequence of those suggestions, put on a new appearance almost every day, until my occasions called me out of the kingdom.

  It was the same malice in his soul that made him introduce Lord Lyttelton, the patron who had picked him up and dropped him quite reasonably when he discovered that there was very little to patronise, as Lord Rattle or Gosling Scrag; and Garrick, who had failed as unforgivably in his appreciation and discernment of Smollett, as Mr. Marmozet.

  It was his restless temper that set him up as a physician, and urged him to quarrel with his women patients and compelled him to write a book exposing the Bath Waters while practising as a doctor in the town.

  It was a spirit on edge that led him to write “that the first work of his that he had left under the protection of a patron was retrieved by pure accident (I believe) from the most dishonourable apartment in his lordship’s house.”

  And it was a spirit in flames that led him, on no real foundation, to write in the Critical Review of Admiral Knowles that “he is an admiral without conduct, an engineer without knowledge, an officer without resolution and a man without veracity”; all of which cost Smollett exactly one hundred pounds and three months’ imprisonment.

  But it was unquestionably just this aggregate of mental furies which had made the obscure surgeon’s apprentice into a great novelist.

  Smollett’s schoolmaster, comparing him with boys of “superior decorum and propriety,” said of him, “give me before them all my own bubbly-nosed callant with the stane in his pouch.” Fortunately there exists an English version by Sir Walter Scott of this remark. It runs: “Our Southern readers must be informed that the words contain a faithful sketch of a negligent, unlucky, but spirited urchin, never without some mischievous prank, and a stone in his pocket ready to execute it.”

  A mischievous prank that involves the old Scots pastime of Tossing the Brickbat seems a trifle heavy going to the modern mind. But it was really the whole secret of Smollett’s literary method. He was the artist of the flying brickbat and the broad wink. And to appreciate his novels it is necessary to throw off two of the heritages of the nineteenth century, a sensitive conscience and a kind nature, and to recover two of the heritages of the eighteenth century—jocularity, and complete inhumanity towards such unpopular persons as the watch, schoolmasters, priests and parsons.

  Smollett, we have said, was a distilled bottle of the essence of his time. And the whole of Smollett condenses in one place into a single drop of picturesque prose. That place occurs in Roderick Random:

  At length it was proposed by Bragwell that we should sweat the constable, maul the watch, and then reel soberly to bed.

  No entire novel of Smollett’s ever proceeded quite so perfectly as that single sentence. No novel could. But they all came near to such picaresque perfection.

  Smollett’s mind as a mind was, on the whole, a poor drabbity affair. It was never high-flying like Fielding’s, or high-falutin like Richardson’s. It never soared above a servant girl’s attic bedroom. Smollett moved in low places, not as Fielding, the gentleman gone rogue, but as though he were a natural part of the furniture of social grossness.

  That he was descended from the Lairds of Dunhill gave him sufficient Scottish pride to declare: “The low situations in which I have exhibited Roderick I never experienced in my own person.” But that is hardly to the point. The charge brought against him is not that he was disreputable in person but that he was debased in mind. And it is not a pleasing thought that Smollett should have invented the vices of young Roderick. Spontaneity is the first absolution of sin.

  Life, moreover, was combed by the author for so many of the burrs and snarls where Smollett had stuck to it that anyone may be forgiven for believing that it had been combed clean. If Smollett did not like to be pointed out as the young man who had fought and fornicated all the way between Scotland and London he had no more than himself to thank for the notoriety.

  Roderick Random remained in the public mind the Autobiography of a Super-Scamp. Smollett’s hero was born of a good family in the North, apprenticed to a surgeon, came South, went on board a man-of-war as surgeon’s mate on the expedition to Carthagena. Which is exactly what happened to Smollett And because some of the events were so conspicuously alike, everyone thought that the two careers of character and author must be identical. For if any author starts writing autobiographically, the public will always show its appreciation of the confidence by continuing to read autobiographically long after the author has ceased to talk about himself.

  And so it is that the characters in Smollett’s novels have all been so neatly pinned out with the names on little tabs beneath. “Scrap” (brother of Fielding’s “Partridge”) = John Lewis, Bookbinder of Chelsea; “Sheerwit” = Lord Chesterfield, and so on; together with many that a child could see had their origin in the whole monstrous brood of Father Adam and not in this one eccentric son of his, or that.

  Such a character as Commodore Hawser Trunnion, for example, bursts into English fiction with the blaze of art and not of nature. He is a model, not a faithful copy. He is the model after which a roaring, stampeding, blaspheming procession of choleric sailors, from those of Marryat to those of Jacobs, have been taken.

  In quoting the passage which introduces Trunnion (which if you like, you will like all Smollett) I make no apology for length. I could wish indeed that it were twice as long. Or that there was no need for me to quote any of it to be understood.

