TOBIAS SMOLLETT BY OLIPHANT : : SMEATON FAMOUS SCOTS: SERIE5 PUBLISHED BY : CHARLES >*&& SCRIBNER'S SONS NEW YORK FAMOUS SCOTS SERIES The following Volumes are now ready THOMAS CARLYLE. By HECTOR C. MACPHERSON ALLAN RAMSAY. By OLIPHANT SMEATON HUGH MILLER. By W. KEITH LEASK JOHN KNOX. By A. TAYLOR INNES ROBERT BURNS. By GABRIEL SETOUN THE BALLADISTS. By JOHN GEDDIE RICHARD CAMERON. By Professor HERKLESS SIR JAMES Y. SIMPSON. By EVE BLANTYRE SIMPSON THOMAS CHALMERS. By Professor W. GARDEN BLAIKIE JAMES BOSWELL. By W. KEITH LEASK TOBIAS SMOLLETT. By OLIPHANT SMEATON CONTENTS CHAPTER I PAGE BIRTH PARENTAGE EARLY YEARS 9 CHAPTER II YEARS OF EDUCATION 19 CHAPTER III WANDERJAHRE, OR YEARS OF WANDERING .... 32 CHAPTER IV THE WEARY TRAGEDY SHIFTS TO LIVE .... 44 CHAPTER V RODERICK RANDOM 57 li> CHAPTER VI PEREGRINE PICKLE FERDINAND COUNT FATHOM DOCTOR OF PHYSIC 69 CHAPTER VII VISIT TO SCOTLAND THE CRITICAL REVIEW THE REPRISAL 80 7 8 CONTENTS CHAPTER VIII PAGE HISTORY OF ENGLAND SIR LAUNCELOT GREAVES THE NORTH BRITON HACK HISTORICAL WORK THE BEGIN NING OF THE END . 95 CHAPTER IX SMOLLETT A ' SWEATER ' TRAVELS ABROAD ADVENTURES OF AN ATOM HUMPHREY CLINKER LAST DAYS . 109 CHAPTER X SMOLLETT AS A NOVELIST 122 CHAPTER XI SMOLLETT AS HISTORIAN AND CRITIC 137 CHAPTER XII SMOLLETT AS POET AND DRAMATIST 147 TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT CHAPTER I BIRTH PARENTAGE EARLY YEARS 'EVERY successful novelist must be more or less a poet, even though he may never have written a line of verse. The quality of imagination is absolutely indispensable to ' him. Smollett was a poet of distinction ! Such was the estimate formed by Sir Walter Scott one of the most incisive and sympathetic critics that ever pro nounced judgment of the element of inspiration in every great writer of fiction. Experimentally conscious of what was of value in his own case, himself the great Wizard of Fiction, he would reason by analogy what would be of power to inspire other men. If the poetic faculty were indispensable for the production of The Heart of Midlothian and Ivanhoe, equally would it be needed in Peregrine Pickle and Humphrey Clinker. That the poetic stimulus is the most powerful of all, is a truth that has been re marked times and oft. That it forms the true key to unlock the otherwise elusive and self-centred character of Tobias George Smollett, has not, I think, previously been noted. To write Smollett's life with absolute impartiality is more 9 io FAMOUS SCOTS than ordinarily difficult. The creator of Roderick Random was one for whom a generous charity would require to make more allowances than man is commonly called upon to make for man. Actions and utterances that might be and were mistaken for irritation and shortness of temper, were in reality due to the impatience of genius, chafing under the restrictions laid upon it by the mental torpor or intellectual sluggishness of others. The eagle eye of his genius perceived intuitively what other men generally attain only as the result of ratiocinative process. Smollett has unjustly been characterised as bad-tempered, choleric, supercilious, and the like, simply because the key was lacking to his character. Far indeed from being any of these was he. Impatient without doubt he was, but by no means in larger measure than Carlyle, Tennyson, Dickens, Goethe, or Schiller, and the feeling is wrongly defined as impatience. It is rather the desire to give less intellectually nimble companions a fillip up in the mental race, that they may not lag so far behind as to make inter course a martyrdom. Smollett's distinguishing characteristic in the great gallery of eighteenth-century novelists was his exhaustless fertility. In his four great novels, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Ferdinand Count Fathom, and Humphrey Clinker, he has employed as many incidents, developed as many striking situations, and utilised as many happily conceived accidents of time and place, as Richardson, Fielding, Sterne, Henry Mackenzie, and Mrs. Radcliffe put together. His invention is marvellously fertile, and as felicitous as fertile. He makes no attempt to excel in what may be termed the * f architectonic faculty, or the symmetrical evolution and interweaving of plot. Incident succeeds incident, fact follows fact, and scene, scene, in the most bewildering TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT u profusion. There is a prodigality visible, nay, an in tellectual waste, indicative of an imaginative wealth almost unique since the days of Homer. By some critics, follow ing in the footsteps of Sir Walter Scott, a curious vagary has been rendered fashionable of introducing the method of comparative analysis into every literary judgment. In place of declaring in plain, straightforward terms the reason why they either admire or censure the works of a man of genius, they must now drag in somebody else, with whom he is supposed to present points of affinity or con trast, and they glibly descant on the attributes wherein the author under consideration surpasses or falls short of his rival, what elements and qualities of style the one possesses which the other lacks, until in the end the reader is thoroughly befogged to know which is which and who is who. The higher criticism has its place in literary judg ments as well as in theological, and the change is not for the better. Tobias George Smollett resembled William Shakespeare in one respect if in no other that a doubt exists as to the precise date of his birth. The first mention made of the future novelist occurs in no birth register that is known to exist, but in the parish record of baptisms in connection with the parochial district of Cardross. Therein, under the date igth March 1721, we read: 'Tobias George, son to Mr. Archd. Smollett and Barbara Cunningham, was baptised.' The day in question was a Sunday, and, as Robert Chambers very properly remarks, 'it may be in ferred that the baptism took place, according to old Scottish fashion, in the parish kirk.' This tentative inference may be changed into certainty when we recall the strict Presby- terianism of his grandfather's household, in whose eyes such an injunction as the following, taken from The Directory 12 FAMOUS SCOTS for the Public Worship of God, established by Act of General Assembly and Act of Parliament in 1645, would be as sacredly binding as the laws of the Medes and Persians : * Baptism, as it is not unnecessarily to be delayed, so it is not to be administered in any case by any private person, . nor is it to be administered in private places or privately, but in the place of public worship and in the face of the congregation.' So much for the baptism. Now for the date of birth. Here only second-hand evidence is forthcoming. In one of the unpublished letters of John Home, author of Douglas, which it was recently my fortune to see, he mentions a walk which Smollett and he had taken together during the visit of the latter to London, when trying to get his first play, Agis, accepted by the theatrical managers. During the course of the walk Smollett mentioned the fact that his birthday had been celebrated two days before. The date of their meeting was the iSth March 1750. If reliance can be placed on this roundabout means of arriving at a fact, Smollett's birth took place on the i6th March 1721. Genealogies are wearisome. Readers who desire to trace the family of the Smolletts back to the sixteenth century can do so with advantage in the Lives of Moore, Herbert, and Chambers. Our purpose is with the novelist himself, not with his ancestors to the fourth and fifth generations. Suffice it to say that Tobias George Smollett was the son of Archibald, fourth son of Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, a Dumbarton shire estate situated amidst the romantic scenery of the Vale of Leven, and in the vicinity of the queen of Scottish lakes, Loch Lomond. Sir James Smollett, a stern old Whig of the Revolution type, to whom 'Prelacy was only less tolerable than TOBIAS GEORGE SMOLLETT 13 Popery, and the adherents of both deserve hanging,' had risked property, prospects, and life at the time when James vn. staked his dynasty against a mass and lost. So prominent was the part Sir James Smollett took in influencing public sentiment in favour of William and Mary, even while one of the Commissaries or Consistorial Judges of Edinburgh, that the grateful monarch knighted him, and the Earl of Argyll appointed him deputy- lieutenant of Dumbartonshire. A very different character was the novelist's father. Archibald Smollett seems to have been, in Scots parlance, ' as feckless as his father was fitty? The characteristic of the rolling stone was pre-eminently his. Consequently, as regards moss, in the shape of worldly gear, he gathered not a stiver unto him. But that did not trouble him. Like Charles Surface, his distresses were so many that the only thing he could not afford to part with was his good spirits, which, by the same token, chanced to be the only good thing he had about him. His health was bad, his morals were bad, his prospects were bad, for he never had been brought up to any profession, not having the steadiness of to a in a application make labour pleasure ; word, he was one of those interesting individuals whose idleness enables his Mephistophelic Majesty to make a strong bid for the fee-simple of their soul. Archibald Smollett, like most youths of good family, with whom, for lack of employment, time hangs heavy on their hands, was not above falling in love to lend a zest to the deadly ennui of life.