  At that instant, Mr. Pickle’s ears were saluted with such a strange noise as even discomposed the muscles of his face, and gave immediate indications of alarm. This composition of notes at first resembled the crying of quails and the croaking of bull-frogs; but, as it approached nearer, he could distinguish articulate sounds pronounced with great violence, in such a cadence as one would expect to hear from a human creature scolding through the organs of an ass. It was neither speaking nor braying, but a surprising mixture of both, employed in the utterance of terms absolutely unintelligible to our wondering merchant, who had just opened his mouth to express his curiosity, when the landlord, starting up at the well-known sound, cried, “Odds niggers, there is the commodore with his company, as sure as I live”; and with his apron began to wipe the dust off an elbow chair placed at one side of the fire, and kept sacred for the ease and convenience of the infirm commander. While he was thus occupied, a voice still more uncouth than the former bawled aloud “Ho! the house, ahoy!” Upon which the publican, clapping a hand to each side of his head, with his thumbs fixed in his ears, rebellowed in the same tone, which he had learned to imitate, “Hilloah! ” The voice again exclaimed “Have you got any attorneys aboard? ” and when the landlord replied “No, no,” this man of strange expectation came in, supported by his two dependents, and displayed a figure every way answerable to the oddity of his character.

  He was in stature at least six feet high, though he had contracted a habit of stooping, by living so long on board; his complexion was tawny, and his aspect rendered hi
deous by a large scar across his nose, and a patch that covered the place of one eye. Being seated in his chair with great formality, the landlord complimented him upon being able to come abroad again; and having in a whisper communicated the name of his fellow guest, whom the Commodore already knew by report, went to prepare, with all imaginable despatch, the first allowance of his favourite liquor, in three separate cans, for each was accommodated with his own portion apart, while the lieutenant sat down on the blind side of his commander; and Tom Pipes, knowing his distance, with great modesty took his station in the rear.

  Having thus seen Trunnion in his lusty lustful prime we should know also his tombstone: that is if we have not made it the goal of a pilgrimage already:

  Here lies

  Foundered in a Fathom and a Half

  The shell

  Of

  Hawser Trunnion, Esq.

  Formerly in command of a Squadron

  In His Majesty’s Service

  Who broached to, at Five p.m. Oct. X.

  In the year of his age

  Threescore and nineteen.

  He kept his guns always loaded

  And his tackle ready manned

  And never showed his poop to the enemy

  Except when he took her in tow;

  But

  His shot being expended

  His match burnt out

  And his upper works decayed

  He was sunk

  By Death’s superior weight of metal

  Nevertheless

  He will be weighed again

  At the Great Day,

  His rigging refitted,

  And his timbers repaired,

  And, with one broadside,

  Make his adversary

  Strike in his turn.

  That typical passage of Smollett, dense with amusing invention, is the epitaph of John Bull afloat: a national, not a personal affair. And it is curious that Scott, who was so deeply impressed by the English nationality of Fielding’s genius, should not have noticed that it was the Scotsman, Smollett, who built the new English hero for the new English novel. The nautical novel has, it is true, never been more than a side show in the street of fiction. It first came in the childhood of the art, and has remained very largely for the childhood of the reader. Smollett’s greatest debtors are not those who write about the sea—Conrad, for instance, owed him nothing, despite the fact that he thought he did—but those who learnt from him to write interestingly in fiction about almost everything else.

  Dr. Baker remarks that “Fielding had dealt in character as well as in characters. Smollett’s concern was the superficial features of temperament, mannerisms in which men differ, not with the deeper human qualities that unite them.” It is an excellent distinction. It is as much as to say that Smollett’s characters, even his Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphry Clinker are flat characters to be looked at and laughed at, but not to be walked round and examined.

  It is not, however, completely true. For Fielding had his crowded background of flat characters such as Mr. Supple the curate, Mr. Thwackum the divine and Mr. Square the philosopher. But that may have been merely that the eighteenth century was one of three moments—Scott brought in another, and Dickens the last—when minor characters enjoyed all the rights of full citizenship in fiction.

  And we should remember that even though Trunnion and Bowling and Strap and Pipes may be no more than flat characters—they certainly only present one face to the world—they are so substantial that we could spend a whole evening in their company without ever suspecting that, like Scandinavian fairies, they are knife edges of which only the broad side of the blade should ever be looked at.

  Perhaps the flattest and thinnest of all the flat characters in fiction are those unfortunate women in the novels of the eighteenth century who stray upon the stage like a dancer in a musical comedy whenever the producer feels that the strain of asking the human mind to work consecutively has grown too great.

  These women with a past who are always so eloquently and reminiscently aware of it, are the most tantalising butterflies of fiction. And the eighteenth century author plunged about after them like a kitten. The inordinate length of The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality makes one ask whether Smollett had the slightest interest in the original story of Peregrine Pickle. Miss Williams again simply steps from the printed page in Roderick Random, accosts the author and goes off arm in arm with him for three, long, seamy chapters while the unfortunate reader sits and waits like an anxious wife for his return.

  The Lady of Quality, however, had one justification for existence, that silly Miss Williams, the sister of Fielding’s Miss Matthews, had not. When Peregrine Pickle appeared, the public with its preference for scandal over literature greedily absorbed it more for the sake of the rumoured relation to Lady Vane, Smollett’s benefactress, than for the sake of Peregrine Pickle, the Young Man of Bad Quality.

  Seven years later when the second edition appeared, and the scandal was about as exciting as l’affaire Putiphar, people began to see how good the rest of the book was. And there being no profit in continuing to boast of it, Smollett industriously began to repent it publicly, and announced that he “had expunged every adventure, phrase and insinuation that could be construed by the most delicate reader,”—i.e. the most delicate reader that Smollett could imagine—“ into a trespass into the rules of decorum ”—probably very much to the annoyance of Lady Vane, whose life does not suggest that shame ever came between her and her sleep, and who probably preferred being reviled to being ignored.

  Her career, indeed, is remarkable enough to merit some passing memorial. She married Lord William Hamilton when she was seventeen. A benevolent providence excused his lordship’s obligations two years later. Then she married the unfortunate Viscount Vane when she was twenty. The rest of her life was as beautiful as it was brief. She was seventy-five when she died.

  It is not altogether clear why The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality should have been so steadily and ruthlessly condemned. They may be poor fiction, butting in and staying on like an insensitive uninvited guest, but they are reasonably good Smollett.

  The objections to Miss Williams go deeper. She was mother—or Moll Flanders was—of a tainted brood of young women with hearts of gold and a powerful narrative style, who are forced usually by their good looks and by the black looks of Fate, into careers which give them unique opportunities both to display their generosity and to acquire material for reminiscence.

  In the famous second edition of Peregrine Pickle Smollett owns with contrition that in one or two instances he did give way too much to suggestions of personal resentment. But he defies the whole world to prove that he “was ever guilty of an act of malice, ingratitude or dishonour,” a remark that leads one to

  wonder whether Smollett had the least notion of what the rest of the world meant by any of those things. Which was very much what Hazlitt was hinting at when he said “that there was a crude conception of generosity in some of his (Smollett’s) characters ”; a generosity of which Fielding’s were incapable.

  During his middle years Smollett was working with that energetic vivacity of mind that at the time is so difficult to distinguish from genius. The cry of “overproduction,” which is the tribute that the half sterile always pay to the fully fertile, was raised. Smollett was accused of having “journeymen authors ready to turn out tragedy, comedy, farces, history, novels, voyages, treatises on midwifery and in physics, and all kinds of polite letters.”

  Certainly in the twenty-three years between 1748, when he published Roderick Random, and 1771, when he published Humphry Clinker and died, he wrote enough to establish a myth of the magnitude, if not the mystery, of the myth of Bacon.

  He followed Roderick Random three years later with Peregrine Pickle. Two years later he published The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, which, if he had not published The Adventures of an Atom would have had the distinction of being his most unpleasant work. Another two years, and
he had translated the whole of Don Quixote. The year following he became editor of the Critical Review, worked hard and was imprisoned for his too active editorship. There he wrote The Adventures of Sir Lancelot Greaves. But hard as he had been working he found to his disgust that someone had been working harder. Hume had already published two volumes of his History of England. Smollett therefore accepted the challenge that Hume had no thought of issuing, read three hundred volumes in two years (so he said), produced four volumes of his history, cornered the market and published another four volumes seven years later. The year after the last volume was published he produced A Compendium of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages, in seven volumes, and after two years of rest another compilation of similar hugeness and uselessness, The Present State of All Nations, in eight volumes. During all this time he was a leader writer on the Tory paper, The Briton, and on the staff of the Critical Review.

  But strain as he could, Smollett never managed to run level with life. He was perpetually in debt, troubled by enemies and irreparably damaged by the death of his daughter. By the year 1763 he would have needed two years’ start to keep ahead of his affairs.

  We might call his youth romantic for want of a better name; and his middle age tragic for want of a worse one. For his whole existence was fitting into just those moulds that Fielding had fitted some fifteen years or so before. When it seemed at last as though Fate had decided that Smollett should conform to the popular impression of a novelist as a human factory working sweated hours on low pay, Smollett went abroad, a broken man too ill to do more than to write two volumes of Travels through France and Italy.

  Sterne in his Sentimental Journey made the work more famous than it ever would otherwise have been by referring to the author as the learned “Smelfungus ” who, “set out with spleen and prejudice, and every object he passed by was discoloured and distorted.” Thus when Smollett came back to England he saw Bath through eyes still discoloured and distorted. He went up to Scotland with the spleen and jaundice working at such a pitch that everything even in his native land was productive of “misery and disgust.” He temporarily eased the fever of his feelings by a virulent political allegory, The History and Adventures of an Atom. Then with that foreknowledge of death that is the privilege of men who have known life well, Smollett set out for perpetual exile in Italy.